In this episode, I speak with author, author, speaker, activist, and public speaker, Greta Thunberg, about her new book, The Myth of Normal: Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. We talk about the impact of a toxic culture on children, and how it affects the way they grow up, and the ways in which they are raised. And Greta shares some of her own personal experiences of growing up in a culture of stress and trauma, including how she was raised as a child by a Jewish mother in the 1930s and 40s, and what she learned about the effects of stress on her own childhood and the impact it had on her adult life and the way she raised her children. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Greta, and that you find some of the ideas she shares in her book and book very relatable and relatable. I know I did! Thank you so much to Greta for coming on the show, and I hope that you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with your friends, family, and loved ones. I appreciate your support and your support. xoxo, Sarah Sarah's new book: The Myth Of Normal: How To Grow Up In A Toxic Culture: A Guide To A Healthy Childhood And A Healthy Mind is available for purchase here and you can find more information about her book here on Amazon here and here if you're interested in becoming a supporter of her work. and/or want to support Greta's work here . Thanks for listening to the podcast, Sarah's book: I hope it's a good listen. Thank you, Sarah, I'm looking forward to hearing from you in the next episode! - Sarah, Sarah is looking out for you! Sarah s book is out soon! I love you, too, Sarah xo Sarah's Book Recommendation: "The Myth of Normality" by: Greta Gerhard Heinemann, - , of course, the author of The Mythical, Trauma, Illness & Healing in the Toxic Culture by (The Mythical and the Mythical by The Mythual, the Book of Normal by Greta McElroy, , and the book, The Mythic, the book of Normal, the Mythic of Normal? or &
00:00:47.000If you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory growing microorganisms in a Petri dish, that's called a culture.
00:00:55.000You know, you put in a brew with the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and then multiply.
00:01:02.000But if a lot of them started getting sick and a lot of them started dying, you'd say this is a toxic culture.
00:01:08.000Now, if you look at what's happening in North America now, there's an article in the New York Times, ten days before we speak, of a teenager being on ten different psychiatric medications.
00:01:19.000Ten different psychiatric medications.
00:01:21.000More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD, with anxiety, with depression.
00:01:26.000The rate of childhood suicide is going up, and everybody's saying, what's going on here?
00:01:31.000More and more people are getting autoimmune disease, mental health issues.
00:01:36.000The overdose crisis in the States, over 100,000 people died of overdoses.
00:01:41.000Either we assume that these are all accidents and sort of blows of misfortune, or we get that there's something about this culture that's fomenting so much illness.
00:01:53.00070% of American adults are on at least one medication.
00:02:35.000If you look at how human beings evolved over millions, really, of years, and hundreds of thousands of years, and even our own species has been on the Earth for about 150, 200,000 years.
00:02:49.000For all that time, until the blink of an eye ago, we lived out in nature, in small band hunter-gatherer groups, where kids were raised communally, so that it wasn't just an isolated nuclear family or an isolated mother or father.
00:03:03.000Grandparents and uncles and aunts and the whole community.
00:03:06.000It takes a village, as the saying goes.
00:03:19.000They were breastfed for three or four years.
00:03:22.000In today's society, And I can start even before then.
00:03:27.000Already we know that stresses on the pregnant women have a negative impact on the infant, physiological impact on the infant's brain development.
00:03:39.000In our society, we don't pay attention to women's emotional needs when they're pregnant, and we don't pay attention to the child's emotional needs.
00:03:47.000So the child needs to be held and accepted unconditionally.
00:03:51.000Now, in our society, we actually tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying.
00:04:23.000I read her diary and she writes, this is when I'm two weeks of age and we're in the maternity hospital.
00:04:30.000And she says, my poor little Gabor, my heart is breaking for you because you want to be fed and you're hungry, but I promised the doctor I would only feed you every four hours.
00:04:39.000And you've been crying for the last hour and a half.
00:04:43.000What's it like for an infant to lie there next to their mom and not be picked up and fed for an hour and a half?
00:04:49.000Try telling a mother baboon or a mother cat or a mother bear to ignore the child's distress for an hour and a half.
00:04:56.000So the very advice that we give to a lot of parents these days already damages the child.
00:05:05.000Who are the experts that thought it was a good idea to not pick up children when they're crying?
00:05:10.000It's been going on for about 100 years, maybe even longer.
00:05:15.000Dr. Spock, I don't know if you remember the name, Benjamin Spock, his book was just the most influential parenting bible for decades, through the 50s and the 60s and the 70s.
00:05:28.000And he talked about the tyranny of the baby who wants to be picked up.
00:05:32.000He says how you deal with that is you walk out and you shut the door and you don't go back.
00:05:36.000In other words, you isolate the infant.
00:05:38.000Now, look at how hunter-gatherers raise their children.
00:07:16.000I mean, if you ever raise the puppy dog, you know that how you treat that little infant animal has a huge impact on what kind of a creature they're going to develop into.
00:07:30.000In fact, even more so, because we're more dependent and more helpless than the average animal is.
00:07:36.000So we need that care and that connection even more Powerfully.
00:07:44.000So when we're lacking it, the infant assumes unconsciously that there's something wrong with them, they're not lovable, the world is not a trusting place.
00:07:54.000Then we spend our lives acting out from that unconscious belief.
00:08:00.000So the majority or a large portion of our culture develops as a child with this problem.
00:08:59.000The human infant needs that at least as much as the baby elephant.
00:09:03.000So the first need is this unconditional loving welcome in the world.
00:09:09.000The second need of the child is That the child shouldn't have to work to be loved, to be accepted.
00:09:18.000I shouldn't have to be pretty, smart, successful, compliant, good, nice, anything.
00:09:24.000I shouldn't have to work for what is my birthright, which is to be accepted as a person with value and worth and lovable in their own right.
00:11:41.000You pushed on the anger to be accepted by your environment, but later on that causes you problems, mental health issues and physical health issues.
00:11:50.000So when I'm talking about irreducible needs, I'm talking about real needs.
00:11:53.000And in this society, parents are told to keep ignoring their own parenting instincts, to make the child behave the way they expect them to behave, and the result is a lot of kids are hurt without parent meaning to hurt them.
00:12:18.000And you feel like this is the base of this host of psychological problems?
00:12:24.000Well, I wouldn't want to put everything down to just one dynamic, but certainly what happens to children in the first three years is a huge template for problems later on.
00:12:36.000And once a child develops and becomes an adult and has all these issues that are connected to the way they were raised, what can be done then?
00:12:47.000Well, that's where the process of healing has to begin.
00:12:55.000By the way, okay, let me deal with the question.
00:13:40.000Because as a Jewish infant under the Nazis, the message that I got is that the world didn't want me.
00:13:47.000Now, not because the Nazis directly affected me as an infant, although we lived under Nazi occupation in my first year of life.
00:13:54.000So my mother was, our life was under daily threat.
00:13:58.000In the book there's a painting of my mother and I with her running a yellow star When I was 11 months old, she handed me the complete stranger in the street to save my life in Budapest.
00:14:13.000I stood on that very pavement just a couple of months ago when I visited my birth city.
00:14:19.000So she gives me the total stranger To convey me to some relatives in hiding because she thinks where we're living I'm not going to survive another day.
00:15:28.000So, you know, when you say how do we, at some point you have to say, so there I'm a successful doctor, columnist and so on, but I'm depressed.
00:15:37.000At some point I have to start asking, and my kids are afraid of me.
00:15:41.000I have to start asking myself, what's going on here?
00:18:05.000In fact, I know you had because I saw your interview with Lex Friedman.
00:18:11.000And he talked about how you handled...
00:18:16.000The negative vibes that come your way sometimes.
00:18:18.000So sometimes I can see that as their issue.
00:18:21.000But if I'm particularly vulnerable, maybe stressed, maybe I haven't taken care of myself, maybe I haven't swum for a few days, so my nervous system is on edge, then maybe I can take it personally and then I can get triggered.
00:18:31.000That seems like one of the best forms of medicine, some sort of rigorous exercise.
00:18:37.000You don't want to talk to me if I haven't swum for a couple of days.
00:18:56.000And so I do that 50 minutes an hour a day and it makes a huge difference for me.
00:19:02.000And when you do that, do you do it with the intent of enjoying it, or do you do it saying that this is the necessary work I have to do, or is it a combination of both?
00:19:59.000I will answer that, but I have to tell you as well that this is not separate from my medical work either, because in my medical practice I began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental.
00:20:10.000There were certain traumatic imprints in people who got physically ill and mentally ill, who got addicted and so on.
00:20:17.000So what I saw in medical practice kind of melded with what I experienced in my own life.
00:20:25.000So my steps were both to start talking to my patients and to find out about their lives, and I began to see the commonalities amongst people, including myself and my patients.
00:20:37.000It doesn't matter how addicted or how ill they were, there was always something about them that I could recognize in myself.
00:21:06.000So my book on Addiction in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, was published in 2009 in Canada and in 2010 in the States, in which I point out that addiction is always, always, always rooted in trauma.
00:22:15.000And I thought this is the best praise I've ever got because I've been thanked quite often for saving people's lives, but never for causing one long distance.
00:22:25.000So go back to your question about genetics.
00:22:47.000You know, my father was an alcoholic, my grandfather was an alcoholic, I'm an alcoholic.
00:22:51.000It's not the gene that's passed on, it's the trauma that's passed on.
00:22:54.000Because what's it like to grow up in a home with alcoholism?
00:22:57.000Now, there are some genes that make some kids more prone to have mental health conditions and addictions and so on, but there's no gene that causes any specific mental health illness, any specific addiction.
00:23:13.000What there are is a large group of genes that the more of them you have, the more likely you are to have any mental health conditions, including addictions.
00:23:22.000But, you can have those same genes and be a perfectly happy, successful, joyful, creative person, depending on how the environment acts on those genes.
00:23:32.000Which means that the genes are not for disease, they're for sensitivity.
00:23:37.000And the more sensitive you are, when things go well, the happier you are.
00:23:43.000When things go badly, the more unhappy you are, the more pain you have, the more you have to run away from pain, and that's where the addiction comes in.
00:23:51.000So the genes are not for addiction as such, and most of my profession gets this completely wrong.
00:23:56.000So yes, there's a genetic predisposition not to addiction as such, but to either joy or suffering, depending on what the environment does when it acts on you.
00:24:11.000I forgot where this conversation began, but this is where we are now.
00:24:14.000Well, we're just talking about addiction and genetics and whether or not...
00:24:18.000You know, when you hear about families that have a history of alcoholism, we just assume, based on what we're told, that that's because this is...
00:24:29.000Yeah, and it's probably the part of the world your ancestors are from and whether or not they had a history of abusing alcohol and there's genetic predetermining factors...
00:24:40.000Okay, there's a great example to refute that right here in the United States.
00:24:48.000So prior to colonization, the native people had no problem with addiction at all.
00:24:57.000And they even had some alcohol in the New Mexico area.
00:25:53.000Because they were so traumatized by what happened to them and for a hundred years their children were abducted from their homes by the state and the church, sent to these residential schools where they were sexually, physically, emotionally abused.
00:27:03.000By the time she was 9 years old, she was an alcoholic.
00:27:06.000By the time she was 20 years old, she was a heroin addict.
00:27:09.000Nor her grandchildren, nor heroin addicts.
00:27:11.000What's being passed on here is the trauma, not the addiction.
00:27:16.000Now, the reason I began to talk about addiction is after that book came out showing the relationship between addiction and trauma, I would travel and I'd be speaking and people would ask me, what do you know about ayahuasca and the healing of addiction?
00:28:41.000And I also got the pain of what happens to us when we close our hearts.
00:28:47.000All of us human beings, it really hurts.
00:28:49.000And then we have to protect ourselves from that pain with drugs and behaviors and sex and gambling and work and everything else.
00:28:56.000So I got that if we can both feel the pain that we've been running from all our lives, But also maybe experience the love that's underneath all that pain.
00:29:23.000And then I decided I'm going to work with this plant.
00:29:26.000I'm going to help others with this plant.
00:29:27.000I'm going to help myself with this plant.
00:29:29.000So that's how I got into psychedelic work.
00:29:32.000So this one experience, you have this revelation, you feel this love and you understand that you have been closed off to this your whole life.
00:32:47.000When the shamans come to chant to me, all six of them, in turn, I'm sitting there thinking, you can do your best, but this brain is too thick.
00:33:13.000Because we think that you have such dark, dense energy that affects everybody else in the room, and it interferes with our capacity to help the others.
00:33:22.000And because of this dark energy that you're carrying, our Icaros, our chance, can't penetrate you.
00:33:29.000What's causing them to have this reaction?
00:34:17.000And furthermore, they said, we think you have worked with so many traumatized people in your life, and you've absorbed their traumas, and you haven't cleared it out of yourself.
00:34:27.000And furthermore, they said, when you were very small, we think you had a big scare and you haven't got over it yet.
00:34:34.000This is me at age 75. In the book, I'll show you a painting, if I may.
00:35:21.000And the other five worked with the rest of the group.
00:35:26.000And so they fired me for my own retreat.
00:35:28.000Now, my ego didn't like that very much, but, you know, these people came all over the world to work with me, and now you're telling me I can't do this?
00:35:37.000Yeah, we're telling you you can't do this.
00:36:03.000I describe it in some detail in the book, but you've had those experiences and as far as I can tell, it's very difficult to describe them in language because they're like beyond words, you know?
00:36:21.000Yes, my grandparents died in Auschwitz when I was five months of age.
00:36:26.000Yes, my mother was terrorized and stressed.
00:36:29.000Yes, I was a very scared little infant.
00:36:33.000Yes, the world was a terrible place to be born into, that place at that time.
00:36:39.000But that doesn't have to define who I am.
00:36:42.000It doesn't have to define how I trust the world or how I don't.
00:36:46.000It doesn't have to make me defensive and scared anymore because there's also love and there's also acceptance and there's also a reality that's much bigger than the trauma that happened to me.
00:36:59.000So it kind of liberated me from having to drag that experience around in my soul the way I really had.
00:37:06.000So you feel like up until that point you couldn't accept the fact that there was love in the world.
00:37:23.000And if you had asked me, I would have said yes, the world can be a beautiful, loving, accepting place.
00:37:29.000But on some deep emotional level, I couldn't allow myself to feel it.
00:37:34.000So you had perhaps developed a pattern of thinking that was insurmountable and that even though you had had psychedelic experiences and even though you thought you were doing a great thing by bringing people to these ceremonies and exposing them to the mother and all that comes with it,
00:37:54.000you had not changed the way you really viewed the world.
00:37:59.000Well, again, that's true in a very deep sense, but again, it's sort of relative because I've seen a lot of people heal.
00:38:22.000But also because One of the impacts of trauma is that you feel so alone with it.
00:38:30.000So everybody thinks that they're uniquely traumatized.
00:38:33.000So even though I knew intellectually that wasn't the case, and I knew how to work with people who had terrible experiences, I mean much worse than mine, I just couldn't allow that to penetrate me very deeply, as deeply as it needed to.
00:38:49.000And what these shamans helped me to do was to kind of help remove Another skin of the onion, let me put it that way.
00:39:01.000I've been through many layers, very important.
00:39:03.000But what I can tell you is that since that experience, people who have seen me before, they say there's more lightness about me than there used to be.
00:40:04.000I didn't even like the fact that I enjoyed sex, because sex to me seemed like pleasure, and pleasure seemed like a lazy, weak way to approach life.
00:40:51.000Yeah, so the problem with that is it's to be the best, you have to be Insanely dedicated to this one thing and you have to be pretty ruthless.
00:41:03.000You know and it took a while for me to realize what that was.
00:41:08.000It took a while for me to realize that My desire to do that was not a healthy desire and that it was a desire based on trying to acquire love and respect and the appreciation of others.
00:41:25.000And I was trying to do it through accomplishments.
00:41:27.000And are you aware of the trauma that led you to believe those things?
00:41:34.000I mean, my childhood was very fucked up, and my father was very physically abusive, and my mother left him when I was five years old, and there's a lot.
00:41:46.000No, I don't want to, by the way, create the impression that I'm some kind of a psychedelic evangelist.
00:41:51.000I think psychedelics have a role, but it's somewhat of a limited role overall in healing and when it comes to social issues and even individual healing.
00:42:08.000And certainly in my experience, it's a relatively small part of what I do, but it's a very cherished part of what I do.
00:42:15.000Well, the experiences are so profound and so significant, but they are just a day, and then whatever more you do.
00:42:28.000There's a lot of days, you know, and so it's very easy to go back to baseline.
00:42:32.000It's very easy to slip back into your old way of thinking.
00:42:35.000One of the ways that I describe psychedelic experiences like a real DMT experience is that it's like Control-Alt-Delete for your brain.
00:42:43.000So your brain reboots and then you're left with an empty desktop, but with one folder.
00:42:49.000And that folder is labeled my old bullshit.
00:42:52.000And you can either choose to approach life with a completely new perspective because you've had this experience, or you can comfortably and easily slip back into that old my old bullshit folder.
00:43:32.000And having people know that there is some sort of a deeply profound transformative option, this thing that happens that brings you into this other dimension, which truly feels like another dimension.
00:43:47.000I don't exactly know what's going on, but whether it is or isn't another dimension, it has the feel of another dimension.
00:43:54.000I think it opens up A part of our brain and consciousness that's usually not accessible to us.
00:44:00.000I mean, some people get there with our psychedelics, don't they?
00:45:02.000So this man who was driving here was talking about, and I was saying, you know what?
00:45:06.000There's actually a plant called iboga, iboga, and iboga is the plant that is really good for PTSD. And there's people working with it south of the border here, but they can't work with it in the U.S. because in the U.S. it's illegal, which is insanity.
00:45:54.000Well, I have never done it, so I'm just going on other people's experiences, but it doesn't seem like something that you would ever want to do a lot.
00:46:27.000In the body, and there's nothing you can do to change it, like if you're feeling comfortable in your body, and there's nothing you can do to change it, Yeah.
00:48:33.000Yeah, the North American indigenous cultures and I think you could say the same about Australia and some of these other countries that have been occupied.
00:48:41.000It's one of the most devastating things in modern times and it's not discussed.
00:48:48.000We have relegated them to reservations and they're kind of removed from the cultural conversation as far as like people in this country that are troubled.
00:48:58.000You know, we think often of slavery, which is also horrific.
00:49:01.000We think often of immigrants from other countries that are disparaged and experience racism.
00:49:07.000But we don't think about the native indigenous people that were here that had everything taken away from them.
00:49:15.000That's the colonial mindset, is that the indigenous people, they don't matter.
00:49:44.000If only we were willing to learn what they have to teach, not that we have to give up our science and our medicine and our technological achievements, but my God, if you could infuse some of that with the wisdom that they have to offer us, but we're so bloody arrogant, primitive,
00:50:00.000we have nothing to learn from them, you know, and yet they have so much to teach.
00:50:26.000I mean, there's certainly parallels to all sorts of conquerors in the way they treat their victims.
00:50:33.000It seems to be a human characteristic of cruelty, and I think part of that is based on the fear of being conquered yourself, or the fear of being captured and killed and have someone else's will imposed upon you,
00:51:38.000Or until they go too large and the territory gets a matter of competition.
00:51:44.000So I do think that And I do discuss this as well.
00:51:49.000I do think that we're very much creatures of our environment and so that what shows up as human nature is very often human nature as it is determined or influenced by a certain culture or a certain set of circumstances.
00:52:12.000When you think about the way human beings evolved, it seems like we have a brain and a body that really is designed for these small groups of humans, like 200 people.
00:52:43.000When you get to Los Angeles, this indifferent mass of human beings that's impossible to scale.
00:52:50.000When you look at the numbers of New York City, people stacked on top of each other, and the indifference they show towards each other, and the disdain they have for other people.
00:52:59.000Because other people, instead of becoming a valuable part of the community, they become a detriment to your ability to move around.
00:53:19.000In this culture, where the general belief is that greed and competition and aggressive interaction and selfishness and aggression are the way to make it,
00:53:40.000It's very difficult for people to get to that place of communal kindness.
00:53:46.000But when you talk about human nature, you talked about the kindness that you think you've attained or found that you've attained through your psychedelic work, for example.
00:53:57.000I don't know if you can answer this question, but I'd be curious.
00:54:49.000You very rarely find a workaholic, supremely motivated, conqueror type person who's truly happy.
00:54:58.000But that's the whole point, and that's why I talk about the myth of normal, that what we assume is normal in society is completely unnatural and unhealthy for human beings.
00:56:19.000When someone is stealing money and they have all the success, but it turns out that what they've done is done something illegal, like pyramid schemes or something where someone's...
00:56:30.000Using this sort of desire to succeed as a justification to victimize others.
00:56:37.000Yeah, but you just described the corporate world.
00:56:47.000We live in a world where, like you talked about sugar, for example.
00:56:52.000Well, there was this book, I think a few years ago, called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, or something like that, that was the title of it, by an American journalist, who shows that the food corporations quite deliberately set out to find what they call the sweet spot, just the right combination of sugar,
00:57:07.000salt, and fat that's going to make people addicted to their products, which is going to kill them.
00:57:12.000So these corporations are quite willing to make people sick.
00:57:15.000And so I was talking to a colleague of mine, Rob Lustig, who wrote a book called The Hacking of the American Mind.
00:57:23.000And it's how about the corporations deliberately create products that make people addicted at the risk of making them sick.
00:57:34.000What kind of minds would deliberately set up to sell products and advertise them and to manipulate the market that will actually kill people?
00:57:48.000And this is respectable corporations with philanthropists at the heads of their boards and so on.
00:58:02.000I was just watching this very disturbing commercial yesterday with children, and it was talking about ADHD, and it showed a kid that was not paying attention in class.
00:58:15.000And it showed these kids, like, playing around and doing things they weren't supposed to be doing.
00:58:20.000And then they introduced this medication.
00:58:23.000And then you have the child raising their hand, and then you have everyone clapping, and you have the child with a big smile on their face, and you've medicated your child to be a successful and integrated person in society.
00:58:36.000Shall I spot off about ADHD for a minute?
01:00:13.000If I were to stress you right now, create stress, emotional difficulty or tension for you right now, what would be your options of dealing with that, of dealing with me?
01:00:45.000I mean, the idea that your child, who is an eight-, nine-year-old ball of energy filled with hormones and life and thoughts and things they enjoy, and then you make them sit down.
01:01:01.000All day in this unnatural state in a classroom with fluorescent lights and stare at a teacher that's unmotivated and underpaid and is teaching something in a very boring and non-entertaining way.
01:01:13.000And then if this kid doesn't lock in like a zombie, we need to medicate them.
01:01:18.000Yeah, well, the other part of it is that if you look at my infancy, and it sounds like yours, we spent our first year or two under very difficult circumstances, a lot of stress.
01:01:32.000Infants can't help but absorb the stress of their parents.
01:01:44.000And our brain, this is the part that nobody taught me in medical school, but it turns out that brain science now teaches us that the human brain develops under the impact of the environment.
01:01:54.000So, The most salient feature of the environment that shapes the circuits of the human brain is actually the relationship with the parents.
01:02:05.000And if the parents are present and emotionally attuned and available, child brains develop properly.
01:02:26.000You've got a coping mechanism that's no longer working for you.
01:02:30.000But it had a function when it first came along.
01:02:32.000So this whole idea, and by the way, if a family comes to me with their ADHD child, I'll say to them, what you've got here is a very sensitive child.
01:02:45.000That sensitive child is picking up on all the vibes, energies and stresses in your family.
01:05:30.000But I haven't taken them for decades, because also I know that The brain can change if you treat it right.
01:05:39.000So this reliance on medications that we have is a real poverty of the spirit, a real poverty of imagination, a poverty of medical education.
01:05:50.000The average doctor never learns this stuff.
01:05:52.000The average physician never gets a single lecture on brain development, how the brain develops in interaction with their environment.
01:05:58.000So when you're seeing, let alone do they hear about trauma?
01:06:03.000So when they see an adult with ADHD or depression or addiction or bipolar conditions or, for that matter, autoimmune illness or anything else, they don't think of trauma.
01:08:24.000Because I can look at the same world one day and feel grounded and connected and I may have all kinds of concerns about what's happening in the world, but my nervous system won't be on edge.
01:09:10.000So when the parents are stressed, distracted, economically, or politically, or because of their own unresolved trauma, or whatever's going on in their lives, and they don't respond to the child's distress, they don't pick up the child when they're crying.
01:09:25.000They make the child be alone when the child is upset.
01:09:30.000The child's panic circuits get activated as they should be because when the child's panic circuits get activated, they cry for help.
01:09:41.000A young animal should feel panic when the adult is unavailable.
01:09:48.000In a rational world, in a sane world, that child would be responded to.
01:09:53.000But when children, as in our society, are not responded to in their distress, the panic becomes built into their nervous system, and now you have a lot of anxious people.
01:10:03.000And that's why more and more kids are being diagnosed.
01:10:10.000And the thought process of like leaving a child alone when the child's crying is that to toughen the kid up?
01:10:17.000Is the thought process that you don't want to encourage this sort of behavior because then they'll do it all the time and Then you'll develop an indulgent child like what is the thought process?
01:10:30.000The thought process is that the child's behavior is the problem and so we have to fix the behavior by controlling it now actually The opposite is true because if you pick up the child when a child has distress,
01:10:48.000physical and emotional distress, you're teaching the child that the world is safe and they don't have to be anxious about it and they can just ask for help and It doesn't entrench kind of crying,
01:11:08.000How it works, Dr. Daniel Siegel, who's a psychiatrist at UCLA and a very prolific author and mind researcher, he says in his book, The Developing Mind, that the child uses the mature circuits of the adult brain to regulate its own immature,
01:12:06.000What the mother bear needs to do is to meet the needs of that infant bear so the infant bear can mature.
01:12:12.000So if we meet the child's needs, They're going to mature out of that helpless state with a sense of self-regulation and confidence in their own capacity.
01:12:21.000But when you don't pick kids up, what you teach them is that the world is not available, that they're alone and that they're helpless.
01:12:31.000What about the concept of coddling children?
01:12:35.000And what about the concept of creating, you know, what someone would call a mama's boy?
01:12:40.000Someone who is scared of the outside world and just wants comfort and attention and just wants to be sheltered from stress and anxiety all the time.
01:12:51.000They just want to be alone with their mother and their parents.
01:12:59.000So there's a study that I quote in the book where they looked at a thousand or several hundred women, new mothers, and how they related to their infants.
01:13:33.000And the conclusion of the researchers was you can't love children too much.
01:13:38.000Now the case that you describe is not too much loving, but loving that comes from a very anxious place.
01:13:45.000So these mothers that coddle their kids when the kids don't need coddling, they're not doing it because the child needs it, they're doing it because they need it.
01:13:53.000They're doing it because they were not coddled enough, they're anxious, and they pass that anxiety on to the child.
01:13:59.000You don't create those dependent kids by loving them.
01:14:04.000You create them by imposing your own agenda on them, your own anxieties on them.
01:14:09.000So those are the mama's boys, if you want to call them that.
01:14:12.000But the mama's boy is just a very anxious person who downloaded his parents or her parents' anxieties.
01:14:19.000That makes sense because the kids that I know that grew up like that, their mothers were terrified of everything.
01:14:27.000And so they, boy, but how do you get out of that if you're, you know, you've developed this, these patterns of thinking that are based on a mother that is incredibly anxious and scared of the world and then you've sort of adopted these thoughts and,
01:14:42.000you know, they call you a mama's boy and that you're coddled.
01:14:44.000Like, how does someone break out of that?
01:14:50.000Well, there was a Greek playwright, Aeschylus, who wrote about drama about 2500 years ago.
01:14:57.000And in one of his plays, The Agamemnon, he says that the way Zeus, the way the Master, the God created us, was that we have to suffer, suffer into truth.
01:15:07.000And with most people I find that at some point, like me and perhaps like yourself, some suffering happens that says, okay, You're not going in the right direction.
01:15:19.000So again, it's got to begin with this understanding that what I'm going through is creating suffering for myself and people around me, and maybe it doesn't have to be this way.
01:18:35.000Now dopamine, which is the seeking chemical in our brain, the one that makes life vital and interesting and makes us explore novel objects or seek a sexual partner or seek food, Those dopamine circuits develop or don't develop based on what happens to you very early in life.
01:18:57.000And so that children that don't get the proper experiences, they might be lacking dopamine.
01:19:02.000Now they have to seek the thrill of the stimulant drug or the exciting activity or the dangerous rock climbing so they can feel really present and grounded.
01:20:18.000And he's just digging in his pick and pulling himself up this, and then apparently he had gone to the top with this other guy, and on the way down they died in an avalanche.
01:20:27.000No, I bet if you interview them, and I've seen interviews with these people, the free divers and the free climbers, what's happening during the experience, I'm totally present.
01:20:50.000Because it triggers the dopamine in their brain.
01:20:53.000So you feel like people like that probably have had something happen when they were younger where their body doesn't develop dopamine properly under normal circumstances.
01:21:11.000Yeah, the documentary Free Solo, and he's very famous for climbing like El Capitan and just sticking his hands in these cracks of the walls and climbing up with no ropes.
01:23:39.000When I read that quote to a couple of friends of mine who are fierce meditators in a way that I'm not, they said, That's what we get when we meditate.
01:23:50.000You know, but these people are serious meditators.
01:23:53.000But that state of oneness, that's just the highest state we can experience, isn't it?
01:23:59.000When we get that we're not these separate individuals, and this society creates this, what Dan Siegel calls the myth of the solo self, that we're all just individual separate little creatures struggling to make it against We're in competition and in a fearful race with everybody else so that we get separated from ourselves,
01:24:21.000which is the essence of trauma, and we get separated from each other.
01:24:25.000And then we have these peak experiences and we keep seeking these peak experiences because we don't know how to make it real in our own lives.
01:24:33.000One of the things you find out in competition is that the real competition is with yourself.
01:24:38.000You are competing against other people, but you're competing with yourself to improve upon your performance against other people.
01:24:46.000You're not really competing with other people.
01:24:48.000And once you realize that, it's a real revelation.
01:24:52.000You realize like, oh, I'm fighting my own demons.
01:24:55.000These people are just, this is a mechanism for me to be able to find that in me.
01:25:04.000Yes, which also means that there's no real loss, is there?
01:25:20.000Even though failure feels bad because you didn't accomplish what you wanted to accomplish, the motivation that you get from that and the revelations and the knowledge that you get from that are crucial to your development as a human being and in whatever your chosen pursuit is.
01:25:36.000Well, let me argue with you again, if I may.
01:26:23.000You know, that's why we have divisions, we have weight classes, and we also have belt rankings.
01:26:28.000So you would assume that someone who is a white belt is a relative beginner.
01:26:32.000That's one of the reasons why when we're talking about people who cheat, sandbagging is one of the most reprehensible things amongst competitors.
01:26:41.000And what sandbagging would be is Imagine if you had a black belt in judo.
01:27:02.000And people would be angry at you, justifiably so, because you're violating the rules of this scalable competition.
01:27:10.000And through the scalable competition, you're supposed to be met with surmountable challenges, things that you can overcome, things and lessons you can learn.
01:27:19.000And even if you get dominated by someone, what you learn is that that potential is within a human being.
01:27:26.000You know, one of my most profound experiences that I talked about many times is When I first started doing jiu-jitsu, I got dominated by this guy who was, you know, he's like an intermediate jiu-jitsu player.
01:27:38.000But the overwhelming control that he had over me and the dominance over me was so...
01:27:46.000Because I didn't know that a person could do that to me.
01:27:50.000And now learning that, I knew that that potential was in a human being.
01:30:06.000There's a great quote that I remember in my early years of Taekwondo where my instructor said that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.
01:30:18.000And that through overcoming these difficult obstacles and the fear of competition and learning that with discipline and focus you can get better, it can elevate your ability to do everything.
01:30:31.000Isn't so much of that also being completely present and focused and connected to your body and grounded and responsive to what's happening in the moment?
01:30:48.000You rely on your training and your focus and the ability to maintain this mindset.
01:30:54.000Yeah, which is so missing from our lives in general.
01:30:57.000Yeah, well, it's also one of the things that's missing from our lives is physically difficult pursuits, which I think we've categorized things into two ways.
01:31:08.000Things that are intellectually difficult, which we praise, and things that are physically difficult, which we think of as being like base and, you know.
01:31:18.000Less consequential to your overall development as a human being, but I don't think that's the case because I think that physical difficulties stress the mind in a way that we don't appreciate.
01:31:31.000Don't we value our athletes and our athletics and the people that can do incredible things?
01:31:36.000Sure we do, but we also dismiss them as being intellectually inferior.
01:31:40.000One of the ways that people justify that an athlete is better than them at this thing is by categorizing them as a dumb job.
01:31:48.000Oh gosh, I read sometimes the blog of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
01:31:51.000He's no intellectual midget, you know?
01:31:57.000I mean, to be great at something, I mean, whether or not he applies that to the rest of his life as well, that's where it gets interesting.
01:32:07.000They only focus on being the greatest at whatever, whether it's basketball or golf, and they don't think about their life in general as being a project as well.
01:32:20.000I might say that That certainly could have been said of me at a certain point where I would be really focused on being very good at a certain task or a certain area of endeavor, which is to say medicine and healing.
01:32:36.000But I wasn't applying the lessons to my own life.
01:32:38.000And I think a lot of us get compartmentalized that way.
01:32:43.000We don't take our wisdom into our own lives.
01:32:50.000I think a lot of us need mentors and we need people who have already gone down the path a little further than they have to tell them, hey, this is what's going to come up and this is how I've dealt with it and this is what you can learn from my mistakes without having to repeat them.
01:33:05.000I think one of the significant losses in society that we've sustained is the loss of elders.
01:33:12.000I mean, traditional cultures would have elders.
01:33:25.000And as they ought to, their experience.
01:33:27.000It also means they don't get shunted to the side and get made to feel useless and develop dementia, you know?
01:33:36.000Because they're active and involved in the community.
01:33:38.000And we've lost so much with the loss of...
01:33:44.000The elder and the passing of tradition.
01:33:50.000We're so focused on progress, which has brought incredible advances, that again we sort of cut off from one part of ourselves, which is rooted in tradition and rooted in wisdom.
01:34:10.000I mean, I've always said that about the idea of an ethical, moral capitalism, is that the competition of capitalism isn't the problem.
01:34:18.000The competition is the end-all, be-all, like only win, only get ahead, greed is good, the Gordon Gekko mantra.
01:34:28.000I think that people get lost in the achievement of the goal as being the ultimate thing that's going to bring them happiness, and it's never the case.
01:34:38.000Well, now you have the corporations we talked about before.
01:34:58.000It's also one of the reasons why a person inside of that corporation feels separate from the actual horrific acts.
01:35:04.000There's a diffusion of responsibility in being attached to a group.
01:35:08.000You know, I am just one of these people.
01:35:10.000I am just a manager of this region, and that's all I do.
01:35:14.000I mean, I have to abide by my shareholders' needs.
01:35:18.000In the book I interview A guy who used to be Vice President for Human Relations for IKEA. And he found out about my work about 10, 11 years ago and he said,
01:35:44.000But anyway, he came out to Vancouver from back east and we had...
01:35:51.000We're sitting with lunch at my house, and my wife is there, and Ray, my wife, says to him, his name is Ulf, and Ray says, Ulf, what is it that you do?
01:36:02.000And Ulf says, oh, I work with this company, maybe you've heard about it, called IKEA. And my wife just about jumped off her seat because she's just been to IKEA that morning buying some furniture.
01:36:12.000But Ulf says, That for decades, all he lived for was to be successful within the company, and he totally lost himself.
01:36:19.000He had no value, he said, that it wasn't associated with his success as an executive.
01:36:25.000And he says it was an empty existence, and he says he was making himself sick.
01:36:39.000So he started doing photography, and he's...
01:36:42.000He's a very healthy man, but he had to really learn after decades that everything he'd been done had been done for some external...
01:36:51.000And in this culture, we're so driven to validate our existence by impressing others, by trying to make ourselves successful.
01:37:03.000By the standards that are laid down for us by external forces that have nothing to do with our real needs and who we actually are as human beings, that it's almost impossible not to fall into that trap.
01:37:16.000It's very very difficult not to fall into that trap particularly if you're invested in a career path and you've achieved a certain amount of success and then you have responsibilities and you have bills you know you have mortgages and not only that you also have the old world telling you how great you are yeah so so when my wife would walk into a department store Anywhere with a credit card and they say,
01:37:44.000you know, are you the wife of, oh, isn't he wonderful?
01:38:24.000But you concentrate so hard on this thing that you're pursuing, whether it's climbing the corporate ladder or becoming a physician and working so hard constantly day in, day out.
01:38:37.000And that's the only way you get any measure of this feeling of value.
01:38:43.000It's when you try and get that sense of value from the outside, which if you had been valued just for existing from the moment you were born, you wouldn't have to keep doing it.
01:38:56.000But the thing is, so many people from that terrible childhood have developed this ability to pursue excellence, and then they have a shaped and Enhanced and influenced so many other people's lives because of their work,
01:39:13.000whether it's their art or whether it's their sport or whatever.
01:39:16.000Something that they've done, some way they've accomplished things has been incredibly influential to other people, yet they came from this horrific trauma.
01:39:27.000And the question is, can I balance that with more self-awareness and a more expansive experience of life where they narrowly focus?
01:39:40.000Let me tell you a story and let me ask you what you think about it.
01:39:44.000If I told you about a four-year-old girl who is bullied by neighborhood kids, you've got daughters, don't you?
01:39:51.000So imagine your four-year-old daughter being bullied by neighborhood kids, and one of them runs into the house to their mom and say, for protection.
01:40:04.000And the mom said to her, there's no room for cowards in this house.
01:40:37.000Okay, this story was told on public television in the United States in the front of a cheering audience, millions of people watching on television at the Democratic Convention in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was nominated And it was the voice of God,
01:40:56.000Morgan Freeman, who actually narrated this bio-documentary about her.
01:41:02.000And this was presented as a wonderful example of resilience building.
01:41:06.000And so what I'm saying, trauma is so normalized in this culture that even when this horrific incident is being depicted on television in front of millions of people, people think this is wonderful.
01:41:19.000And nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody commented on it.
01:41:21.000No, 65 years later or 60 years later, the same candidate develops pneumonia during the campaign.
01:41:29.000I don't know if you remember that, when she got pneumonia.
01:42:01.000These are very often our politicians, by the way.
01:42:03.000But I'm not talking about policies of whether I support her or somebody else.
01:42:08.000I'm talking about the human experience that's being depicted and totally normalized in this culture.
01:42:17.000Yeah, and that example, that is a problem that people do think that that's a way to handle a situation like that where a child's being bullied, to tell the child to go out there and face those bullies.
01:43:51.000I mean, how much of an effect did that have on people?
01:43:53.000Well, there was a study this week just about that, about how traumatizing spanking kids is.
01:44:00.000Yeah, I had a conversation with someone the other day, and they were just, like, talking about how they spanked their kids, and I'm like...
01:44:23.000But I'm telling you, the studies have been done over and over and over again about spanking, and its effect can be as bad as a more severe form of abuse.
01:44:35.000Yeah, I can completely see how that would be the case.
01:44:38.000I just don't think it's ever required.
01:44:42.000I wasn't really spanked maybe a couple of times when I was really young, but it was nothing serious.
01:45:11.000I don't do it, and I would never even consider it.
01:45:14.000I try to have conversations with my kids, and I have since they were really young.
01:45:19.000I have conversations with them, though I talk to them like I would talk to you.
01:45:23.000And although I'm much more, you know...
01:45:28.000Expressive and lenient and kind and I tell them how much I love them and the only reason why I'm having this conversation with you is because this is just an issue that people have.
01:45:39.000And one of the things that I always bring up with my kids is whatever you've done, I've done it.
01:45:45.000I caught my kid lying to me once, one of my daughters, and I said, I used to lie to my parents all the time.
01:47:15.000And Hunter has actually mentioned my work because his own addictions, he came to some understanding about the traumatic basis of his addiction problem.
01:48:33.000When they say that he's lying, I don't even think he's lying consciously much of the time.
01:48:39.000The guy who wrote The Art of the Deal with him, a guy called Tony Schwartz, once said that this man doesn't know the difference between the truth and the lie because if he wants something to be true, he'll believe it.
01:48:50.000Now, what other class of human beings will believe when they want something to be true?
01:49:24.000I'm just saying, I recognize it as a response to trauma.
01:49:27.000But the other is that he's got difficulty telling truth from reality sometimes because he wants something to be so true because his early years were so difficult he couldn't face the truth of it.
01:49:41.000And so what we're seeing in our politics, very often are highly traumatized people, you know, who then have to act out their trauma on the public level.
01:49:50.000I don't care which party you're talking about.
01:49:57.000Well, it's one of the more difficult aspects of modern politics is that the people that choose to pursue that level of adulation and attention and power are the people that should never have it.
01:50:15.000It's this wild pursuit and every four years we hope for a new leader, someone to rise who's going to make sense of it all and fix it all and it just doesn't happen.
01:50:27.000Which kind of, which is true, and it also points to the real dynamic in political life that we're, on a political level, we're much more immature than we might be as individuals.
01:50:40.000So we're like, we're looking to the mother figure or the father figure to fix it all for us.
01:50:45.000Instead of us asking, well, what's going on here, community?
01:50:48.000What's going on on a social level or cultural level?
01:50:51.000How do we all play a role in somehow making it better?
01:50:54.000We say, let's just elect the right daddy or the right mummy, and they're going to make it okay.
01:50:59.000And then four years later, we're disappointed.
01:51:05.000And we're also locked into this tribal ideological thinking where you can justify the lies of the person on your side because they're on your team.
01:52:02.000But he was criticized far more severely than Clinton ever was for the very same behavior.
01:52:12.000And it works both ways, that people tend to criticize in the others, in the other side, that which will completely excuse in their own side, which makes political debates so toxic.
01:52:28.000And we decide what team we like, and that's our tribe.
01:52:33.000And that's also a negative consequence of our development, how we all evolved in these small tribal groups, is that the outsiders are threatening, but you are protected by whatever group you align with.
01:52:51.000And you see that with the blue no matter who or red till dead.
01:52:55.000You see that from either ideological position.
01:52:58.000They would support whoever's on their side.
01:53:01.000You know, there's a psychologist at Notre Dame University.
01:53:06.000Her name is Darcia Narvaez, and she studied hunter-gatherer groups.
01:53:11.000It might be interesting for you to talk to her once.
01:53:14.000She studied them internationally, studied them historically, and I don't want to speak on her behalf, but she could give you a very interesting What's her name again?
01:53:24.000I'll write it down for you afterwards.
01:53:25.000It's Darcia Narvez, and actually she's written a new book, which when it comes out, you really might want to talk to her.
01:53:31.000I wrote, she asked me to write the foreword for it, and the book is called The Evolved Nest, and it'll be published next year by North Atlantic Books, and I'm happy to give you her name.
01:53:56.000Anyway, Darcia could really tell you about her studies of hunter-gatherer groups.
01:54:02.000And not only about that, but about how...
01:54:06.000Her evolution has mirrored and paralleled the evolution of other mammals and how much we have in common with other animals when it comes to rearing the young and interacting with each other and so on.
01:54:18.000She's a very fascinating person to talk with.
01:54:22.000Well, I wouldn't be surprised that our evolution mirrors other mammals.
01:54:28.000We are animals, no matter what we think of ourselves.
01:54:30.000We're just this weird mammal that happens to be, at least amongst the ones walking on Earth, the most intelligent.
01:54:39.000Yes, and unfortunately, once that intelligence becomes disconnected from our emotional lives, it becomes a dangerous weapon, which is largely what's happened.
01:54:50.000I'm talking about our real emotional lives.
01:54:54.000Darcy's got this concept called, she says that we are species atypical, which means that we're actually the only species that is capable of creating environments that actually hurt us.
01:55:09.000Most species will seek out and cultivate, like beavers, will create environments that will support the protection and nurturing of the young.
01:55:17.000They build these dams, they create ponds.
01:55:22.000We create environments that actually hurt us.
01:56:35.000I mean, that experience didn't serve anybody's needs.
01:56:41.000It had no purpose other than Acting out of pure hatred and insanity by one people against another, you know, but this happens all the time in human life and so My quest as an individual and as a physician and just as an observer Why why do we do this and what do we have to learn about ourselves?
01:57:04.000So that we can break this chain of trauma I think people need to hear it discussed in a way that I It makes sense in their mind.
01:57:17.000Like what you're saying here today I think is going to radically impact a lot of people that are listening to this because you're saying things that resonate.
01:57:32.000And then once you've intellectualized that, once you have these ideas in your head, now when confronted by what would be a typical behavior, a pattern that you had fallen into, then you can recognize and say, oh, this is why I'm doing this.
01:57:48.000And then the process of change Is gradual and slow.
01:57:53.000I think psychedelics, one of the ways they help, and I agree with you that they're only a small part of this process of change, but they allow you to completely detach from the normal patterns of life in a way that is inescapable.
01:58:09.000Like when you're having a DMT experience or a psilocybin experience, it's And one of the weird things is that the most profound of these experiences, or many of the most profound, mimic human neurochemistry.
01:58:48.000Oh yeah, when you're talking about people recognizing, I think what's really important here is that when people look at their lives and whether they've lied or they've let themselves down or others, that they examine their experience compassionately.
01:59:04.000Not with self-judgment of moral condemnation of themselves, but why did I do that?
01:59:29.000So people are addicted to heroin, you know, and I worked with a lot of heroin addicts in Vancouver's downtown Eastside, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use.
01:59:40.000I mean, if you've never been there, it's an eye-opener.
01:59:44.000Yeah, so that's why I was a physician there for 12 years and I was a doctor at North America's at that time only supervised injection site where people would bring their drugs and inject themselves with heroin with clean needles, sterile water, and if they overdosed they'd be resuscitated.
01:59:58.000So opiate addictions and what you said about natural human chemistry.
02:00:03.000So why do people get hooked on opiates?
02:00:07.000Well, Opium works in the human brain because we have receptors for it.
02:00:16.000But why do we have receptors from a plant that comes from Afghanistan?
02:00:30.000Well, if you understand opiate addiction, you have to look at what do our natural opiates, which are called endorphins, and endorphins are, it means endogenous morphine-like substance.
02:01:04.000So the pain relievers, physical and emotional pain relievers, that's the first thing they do.
02:01:10.000Second thing they do is they make possible the experience of pleasure and reward and joy and elation.
02:01:17.000So those are important experiences because life is tough.
02:01:20.000What would our life be like if we had no joy, elation and pleasure?
02:01:23.000So endorphins help with that experience.
02:01:26.000The third thing they do is the most important thing.
02:01:30.000Then it's possible this little thing called love.
02:01:33.000Endorphins promote the loving contact between mother or father and infant.
02:01:39.000So when mother and dad or mother or dad are looking into the infant's eyes and the infant is smiling up at them, both the infant and the parent gets an endorphin hit.
02:01:50.000Now without that, now if you take infant mice and you knock out their endorphin receptors, these little mice will not cry for their mothers on separation.
02:02:06.000Now, if you take human beings who didn't have those early experiences that promoted the proper development of endorphin circuits, you got a sitting duck for opiate addiction.
02:02:16.000When they do heroin, they feel normal for the first time in their lives, as many people have told me.
02:02:22.000Russell Brand told me about this experience of love that he had when he did endorphin, you know?
02:03:41.000It's still a struggle in the United States to establish safe injection sites where people can use clean water so they don't pass each other with HIV. I mean, we're that backward.
02:03:58.000Iboga gain and also psilocybin and ayahuasca have been shown to help people cure addiction and to have some sort of a center where you have trained experts that can guide people through these things.
02:04:13.000And then there's the problem with these experts because they become a subject to all of the human flawed instincts of the guru mentality and then they become this revered person because they've introduced this person into this world of psychedelics.
02:04:33.000And their ego grows and they feed off the adulation and attention and then they get lost.
02:04:39.000I've seen psychedelic shamans even abuse, sexually abuse their clients.
02:04:46.000Not that I've seen it, I know of it very directly personally.
02:04:50.000I've heard of it as well in some of these retreats where you go to these other countries.
02:04:54.000So you have to really have some due diligence before you go to a place.
02:04:58.000And this happens, of course, in the spiritual leadership where all the Buddhist masters that have abused their clients or exploited their clients, the Catholic priests who have...
02:05:09.000The psychiatrists who have, the doctors who have, the politicians who have.
02:05:14.000It's just once you have power and you don't know yourself, Right.
02:05:19.000It doesn't matter how good you are and how much you know and how much wisdom you might even have, but if you're not integrated, you might very fall into the trap of using your power for selfish purposes.
02:05:50.000And yet people still go down that path because in that moment when they're in control of their flock and when they're getting all this adulation and they're doing whatever they want to do, they feel like they're superior.
02:06:12.000There's so many athletes that I know that were abused by coaches and experts and the very famous case, the infamous case of Larry Nassar.
02:06:24.000The doctor who abused all these young women and the acrobats.
02:06:30.000He got away with it for years and years and years, which is again, part of what the system does is it robs people of their internal power and they surrender it to others and they don't even think to complain.
02:06:53.000And they're also holding this position of a spot on the Olympic team, and you're going to compete, represent the United States in gymnastics, and so you just deal with it.
02:07:05.000Yeah, the power dynamic of human beings having power over other human beings in that way, specifically in regards to psychedelics, is one of the more disturbing things to me because I've seen this abusive thing happen in people that should know better.
02:07:23.000I mean they're supposedly on this journey and yet they're involved in this thing where they're clearly – they're extracting an enormous amount of adulation out of these people and they're using it in this very transparent way.
02:07:41.000And when you hear them talk, it's so obvious.
02:07:43.000And to anyone who doesn't know any better, or doesn't know them, rather, and they walk, like, what do you think's going on here?
02:08:17.000They may have been good at leading a war party, but that didn't give them authority to rule over the others.
02:08:25.000What we can say is that human beings are incredibly complex beings and we've got these incredible intellects and the more we become Again, you talked about the kindness that you found in yourself and that you recognize is closer to your true nature than your previous persona.
02:08:49.000When we develop the power or we develop the intellect or any aspects of ourselves, but we get cut off from the heart, we become very dangerous creatures.
02:08:58.000And neuroscientifically speaking, we think of the brain as sort of the ruler of everything.
02:09:05.000Actually, we have three brains, at least three brains.
02:09:08.000We have a brain up here, then there's a brain in the heart.
02:09:11.000There's a nervous system in the heart that has got important Predictive and knowledge.
02:10:25.000It's how that operating system gets programmed by the environment that determines so much of what we behave like and what we love, what we hate, what we accept, what we deny.
02:10:51.000That's my whole, not just mine, but it's one of my, that's the essential question.
02:10:58.000And so you're trying to, with this book, provide people with the tools and the understanding to recognize these inherent flaws that human beings have and these traps that they fall into and give them an understanding of how to lead their life in a way that's more harmonious.
02:11:18.000That's as good a summation of the book as I could give you.
02:11:21.000Yeah, that's a very valuable thing to do for people because there's so many people that they just don't know what to do and they don't have any outlet other than psychiatrists and psychiatrists oftentimes immediately put them on drugs.
02:11:40.000Modern trend of what's called biological psychiatry.
02:14:11.000Like when you do the research, the more adversity you had as a childhood, the more we risk you are for addiction, for mental health issues, for relational issues, and also for autoimmune disease and malignancy.
02:14:24.000So for example, there was a study out of Harvard University, I think three years ago, women with severe PTSD have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer.
02:14:41.000In my experience, and I worked in palliative care for a while as well, looking up to two million people, and I've done the research, a lot of malignancy is related to trauma.
02:15:32.000Now, scientifically speaking, I'll tell you a secret that most physicians never hear about despite decades of research and thousands of research papers and elegant science.
02:15:44.000The mind and the body are not separable.
02:15:46.000What happens in the mind happens in the body and vice versa.
02:15:58.000So our emotional system is part and parcel of the same apparatus as governs our immune system and our nervous system and our hormonal apparatus.
02:17:29.000When you repress healthy anger because you're programmed to do so, because some parenting expert told your parents that an angry child should be banished from your presence, or because the child was abused and to survive the abuse they had to repress their healthy self-defense.
02:17:44.000Then they learn to suppress their anger all their lives.
02:18:15.000Those who are unhappily married and didn't express their emotions were four times as likely to die as those who are unhappily married, but they did talk about their feelings.
02:18:33.000So when you look at the question of why do women have 70-80% of autoimmune disease, they have much more likely to get rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, lupus, chronic fatigue and so on and so forth.
02:18:48.000It's because women in this society are particularly acculturated not to be angry.
02:18:57.000It's also why black people have more illness in society, because they can't be angry.
02:19:02.000For a black person to be angry is the core danger.
02:19:06.000And so, if you look at the biological markers, they're different.
02:19:11.000Not because of race, but because of racism.
02:19:32.000So as you know, for example, women who are, because I've heard you talk about it, people who are obese are more likely to get COVID, right?
02:19:49.000So the obesity epidemic in our society is an epidemic worldwide, by the way, as globalized capitalism extends its influence internationally.
02:19:58.000Obesity is a huge problem in China now.
02:21:18.000So I think that human beings, I have a lot of belief in the human potential.
02:21:22.000I just think we have to recognize what the problem is and move towards conditions that will support that potential rather than inhibit it.
02:21:29.000So yeah, I believe in the possibilities of human beings.
02:21:33.000That's why I get so excited about these kind of conversations and about your work in general is because it does give people a viable field of study and an option to understand and to look into all of the things that bother them and what is actually happening.
02:21:50.000What are the underlying factors that are leading me to these bad decisions?
02:21:54.000What are the underlying factors that lead me to this general feeling of distress and being upset?
02:22:02.000Well, I think people need a map to themselves, and I think my work and the work of others that I highly respect is to offer people a map to understand themselves so that they can navigate their lives with some information rather than blindly.
02:22:27.000Give people another viable option and give people an understanding of why the current options are so unsatisfactory and what caused them and why they're there and how you could avoid these problems.