Transcript for:
Trauma and Healing Approaches

it's very hard to Define trauma in a way is it external is it internal is it the event is it the reaction but basically the way I like to say it's something that overwhelms Your Capacity to cope and nobody else takes over for you at that particular point so and then you get stuck and so your whole central nervous system continues to experience the ongoing world through the lens of that particular overwhelming experience so you continue to be constantly scared or feel like people are going to attack you or feeling like you're going to be left for dead or so so you continue to react to often times fairly trivial uh challenges as if it is a cat catastrophe and it's really the ongoing reaction that really defines what trauma is about it so that your mind and your brain gets changed by trauma and then you from then on you live in this traumatic internal world TR lives inside of you basically yeah in the country in which you now live in practice the United States do you know do we know how prevalent trauma is is it even possible to measure it well there's things you can measure incidence of domestic violence in the US it's about one out three couples engages in domestic violence one half three yeah and probably in UK would be similar and can we just pause a minute that is a staggering amount you know I think every relationship is a miracle you know to put up with each other we drive each other a little bit crazy Al for people to actually get along and live so close together and having to make adjustment with each other is a very complex thing but it takes a fair amount of maturity actually and being able to understand other people's point of view I I think it is precious for people to be able to get along with each other and often times they don't yeah and let's take it away from domestic violence for a minute yeah this is an idea I've been really playing around with Bessel and it's kind of is it external is internal yeah an external event happens the same external event could happen to 100 people and 100 people are not all going to have the same response some people will be able to manage that better some people I'm guessing may not be traumatized from the same incident so if our responses are individual to external events is it easy for us to see how prevalent trauma is in society because on one level trauma whether an event is traumatic or not actually depends on how we perceive it and our internal response not only how we perceive it but how people around us perceive it so you may look like a very well put together person and people say they clearly didn't get affected by the particular incident but basically I like to say you don't know somebody until you marry them for some like of time like we all have our personas yeah and uh somebody may be calm and Brilliant uh under certain situations and uh something minor happens and they blow up but we may never get to see that so so it's very hard to know as an outsider yeah who has survived the trauma and to what degree people have and in my world say oh some people are resilient uh really are you sure like how do people wake up with night b or did they actually uh freeze in front of their children and uh become all uptight and don't respond to their kids needs um that wouldn't be baited as being post tromatic just I saw it all the time in many of my patients particularly my German patients uh of they all had these traumatized parents and there was very quiet the household nobody ever talked nobody talked about anything people worked all the time and there was a Paul of dead iess over the family uh yeah you wouldn't made that as traumatic because nobody blows up with anybody yeah for me that raised a really interesting point which I want to come to which is how different cultures uh deal with trauma or or or don't deal with trauma before we get to that though I have been constantly Amazed by how many people say they've had happy safe secure childhoods and when you go a little bit deeper and just probe a little bit it's not always the case and so I feel that humans have a remarkable capacity to bury stuff yeah and get on with their life right so it's still there absolutely haven't dealt with it but they tell themselves a story that yeah my childhood was great everything was fine my parents L me so could you with all your experience outline yeah some common signs of trauma for one thing the family you come from defines who you are so if you said tell people my family was really messed up and violent then you tell people I'm a messed up person and so so you you own that and it becomes a soci shame so you try to Guild the Lily and people generally do that they try to make things pretty I don't know how common it is for people to have perfectly happy childhoods I know a few people but not in the mental health field so what are the various qualities that Define a healthy non-traumatic childhood worms uh usually lot of food lot of music but people being tune to each other people spending a lot of time with each other having having time for each other not hiding themselves behind screens or workaholism or whatever U it it does happen and people who do things together they're pleasurable and interesting yes it happens okay so yeah for someone who's listening who thinks I don't think I had a traumatic childhood or I don't think I'm suffering from any trauma yeah what a common signs that might indicate trauma yeah well people very start off with a trauma they go into I get so angry with my partner or my kids make noise I cannot control myself and and uh I start screaming at them or I need to hide myself in my room when stuff is happening uh because I get easily overwhelmed or um you you are in a job and you start hating your your boss and you leave your job and the next one you hate your boss again and you hate your boss again and then at some point you may start thinking is it my boss or is it me that is really so bad and usually I think people usually get in touch with these things not by their own observations but the people around them people who say honey I love you but if you continue to do this I just cannot be with you any longer huh uh friends who no longer talk to you co-workers who avoid you so usually it is your irritability or you're being Out Of Tune or you uh blowing up all the time or no making no space for other people that creates interpersonal conflict and misery and you start off usually saying it's all your fault and at some point you realize H maybe it's not all my fault it's it's so interesting in in my work I'm into psychedelic uh treatments these days that people deal with stuff from their past and suddenly they say I thought my sister was the most terrible person around we always fight and now I spend time with my sister and we enjoy each other yeah and so nothing has happened between the two of them but their own energy has changed so they don't irritate other people anymore or don't scare other people anymore yeah that that fascinating example those signs that you mentioned there were quite a few there and I think there were there were really great examples because I think a lot of people will go hm wait a minute wait a minute that might be me that might be me that might be me on my fifth marriage and I keep choosing somebody who is horrible uh maybe there's something about me yeah I mean let's let's say one example you I think one example you said was if my kids are shouting yeah I I shout or I I get annoyed or if my kids even make a little bit of Noise Okay so let's let's take that as a practical example someone might say well Bessel yeah but if my kids are making noise is it not okay for me to get frustrated and want them to be quiet how what would you say to them I'd say of course you need your warning signs and you cannot shut off your warning signs and it's very good to know what scares you and what upsets you but if it scares you as a result you blow up your family and everybody becomes scared of you and people walk tiptoe around you uh you have a problem with your hand and so maybe there is something about you that gets triggered by that noise of your kid and then you go into where else has this shown up yeah and we often times talk the language of Parts how old is this part how long have you noticed you sudden going into these rage reactions and um is a kid seven years old or four years old and people often times say yeah I remember kindergarten but say before the time it didn't feel that way so they you they you start of dissecting the situation to see where this stuff has its origin sometimes yeah what does trauma actually do to us physiologically what does it do to our brain what does it do to our body well it it it really changes uh well Antonio deasio calls the housekeeping of the body and uh trauma is really about an overwhelming experience of of Terror Terror is already too high it is your whole organism uh freezes or gets disorganized and then that continues and it affects many many different parts of the brain uh mainly deep down uh having to do with appetite having to do with motivation having to do with arousal have to do with sleep very Elementary bodily functions get affected by trauma and it's really about a a body that no longer knows how to take care of itself in some ways and that's something people rarely mention but most trauma symptoms are symptoms of a body that cannot take care of itself uh we talked before about uh the enormous amount of drug addiction and [Music] alcoholism corated to trauma people take these drugs in order to calm their bodies down or in order not to get out of control people don't take heroin uh in order to make you feel bad about somebody taking heroin you take the stuff because you cannot stand the way you feel and so trauma people are enormously vulnerable to indulge in substances and behaviors to just desperately tried to not lose control over themselves yeah yeah as a medical doctor myself I probably thought many years ago that if you can educate patients and and help them understand what they need to do let's say food you know nutrition you know adequate sleep moving your body regularly you know managing stress I used to think that would be enough yeah but I've realized time and time again that knowledge in and off itself is not enough and I think one of the things we get wrong in medicine or I say wrong maybe I say is is incomplete is let's take alcohol as that example we might say with public health guidelines how many units of alcohol you can drink a week without it impacting your liver and your cancer risk it's very dry it's it's I don't think it connects with people and what it fails to do is help that individual understands what role does alcohol play in my life what role does excess sugar play in my life what role does gambling play in my life and I feel that the missing link for many people is this kind of hidden trauma that they've not processed so they can try their best to make better choices but they'll always be driven back cuz there's a disregulation in how they feel about themselves there's a disregulation in the nervous system yeah TR lodges itself in a very Elementary housekeeping part of your brain it's not a rational process it's not like oh let me drink some alcohol in order to make the feeling go away you feel discombobulated you feel out of control you feel out of sorts and then you discover that if I drink alcohol I feel so much better or my doctor says alcohol is bad for my liver but to hell with my liver because alcohol makes me feel so much better and I don't care if my li gets disease because because this very Elementary feelings Darwin already talks about this that the trauma is lived out as heartbreaking and gut vening Sensations yeah and that's something we all are familiar with if something terrible happens in our lives we feel it in our gut as gut vening uh heartbreaking and and so it's the sensibly world you live in that becomes unbearable and then you start doing stuff whatever you can to make the feelings go away what really struck me about a study the famous study of Fetti of the prevalence of tamaric this is Ace adverse childhood experiences yeah that all of the things that they identify are have to do with your relationship to your body an increased in smoking an increase in obesity an increase in heart disease an increase in alcoholism increase in in drug use these are all things having to do with I don't like my body or I don't trust my body or I cannot take care of my body so the very thing that you try to promote needs to come from inside yeah and your doctor cannot tell you you have to love your body I have to learn to love my body but if I've been beaten up as a kid and I I'm always feeling terrible inside uh my body is not my friend yeah your book your salal book um is called the body keep keeps the score a few things to sort of comment on it's it's over 10 years since that first came out it's still selling by the bucket loads today right uh it's it's one of those once in a generation phenomenas something comes out I I imagine you couldn't have predicted this sort of level of no way success and connection with people all over the world I I I'm interested in why think it has resonated so deeply with so many people and then it also for people who haven't read the book first of all you really should read it but 10 years on how would you Briefly summarize the key message in that book well the key message is that horrendous life events uh including disrupted Detachment a very big thing is who do you feel safe with who cares for you uh determine your or shape your biology and then lead a life of its own and it express itself in a variety of different ways and but you can do something about it it basically I try to give a message of Hope of you need to develop language for yourself you need to understand yourself and then you may want to start doing yoga and alter the relationship you have to your body and yoga our research shows is very effective or you may want to do a neuro feedback to change the neural under the the neural circuits in your brain so you can be more focused and pay more attention or you may uh do theater and see what it feels like to play a different role and to embody a different role than the the role you ordinarily uh inh but you and I went through that we went to medical school and the first day in medical school people call you doc you go who you talking to and you feel like this inadequate stupid little kid who TR to those and then slowly over time you become a doctor and it changed your identity and it changes your relationship to yourself and then it gives you a certain sense of I'm a very competent person who can sometimes do make an enormous difference so your identity changes by the the roles you play and if you're an unemployed person in a poverty staking area Your Role is to be an unemployed how can you feel proud how can you feel competent if you cannot bring home the bacon for your family so so the the social condition make a huge difference and but also the identity you get and one of the things I'm worried about with the popularity of my book and the word trauma coming into our culture is that people in inly May uh claim the mantle of of being a victim and because this happened to me I cannot be held responsible for what I'm and so so once you get an identity as a victim then you're allowed to do all kind of things and so so it's so important for us as Physicians as therapists as school teachers to help people to get a sense of Competency yeah very deep deep sense of I can do stuff but that's not really the focus of many of our social systems I think that's such a such an important point I mean for me one of the root cause decisions we make as individuals in life that will determine massively the quality of Our Lives as whether we take a victim mindset or not and we have no idea that going to happen yeah and also I also acknowledge that some people many people have lived through horrendous experiences right so I'm not saying um I don't understand it I fully understand it but whilst you remain a victim to your past or external events you well this is in essence what you're talking about trauma it lives on inside you how would you phrase this I would frame that uh I need to function and that's what I see in most people I work with I need to go on with my life so I'm going to be the best school teacher I can be I can the best tennis player can be despite the fact that I feel scared to death when I am in a sexual situation I'm going to try to function as well as I can and then but don't but to realize that life goes on and when you get stuck in your victimhood life passes you by the only thing that you can experience is insult and injury yeah and but how to shift that orientation is not it's not like some you tell yourself of that it's mainly have be having with somebody a spouse a boyfriend a girlfriend a friend who helps you to focus on what's going on and to help you focus on uh being able to do things that give you a sense of pleasure and enjoyment so okay if if someone says look Bessel um your book and the uh The Wider education around trauma compared to 10 years ago has really helped me or you know see that my childhood is a huge part of why I feel the way I feel today around the world okay if someone says to you look my parents weren't there for me they weren't a tuned to me like you've already mentioned it's a key thing right there there wasn't Joy there wasn't music when I was growing up it was uh scary for me I didn't know how my dad was going to react right the TV was always blaring yeah okay and then then say to you you know understanding that has really helped me understand who I am today I have every right to be reactive and angry and drink alcohol because that was my upbringing what would you say to them what is what people say uh is I know understand why I do the things we I I do and that gives me a better handle on how to create a life for myself and so you know it's very interesting that Jamie pennebaker is a language research at the University of Texas and he asked one group of people to write about their trauma another group of people to write about their trauma and how is affecting your life right now the people who wrote about your trauma nothing changed he study immune systems health and functioning and when people said this is how it has affected me uh made a huge difference because once you know how it affect it affects you you can actually start making decisions about yourself of like okay I get very angry with my kids my dad used to beat me up when I when I make kids scream I get to a sense of panic and I lose control of myself just like my dad and I am going to try not to do that and I'm going to learn yeah to sit down on the floor on my knees and play with a model train but that's the key it's yes get an understanding of your upbringing and your experiences and your childhood and the way you were parented but don't stay there like use it to understand yourself and then I don't know that's how I see I feel that I think that victimhood mentality is very very common right and I do think that is as you say that's one of the um the unforeseen uh risks of an increased education around trauma is I feel and I guess I've seen this with many patients over the years that they they stay at it's a progress of evolution and learning and understanding right but you can stop and stay locked in what happened to you in your past without using it as a way of learning and moving forward and taking agency well I think it may become an alibi huh an alibi for your disfunctional behavior and but telling telling people you should make different choices doesn't work either then people need to be offered the possibility of do things doing things differently yeah and to somebody need to say to them have you ever thought about joining a church choir have you ever thought about cooking for homeless people have you ever thought about um doing kava lessons so people need to be invited and given the opportunity to discover what make what makes a difference people don't you generally don't do that on their own and that's a think that's where we as Physicians and mental health profession come in not to tell people you shouldn't behave that way no for sure but they really say boy it really looks like you don't see other possibilities and let's explore some other possibilities and I will be with you as you explore that just giving people little sheets to take home with instructions is not going to work people need that human encouragement and that is certainly in the US the breakdown of medicine is that people are no longer have a relationship with their doctor you go to the doctor to fix a little problem to get a pill but uh but you don't have somebody who is there for you and guides you in your health but when you have somebody like I happen to have somebody in rural from multiple places in a very far you I live among some of the famous most famous hospitals in the world in Boston I get my primary medical care in the rural community far away why is that because the doctor there knows me and we spend time together and you know each other over time and that's what we all need somebody who says hey how are you doing my last time you were struggling with this how is that going uh and what has worked and what hasn't worked and so we need all need people in our Lives who have a very deep interest in US yeah and medicine is really falling apart on that score I mean I completely agree and and I I really do believe that any good healthc care professional doctor yeah uh nutritional therapist um psychotherapist counselor whatever it is I think having that deep connection with your patient or client and it's not about us telling them what to do it's helping them as you say see possibilities helping them have agency there has to be something I believe that they feel they can do proactively in their life that's going to make a difference it can't just be I'm dependent on this psychotherapist I'm I'm dependent on this doctor and without this person I'm going to struggle you know I think that that agency is really important but walking out of out of an office as I do with my P this guy knows me yeah this guy sees me in Boston the big hospitals I never have the feeling anybody sees me they just give me a pill to fix my problem problem I had a great example this past week I was visiting my uh my brothers in the Netherlands and we talked about different parts of our youth and my father suddenly says to me oh you know I think what made a big difference for you growing up was your fourth grade teacher and he mentioned the name and I think you're my brother 70 years later you know the name of my fourth grade teacher and what effect he had on me like it was just stunning for me to feel my brother knows me and he remembers details of my my life that nobody else knows and that must somebody should measure my cyto kind and stress hormones at that moment because I bet something changed in my body feeling seen and known by by somebody yeah super powerful yeah and I think that's that's very if you know John B Be The Great attachment researcher from here he said if you're not known to other people you're not known to yourself and I think that's a huge dimension in medicine and education that often times people are not known by the people but the moment you feel like this person knows me yeah the shame goes down and you become accepting of yourself and you start making changes yeah for someone to know you you have to be vulnerable with them you have to open up with them um and let them see you which of course some people find very hard now people pleas pleasing is a very common trait that many people have I certainly used to have it to a very high degree I I hope I think it's much much less than it used to be but people pleasing is often an attempt to I guess manipulate other people's perception of you because you're often not truly being yourself because you want to be accepted right you're saying the right things doing the right things so the people around you like you that's not the same as knowing you is it that's true and you know and it it depends very much on on The Giver part doctor professional that that they take an interest in you not only whether you behave well you know Psychiatry is all about Behavioral Health what does behavioral health mean don't be a pain in the ass that's really what it means to me like it's totally like let me control you so you don't bother other people but that's not why we're that's not our job our job is for people to actualize themselves and to really bring out uh the optimal functioning and so if you say to people well if you deal with people like let's really get to know each other then maybe the people pleasing part will hold on you may even say to people uh you know I think it's important for you to to feel like I like you uh but do you like yourself MH and how do you feel about yourself but how do you feel how you are doing and you say that with compassion and people say oh this person really wants to know me and once people want you feel that somebody wants to know you you hold you hold existence changes yeah I I learned that very on in my career as a doctor uh especially when I move to general practice from specialism and to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits we can all make short-term change but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life often they don't and that's why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take they're really really effective if you want to get hold of that free guide right now all you have to do is click the link in the description box below you know I I think I've mentioned this a couple of times on the podcast in the past but I think it was in my first or second week as a GP I do remember this young lady came in and she definitely had symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of depression yeah and I was looking at my um the protocols that we had and you know it it would be very easy for me to have prescribed her and anti-depressant like an SSR or something but like I didn't want to do that it I just thought I I need to know her first I need to I can't just see her for 10 minutes give her that and say I'll see you in four weeks it just feels completely wrong and and against everything I stand for so I did something really that's getting uh less and less common in benis I I I talked to her yeah you know we had a 10-minute consultation but I ended up spending 30 35 minutes with there talking even though there were patients waiting I invited her back the following day I said look at the end of my morning surgery tomorrow if you come in we'll chat a bit more yeah and I was see her once a week for the next few weeks and I just talked to her and I'm not kidding you vessel yeah within four to six week she was like a different person she a lot of those symptoms have started to fall away she was feeling better and I thought wow I didn't learn this at medical school but all I've done for her and maybe she doesn't have this in her own life I I provided for her yeah a safe non-judgmental space to speak to talk to listen right it it really it was such a powerful lesson for me yeah you know it's ironic that I did the first study on project for trauma and it wasn't bad and at that time he thought boy we're going to find the right drug for right disease and to some degree that study as decent as was was part of the ruin of Psychiatry because people chose pills over human connection and I don't have anything against psychiatric drugs and sometimes they help some people and uh but but we lost is that connection and the feeling of somebody knows me somebody sees me somebody is concerned about me I think that's basically disappear disappeared out of American Medicine it's going that way here in the UK as well um B in your book one of my favorite phrases and there are many yeah but the one I've written down to talk you about is this one if the body is storing trauma in its musculature in its hormonal Pathways then it is the body that needs experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness Rage or collapse that result from trauma I think it's really really powerful we in the west at least are a very head-based Society everything's about thought and our rational Minds one of the key things I got from your book many years ago when I first came across it is this idea that the the body stores trauma right yeah but but go on how would you explain that cuz that's a controversial idea to some people yeah but although it's become a meme it's stunning that the New York Times Crossroad person had the body keeps score like rock songs are being written about the body keeps SC like oh you can reti now you made it it's that's crazy like but and it's not quite true that the body remember but you live out the traumas through your to the perfer of of your body how your muscle TS up somebody saidit way before me uh a angry person lives in an angry body a depressed person lives in a depressed body uh that you you carry these things inside of you very meaningful to me because I had Asma as a kid and that had a huge influence on my interpretation of the world because I could often times couldn't breathe and I think part of my interest in trauma comes from my own experience of being a sickly child um and uh sry and then I had somebody who rol me rol is a very intensive form of of um open up muscles and r o yeah yeah I know about it and that may have been the most powerful therapeutic experience I've had because my body was locked in the body of that asmatics scared kid and after getting involved my body I lived in a different body yeah the no am of psychotherapy would have been able to do that th this is such an important point I feel I've really couple of things have happened over the last five or 10 years that have really helped me understand the body's role yeah in trauma or health or the way the body holds things I fact I think of five or six different examples I mean two that come to mind um quite a few years ago now when I was experimenting with this uh trainer in a gym I I I just did it for two or three months just to feel what it you know what is it like I heard really good things about this guy and he also did lots of Active Release on your muscles and things and you know I always used to have in in inverter commas tight hamstrings okay and at the end of each session he'd spend some time stretching them and loosening them but they'd always come back anyway I didn't see him for a year or to and in that time I think I was doing some internal family system therapy work with this this amazing guy who lives near to me called Christian and I was just feeling lighter and Freer just in my whole being yeah and I was driving past the gym one day and I sort of or I knew I was going to be there I called up and I said y let's have a session and funnily enough he basically examined my hamstrings he said wrong what what have you been doing they're really really loose yeah yeah and again there there's a lot more detail there but in essence me working on my past and my trauma changed my body yeah right yeah it wasn't through stretching my hamstrings it was through other stuff it wasn't mechanical yeah but I think it works both ways as well because you can also free up your body there's a I spoke to um we not put this episode out yet I spoke to this incredible movement coach called Lawrence van lingan last week and he very takes a very holistic approach and um like Helen Hall who I work with and he basically was saying that what he's noticed over the years is that people who often have been traumatized often uh go into a more sort of flexion ohpe fetal position and if he can help them open up and in particular with running he would talk about it from ending from the hips which many people can't do not only does their running get better yeah but their whole being and who they are it's it's fascinating isn't it oh yeah and and it goes both ways it goes both ways and for example if you have been molested as a kid you're likely to have problem with touch one of the most Comfort maybe the most comforting thing in life is to be touched and to be held throughout life but if you're afraid of touch you live in an untouched body you live in an unloved body and maybe and I really take this very seriously with my patients who are always almost always sent to to body people body workers you need to learn the pleasure of being touched the safety of being touched but as long as you're afraid of human touch and comfort your mind cannot really get better in some ways yeah this is fascinating so yeah in my second book the stress solution I I wrote a whole chapter on touch and it was heavily influenced by Professor Francis mclone at the University of lall who who's done incredible work on touch and how we have these ctfr nerve fibers and when and when when they're stroked it goes all the way to the kind of primitive parts of the brain lower stress levels cortisol yeah um and I remember when we put that episode out that I recorded with him and when the book came out some people go on and touch say yeah look I understand that human touch effective uh consensual um Wanted human touch can be very very beneficial but I don't like to be touched and you're now saying it's really interesting you're saying that if you were molested as a child you may struggle with that is that something people can um heal from like human touch is as you say one of those basic things that we need that we thrive on have you had patients before who struggled with this and through various therapies they got to the point where absolutely they could yeah absolutely uh maybe I should put in the plug for book by my own body worker I lived in a small village in in the mountains my some M and somebody Taps me my shoulder and says I'm a body worker would you like to have an experience with me and so u i I have my own body worker uh Cardon Babin is his name uh something about the body body uh but yes you can change and like my wife is a body worker um and also at pic therapist and she starts off with tuning Forks just a little tuning fork and put it in your chest and that may be almost too much for some people you need to very gradually open up your mind to your body you need to activate those connections in the brain it have to do it's called the insula oh you you know that but explain it anyway for the audience who may not but so there's an organ in the body that tells you what your body is feeling and what your body needs there a two-way communication for example if you go out uh you think is it veining and you feel the feeling of what rain would F in your body you go I rather get an umbrella so you need to be aware of that and if you're not aware of what's going on in your body you get situations like people who are pregnant and think they're just becoming obese because they so out strouch to their bodies that really they oh yeah it's not uncommon actually for people actually feel nothing in their bodies and so as long as you cannot feel anything in your body you cannot feel pleasure you cannot feel human connection so your whole world gets locked up and so you need to slowly open up your relationship to your body you need to know when you have to go poop you need to you need to know these things and things can get so disrupted people don't know anymore that need to go to the bathroom stuff like that uh but the these are we would call these I mean medicine might call these um dysfunctional States right but can we not just reframe this and go Okay the reason you cannot uh at the moment or one of the reasons why you cannot feel your bodily Sensations is because it you know it an appropriate response to the trauma right which which served you for a period of time perhaps but it's no longer serving you and I think people tell me that that information my in my book was helpful for them I'm not much of a cognitive therapist I don't think you'd wisen people up much by doing that but a lot of people say yes understanding that it's that is happening to me makes me not feel crazy right I think that's the big thing oh I can't feel my body because I shot di myotic with my body because I was being molested all the time and that that's how I learned to cope as Dick Schwartz who invented ifs which you know about says all parts are welcome because every part of you used to F fulfill a function there's a reason why you don't your body can't feel anything that for me it's always how interesting that you cannot feel that when you have to go to the bathroom rather than you bad person you can't feel that it's like that's that's fascinating mean most people can how did that happen and it and you find always and that's why the trauma model becomes terribly important yeah you said you're not much of a cognitive therapist okay and the thing I've been really sort of playing with in my mind particular because I knew I was going to meet you and and again and talk to you is there there's multiple ways to heal I think for most things there's multiple ways to heal and people all have their own biases over their therapies that they've seen that work for them and then think that the same the is going to work for everyone it's kind of like that's certainly not how I see the world but um if the body keeps the score yeah and many of us live in a very head-based Society where we try and think our way through issues can you heal trauma with thoughts alone or do you have to deal with the body as well I don't have the answer for that you know uh because I only see people who I see yeah you know and so there may be all sorts of people out there one thing that I know is that doctors and therapists think that they're the answer but there's multiple ways of getting better yeah maybe maybe it's your tennis coach maybe it's your yoga teacher maybe it's your theater teacher know very much into tra we have learned so much from theater experiences uh in order to help people to get better and so there's other ways besides so this Legacy of Freud you sit down you talk about your internal world you get better and in fact I researched that and research If people really get better from uh from knowing and remembering everything and but we found out no even if you know everything and can talk about it the symptoms often times still don't go away yeah and so for example what you brought up earlier experiences uh for examp I think doing martial arts is a spectacularly powerful way for people who have been molested as kids to get a sense of agency in their body and like I am a powerful person inside not cognitively but you feel like a powerful person after you do your Kate shops or if you become a Tango dancer you know my my body can really do all kind of complicated stuff yeah it's interesting when you first came on my podcast I don't know year and a half ago something like that we spoke about various uh movement modalities that can be helpful for people for all kinds of things and also trauma you mentioned yoga I think you touched on Martial Arts Theater is something and drama you spoke about which I found fascinating and I got to say when my son was making his subject choices for gcsc I don't know what you would call it in America so basically when you're about 134 and then you got two years of kind of um when when you narrow down the subjects and then you were examined on them at the age of sort of 15 or 16 right and he kind of he loved all his subjects right so it wasn't easy um and when he was looking at various options I think what you said to me about theater and drama really was at the back of my mind so he's actually doing drama as well as the academic stuff he's also doing drama yeah and I think I think that conversation influenced me in in the way I had those conversations because I kind of I feel strongly that I think I I have uh a lot of concerns over how we educate kids in the UK and the US and the things that we focus on and it's more about work and academics and the time they get to play and go outside and move their bodies in some schools is getting reduced and I think it's a very dangerous thing to do oh absolutely yeah which we can talk about but I but I thought yeah you know theater having to play other roles move your body do things that maybe are not natural to you at this point not natural to you to you exactly I thought would be very very helpful so I want to say thank you for that because he is doing drama um but there's this wider point for me which we touched on a little bit on stage yesterday which I'd really want to put to you the reason I ask the question about healing with thought alone wasn't necessarily to get the answer it was more to promote discussion around this topic so since my dad died in 2013 I feel that I've that was the big moment for me to start going inwards and looking at my life and making sense of my life and I've done a variety of things on that Journey yeah including ifs internal family systems therapy by dick Schwarz um including working with great movement coaches to move more efficiently right but I will still say as I mentioned to you yesterday that one of the most powerful experiences I've had that fundamentally changed me was my podcast conversation with Edith eager yeah right okay so uh 93y old lady when I spoke to her yeah went to alitz when she was 16 survived alitz came out spoke with just forgiveness and love and compassion really quite remarkable how forgiving as a human being she was and there's many things she taught me um in that conversation one of the you know without going into the whole conversation you know one of the final things she said to me was that was was wrong and look I have lived in awit and I can tell you the greatest prison you will ever create yeah is the prison you create inside your own mind yeah okay and that that really resonated with me and that's quite a perspective for an out Tov exactly because her statement is absolutely correct but if you can say it after I switch exactly so so that that I I remember because it was a remote conversation it was in the middle of Co it wasn't in person and I remember finishing the conversation and because of the time difference between California and the UK it was in the evening and by the time it finished I knew I could get into the house and go and put my kids to [Music] bed but I just had to pause like I fundamentally felt differently I I I I will still say to this day I was not the same person at the end of that two hours as at the start of those two hours and so I can apply my rational mind and go you know whenever I struggle to reframe something in life which is rare these days but when I used to struggle I'd go hey wrong and listen Edith could reframe stuff in alwiz right she basically started to see the prison guards as prisoners she said they weren't free in their mind I was free in my mind so that was stunning it's stunning and hugely inspiring to me so I've taken that as inspiration I'm not saying that would connect with everyone it for some reason at that point in my life it deeply connected with me so I feel now having practiced actively reframing situations in life I feel now that unless I'm sleep deprived or chronically stressed I feel that I rarely get triggered anymore in the way that I used to now I put a lot of it down to that conversation so getting back to the point about thought or body that was a cognitive conversation well that's what I like to yeah I disagree with you on that see what I think happened is you met an amazing person truly an astonishing person and your mirror neuron system in your brain picked up the energy of this unbelievably wise person and that allows you to take a new take on reality but it's her energy on a deeper level in your brain that make you open for reframing some stuff yes and some people have the capacity I you spend a fair amount of time with Desmond Tutu after you tutu you're not the same person you just feel the astounding energy and wisdom of this person and I think most of us have the Good Fortune of sometimes meeting people where go like just sitting with this person the energy of the wisdom that of the person gets downloaded to some degree on you I I love that perspective and what I was going to get to was although I can with my rational mind say it was thought and the wisdom she imparted in my brain that that was what changed me I I don't think that can completely explain it as you say I feel I can't remember how I felt but I know I felt different I just thought I I was literally mesmerized afterwards and so I don't know if um if it was possible to uh measure certain things in my body right I imagine pre and post that conversation I think my body was keeping score and I feel that my body was able to let go of certain things probably through that interaction with her right I can't prove that what comes to my mind is that the moment that our current president of America said I would not won for re-election I wish I had a physiological measurements of people in America and I think our biology changed at that moment because up to then we had the choice in the next election Be A demented person and a psychopath and we were all the state of despair and then we got new candidate who looks really bright and optimistic and my whole system has changed because the future no longer is between a demented person and psychopath there's options in the world hope hope is such an important thing yeah and your conversation with this a Survivor you go like oh my God if she can survive that you can survive anything and you got a sense of hope yeah and that is such a critical element and so many people live in an environments locked into TV shows blah blah where they don't have any hope yeah and I think that's a very important part of our educational system to also give people possibilities so show what can be done and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier which is the importance of any healthc care professional and frankly any individual take it Beyond Healthcare like you want to give that person your way agency yeah and hope hope and agency I think it's really important I hear it all the time doctor saying to the patient you will not get better uh this is chronic condition and and I know quite a lot of people who actually have who have beaten the odds why they have beaten odds I can sort of speculate about what it was but to tell a patient this is a hopeless condition you have to live it for the rest of your life is malpractice even statistics are on your side yeah yeah we've got to be so careful with the language we use and what we what information we impart to to the person sitting across from us and if our energy is this incurable it's bad for you because as a physician because I'm helpless and I cannot do anything for you and the patient says you're helpless like what a what a what a condemnation that is huh okay Bessel so in in our first conversation we spoke about all these different movement and body based therapies which people can revisit if they want to get your take on those things on stage yesterday at the Master Series conference in Oxford I asked you a question I said to you if you were writing the body keeps a score today right what would you change and you said to me the only thing you would change the only thing which I found staggering is that you would add a new chapter on psychedelics yeah so so many patients tell me that life just feels like a blur because of the pressures so many of us face the busyness the overwhelm the endless to-do list I've heard it time and time again why haven't things changed why can't I bring these healthy habits into my life and make them stick I've been a medical doctor for over two decades and I have to say one of the most transformative practices I have ever seen is the practice of journaling because it breaks the loop we have these unconscious patterns these subconscious patterns running our lives we don't realize how many anxieties and worries and concerns we have woring around and journaling is a very simple way to get the stuff out of your brain you get it down onto paper and you see it and that does something really really powerful when there's a new diet that you were following Fall by the wayside when does the new healthy habits that you were sticking to start to fall off track back that's the self-awareness that journaling is going to give you when people ask the right questions they get the right answers and those right answers allow them to change their life take up journaling today and watch your life start to change okay maybe five chapters in for second five chapters okay maybe but because it's a very big deal so for someone who has come across this conversation yeah and has grown up with the view that uh in inverted commas drugs are illegal they're toxic um they're things to be avoided I want you from your perspective to outline please what is the big deal about psychedelics why are you so passionate about them and why do you think they could be pivotal in the future mental health I did a research and that's the ultimate thing is you can look up my name and type in MDMA and you'll see a bunch of papers uh that showed that MDMA our treatment method was probably more effective than anything we have studied up to now so there data it's not just feelings but there's also an attitudinal difference and that is that um you know I'm 81 years old so I grew up in the 60s we took acid that's part of my culture that I grew up in and I didn't drop AET a lot but several times and uh I have a bunch of very prominent scientific friends and I say to my friends did you also drop aets and they also say yeah I did too and I say what did it do for you how did it affect you and they say be I think it's because of acid that became a great scientist because in acid I got to understand that the reality that I live in in my own head is such a small segment of an over reality and so that was also my experience I had not taken drugs since for 50 years or something uh until this opportunity came along but I knew that psychic agents open up your minds to new possibilities can we just pause there a minute so there's a couple of terms you've used which I think people may just need a bit of guidance through that so you mentioned MDMA and you mentioned could you just you just quickly walk people through you when we say psychedelics what are we talking about what do these different terms mean it's interesting so MDMA is a party drug supposedly what does it sound for uh ecstasy okay or Molly it's known on the street that's the drug that we did this very serious research about uh acid is LSD okay not so many people use it these days um but has potential uh cocy of course um is very popular and there good research on it also uh camine is an anesthetic that I I use a fair much in my practice uh completely different organ and you have IBO gain a chemical from Africa that seems to have has been studied for a treatment of addictions U as said there's a whole range of of drugs that what fascinate to me they all are very different chemical substances and they all give you uh somewhat different experience but the end result seems to be similar across these drugs we haven't done they they all even though they work in different Pathways if you look at broadly speaking what what they're all doing are you saying that in essence they all open up your mind to new experiences you you get you get out of your locked state of viewing the world and realizing there there's much more than what you thought so if you want to know more about it uh David nus yeah at Imperial College of course has done more studies on different things than anybody else so you may want to listen to a lot of people have heard the term iasa oh aaska is another drug I'm not scared of aasa is it's very impure substances that come from the jungle you don't know what's in it but I have seen people who were dramatically positively affected byka I also know a few people who got really messed up by well I think the the potential negatives are definitely something we we have to be aware of but so you're you're basically saying the category uh that we call psychedelic drugs there's MDMA there's acid there's siloc ibin there's ketamine and I Iain and IAS there's actually many more many more okay fine so um but you're excited about their potential and helping people heal from trauma our data and I mean so so I parttime a researcher and data strict obsessive and part I'm a clinician uh our data are spectacular and maybe have our clinical experiences but clinical experience you cannot quite trust because you have an N of one or you've only seen five people and there five people so you need to do research to see what happens to a larger group of people and so what we found in our research is that there was a dramatic change in the PTSD score with very good MDMA uh Psychotherapy assisted therapy so you have therapists to be with you as you go through the experience people in our study uh generally accessed very painful material so it was not a fun trip at all it's actually puzzling in a way to me that it's known as a party drug because in our setting it's mainly a trauma drug people really come up with very bad stuff they go through the pain and they become aware of this happened to me but it happened to me when I was three years old or 18 years old and people get sense of time and perspective and say I was just a little kid or I was just a stupid kid who was handed the machine gun and sent to a place for people blowing each other up so he did terrible things but I was just stupid kid back then and what you see is a dramatic change in people's self-perception what you see is people become compassionate about themselves and our earlier conversation was much about shame you should do this you're inadequate chronically tered people always feel ashamed about themselves why am I so fat why am I drinking why am I dring drugs I'm just a terrible person and on these substances people go like oh I eat so much because I can't stand my body and I don't want anybody to take a sexual interest in me uh and so you get this different perspective in yourself and you go like but today is today and the past is the past and the past may have been horrible but I don't relive the past anymore it is a sensational thing for me to see that people really change their whole perspective and orientation primarily on them El in in Practical terms so someone can visualize what this looks like does a patient obviously I'm guessing there's there's counseling or Preparation beforehand getting them ready is it a one hit where they they take it once and they have a psychotherapist with them whilst they're doing it or is it multiple or are we still looking into that today we do our we did our studies is you get a lot of preparation time you can really form an alliance with the therapist or therapists uh then you have a whole day you get debriefed people are there with you you process you talk about it you find language for yourself and then a month later you have another session and a month later you have another session so so three yeah has said it's the research protocol quite a few people said the study was over boy I learned a lot but I'm not done yet but because we do research protocol we stopped as three and some people after one session said oh my God is fantastic I'm done so but you do research protocol you should make it vigit and don't make variations some people Bessel who I I know uh some sort of acquaintances and friends who have previously suffered with addiction Y and let's say have gone through 12 step to kind of uh move beyond their addiction some people I know who have have gone down that path they feel nervous about taking another in invert com's drug because it's taken them so long to break free from another addiction they're they're scared but there is research now showing that it can help with addiction oh absolutely are they right to be fearful well they're fearful okay yeah sure see that's where you start yeah they are fearful you don't say don't be fearful get I get it totally and then you say well you give them some data which reassures them a little bit deep down doesn't make the fear go away but they and you form an alliance with them and they say you say your experience is that it's dangerous but I've seen so many people who really were helped by by this medication so I think it's worth your while to try it because you're being locked into this addiction or the fear that it will come back which is there every day for you is so huge that I recommend that we do it very carefully and I'm with you while you go through it and I'll take care of you but during your experience and afterwards from what you've seen with patients and from your research what are the various um situations where you feel it can be helpful you you mentioned addiction you mentioned PTSD what what other kind of collection of symptoms might you think chronic depression often times uh I'm very curious about OCD obsess with compulsive disorder which is so treatment resistance U let's be clear what we mean by that treatment resistance but people don't get better they don't get better whatever we do yeah O is a very ingrained disease and and but it hasn't been studied yet through the lens of psychedelics uh some people are beginning to do it and I'm somewhat hopeful because again OCD is a pattern you always react a certain way and uh the psychedelics may open up your pattern Network so psychedelics have been shown to change your neuroplasticity in your brain it's actually a huge issue and for someone who's never heard that term what is neuroplastic so there's such a thing is so your brain gets organized over time and as everybody who listens to this knows at some point it becomes pretty stable you're pretty much the same person tomorrow tomorrow as today and if today you're basically shy and there's a lot of Shame inside of you you can pretty much count in tomorrow you'll feel the same way because these patterns get locked in and in therapy you try to change those patterns but they're very ingrained neuronal patterns in your brain of what gets connected to what and on for a certain window of time and it's different for different one of these drugs your brain becomes wide open for a new V pattern so that the things for example you were neglected and Abus as a kid that sort of becomes part of who you are and how you continue to live your life and after MDMA and we showed that actually scientifically uh you may feel like now I know what it feels like to be a l child is it is it a bit like this is there probably not a great analogy but um I don't know let's say you've got an i phone and you reset it to factory settings right and suddenly everything's working again and it's flowing again right it could we look at it in some way that if you are stuck and your views and the way you are has become quite rigid and inflexible are psychedelic drugs potentially almost like a reboot to kind of I know it's not a Perfect Analogy but can we look at it a little like I would have no quarrel with that yeah yeah uh see the thing is you become wide open and whatever comes into you around that time can have much more profound impact than before and so but but the big thing that we actually just lost on is we try to have MDMA legalized as a psychiatric substance in in America in America and but we said you need to do uh psych assisted Psychotherapy somebody needs to be with you because what comes into your brain into your mind into your being at that time can have a transformative experience so if you're left alone with a drug and you're reliving your childhood abuse uh you're going to have a very scary experience if you have somebody sitting with you and um holds your shoulder about's going on or talks in like just stay there notice that it will be over before too long and you have this gentle voice and gentle presence then said then what comes into your brain is I can feel badly but I can be comforted during that time which of course is exactly what's missing in your past abuse experience why did the FDA turn it down uh was it the FDA the most ridiculous they said uh the risks out outweigh the benefits we did uh we focus more on risk we focus on every possible side effects there were serious side effects so why do you think they're saying the risks outweigh the benefits you know I think the Nixon years are back with us again right it it's like like you mean it's preconceived ideas over what these things are our data were so clear but I think in Psychiatry people are afraid of people feeling pleasure medicine also medicine never talks about pleasure and if and they had talked a lot about addiction potential no on MDMA it wears off after a certain time so if you take MDMA for several weeks in a row you don't it doesn't do anything for you anymore because there's actually no addiction potential because the effects are not reinforcing themselves the the effects become less and less with f use uh so it was a completely misinformed study by people who knew NE about psychedelics nor about PTSD and on the panel there was nobody who knew about trauma uh that's a state of play in America what's the state of play in the UK at the moment I don't quite know where it's in UK I'll meet with the uh oh you're going to see the psych Society yeah and and I'll spend time with David so I'm curious how it is but I've been in the Netherlands uh they put out a report about how safe MDMA is largely based on our research actually interesting in Australia they also legalized it and I what I'm saying to my European colleagues you know America is such a dominant cultural Forest that the world still yeah still follows America uh even though they follow the broken things of America also and I say know as Europeans and and Brits you guys need to get your own voice and not follow Americans in this but you can of course you should use our research to make a deal yeah earlier on in the conversation uh we we touched on different cultures and their relationship with trauma yeah and of course there's certain cultures that don't like to talk about stuff you know it's you don't talk about stuff I think you mentioned uh German upbringings before what did you say about them certainly German families Germans never talks about what the war did to them right the Japanese never talk about what the war did to them in China you cannot talk about the cultural revolution or gentleman Square it didn't happen but boy the Chinese are very good in body work so they are very good in dealing with the body but they terrible about talking hold on but that's really interesting isn't it so if if one of the things you're saying is that the body uh I was going to say stores trauma it's perhaps not the the correct word contains it it's expressed for your body yeah okay so expressed for your body yet you live in a culture where it's not acceptable or at least the done thing that you talk about it do you think things like uh Tai Chi and Chong for example came about maybe as a way of managing trauma and dealing with it without having to talk about it absolutely that's very much my take on things I think every culture mean this trauma has always been ubiquitous so very much of a part of a culture is how do we deal with trauma and yoga in India yoga in India and chiong taii and and acupuncture in China uh singing and marching in Germany so every culture has this Sufi dancing maybe in the Muslim ReliOn we know don't know we haven't studied it but every religion has inculcated trauma methods and I think for us as Western researchers doctors it's very important to discover What that particular culture has already has and to honor what is place there you mean I've seen taii Chong being practice in China and my first reaction is I was back in early 990s I got what what these people doing and then join people in the park and I go wow my whole body feels so much calmer and more focused and yoga bending over puty touching your toes and putting your butt in the air and you started doing he said wow this is amazing this really helps people yeah one one of the things I I mean I won't quite go as far as say I've been concerned about it but but I think about a lot and that we now live these sedentary lives yeah so moving our body is clearly important for physical mental emotional spiritual health you know we it literally changes us as we move our bodies even just go for a walk in nature you can feel fundamentally different about yourself and your life and I feel and I have to take responsibility that sometimes we have these conversations on this podcast about the importance of let's say resistance training as you get older you lose lean muscle mass and so it's important as you get older to do things that uh mitigate that loss to keep you well as you get older but I feel like with many things we come we've become quite reductionist and so often of of course moving your body is a good thing right but if you're sedentary and you're in a flexed posture all day and then you go to the gym to work on your muscles and you're doing more flexed movements and bicep curls and like I'm not saying that has no value but if we look at movement as much more than our lean muscle mass as much more than our physical health but as an expression of who we are as a human being you talk about these Eastern modalities and there's sort of an energy through the body with these various movements sometimes I wonder are we missing like the big picture of movements we're missing a big picture like when you talk about we training I know at my age I should do weight training 100% I don't do it because it is awkward and not rewarding to do it but if there were a little um shop in my little town that I live in where I would see my my friends and every Friday morning at night we're doing weight training I'll go see my friends yeah and I'll do weight training so you also need to think about what is rewarding and what what the social conditions we are we are tribes we're we're connected human beings so go I don't know how you do it but when you go to a gym by yourself and you don't know anybody it's not so much fun yeah reminds me I have you heard of the um Kenyan marathon runner elied Kip chogi yeah I've heard he's the only you know he's regarded as one of the greatest of all time marathon runners he's the only human that we know that has run a marathon in under two hours and I spoke to him on this podcast a couple of years ago a week after he broke uh the world record and he's a very calm uh softly spoken uh individual very very wise and one of the things I always remember is that he told me he never trains alone even though he's like one of the fastest people on the planet it makes everybody else feel terrible he never trains alone he goes no we always train together because it means that if I'm feeling tired or I don't want to do it someone's going to be on the phone hey s ellien where are you right where are you today and I said to him I'm pretty sure I said to him hey look you know it's kind of interesting because in in the west yeah and there's something wrong with this necessarily right it's just you know it's just interesting to observe we often go for a run by ourselves to deal with our stressed out lives right so we then motivate ourselves to put our shoes on and go whereas I feel in certain cultures it's not used for those purposes they they run together they're chatting they're you know like what you said about if you were meeting your friends every Friday you might wait train but if you have to go to the hotel gym here in Oxford right like i' I'd rather do it you ain't going to do it so it's fascinating how different cultures perceive things isn't you and you know you go to Italy and all these old men are doing bche together and they sit together and throw their balls together and they get their we training because it's social yeah to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I have created a free breathing guide that's going to help you reduce stress calm your mind and boost your energy in this guide I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference to receive your free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below and I think that's the key thing we learned from the blue zones more and more these these communities that have been studied where they live to a yeah you know a rip old age and they all have Hills they got Hills you know they are you know everyone of course the the the the the modern reductionist scientific mind wants to reduce it down what is it I don't think it's one thing I think it's a combination of factors and it's very hard to get away from the fact that every single Blue Zone yeah has community at its heart yeah and good example is that so I I have a research team and we were all we're all crestfallen that MDMA was declared illegal and so we had to research retreat at my home to think about what we're going to do next and one of the members of a group has a new baby and he and his wife was well he said I can't come to the research receipt because I have a new baby and I said to him well if you follow the FDA it's all a chemical Disorder so why you make sure that your little baby gets some right chemicals and just give it have some neighbor give it to him and come over to research for she hahaa it's not all to be reduced to one little chemical because we need that that human interaction with with each other that's at our core of our that's the essence of who we are this um FDA ruling has has really frustrated you hasn't it it is devastating no our study cost $163 million to do it just right it has the most potential of anything I've studied I've studied more different methods for dealing with trauma than anybody else alive from yoga to neuro feedback to theater to proac uh and here we see something where you go like wow there really is Hope and now it will go on theground and well that's what already is happening isn't it because he but here you get to the Great racial and economic disparities if you're a black man and you start using illegal drugs you go to jail if you are a person of color who's poor you go like I'm not going to touch illegal substances because look I have this fentel epidemic going on my community I'm not going to take these illegal drugs so you get into very educated people will know the research and will know how to choose somebody themselves on the ground and not not being afraid of going to jail well if you're poor and a person of color uh you're crazy to do it yeah but all these things have these huge uh social implications huh yeah uh have you got a plan as to what to do next doing podcasts so that the general public can get to know what it's like and so in America actually every state can make things legal and so it become we're actually going to not argue with the FDA talking to FDA is like talking to Trump you know like what make any difference but but uh we're going to put it on on the ballot and get it legalized state by state we're planning to work on actually it's kind of interesting many things throughout the course of human history yeah many many significant changes haven't actually come from the top down they've come from the bottom up these big Grassroots movements absolutely you know like you know my passion in life has to be has been to see what can help people and I was a sort of a very promising Junior professor at Harvard studying Pro and stuff like that very respectable then I start studying yoga and people like oh my God he's gone off the deep end and then I study EMDR this crazy ime movement treatment which is spectacularly helpful for sure and people go oh my God this guy he doesn't belong at Harvard they studying eye movements that's crazy like and now everybody's doing it uh but AC Academia is not very exploratory Academia like judges are interested in being respectable and getting a lot of Don donations from rich people they're not into Innovative stuff the Innovative stuff happens in the trenches we often find or I've often seen that uh clinicians medical doctors like yourself often speak more freely in the latter stages of their career now first of all I'm not saying in the latter stage of your career okay let's pretend they still true okay yeah so to be really clear I think you've always spoken your mind from what I can tell and being very open uh you know you wrote you wrote this book for example you know 10 years ago you must have been writing it 1213 14 years ago longer than that yeah right so yeah do you feel at the age of 81 more empowered to talk about these things less worried about judgement and critique from others which I know a lot of Junior clinicians are the early stages career they don't want to R they don't want to ruffle feathers it's like they need the respectability or they feel they need that to progress in their careers it's it's fascinating I think it's a generational issue and like most of my colleagues including the colleagues you meet at this conference uh many of them we have known each other for 40 years we are the people who are now in the late 70s early ' 80s in the US are a different population we were not motivated by getting tenure or being We're Not Afraid about making a living somehow money was not on our we were impassioned by finding something and I think it had something to do with Vietnam if you didn't protest against the war in Vietnam you will get sent to Vietnam you get killed so we were all very politically active and the civil rights movement and those are major forces in all of our Lives growing up like we're going to change society and there was very active and you know I've had students for 50 years now and every generation is slightly different and at some point people start talking about self-care and I go what is self-care I didn't think about self-care going to medical school and being every other night on call for my surgery or tell you you just do it and so and then oh maybe self-care is relevant and then people say I need to have Financial Security said Financial Security I never thought about that uh but that's what people are into so the culture changes it is that's fascinating because last time I spoke to Gabel mate yeah I think for the fourth time on the show was a few months ago gab had just turned 80 yeah's he's it's fascinating to me that you Dr gabal mate and many others are of that age yeah and we've spoken in this conversation about how our culture influences our beliefs and how we deal with things but yes of course the generation like what we deem or what Society deemed important at that time strongly influences your motivation to do your work it's incredible but I like to say in the contemporary culture they ignore six out of the seven deadly sins and they only focus on Greed how the hell did that happen I mean acquisition of money was not the primary driver as I was growing uph you want to do something meaningful you want your dad to approve of you all kind of other things but but again we have to acknowledge there that if you grow up in poverty yeah the acquisition of money way may well be for good reason a primary driver could be but that's not what I see really no I think this this whole you have to be more successful and make more money that is not what I grew up with and and I didn't see it in my patients either like I need to have a good life I want to have a house I want to have kids I want to be able to go on vacation but or in order to go vacation I also need money but it's really I really want to travel or I really want to do something and the money really was largely secondary for most people I've known yeah we we we we started off this conversation and you were very optimistic about Humanity in the world well no no that's not true either okay no no I I think no we we are a self-destructive species we won't stop climate change no uh for example we in Oxford I live in Wern Massachusetts uh I spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the air flying over here my brothers no longer fly because they take climate change seriously how many people do you know who have stopped flying because they don't want spew CO2 into the air now we are going to destroy ourselves and we are not capable of stopping that hold on hold on so this is interesting I think you did strike a very optimistic tone at the start which which again you're talking to this kind of these um I think these contradictions that we all have within us and we try and make everything black and white and I feel all of us have an element of personal hypocrisy I really do and we are kind and we awful at the same time yeah well I guess where I was trying to get to is given that you have seen some of the darkest things or you've you've been with people who have experienced some of the darkest things humans are capable of despite that it seems to me that you have a very optimistic and hopeful view about the capacity of a human being yeah the human Spirit what it really me to is would you agree with that yes I would but very much uh if you're on the Journey of Discovery if if I meet somebody who is motivated and say you know I always want to die but now I have kids and I want to live to see my kids goow up and I go to work on myself to be a real parent for my kids we'll find a solution and if that doesn't work we'll try that and if you have money you can explore a lot of different options if you're poor you go into pre-existing healthare systems where you get cognitive treatment to tell people you should think differently and I will fix your thoughts you know you get this nonsense stuff I think once you're in a position of some uh privilege some position of agency uh the world is open for you and and you people can I've no that's what I've SE seen my practice all my life people can change dramatically for the better uh they can they can they can given how important our childhood experiences are to how we see the world experience the world and our adult lives what advice would you give to parents who are trying to raise resilient kids you know as I said yesterday in some ways parents are over valued in your mom your dad uh yes your mom and dad are important but so are your siblings so is the school that you go to so is uh the culture you live in so your friends are terribly important growing up but s of friends you happen to meet and then you know so I'm thinking about writing a member right now and I actually met with a cousin of mine who has be at some point became the former oncologist in Netherland and he says to me you know there was nothing in my childhood that predicted I'd become as successful as I have become and I'd say there's nothing in my childhood that would predicted that someday I write the best selling book in Psychiatry like so things keep happening and keep growing and what can we do for our kids to believe in them to believe in them and to encourage them to explore the world and to take risks and to say you can always come home is it not work but go and really help our kids to feel safe in our affection and safe enough so they're willing to go take risks out there so they know on some deep level I can always go home and be taken care of but once you've once you know I'm safe you don't stay home anymore you go explore the world you know you've got that yeah yeah that that sort of Nest to come back to but I see a lot in traumatized people they stay close to home because they're scared bulby already talked about it with attachment but the more scared you are the less risk you're able to take the less you're able to break away from your tribe even if your tribe is a terrible tribe what about if your tribe is a helpful supportive tribe and you want to stay near that tribe like it's really fascinating this this for me so because yeah we do have now uh one of the things that's massively changed from let's say few hundred years ago you versus me you you still close your family and far away from my yeah exactly so it's fascinating and again not right or wrong just kind of interesting is to we know having a strong supported tribe around us is very um it can be very nurturing yeah it can also be problematic also drivve you crazy yeah depending on the relationship you have so anyway this is this is it is deeply fascinating um one of the things you said earlier Bessel which I think relates to this part of the conversation is that you've witnessed people who've had that really safe secure upbringing and you said in that environment the people around them were highly attuned to them I believe that pretty much anything good in Life or the most important things in life come from our ability to be present right absolutely so if as a father I can be present with my kids and hear them and listen to them not easy as you know no no not easy being present is is I if being present with the people around you if being present as a parent is one of the most important gifts you can give your [Music] children I imagine that being traumatized makes it harder for you to be presence yeah yeah it who dar pointed out already 1872 he says if he get stuck in fight or flight which is s defin of trauma uh it interferes with your reproductive capacities and it works against you on evolutionary basis because in order to create new life you need to give up your fight flight response to be totally there for The Offspring and if you cannot be there for your Offspring it works against the welfare of your Offspring 1872 amazing and that's so true if you're traumatized uh and you see it all the time you freeze with your kids you cannot be there for your kids you cannot be to like one of my joys in my life is to see my son I'm not sure how good a father I was but he has two kids and I just love watching him be totally attuned to his kids and I don't totally take credit for it but I'm really glad that my kid is really a t to his kid like beautiful wow yeah hey Bess you you you really are someone who has done such incredible work over the years both directly with your patients through your research but also through publishing this incredible book that still continues to make an impact and I hope we'll do for many many more years to come I first all want to acknowledge you and thank you for everything you've done for the greater good of humanity I I've just hung up with the red people you know yeah well it it is pretty incredible nonetheless and and to finish off if there's someone who stumbled across this podcast or they've been on YouTube and they've just come across this and they heard those signs that you mentioned earlier on about the things that may indicate that they have some unresolved trauma and they're like okay like I I reckon that's me I want to start somewhere but I don't know where to start what would your words to them be you know choosing finding a good therapist is very difficult uh I no this from own experience also I also gone to therapists that were no good uh but so word of mouth is the best having if you tell me I went to this trainer and I just made a big difference I trust your judgment more than the credentials that people have and number one uh so really good personal recommendation of people say yeah to really help me is the best thing um in the US people call me from all over the US I say go on the website of American psychologist which is a website and find people who are well trained in at least three different methods because anybody who says I'm a Freudian is a cult person they Freud is more important to you than the welfare of your patients I'm offending a lot of people by what I just said and a lot of there's therapist tend to become religious people they know one method and they start saying this method is the best method and you have to go to somebody who is very good in a variety of methods hopefully one having to do with the body yeah uh I think EMDR is very helpful for many people and very easy to do can you just briefly explain what it is for someone who never heard that this ey movement ization it's a very strange method that I've very studied very thoroughly that helps you to S dampen the memory somewhat uh and the other thing that you did ifs I think is a very helpful fundamental thing to do with people so I think that's knowing something about seatics uh knowing something about like EMDR type method and something like ifs is likely to leak you in the right direction yeah I just want to touch on what you said about someone who knows at least three different modalities you can take that out of the trauma world and I think you can apply that to many things so for example the the the movement coach who I work with who's incredible what she she has trained in so many different modalities over the years she is able to use different methods for when you know she has a huge toolbx so she can use the right tool and I kind of feel you know I'm very proud to be what I would call an expert generalist you I think we've got so super specialized but I love being a generalist who can go oh with this person I feel these things are going to help you with this person this is going to help you and I think I think we all have please the other thing that I recommend to people is ask whoever you go to has what you going to do for to me has it helpful to you yeah and if people say no because I'm not messed up and you are walk immediately out of that office because nobody escapes bad things in our lives yeah we like I'm so glad that you talk about your own therapy experiences you strike me as a very well put together guy and so you you know that things inside of you that also needs help sure and people who don't know that they need help themselves are not good therapist you know anybody who knows anything knows that we all are coping with really diff they know life is easy yeah that every life is difficult and be sure that whoever you see knows that life is difficult and you don't want people to talk about their own trauma get away from that also but if people can say this has really been helpful to me also that's a very important thing yeah and just finally Bessel if someone um because of where they live or their financial situation cannot have the funds or the means to uh find someone or see someone what are some things that they can do themselves to start them on the road to recovery I think anything that gets you in sync with other people is helpful you know it's no accident that after national disasters people get together and sing in cathedrals uh singing together is very very powerful moving together with other people is powerful I would imagine even joining a bowling league would be helpful for people you're saying that because you're in Oxford at the moment maybe I don't know is are you have bowling leagues here I did you say I think you said oh I think you said boating no no no bowling bowling okay do something together in aou together so my friend uh who you may have met this weekend he went to eeden and he said he was privileged I know his background he his mother died he was one years old and very painful background he says but the one thing I got from Ethan we were always playing together and doing sports together wow and if you can do that that's great or making music with other people or cooking with other people anything that gets you in a synchronous relationship with people around you is very good for you Bessel you do great work in the world it's uh been a real honor for me to have my second conversation on the show thank you so much pleasure pleasure if you enjoyed that conversation then I think you are really going to enjoy this one if I were to choose to live my life over again I wouldn't live it in this way yeah I wish I hadn't worked so hard when you're driven to work too hard you actually ignore what matters and where does that come from a game that comes from childhood trauma