[Music] trauma is not what happened to you it's what h what what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you physical abuse sexual abuse emotional abuse of children neglect a parent being addicted a parent dying a parent being jailed poverty or racism these are big traumatic events that can wound kids i had a wildly traumatic birth i got rushed to emergency surgery oh gosh and lost 2 and 1/2 L of blood oh gosh and they sent Sawyer home with Chris they kept me in the hospital and by the time I went home I had severe postpartum depression she's recently uh gone into therapy and one of her visions is a vision that she has where she's in her crib and she really wants me to come yeah and it's my husband and then it's my mother and then it's my mother-in-law and then it's my friend Joanie that would sit with me while Chris went to work and I never came that's one of the impacts of trauma is that a that shame based view of the self people start blaming themselves that somehow you invited it or deserved it or you didn't fight back hard enough the healing needs to begin with some compassionate curiosity towards the self not why but Why it's a totally different conversation it makes me sad that I didn't know this sooner but I feel very grateful for your work mhm hey it's your friend Mel i am so thrilled that you're here with me it is always an honor to be able to spend time together with you if you're brand new welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast and I know because you chose to listen to this episode that you're the type of person who values your time and you're also interested in learning about ways that you can improve your life i love that i love that you're listening to this episode and you want to know what else I love i love that you and I are going to get to spend time learning from the extraordinary Dr gabbor Mate dr mate is a world-renowned physician and best-selling author whose work dives deep into childhood development and the impact of trauma on how it shapes your mental and physical health over your lifetime dr mate has completely transformed how the world sees talks about and understands trauma and he has absolutely had that impact on me and it's been life-changing i promise you this episode is going to shift the way you see everything how you show up for yourself how you connect with the people you love and why you experience life the way that you do it's going to help you understand why coping has become your default and how you can move toward true healing i am so excited for both you and me so please please please help me welcome the extraordinary Dr gabbor mate to the Mel Robbins podcast before we dive in Gabbor I would love to have you speak directly to the person who's listening to us and just share with them what they might expect to experience if they really take to heart what you're about to teach us and share with us today well a lot of people are facing challenges um a lot of people are very hard on themselves a lot of people think there's something wrong with them uh my fundamental understanding and what I've learned is that underneath there's nothing wrong with anybody that everything you're dealing with came along for a reason there were adaptations or they were responses to difficult situations and the more you can understand where your issues came from and even when your negative self you and the shame and the self-loathing and the self-criticism and the perfectionism that you experience that there were actually responses to some kind of life experience and that fundamentally there was and there is nothing wrong with you and those things can be looked at and you can understand them and you can um transform that and really become yourself who you are that's available to you it's available to everybody so nobody's damaged goods i love that no one is damaged goods we are going to unpack this uh in this conversation at length but I think it might be helpful for someone who is not familiar with your work if we could go back sure and can you share if we go all the way back to your childhood just what was happening in your life and in particular how finding your mother's journal really impacted you and sent you in a certain direction in terms of your life's work well so I was born uh 80 years ago uh this year um in Budapest Hungary January 1944 to Jewish parents whose um lives were already impacted by the Second World War my father was in forced labor with the Hungarian army a Jewish man had to go into forced labor when I was born so he wasn't there when I was born in um March the German army occupied Hungary and then the genocide the holocaust that had obliterated the Jewish population of Eastern Europe but not yet that of Hungaries began in our country and within three months between March and June they murdered half a million Jews including my grandparents and we came very close to being deported ourselves my mother and I so I spent the first year of my life under Nazi occupation uh with the mother was terrorized and grief struck didn't know if my father was dead or alive for most of that year and then when I was 11 months of age to save my life mother mother gave me to a complete stranger Christian woman in the street and she conveyed me to some relatives living in relative safety and hiding um I didn't see her for five or 6 weeks and all this is recorded in the journal that she kept i I didn't discover the journal i I always had this her her journal but for many years when I tried to read it I get dizzy it's almost like sending me knew that this is too painful for me to handle so it wasn't until some years ago when my mother is still alive when I asked her to actually read the journal to me so I could really read what happened and she wrote in the journal that I'm writing this cuz if my son if my son grows up I want him to know what happened so that's in a nutshell but those events left a deep imprint in my nervous system in my body and in in my psyche um and those traumatic events created a lot of psychological wounds in me that took me some years to even recognize let alone to heal and uh it wasn't until I was into late adulthood and or middle age that I really began to deal with it and to recognize the subsequent impacts that then I passed on to my kids without meaning to but just for the lack of awareness so that's it in a nutshell well that's a big nutshell wow so how did those experiences in your life really start to shape your work like how did you start doing what you do today well before it shaped my work it shaped me and how I functioned in the world or how I dysfunctioned in the world in so many ways so it's it's when I began to experience challenges in my life um I was a successful doctor in my early 40s um respected but depressed and unhappy um I was married to the love of my life and we had a very strained conflictual marriage and my kids had issues and some ways they were afraid of me cuz I was very unpredictable um so all those issues then made me start looking for some answers so the work began by having to look at myself and trying to understand the sources of my behaviors um and that coincided with me noticing things as a physician in my medical practice and that's how I began to look at childhood development the impacts of early years um the concept of trauma and what that represented and its impacts on adult or childhood mental health physical illness and so on so both my personal experience and my professional work kind of led me in this direction of exploration and what have you learned about how childhood experiences shape who we become as adults they're largely decisive and um this begins even before birth so already the emotional states of the mother while carrying the baby will affect the child's brain development i just want to make sure that the person that's with us in this conversation really gets this because I didn't first learn that your emotional state and your physical state when you're carrying the child impacts the nervous system and development of the human being inside you and it makes sense but but can you explain more about that because this is an idea that was brand new to me just a couple years ago sure but we have to nail down first is we're not blaming mothers here they do their best we're talking about the stress is acting on the pregnant woman that's no fault of her own but speaking of stress when people are stressed they release stress hormones are dwelling on cortisol when the mother is stressed in pregnancy those stress hormones go through the placenta of the umbilical cord to the baby that affects the child's nervous system in his development cortisol has a huge impact on the development of important brain circuits you can look at the heart rate of infants in the womb as it changes as the mother is more or less stressed so these are just physiological facts so um there was a study done after 911 after the tragedy of 9 911 women who were pregnant then uh and who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder in the third trimester of pregnancy as a result of 911 their infants had abnormal stress hormone levels a year later now abnormal tester levels have an impact on brain development and on physiology on the physiology and physiological health as well so you can expect those kids unless something's done to to correct it to face more challenges later on and we know that mothers who are stressed during pregnancy depressed during during pregnancy their children are more likely to have ADHD attention deficit disorder other mental health challenges so it's just now what's interesting here is indigenous people have always known this i was talking to a a native group in British Columbia where I live and this guy comes up to me and says you know doc in our community when a woman was pregnant there was a rule that if you're stressed or upset you were not permitted to go near them we didn't want your stress and upset to affect the baby so this modern science has only confirmed indigenous wisdom but it's a huge issue in this country in this culture cuz people are so stressed for so many reasons well it's interesting to listen to you explain all this because for me personally your work has impacted both me and recognizing the way that childhood experiences and in vitro experiences when I was inside my mother's body impacted Sorry in utero in utero is that what it Okay see I'm not a medical doctor no in vitro means in the laboratory oh okay you're right in in utero exactly yeah so impacted me when I was inside my mother developing you know into a baby and then I think about your work in the context of me as a stressed out mother and the state that I was in when I was carrying any one of our three children and how that absolutely impacted their development there's this kind of conflict that I feel between oh gosh you know I hurt my kids and I didn't mean to and also this understanding that I think this is part of the human experience on some level well for first of all when my mother was carrying me I don't think she even wanted to be pregnant i mean what Jewish woman really wanted to be pregnant in the middle of the Second World War when my when her husband is in forced labor already in Udo kids can feel if they're not wanted i've seen this show up in many many many many ways now the the the thing that I would take up with you is on the one hand there's the awareness that this is what happened but the way you formulated that you hurt your kids no pain flowed through you to your children but you didn't hurt them you didn't it's not that you did something deliberately or consciously to hurt them it's just that the way it worked is that trauma is transmitted transgenerationally but that's not to blame anybody and it's really important to remove blame cuz parents feel so guilty already parents with kids who are challeng have challenges believe me I've been one of them there's a tremendous sense of guilt which is entirely unwarranted and undeserved and it doesn't even help so let's just agree that the trauma does come through us but we don't do it as such that is incredibly helpful way to think about it though when you said that it's pain moving through you yeah yeah that made my shoulders drop how do you define trauma particularly for somebody who isn't aware whether or not they've experienced it um the way I define it is very straightforward trauma comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding so trauma is a wound it's a psychological wound in this case could be a physical wound but here we're talking about psychological wounds the important distinction to make is that trauma is not what happened to you it's what h what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you so in my case my trauma wasn't that my mother gave me to a stranger the trauma was the wound which is that I perceive myself as not wanted i perceive myself as abandoned who gets abandoned somebody who doesn't deserve to be loved so then I develop this sense of not being good enough not um being lovable enough now that means I spend much of my life trying to prove that I'm good that I'm lovable that I am important which then drives all kinds of behaviors which then create more problems but the trauma is not the event that's the traumatic um episode but the trauma is the wound that happens inside you so if I get a blow head that's not the trauma the trauma is the concussion that I developed now in that case it's physical and I want to kind of hover here because for a long time I just assumed trauma was something that happened to people yeah who were at war or were in a country that was occupied by you know a fascist government or country coming in like your parents were and that you were i or somebody that was the the victim of a violent crime i never understood that experiences that may seem insignificant on the surface somebody's mood somebody criticizing you feeling left out that these are things that can also leave a mark just like a blow to a head can can actually leave a concussion and I would love for you to explain to us what actually is a psychological wound because one of the things that I see happening a lot is people either shame themselves for being stuck or they say I'm just too emotional or I should just get over it and there is something deeper that you mean when you say it's a psychological wound so well that self-t talk that negative selft talk that you just articulated is itself a psychological wound it's a sign of psychological wound it's a sign of self-rejection which is one of the deepest impacts of of trauma is that people traumatized they develop a shame based view of themselves so they begin to think that there's something wrong with them that itself is a wound now when you talked about seemingly insignificant things we have to make a distinction here there are what we call the big T traumatic events those are have been well studied physical abuse sexual abuse emotional abuse of children neglect a parent being addicted a parent dying a parent being jailed um violence in the family um a ranker's divorce a parent being mentally ill to which we need to add social factors such as poverty or racism these are bigt traumatic events that can wound kids and we can talk about the ways that hap happens but you can also wound kids not by doing bad things to them that you shouldn't but by not doing the good things that they need in other words children have certain needs a human child is born with certain evolution determined needs those children whose needs are not met that way for example for unconditional loving acceptance and I'm not talking about the parents love i'm talking about the capacity of the parent to unconditionally accept the child and to see the child what do you mean when you say unconditional acceptance because I think most of us it's revelatory to hear no there's a biological hardwired need that you have as a child to feel unconditional acceptance and safety from the adults around you and in your environment and if you do not feel that way it creates a response inside your body there is a reaction to that but most of us I think we even just skip over that fact Gabbor that there's a fundamental need that a child has to feel accepted and so what does that mean if you could unpack it for us sure children get to experience and see themselves the way they are seen by the adults so if a child gets emotional and they get criticized then there's think there's something wrong with their emotions if a child is very sensitive and they're told "Don't be so sensitive," they think there's something wrong with them if um a child a young toddler is behaving a certain way and the parent thinks that the way to correct this is to punish the child then the child and the child is just being a 2-year-old then the child begins to believe that there's something wrong with them and they have to compensate for that by meeting the parents expectations so now the acceptance is no longer unconditional i'll accept you if you look this way talk this way behave this way and then all your life you'll be worried about how do people see you that's a sign of a childhood wound because fundamentally uh we need to be connected to ourselves and and um when parents don't see us we don't see ourselves that's just a fact and if you look at human evolution um we didn't evolve under the conditions that kids are raised now we evolved under conditions for millions of years until 15,000 years ago living in small communities where there were many adults it takes a village to raise a child um the kids were always with the parents there was no separation kids were carried everywhere they were not put down to let it let them cry it out they were just unconditionally accepted and uh not punished actually not hit it's a totally different paradigm of of parenting that's how we evolved which means that the human child expects to be treated that way uncondition you know unconsciously when those needs are not met kids are hurt children have another need which is we're wired to have certain emotions you know along with other mammals we're wired to have anger it's anger is essential for survival fear we're wired to have fear we're wired to have um curiosity seeking we're wired to have um separation distress so that if the adults not around we should be upset we should panic so we cry so the parents come and get us mhm we're wired for play and children have this need that when those emotions arise parents should understand those emotions and and and not necessarily do what the kid wants them to do but to understand the child's feelings and when children are denied that kind of understanding they think there's something wrong with their emotions then they start telling themselves I'm too emotional i'm not good enough uh I'm too sensitive i am um not lovable or when children don't get the attention that they need guess what they develop and need to be attractive so they can attract attention now look at the damage done in this culture by people thinking that they need to meet certain standards of physical looks and the trouble that people go to it's all because they were not accepted just for who they were and not they're trying to attract attention is there a human being on the planet that doesn't have trauma from their childhood i mean you know cuz I I'm sitting here listening and it's an interesting conversation because you listen to it both from your experience and I love that you said we're not going to blame mothers and pain is moving through people yeah this is why trauma passes through your family and through cultures generationally and learning about this helps you understand the responses to your childhood that helped you survived and it also helps you feel empowered to take responsibility that's right to change those now subconscious responses that you have yeah so going back to your question about is there anybody on the planet yeah but in this culture that would be the exception because there's so many features of this culture that don't meet human needs that human make human life difficult look the United States is the richest country in history 70% of adults are at least on one medication 40% of adults are at least on two medications more and more kids are getting medicated for all kinds of conditions from ADHD to self- cutting to to aggression to so-called oppositionality to anxiety we can look at this two ways either human beings are just innately troubled or there's something wrong with the environment in which we're raising our kids and in which we're trying to striving to doing our best but we're facing conditions that are enimical to healthy human development so in this sense when we talk about trauma we're talking about the conditions under which parents have to function these days if I was functioning in a laboratory trying to grow microorganisms the word is called culturing we're trying to culture organisms laboratory culture if in that laboratory culture a lot of those microorganisms began to develop pathologies or die off you have to say this is a toxic culture well it's the same thing with human beings so rather than look at the source of people's problems strictly within themselves we have to actually look at the conditions for any creature in the world whether it's a plant or animal you have to look at the conditions under which people are living and raising kids and trying to function so that's what I'm doing here when you think of childhood trauma how do you identify it well again I mentioned those 10 conditions the big T the big T's ones um adding to it poverty and racism those things actually affect the physiology of the body so people who are traumatized that way they have a much higher risk for example people who've had several of those big experiences that I talked about they have a higher risk for autoimmune disease high risk for higher risk for cancer much higher risk for addiction much higher risk for mental health problems and so on why like can you explain for from a medical reason like in the body this show is has listeners in 194 countries sure and this might be the very first time as you're listening to God birth that you're actually starting to go wait a minute everything that he's saying is what I experienced or at least pieces of it i've never considered that this could be trauma yeah and we've talked about it as a psychological wound but I think it'd be really helpful if you also explained how does this create either programming or conditioning in your body that starts to define who you become as an adult and create behaviors that you never intended so that happens on both the physiological and the psychological level okay on the physiological level trauma incites inflammation in the body so people who are severely traumatized in childhood you can measure the level of inflammatory particles in their bloodstream they'll be abnormally high which makes them more at risk for cancer more at risk for autoimmune disease more at risk for depression mental health problems and so on that's just a physiological fact trauma can affect the way uh genes are turned on and off so genes don't function independently um there are very few conditions that are purely genetically determined there are some when one runs in my family musculardrophe if you inherit the gene you'll have the disease but that's very rare relatively but genes are turned on off by the animal environment so the wrong genes can be turned on and the and the right genes can be turned off by trauma then trauma can disregulate the body's stress mechanism so people are secretreting more cortisol and adrenaline these are the stress hormones which in the short term are lifesaving because if I was threatened or you were we would generate cortisol adrenaline from an adrenal gland and we would be stronger and faster and better able to counter the threat either to escape or to fight back but in the long term those same stress hormones thin the bones create more clotting in the blood narrow the blood vessels elevate the high blood pressure elevate the blood pressure you get hypertension suppress the immune system put fat on your belly creating higher risk for heart disease makes you depressed ulcerate your intestines these are the stress hormones wow so there's all that um on the physiological side and I could say more about it but if you for example I I mentioned racism so if you look at the chromosomeal aging of black people in this country they age faster than Caucasians and black is already have higher blood pressure measurements than their Caucasian counterparts it's got nothing to do with genetics it's got to do with the stress of racism a black woman in this country the more episodes of racism they experience the higher the risk for asthma children whose parents are stressed are at higher risk for asthma this has been known for decades i could go on a great length about that so these are some of the physiological impacts then there are the emotional impacts so like in my case being given to a stranger gives me the sense of not being wanted not being important then I develop behaviors where I try and prove my importance so I become a workaholic doctor so I drive myself too hard and I don't pay so much attention to my family cuz I'm out there trying to prove my importance in the world now that has impact on my kids that has an impact on my marriage so there's these um behavior emotional impacts which result in certain behaviors then we can talk about addictions addictions is a huge consequence of childhood trauma of all kinds and there's all kinds of science behind that so the one more thing if I may say when people get the message that their emotions aren't acceptable to the adults children will push down their feelings in order to be accepted and they'll try to be nice and cooperative and they'll try to fit in with other people's expectations which then means they'll be stressed all the time which then potentiates all kinds of illness you know I am sitting here thinking about ways in which I can try to distill down what you're saying because the information has been so life-changing for me in my own life to really accept acknowledge and seek to understand how childhood experiences created a traumatic response inside of me and I want to focus on the I guess you would call it the smaller T stuff which is that you have fundamental needs as a child and when they are not provided to you that it creates trauma inside of you and is it fair to say that another way to think about trauma is that it's something happening outside of you that creates this almost like alarm or bracing in your body it's like it it kind of flips you into that fight or flight cuz I have this experience of not like going back through my childhood and not like seeing anything that's massive related to my parents but just having this sense of constantly being on edge constantly feeling like you know it's my job to make everybody happy don't say the wrong thing this hyper vigilance and I never knew where it came from yeah well the child is very sensitive to the parents emotional states and uh even if for example you can uh one of the ways you can tell if a marriage is troubled is you can ask the parents or you can measure the child's stress hormone levels so the stresses of the parents are directly rel um affecting the child's physiology and the child's psychology so you may not have articulated and and and and clearly see what was going on but especially if you're a sensitive person genetically and that is genetic sensitivity you'll feel exactly what's going on and you'll think it's all about you and then you also develop the belief that it's your job to fix it and then when you can't fix it you have this tremendous sense of guilt and shame cuz you failed at your job of making your parents happy which never should have been the child's job in the first place what is a child supposed to do about what just as you're growing up it's interesting because I think so many people at least in my life and my lived experience is that that that's my job to protect myself to like make everybody happy to but but you see that's how you survived because what you needed most of all is a relationship with your parents and one of the needs of children that I haven't mentioned is what we can call rest which means in order to cuz in that rest state we can develop and grow and unfold now rest means the child doesn't have to work to make the relationship work with the parent the relationship is just there there's nothing the child can do to break the relationship now in a situation where that's not the case then the child necessarily has to work to make the relationship work because without that relationship they know they can't survive so that adaptation the the hyper vigilance on your part remember I said in the beginning that nobody's damaged goods mhm so that that hyper vigilance on your part and that belief that it's your job to make the situation peaceful that's an adaptation on your part so that's a form of trauma that's an outcome of trauma the problem is that that becomes then wired into your personality but children don't have any choice in the matter they have to adapt to this situation those adaptations they become wired into their personalities and that's who they think they are that's not who they are those are their adaptations their trauma showing up in their behavior and in their emotional functioning one of the ways that I've seen people really deny Yeah the existence of trauma inside a family is between siblings where two siblings will grow up in the same household and be like "Well that never happened." Or "Mom wasn't like that or you're just being too sensitive." In your work what have you discovered about how siblings can grow up in the same house no siblings grow up in the same house no siblings have the same parents no siblings have the same family no siblings have the same childhood why not there whole lot of reasons number one there's the birth order parents don't relate to the first child the way they relate to the second child then there's gender differences parents don't relate to I'm not talking about whe the parents love the kids or not i'm talking about what actually happens the child doesn't experience the parents love the child experiences the way the parent shows up so um number one number two the parents relationship might be in a different phase one child and another um the parents might be in a different economic situation the parents lives might be different um then each child will evoke a different response from the parent like with my three kids or your three kids yeah you have three children yeah you have two daughters and a son i have two sons and a daughter it's not that I loved or we loved any one of them more than the other but we responded to them differently and there's one more factor which is children are born with different temperaments which is they experience the world differently so even if I could be the same parent to all my kids which I couldn't be they still have three different parents because they would experience me differently well you know I I am sitting here listening again kind of from two places one as a mother right and one as a human being who was a daughter who has recognized that there were lots of small things that happened and one big thing that created a tremendous like a traumatic response inside me sure that created hypervigilance and anxiety and probably ADHD and I'm also thinking and I'm going to share this because I think it'll be really helpful that I had a wildly traumatic birth i was two weeks overdue they had to induce me here in Boston and my daughter Sawyer who is sitting outside this studio and yeah worked on the let them theory book with me she did not want to come out so it was 36 hours they had to use a forceps didn't work they ended up doing a vacuum extraction and then I tore and I got rushed to emergency surgery oh gosh and lost 2 and 12 liters of blood oh gosh and they sent Sawyer home with Chris they kept me in the hospital and by the time I went home my skin was as gray as a dolphin and I had severe postpartum depression yeah and the kind gobber where I could not be alone with her because I was in such a depressive and scary state and I was on medications that made it completely unsafe for me to breastfeed her i understand and for the first 10 weeks of her life I was a zombie on medication and oh my god it just like kills me to think about this and she's recently uh gone into therapy and has started doing EMDR and one of her visions when they kind of trace her you know responses to stressful things in the moment and it goes all the way back to the first vision is a vision that she has where she's in her crib and she really wants me to come yeah and it's my husband and then it's my mother and then it's my mother-in-law and then it's my friend Joanie that would sit with me while Chris went to work and I never came yeah so we went through the same thing uh with one of our children and my wife had a severe postbone depression she couldn't even look at the kid and um so let me say a couple of things here um one is that sometimes birth trauma happens you know but yours was severe now birth was created by nature in a certain way and um during the birth process there's natural hormones that are released both in the mother and the infant it's been called a love cocktail it's a combination of internal opiates and oxytocin and other brain chemicals which create the bonding between the mother and the infant now sometimes medical intervention is life-saving and essential but we've medicalized birth so much that we interfere with it so much now that we're getting a lot of birth trauma where it's not necessary i'm not saying that was the case in your situation but nevertheless we're doing it a lot you know and that interferes with mother and child bonding number one number two the child does have this need to stay with the mother's body for many months uh because the human child is the um least developed and the least mature and the most dependent of any mammal and the maturation like a horse can run on the first day of life human beings can't do that for a year and a half the horse is a year and a half ahead of us in terms of brain development that's because we develop these big brains these big heads if we waited any more than 9 months we would never get born sometimes even now we barely get born cuz the head is get stuck which is probably what happened in in your case mhm which means that the development that in other animals happens in the womb in human beings have to happen outside the womb that's been called extrostation there's introestation in the womb and extra gestation outside the womb now that means the mother's body the mother's skin the mother's heartbeat close to the baby for many many many months so when that doesn't happen in in the US 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth which is a massive abandonment they don't do it because they want to they don't they they have to do it for economic reasons it's a massive abandonment of children so so there's the birth trauma and its impacts which then there's the mother's depression and that has an impact on the infant so people kids whose mothers were depressed postpartum have a higher risk of ADHD and we can talk about why that's the case why is that the case cuz all three of my children have ADHD well I I can tell you what I The first book I ever wrote Scattered Minds was an ADHD after I was diagnosed and um we can talk about that but let me just say it now that's just the case and we can discuss it they've done electro and sephiloggrams on six-month old infants whose mother was depressed and whose mother was not depressed you could tell from the eg of the infant whose mother is depressed and who is not not because the depressed mother loves the child any less or is any iota less devoted than the non-depressed mother but because depress depressed mother can't respond to the infant with the same smiling u playful attuned interaction which the child needs for healthy brain development it's a sacred thing and and society needs to hold it sacred now how mothers used to develop or raise children is in the community where they gave birth in a community where they were with doulas where um no mind you they didn't have the advantages of modern medicine which again I'm not dismissing I'm just talking about how we evolved right and there was such a thing as aloe mothering other mothers would come and support the mother when the mother needed to rest other women would come and hold the baby um and mothers are left very much on their own in the society and that depression in the mother then affects the child's brain development not only that given that we develop a sense of ourselves based on how the adults look at us when the mother or the parents can't look at the child or they can't hold the child again the child begins to feel there's something wrong with them it feels like there's a million ways for this to actually happen well there is and I and I share the story because it's true i was a completely different mother when I gave birth to our second child Kendall just 19 months later and her birth was different and Chris and I were different and so I can see how without any ill intention Yeah you are a very different parent absolutely and the child is a very different child and the child is born with a different temperament correct so even so they they experience you differently to start with you know so how do you like how does this sort of unresolved trauma from childhood that I would imagine you know a lot of us learn about this as an adult and then we start to recognize that this is an explanation for a lot of the patterns of behavior that you don't really like but you're not quite sure how to get control of them how does unresolved trauma impact the way that you deal with stress as an adult so um the body's stress regulation apparatus which is physiological mhm it has to do with the connection between certain uh brain centers um down to the adrenal gland which is the stress gland you might say no child is born with stress regulation infants don't know how to regulate their stresses well neither do adults well as you say as you say in your book most adults are eight years old if that but I thought that was pretty generous this might have been four three or four years old um well stress like other functions has to develop so that when something stressful happens I know how to face it without being overwhelmed and that depends on the development of these brain circuits and receptors for brain chemicals now trauma interferes with the development of the body's stress regulation apparatus so that become adults and we don't know how to handle stress and then we seek escape so one of the ways that people escape from stress is addictive behaviors you know for example so if you do if you talk about or talk to addicts if you I look at my own addictive behaviors even if I go quote unquote sober for a while and then I relapse what usually happened is that I got stressed and then I reach for that addictive outlet as a way of soothing my stress so that's how it shows up but but physiologically it shows up by a disregulation of the body's stress regulation apparatus so there not just psychological we're talking physiology and you can you've done the studies in in laboratory animals where the way the mother handles that infant rat pup in the first few days of life will have an impact on the adult rat's capacity to handle stress and if you take the rats by the way whose mothers don't handle them as well and you put them with mothers who do their brains develop normally so it's not a genetic effect it's what's called an epigenetic effect it's the environment acting on the genes which is why we come back to your original point no human being is damaged goods no that the good news is that if you can recognize that your response to stress Yeah and traumatic situations and overwhelming emotional situations is something that you can identify and change that that's what the opportunity is here in terms of being able to heal and resolve trauma absolutely and especially if you begin by recognizing that it's not your fault there's nothing wrong with you you know when I think about my husband who absolutely experienced trauma by having a dad that was a workaholic and never around and narcissistic personality style and lots of drinking and stress in the marriage right and his response to stress is to just shut down the man goes silent and stoic and in our marriage one of the things that have come up a lot which you can direct line to his response to his own childhood is he doesn't really know what his needs are because they weren't met that's right and for him it took a long time to call that trauma from his childhood because he's like "Well I had food my parents were there i I know went to school it's not like they beat me." I know and for me I am the opposite i'm a reactor like I'm a human volcano and when I get disregulated or triggered or upset or overwhelmed I'm like and I and it's even though I know this and I've been working on it and I am a completely different human being i feel that way over the last three years I still erupt well join the club and well well so how do you personally navigate your daily challenges and when you get overwhelmed by stress so let me say something about Chris first if I may yes please when he says that I wasn't beaten or we weren't starving I had food and therefore I wasn't traumatized here's what I would say to him so listen Chris let's take one of your kids and let's say you were an alcoholic which means that you came home in different moods all the time and the kids didn't couldn't rely on who dad was going to be for one minute into the next and your mom was constantly stressed and you and and and if you were this way do you think your kids wouldn't be hurt by that so just plug your kid into the situation that you're in you see how and if one of your kids came to you and said "Dad I I don't like it that you're drinking and you're behaving this way or that way and and you're a workaholic like I never around." Would you say to your kid "Well there's food on the table what are you complaining about?" You know but I did no that happened in our house like 15 years ago okay and he felt bad and I was an oh okay again more trauma and more pain passing on to Yeah our kids yeah i'm just saying that when people look at their own childhoods they kind of minimize why do we do that because it was too painful to accept in the first place so that people dissociate and they disconnect from their bodies and their feelings now you said that he had a hard time feeling what he feels that that itself is a trauma impact it's a protection it's not a flaw it's not a damage it's an adaptation if I was hurting you right now and you couldn't escape and you couldn't fight back and you couldn't ask for help then dissociating and not experiencing your feelings would be your only protection but then it gets wired into you and then all your life you go through not knowing what you feel and not knowing what your needs are so again it's an adaptation that's what I'm saying is that nobody's damaged goods these are just adaptations the abnormality is not in the individual it's in the circumstances to which the individual had to respond that way so that his response or yours or mine for that matter were perfectly normal responses to abnormal circumstances i say abnormal in a sense circumstances that did not meet human needs one of the things that's coming to mind is thinking back to my own life and the moment where I first bumped into your work and I learned that the seemingly little things created a lasting impact yeah and that even though I wasn't to blame for the emotional volatility or the emotional shutdown in my parents when I was growing up that it impacted me it was real and it was my responsibility to heal and to decide whether or not I wanted to do the work to change the way that it impacted me cuz it did have a massive impact on my behaviors constantly feeling on edge people pleasing anxiety ADHD drinking too much chasing success as a way to prove that I was worthy of something and to make other people happy yes it was everywhere it honestly just defined how I ran on default and I remember the moment though when I started to truly accept the fact that these were all indications of trauma and that if I wanted my life to feel different that I needed to lean into everything that you're saying yeah and I felt a lot of conflict about that moment because I felt guilty for identifying it that way because I know my parents were just doing the best that they did they did and that there was a lot that I didn't remember yeah and I'm wondering if you could just talk to the person who's listening who is having that awakening for the first time where they're really accepting that some of the behaviors and the negative selft talk and the anxiety that this is a result of experiences that you had as a child where you were not given the things that you needed mel there's a lot in what you said okay f said you you behaved that way by default there's a difference between default and fault okay default you didn't know you were doing it you didn't know any better you were just following patterns that were programmed into you but it's not your fault okay there's a huge difference important distinction number one number two it's never the child's job to make the parents happy or to create peace in the family and a child invariably fails which instills a huge sense of guilt and inadequacy for not having fulfilled a task that never ought to be in yours never should have been yours in the first place it's a reversal of roles cuz whose job it is to hold who emotionally to create peace and so when a child is forced into that position again as an adaptation to maintain a relationship with the parents she's given an impossible task that she's bound to fail at and bound to feel shame over it which means that any shame and guilt that you feel is completely undeserved when we start to noticing these patterns we can start asking ourselves questions but it depends on how we ask them so I could say why am I behaving this way or is that a question no it's an indictment it's an indictment but I said hm I wonder why I'm behaving that way so we need to begin to develop that compassionate curiosity towards the self where we start looking not to why did I not this indictment as you say but genuine curiosity and from that perspective everything pretty much everything anybody thinks is wrong with them is actually begins as an adaptation or it begins as a failure of development because the conditions for development were not adequate and so then we can understand now it's not a question of being victims that's the last thing we want to do is to uh foster victim mentality they did this to me and now I can't help it no that happened and it's your responsibility and it's your capacity to change that now so you have to drop the victim mode altogether but that doesn't mean that we don't recognize what happened m so to say that stuff happened to you and I get the sense that something big happened that you haven't articulated yet but something big happened to you at some point um to recognize that is not to say that you're a victim it's just to say that whatever happened had certain impacts and fostered certain adaptations on your part that made you behave and undermine your development in certain way oh I'll share it with you when I was in the fourth grade I woke up in the middle of the night on a family vacation and an older kid was on top of me okay all right and that had massive implications on my life when were we uh I was fourth grade and I was sound asleep so I was in a safe space wake up to an older kid on top of me who was fondling me okay and in the scheme of things that can happen it was here I go to dismissing it you're looking at me you're like "No no no don't go there." Okay okay but I like It's almost like I'm shaming myself for having trauma about this no can I unpack this for you a little bit sure are you open to it oh I'm so open to it yeah okay here's a question I'm going to ask you okay how did you feel when this happened i felt very confused and scared confused and scared good enough who did you speak to about it no one okay now if something like this happened to one of your daughters in grade was it grade four okay if one of these things happened to um Sawyer or Kendall in grade four and if they didn't talk to you how would you explain that i'd feel How would I explain it i would explain it and I'm about to go intellectual i personally as the mother would feel heartbroken i understand how you'd feel but really I'm not asking how you feel i'm asking how you'd explain it why wasn't my daughter talking to me about feeling scared and confused and violated why because she didn't feel safe talking to me that's the trauma the trauma began before that happened cuz if you had been able to talk to your parents and they would have said "This is awful you must feel terrible come here let me hold you and let's deal with the situation so the trauma is not only in what happened is that you were so alone when it happened and that aloneeness was yours before this traumatic event ever occurred as a matter of fact abusers can tell with almost laserike accuracy who's defended and protected and who's not who can be victimized and who cannot so that your primary traumatic event was not this event not that this wasn't traumatic of course it was hugely traumatic but it became hugely traumatic cuz you were alone and that sense of lack of safety and and and lack of protection furthermore you may not even have wanted to bother your parents cuz already they're already stressed enough already you were protecting them that's the primary traumatic situation i've never looked at it like that yeah do you see that when I Oh a thousand% and I can also see when I think about experiences that friends have shared with me where they did say something and then there was denial there's dismissal in or dismissal or we're not going to tell anybody or this stays within us or even if they then go after the person and confront it it blows up and somehow you're to blame and so I can see how That's right and and and of course when you shove it down you then think you've done something wrong and that was the other thing that happened for me is that I felt like I had done something wrong that's one of the impacts of trauma is that the shame based view of the self people start blaming themselves that somehow you invited it or deserved it or you didn't fight back hard enough or which if you didn't was also self-p protection well I think that was one of the original moments that at least that I remember where I literally left my body and disassociated which was a defense yes so again it's an adaptation so that's what I would say about that incident it makes perfect sense yeah but again the problem is in the environment in in a lack of being held and being seen so there's nothing and then in your in your initial impulse when you began a narrative about how it's not as bad as what you know right right right would you say that to your your great if your daughter comes to you and says you it's not so bad think of all the kids that are you know being beaten or you know so that lack of self-compassion is one of the ways that trauma shows up and that's why I'm saying the healing needs to begin with some compassionate curiosity towards the self not why but why it's a totally different conversation and then I can also see and take responsibility and have a lot of compassion for how my volatility emotionally absolutely just pass that on to my daughters absolutely and so there are things that happened to them that in the time they didn't feel comfortable coming to me yeah yeah because the exact same thing exactly and you know it it of course just makes me it it makes me sad that I didn't know this sooner but I feel very grateful for your work because I know it now and so do our children and so does my husband and that knowledge gives you the the ability to truly address the things that happened and the response that happened in your body yeah and how that has created these default patterns and this inability to manage stress or emotion or conflict yeah in a way that is healthy and that keeps you connected to yourself instead of constantly abandoning yourself and feeling disappointed in yourself and shaming yourself and so while I can reflect on that with a lot of sadness and grief Yeah and regret i feel more empowered honestly well that's the whole point about what's possible that's the whole point is that we all want to be free but as long as we're running on default mode and we're just reacting to stuff there's no freedom in it we're actually like puppets on a string and if you remember Pinocchio you know when he becomes a real boy he says how silly how foolish I was when I was a puppet where we're all puppets in that sense as long as these traumatic impacts are running our lives we're puppets on a string and those strings are unconscious so it's a whole thing about becoming really free and that real freedom looks at depends on looking at how it was and getting in touch with our capacity to take responsibility now you know so what really the work is for all of us is how to become free so we can be in the present moment connected to ourselves the great trauma psychologist Peter Lavine says no longer living under the tyranny of the past and it's totally available it's totally possible it is totally possible and it's possible for you it's possible for your children it's possible for anybody that you know and love it's possible for your parents if they accept the invitation to look at themselves if they if they choose it yeah yes what is the first step is it asking the question like why like just being curious with a level of compassion like why am I like this because if I reflect on your question that's what happened for me i started to say to myself it's no longer tolerable for me to operate like this i don't want to be this person i don't want to feel like this i don't want to feel disconnected from other people i don't want to have this level of anger inside me so that's actually the first step is to recognize one's suffering rather than taking it for granted which incidentally is the Buddha's first teaching is that life is duka like is life is brings suffering you know and then the second question is okay why you know so it does begin with recognizing the suffering rather than denying it and running away from it and there's many ways to run away from our pain um through certain behaviors and addictions and the point is stop running from your pain accept that it's there and be curious about it without blaming yourself for it so those are the first steps and then you ask for help i mean the if help is available the natural we're born seeking help you've never you've never met a one-year-old in one day old infant who doesn't know ask for help but let me ask you a question how easy it has been going back for you to ask for help you mean if I think about when I was in fourth grade um then and and and even decades later are you are can you ask for help or is that a pro challenge for you well I ask for a lot of help now no I don't mean now i mean I mean I mean before your transformation absolutely like like when you just said that Yeah i had this epiphany that I've always felt like I got to do it myself exactly i've always felt like it's on me i've always felt like I just I'll just take this on i'll just do this like which was an adaptation cuz there was no help available but you were you know what's interesting so sorry go ahead is you just said there's no help available and I felt this knee-jerk need yeah to protect your parents yes i understand because I do know like I I mean I know my mom well enough to know that she would have picked up a shovel and probably clocked the kid into next week like I Yeah yeah that's not what you needed your mother to do you needed your mother to say "Oh gee that's awful come here let's talk about it." You weren't born not knowing how to ask for help you were born with a supreme capacity to ask for help i mean as we know any infant knows how to ask for help so something educates educates it out of us something compels us to suppress our capac capacity to seek help so if the first step is recognizing our suffering and the second step is getting curious about it then the third step is I need some help here it's beautiful well it's only the simple truth it is so simple when you lay it out like that and it's also so freeing one of the things that you write about that I think is so important that I would love to have you explain is this idea that we are naturally wired and have a fundamental need for joyfulness playfulness creativity and that we sacrifice that can you talk more about that well so there's um a book written by a paliative care nurse in Australia and I used to work in paliative care and it's called the top five regrets of dying people and she's talking to people who died before their time you know from cancer usually one of the regrets is is that they worked too hard they didn't play enough now playfulness is built into our brains all mammals play bear cubs play lion cubs play uh puppies kittens they all play we're wired for play why because play is essential for a number of things one is essential for brain development it's much more important for brain development than academic learning i'm talking about scientifically you know brain physiologically so play is important play is also important to form relationships cuz in play you can kind of rough house a bit but you're not actually being enemies so you're making friends that way so play is essential with the Pooh which is one of my all-time favorite books why is it one of your all-time favorite books well well it's so playful and uh but at the very end and I know you're married to Chris Robbins which is Christopher Robin you know I mean anyway there's a passage at the end of the book W the Pooh where Christopher the the boy by the way him and his father had a terrible relationship which is a whole other issue i'm talking about the real Christopher Robin um but the fictional Christopher Robin is now growing up and he has to go to school which means he won't be able to play with his animals anymore and he's trying to explain this to these animals including Winnie the Bear and the book ends with this statement that I'll paraphrase where it says that they go off walking together hand in hand and the book ends with "But whatever they do and wherever they go in the ent in the enchanted forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing together." And that passage as an adult would bring me to tears because as a kid as an infant I wasn't played with my mother was way too terrorized and depressed to play with me and and kids peekab-boo play starts so early it's essential for our mental health it's essential for our brain development so these poor people who were looking back on their lives and saying "I wish I had played more." Play is just essential and I have to say that one of the things that has kept our marriage going 55 years now is that we play so well together and we're just playing all the time when we're not fighting which which by the way is long gone not long gone but gone um so um play is play is just essential and you weren't played with so did you play with your kids it's interesting i have two brothers they're both intuitively playful with young kids they just know how to be with them how to pretend how to just get into their space i watch them and I don't know how the hell they do it cuz I didn't know how to play with my kids um not really i I I I kind of faked it but I I always kept waiting waiting for them to develop minds that I could engage with verbally cuz that on that verbal level I'm very comfortable on the play level I wasn't i was rather stiff i wish I was a grandfather i'm not yet because I'd learn how to play i'd let that infant teach me how to play but no I didn't know how to play i didn't know how to play i I really lacked that because it wasn't given to me when I was small my brothers had it now they grew up under a very different circumstances they didn't have the same parents you know in the way we talked about it today so they know how to play i don't But kids I mean well a very surprising insight for me as I've been working to resolve Yeah issues from my past is noticing that I'm a very warm person oh but I'm not affectionate uhhuh and it's this epiphany of going in more for the hug being more physical in terms of embracing my kids mhm and it's something that I definitely did not receive and I come from a long line of farmers and hard workers yeah and pull up your you know big girl panties and let's move on and that's the way that my mom is even though she's warm and amazing and loving but not physically embracing and so I really relate to that because it's something as an adult that I recognize that I truly want to change and it's takes effort it takes effort for me to go "Oh I noticed I'm just standing here i got to put my arm around." Just gone to five that's true and then hug somebody um the um I used to be hug phobic really and I embraced you when you walked in yeah you did but I honest to God when people in a room would start hugging each other I'd stand there like this and is that a response it's a response to really not being held and it's also um a kind of a protective shell i don't want to make myself that vulnerable i don't want to open up what might be some surprising adult behaviors that are an indication of unresolved trauma from your childhood well sometimes it's attributes and behaviors that the world respects you for so great success can sometimes be an outcome of childhood trauma cuz you're working so hard to prove something to the world like I talked about my own workism and and you know cuz I had to prove that I was important now that made me a very successful respected physician from the outside and the inside different story and in my family a different situation altogether um people who are very attractive and who put a lot of effort into being very attractive the world admires them but it's very often like I said before they're trying to attract the attention they should that should have been their birthright and they don't feel good if they're not attractive and you see this uh as people age this desperation to keep looking young because um they're not acceptable the way they are so it sometimes it shows up in success in what the world considers success and other ways like you talked about kind of not being the kind of person that is open to hugging or my husband shuts down well my response to um a sense of disruption in my relationship with my wife is to shut down so I just you know go sullen and uh non-communicative i mean I talk about that in the first chapter of the book this is you know I I arrive home from a speaking trip and she texts me that she hasn't lived home yet to pick me up from the airplane and I go into a sullen withdrawal stage because I'm reliving my abandonment unconsciously but I don't realize it and when I saw my mother again after that five or 6 week separation I didn't even look at her for several days which is the typical response of the child because the child's brain says you were so hurt when you were abandoned that you will not open yourself up again so your husband is exhibiting the same thing that that has been very dominant problem in my relationship in my marriage is my tendency to shut down uh in response to any sense of hurt even if the hurt has nothing to do with the present moment but it's a re triggering of some old wound you're so amazing what are your parting words you know what comes up for me is that beautiful movie um with Robin Williams and uh Matt Damon where Goodwill Hunting goodwill Hunting here in Boston yeah that's right where the psychologist Robin Williams grabs this very dysfunctional disregulated client paid by Matt Damon and he says "It's not your fault." We can only get that that's the biggest takeaway I would say just get it it's not your fault but there's reason for it it can be worked through well thank you thank you thank you for being here for sharing all of your wisdom and your research and for not only validating Mhm our experience but giving us three simple things we can do to reconnect with ourselves and truly take our power back you're amazing my pleasure thank you you're welcome yeah and for you on YouTube I just wanted to thank you for watching all the way to the end for choosing to watch something that is so important to your happiness to your health and for sharing this and I also want to thank you for hitting subscribe one of my goals is that 50% of the people that watch this uh YouTube channel that are subscribers to the channel because it really supports our team and it tells me that you love this content and it helps us continue to bring it to you and I know you're thinking "Oh my gosh this was so incredible what should I watch next this is the video that you should watch next you're going to love it and I'm going to be waiting for you when you hit play