Dr. Gabor Mate exposes modern North American society’s toxicity through skyrocketing psychiatric medication use—70% of adults on at least one drug—and 100,000+ overdose deaths, tracing roots to childhood trauma like ignored crying babies and intergenerational pain, including his own from Nazi-occupied Budapest. He links suppressed emotions (e.g., anger) to weakened immune systems, autoimmune diseases, and systemic stress, critiquing corporate exploitation of addiction while citing cases like Hillary Clinton’s resilience built on trauma or Trump’s "poster boy" status. Both agree healing demands compassionate self-inquiry and addressing societal harm, not just quick fixes like psychedelics, with The Myth of Normal launching September 13th. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day Pleasure to meet you I've really enjoyed your conversations online.
I love your perspective and it's really a real pleasure to have you in here.
If you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory growing microorganisms in a Petri dish, that's called a culture.
You know, you put in a brew with the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and then multiply.
But if a lot of them started getting sick and a lot of them started dying, you'd say this is a toxic culture.
Now, 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.
Ten different psychiatric medications.
More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD, with anxiety, with depression.
The rate of childhood suicide is going up, and everybody's saying, what's going on here?
Why is this going on?
More and more people are getting autoimmune disease, mental health issues.
The overdose crisis in the States, over 100,000 people died of overdoses.
Either 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.
70% of American adults are on at least one medication.
If 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.
For 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.
Grandparents and uncles and aunts and the whole community.
It takes a village, as the saying goes.
It takes a whole community.
Now, children also were picked up when they cried.
In fact, they were never even put down.
They slept with their parents.
They were breastfed for three or four years.
In today's society, And I can start even before then.
Already we know that stresses on the pregnant women have a negative impact on the infant, physiological impact on the infant's brain development.
It's not even controversial.
In 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.
So the child needs to be held and accepted unconditionally.
Now, in our society, we actually tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying.
And that has an impact on the child's trust in the world, sense of safety, sense of belonging, how they feel about themselves.
You know, in the book I talk about my mom, and I talk about my own infancy in Budapest, Hungary, as a Jewish infant under the Nazis.
So you can imagine how stressed my mom was.
But forget the Nazis for a minute.
I read her diary and she writes, this is when I'm two weeks of age and we're in the maternity hospital.
And 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.
And you've been crying for the last hour and a half.
What'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?
Try telling a mother baboon or a mother cat or a mother bear to ignore the child's distress for an hour and a half.
So the very advice that we give to a lot of parents these days already damages the child.
It's been going on for about 100 years, maybe even longer.
Dr. 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.
And he talked about the tyranny of the baby who wants to be picked up.
He says how you deal with that is you walk out and you shut the door and you don't go back.
In other words, you isolate the infant.
Now, look at how hunter-gatherers raise their children.
They carry their babies everywhere.
I met a Cree woman once who told me in our community kids weren't even allowed to touch the ground for two years.
They were just held all the time.
So it's modern life.
It's the pressure and stresses of modern life Acting on parents that makes it so difficult for them to really be there for the kids.
Now, my mother's heart was breaking.
She went against her own instincts to follow the doctor's advice.
Again, you tell a mother rat or a mother baboon to ignore the baby's cries and you find out what mother rage is all about.
Not consciously, but unconsciously the child makes the assumption that there's something wrong with me.
I'm not lovable.
The world is an unsafe place because we learn about Our worlds through how we interact with our caregivers.
That's the template.
I 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.
Well, human beings are the same.
In fact, even more so, because we're more dependent and more helpless than the average animal is.
So we need that care and that connection even more Powerfully.
So 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.
Then we spend our lives acting out from that unconscious belief.
If you look at what a psychologist friend of mine calls the irreducible needs of children.
Irreducible meaning that if you don't meet these needs, there's going to be negative consequences.
The first one is unconditional loving acceptance.
Just a sense of belonging, attachment, it's called.
Connection.
The infant needs that.
You know how baby elephant is born?
When the mother elephant goes into labor, all the mother elephants stand around in a circle.
When the infant plops on the ground, they all reach out their trunks and they stroke the infant.
That's natural instinct.
You belong to us.
You're welcome here.
The human infant needs that at least as much as the baby elephant.
So the first need is this unconditional loving welcome in the world.
The second need of the child is That the child shouldn't have to work to be loved, to be accepted.
I shouldn't have to be pretty, smart, successful, compliant, good, nice, anything.
I 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.
That's the second.
The third need is the freedom to experience all our emotions.
Okay, all our emotions.
Now our brains have emotional circuits.
For rage, which we need to protect ourselves.
For lust, which we need to reproduce.
For seeking curiosity, to explore and get to know our world.
And there's other emotional circuits as well.
For care, so that we can look after each other.
These are circuits that nature, evolution has wired us with.
These have been studied.
So one of the needs we have is the freedom to experience all our emotions.
All our emotions.
Our gut feelings and everything else.
A lot of parenting experts will tell you an angry child should be made to sit by themselves so they come back to normal.
I'm quoting a very famous person here, a psychologist who said this in his book.
An angry child should be made to sit by themselves so that they come back to normal.
Now, what's the message to the child?
Anger is not normal.
If you want to belong to us, you have to suppress your anger.
Suppressing the anger is a trauma because anger is given to us by nature as a natural boundary defense.
If I enter your space in a way that threatens you, you better get angry with me.
Get out!
That's healthy anger.
If I suppress that, If I depress it, push it down, 30 years later you're diagnosed with this disease called depression.
It's not a disease.
It was your response to the stupid advice of the parenting experts that your mothers and your fathers believed they should follow.
It's a coping mechanism.
You pushed on the anger to be accepted by your environment, but later on that causes you problems, mental health issues and physical health issues.
So when I'm talking about irreducible needs, I'm talking about real needs.
And 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.
They love their kids.
They do their best.
But because of this culture, they actually end up hurting the kids.
Well, 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.
So, medical doctor, I'm in my 40s, successful physician, newspaper columnist, respected, good income and all that.
But I'm a workaholic.
I have to be working.
If I'm not working, I'm kind of depressed and alienated.
Which is how my family experiences me, including my young kids.
But why am I that way?
Because as a Jewish infant under the Nazis, the message that I got is that the world didn't want me.
Now, not because the Nazis directly affected me as an infant, although we lived under Nazi occupation in my first year of life.
So my mother was, our life was under daily threat.
In 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.
I stood on that very pavement just a couple of months ago when I visited my birth city.
So 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.
So she does this to save my life.
But what message do I get?
I don't know that there are Nazis.
I don't know that my mother is passing me on to a stranger to save my life.
What sense do I get?
I'm being abandoned.
I'm not wanted.
I'm not lovable.
Well, if you're not lovable, if you're not wanted, one of the things you can do is to go to medical school.
Because now they're going to want you all the time.
And every day you get to prove to yourself how important you are, how much they want you, and how essential you are to everybody's life.
What message do my kids get?
When daddy's not around all the time.
Or when he's around, he's kind of in withdrawal from workaholism.
They get the same message.
So we pass it on.
This is what trauma is.
We pass it on unwittingly from one generation to the next.
And we don't even know we're doing it.
I didn't know I was doing it.
So, 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.
At some point I have to start asking, and my kids are afraid of me.
I have to start asking myself, what's going on here?
Why is this tension in my family?
Why are my wife and I breathing together at this point?
54 years coming this November.
But when our kids were small, we had a very tense marriage.
And I have to start asking myself, what's going on?
And that's when you start looking for the answers.
So the first thing is we have to recognize that the way it is is not working.
In fact, I know you had because I saw your interview with Lex Friedman.
And he talked about how you handled...
The negative vibes that come your way sometimes.
So sometimes I can see that as their issue.
But 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.
And 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?
I 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.
There were certain traumatic imprints in people who got physically ill and mentally ill, who got addicted and so on.
So what I saw in medical practice kind of melded with what I experienced in my own life.
So 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.
It doesn't matter how addicted or how ill they were, there was always something about them that I could recognize in myself.
And I began to go for therapy.
And I began to really research the child developmental and trauma literature.
And the more I did, the more I learned.
And then, you know, eventually, like you, I got into psychedelic work as well.
So 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.
Well, here's the interesting thing about genetics.
You know what the best letter I ever received was?
It was for a woman who was 48, and she wrote me from somewhere in the States.
She sent me an email to thank me for the birth of her four-year-old child.
She said, we just celebrated my daughter's four-year birthday, thanks to you.
She said, because my husband used to be an alcoholic, and he used to believe that his alcoholism was genetically determined.
So he didn't want to have a child because he didn't want to pass on the alcoholism gene because he had suffered so badly.
But then he read your book, and he realized it wasn't genetics at all.
It was trauma.
As a result, and I was just at the edge of the childbearing years.
I was 44. So now we have this four-year-old child.
Thank you.
And 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.
So go back to your question about genetics.
There's no gene for addictions.
I don't care what they tell you.
What they are, there are some genes that make it more likely that you might become addicted, but they don't cause addiction as such.
In fact, the genes have nothing to do with addictions at all.
Now you say, well, how come?
You know, my father was an alcoholic, my grandfather was an alcoholic, I'm an alcoholic.
It's not the gene that's passed on, it's the trauma that's passed on.
Because what's it like to grow up in a home with alcoholism?
Now, 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.
What 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.
But, you can have those same genes and be a perfectly happy, successful, joyful, creative person, depending on how the environment acts on those genes.
Which means that the genes are not for disease, they're for sensitivity.
And the more sensitive you are, when things go well, the happier you are.
When 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.
So the genes are not for addiction as such, and most of my profession gets this completely wrong.
So 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.
I forgot where this conversation began, but this is where we are now.
Yeah, 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...
Okay, there's a great example to refute that right here in the United States.
So prior to colonization, the native people had no problem with addiction at all.
And they even had some alcohol in the New Mexico area.
Really?
Yeah, apparently so.
There was all these other plants around, by the way.
There was no addiction.
Then you traumatize that population.
You subject them to the extermination and the...
Destruction of their ways of life and their culture.
Like in Canada, we have a terrible problem.
When I worked with addictions in Vancouver's downtown Eastside, 30% of my clients were indigenous people.
They make up 5% of the population.
30% of the men in jail in Canada, 50% of the women in jail in Canada are indigenous people.
They have much more addiction, child abuse, mental health issues, suicide, violence.
Maybe you heard about the stabbings up in Canada right now.
It was in an indigenous community.
Why?
Because 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.
I had a I met a woman.
By the way, remember where we started talking about snog.
You're asking about psychedelic work, so I'll come back to that in a minute.
I was in a psychedelic ceremony with some indigenous people in Canada maybe about eight years ago now.
I met a woman who was taken from her family by law, abducted by the police, taken to the university school.
The parents weren't even allowed to visit these kids.
Her first day in school as a four-year-old, she spoke her tribal language.
You know what the punishment was?
They stuck a pen through her tongue.
This was in the 1960s in Canada.
1950s, I'm sorry, late 1950s.
For a whole hour, this little girl couldn't put her needle, couldn't put her tongue back in her mouth for fear of cutting her lips.
That's before the sexual abuse began.
By the time she was 9 years old, she was an alcoholic.
By the time she was 20 years old, she was a heroin addict.
Nor her grandchildren, nor heroin addicts.
What's being passed on here is the trauma, not the addiction.
Now, 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?
I'd say I know nothing.
Next city.
unidentified
Hey, what do you know about addiction and anything of trauma?
I've just spent three years writing a book and you keep asking about the one thing I don't know anything about.
But you know what?
The universe is a way of knocking at our doors.
And somebody said to me, did you know you could actually do this up here in Vancouver?
I said, okay, this is the message.
I gotta do it.
I did the ayahuasca, and in half an hour I got why I'd been asked that question.
I just got it.
Because with the ayahuasca and the chanting, I had these tears of love flowing down my cheeks.
Not love for any one particular person, just open-heartedness.
It was amazing.
And I understood something.
How close I had been to love all my life, even to my spouse and to my children and to the world.
Why was my heart so closed?
Because it had been bruised so early and so we closed down our hearts.
We don't even know what that kind of love is.
So with this plant, that opened up.
And I also got the pain of what happens to us when we close our hearts.
All of us human beings, it really hurts.
And then we have to protect ourselves from that pain with drugs and behaviors and sex and gambling and work and everything else.
So 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.
We don't have to keep running.
No, it's not that simple.
And it's not like overnight I was a changed person.
Believe me, I wasn't.
But at least I saw the possibilities.
And then I decided I'm going to work with this plant.
When 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.
You're not going to get through.
This skull is too thick.
Try and break through this one.
And not much happens.
Next morning they send a delegation to me.
And they say, we can't have you in ceremony.
Why not?
Because 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.
And because of this dark energy that you're carrying, our Icaros, our chance, can't penetrate you.
I don't say anything and they don't know who the heck I am.
They're not impressed with my reputation and my international standing or the books that I've published.
They just pick it up.
That's what shamans do.
That's what a good shaman does.
So they said, Our chance can't penetrate it, but worse than that, it's affecting the others.
So we want to help the others.
We can't have you in the room.
And 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.
And furthermore, they said, when you were very small, we think you had a big scare and you haven't got over it yet.
This is me at age 75. In the book, I'll show you a painting, if I may.
This is from the first chapter.
This is a painting that my wife did from a photograph.
The photograph is in the upper left-hand corner of the painting of my mother and I at three months of age.
You notice she's wearing the yellow star that Jews had to wear under the Nazis.
And the other five worked with the rest of the group.
And so they fired me for my own retreat.
Now, 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?
I 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?
But the download I got...
Yes, my grandparents died in Auschwitz when I was five months of age.
Yes, my mother was terrorized and stressed.
Yes, I was a very scared little infant.
Yes, the world was a terrible place to be born into, that place at that time.
But that doesn't have to define who I am.
It doesn't have to define how I trust the world or how I don't.
It 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.
So it kind of liberated me from having to drag that experience around in my soul the way I really had.
So 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, you had not changed the way you really viewed the world.
But also because One of the impacts of trauma is that you feel so alone with it.
So everybody thinks that they're uniquely traumatized.
So 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.
And what these shamans helped me to do was to kind of help remove Another skin of the onion, let me put it that way.
It's more like the skin of the onion.
It's not one layer.
There's different layers.
I've been through many layers, very important.
But 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.
You know and it took a while for me to realize what that was.
It 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.
And I was trying to do it through accomplishments.
I 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.
No, I don't want to, by the way, create the impression that I'm some kind of a psychedelic evangelist.
I 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.
Well, the experiences are so profound and so significant, but they are just a day, and then whatever more you do.
There's a lot of days, you know, and so it's very easy to go back to baseline.
It's very easy to slip back into your old way of thinking.
One of the ways that I describe psychedelic experiences like a real DMT experience is that it's like Control-Alt-Delete for your brain.
So your brain reboots and then you're left with an empty desktop, but with one folder.
And that folder is labeled my old bullshit.
And 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.
And 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.
I don't exactly know what's going on, but whether it is or isn't another dimension, it has the feel of another dimension.
So this man who was driving here was talking about, and I was saying, you know what?
There'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.
It's insanity.
And he said, actually, this friend of mine with severe PTSD has actually gone south of the border.
And working with one of the universities who was doing a study on it, I said, oh good.
And he says, the driver, he says, there's already been such profound changes in my friend.
In 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.
That feels pretty scary, you know?
Now, even though I know that this experience will end.
Now, again, I have to say that I'm more resistant to psychedelics than most people.
I have a pretty thick skull, as I told you before.
And it takes a lot to get through to me.
I keep getting worried that we keep talking about psychedelics and there's so much more that I want to say.
Yeah, 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.
It's one of the most devastating things in modern times and it's not discussed.
We 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.
You know, we think often of slavery, which is also horrific.
We think often of immigrants from other countries that are disparaged and experience racism.
But we don't think about the native indigenous people that were here that had everything taken away from them.
And I quote him in this book, and I do talk a lot about not just the indigenous experience, but also the wisdom they had.
And they have.
If 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, we have nothing to learn from them, you know, and yet they have so much to teach.
I mean, there's certainly parallels to all sorts of conquerors in the way they treat their victims.
It 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, so they impose it upon others.
Or until they go too large and the territory gets a matter of competition.
So I do think that And I do discuss this as well.
I 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.
When 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.
When you get to Los Angeles, this indifferent mass of human beings that's impossible to scale.
When 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.
Because other people, instead of becoming a valuable part of the community, they become a detriment to your ability to move around.
In this culture, where the general belief is that greed and competition and aggressive interaction and selfishness and aggression are the way to make it, It's very difficult for people to get to that place of communal kindness.
But 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.
I don't know if you can answer this question, but I'd be curious.
Which feels more like yourself?
This kinder state of being or kind of the aggressive, I gotta be there.
But 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.
When 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...
Using this sort of desire to succeed as a justification to victimize others.
We live in a world where, like you talked about sugar, for example.
Well, 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, salt, and fat that's going to make people addicted to their products, which is going to kill them.
I 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.
And it showed these kids, like, playing around and doing things they weren't supposed to be doing.
And then they introduced this medication.
And 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.
If 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?
I 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.
All 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.
And then if this kid doesn't lock in like a zombie, we need to medicate them.
Yeah, 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.
Infants can't help but absorb the stress of their parents.
They can't help it.
What does an infant do?
Could I have escaped or fought back?
Could you have?
All we could do is tune out.
But when is this tuning out happening?
When our brain is being developed.
And 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.
So, The most salient feature of the environment that shapes the circuits of the human brain is actually the relationship with the parents.
And if the parents are present and emotionally attuned and available, child brains develop properly.
But the parents are stressed.
The child absorbs the stress.
What can they do with it?
They tune out.
And that tuning out thing is programmed into the brain.
And then 10 years later, or 50 years later, we say, you got this disease.
No, you don't.
You've got a coping mechanism that's no longer working for you.
But it had a function when it first came along.
So 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.
That sensitive child is picking up on all the vibes, energies and stresses in your family.
Want to help this child?
Deal with the whole family.
Look at the parental relationship.
Look at what stress is there in your life.
Look at how you react to the child.
Look at, do you understand the child's behavior or the emotions that the child is having?
Or are you just trying to control the child's behaviors?
Look at all that.
And very often parents will tell me after they've read that book on ADHD, they've totally changed their relationship to their child.
The child changes.
What a surprise.
But you go to most doctors, you got this disease, here's the pill.
And by the way, I took those medications and they helped me for a while.
I became a much more efficient workaholic, and I could do even work.
It didn't change any of my emotional issues, but it made me more focused and so on.
It helped me write my first book.
But I haven't taken them for decades, because also I know that The brain can change if you treat it right.
So this reliance on medications that we have is a real poverty of the spirit, a real poverty of imagination, a poverty of medical education.
The average doctor never learns this stuff.
The average physician never gets a single lecture on brain development, how the brain develops in interaction with their environment.
So when you're seeing, let alone do they hear about trauma?
They don't, hardly at all.
So 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.
They just think of this disease.
And they think that the diagnosis explains everything, but the diagnosis don't explain anything.
Because think about it.
Let's say Gabor or Joe goes to a doctor and The diagnosis is really well.
What are the hallmarks of ADHD? Well, tuning out, poor impulse regulation, maybe hyperactivity.
Why does Gabor have poor impulse control, hyperactivity, and tuning out?
Because he's got ADHD. How do we know he's got ADHD? Because he's got poor impulse control and tunes out and he's hyperactive.
Why is he hyperactive, tunes out, have poor impulse control?
He's got ADHD. How do we know he's got ADHD? It's circular.
It doesn't explain anything.
Diagnoses describe things, and they can be helpful that way, but they don't explain.
Because 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.
So 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.
They make the child be alone when the child is upset.
The child's panic circuits get activated as they should be because when the child's panic circuits get activated, they cry for help.
So it's necessary for survival.
A young animal should feel panic when the adult is unavailable.
In a rational world, in a sane world, that child would be responded to.
But 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.
And that's why more and more kids are being diagnosed.
And the thought process of like leaving a child alone when the child's crying is that to toughen the kid up?
Is 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?
The 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,
physical 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, manipulative behavior.
How 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, unregulated circuits.
So when the adults show up in a calm, loving way, the child downloads that into his own nervous system and then he grows up.
He's not going to be an infant forever.
At some point he's going to be a mature adult who knows how to take care of themselves.
That's a natural process.
We don't have to teach kids to be independent.
Independent is nature's agenda because the parents are going to die.
At some point, the mother bear is going to disappear.
That bear cub has to be able to look after themselves in a mature, confident way.
That's nature's natural agenda.
What the mother bear needs to do is to meet the needs of that infant bear so the infant bear can mature.
So 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.
But 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.
So 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.
And most of them related very well.
Some were not that available.
And some were extra doting and extra coddling, you might say, with the infants.
They looked at the adults 35 years later.
The people that were the most independent and successful and self-actualized were the ones that were super loved by their mothers.
And the conclusion of the researchers was you can't love children too much.
Now the case that you describe is not too much loving, but loving that comes from a very anxious place.
So 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.
They're doing it because they were not coddled enough, they're anxious, and they pass that anxiety on to the child.
You don't create those dependent kids by loving them.
You create them by imposing your own agenda on them, your own anxieties on them.
So those are the mama's boys, if you want to call them that.
But the mama's boy is just a very anxious person who downloaded his parents or her parents' anxieties.
And 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, you know, they call you a mama's boy and that you're coddled.
Well, there was a Greek playwright, Aeschylus, who wrote about drama about 2500 years ago.
And 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.
And 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.
So 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.
There's got to be that recognition.
Now, once you get that recognition, the sky's the limit.
Because now there's all kinds of therapies and possibilities.
Now you can...
I mean, I think a wonderful I don't like this phrase, mama's boy, but it describes maybe a certain kind of personality.
What if they did martial arts?
What if they worked out?
What if they developed some confidence in their own bodies to start with?
Because they don't have confidence in their bodies.
And so the gambler, the workaholic, the shopaholic, the sexaholic...
Any addict, substance addict, they're not after the actual...
They're as much as after that thrill, that seeking, that dopamine hit, the pornographer.
They're after that dopamine hit.
Now 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.
And so that children that don't get the proper experiences, they might be lacking dopamine.
Now 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.
You could see the gap in between the ice and the face of the cliff, and he's climbing the ice.
It could break off at any second.
It's not permanent.
And 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.
No, 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.
So 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.
I've had Alex Honnold on several times, and he is the guy from, what is the documentary?
Is it Free Solo?
Yeah, 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.
And he's a very calm guy.
It's very interesting.
He's like sort of calm and mellow.
And, you know, when you talk to him about climbing, and he's like, no, it's like you're pretty relaxed.
When 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, which is the essence of trauma, and we get separated from each other.
And 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.
Even 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.
No, and then you entered into a jiu-jitsu competition.
You would technically be a white belt in jiu-jitsu.
But you would be very experienced in grappling and submissions and you'd be dominant and you would just tear through the field.
Of people that were also white belts.
And people would be angry at you, justifiably so, because you're violating the rules of this scalable competition.
And through the scalable competition, you're supposed to be met with surmountable challenges, things that you can overcome, things and lessons you can learn.
And even if you get dominated by someone, what you learn is that that potential is within a human being.
You 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.
But the overwhelming control that he had over me and the dominance over me was so...
Because I didn't know that a person could do that to me.
And now learning that, I knew that that potential was in a human being.
He wasn't like physically gifted.
He wasn't much stronger than me or bigger than me.
He was just much better at this thing that we were both doing.
And I realized that on the path, he was many miles ahead of me and that I could go down that path and achieve what he is doing.
There'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.
And 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.
Isn'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?
Yeah, 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.
Things that are intellectually difficult, which we praise, and things that are physically difficult, which we think of as being like base and, you know.
Less 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.
I 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.
Because some people don't.
They 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.
I 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.
But I wasn't applying the lessons to my own life.
And I think a lot of us get compartmentalized that way.
I 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.
It also means they don't get shunted to the side and get made to feel useless and develop dementia, you know?
Because they're active and involved in the community.
And we've lost so much with the loss of...
The elder and the passing of tradition.
We'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.
So what if we could have both?
What if we could have both wisdom and progress at the same time?
In 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, I want to talk to you.
And he called me at home and I thought he was just a strange guy with an accent.
You know, when you get known a little bit, all kinds of people want a piece of you, you know?
And I thought, here's another...
But anyway, he came out to Vancouver from back east and we had...
We'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?
And 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.
But Ulf says, That for decades, all he lived for was to be successful within the company, and he totally lost himself.
He had no value, he said, that it wasn't associated with his success as an executive.
And he says it was an empty existence, and he says he was making himself sick.
So he gave it up.
But he talked about what it's like inside that world.
And he's uniquely...
He's a gifted photographer.
So he started doing photography, and he's...
He'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...
And in this culture, we're so driven to validate our existence by impressing others, by trying to make ourselves successful.
By 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.
It'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,
Yeah, and oftentimes you don't concern yourself with the appreciation of your loved ones because you get it no matter what.
You live with them.
You get it.
You expect it.
But 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.
And that's the only way you get any measure of this feeling of value.
It'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.
But 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, whether it's their art or whether it's their sport or whatever.
Something that they've done, some way they've accomplished things has been incredibly influential to other people, yet they came from this horrific trauma.
Okay, 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, Morgan Freeman, who actually narrated this bio-documentary about her.
And this was presented as a wonderful example of resilience building.
And 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.
And nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody commented on it.
No, 65 years later or 60 years later, the same candidate develops pneumonia during the campaign.
I don't know if you remember that, when she got pneumonia.
Yeah, 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.
But 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.
I don't do it, and I would never even consider it.
I try to have conversations with my kids, and I have since they were really young.
I have conversations with them, though I talk to them like I would talk to you.
And although I'm much more, you know...
Expressive 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.
And one of the things that I always bring up with my kids is whatever you've done, I've done it.
I caught my kid lying to me once, one of my daughters, and I said, I used to lie to my parents all the time.
It's totally normal.
But what I'm telling you is you don't have to lie to me.
And it's better for you if you don't lie.
If you just address things that you've done that were wrong or incorrect or unwise, let's just talk about them.
I'm not going to judge you on a mistake because you're a human being and you're 12 and human beings make mistakes.
But what's important to know is that I will praise you for telling me the truth if it's difficult.
And Hunter has actually mentioned my work because his own addictions, he came to some understanding about the traumatic basis of his addiction problem.
But...
That addiction on Hunter's part is just the downloading of multiple generations of family suffering.
So it's not anybody's fault.
You're not pointing fingers at anybody.
But there's trauma in that family.
And there's no American president in recent memory that didn't have significant trauma in their childhoods.
And it's affected, of course, how they conduct politics.
You know, and it shows up.
I mean, I don't know if you know the name Bessel van der Kolk.
He's a psychiatrist.
There's a perennial bestseller in the New York Times called The Body Keeps the Score, which is about trauma.
And this is a book about trauma that's been bestseller enough for five years, every week in the New York Times.
And Bessel told me that Donald Trump is a poster boy for trauma.
Which he is in a certain way because often many people say that he's lying.
But by the way, there's Trump supporters here.
I'm not arguing politics here.
I'm just talking about a human being.
I'm talking about a human being.
When they say that he's lying, I don't even think he's lying consciously much of the time.
The 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.
Now, what other class of human beings will believe when they want something to be true?
And his niece, Mary Trump, who's a psychologist, whose father drank himself to death, was Trump's brother.
And he drank himself to death.
So traumatized was he in the Trump family of origin.
Well, one of Trump's responses to that...
Well, first of all, poor attention.
His attention is all over the place.
That's a typical ADHD response.
I'm not diagnosing him.
I'm just saying, I recognize it as a response to trauma.
But 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.
And 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.
Well, 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.
It'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.
Which 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.
So we're like, we're looking to the mother figure or the father figure to fix it all for us.
Instead of us asking, well, what's going on here, community?
What's going on on a social level or cultural level?
How do we all play a role in somehow making it better?
We say, let's just elect the right daddy or the right mummy, and they're going to make it okay.
But the point I'm really making is that I have to say, not that I'm defending Trump here.
There's nothing to defend.
To me, it's a sign of dysfunction.
But he was criticized far more severely than Clinton ever was for the very same behavior.
And 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.
And we decide what team we like, and that's our tribe.
And 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.
And you see that with the blue no matter who or red till dead.
You know, there's a psychologist at Notre Dame University.
She's retired now.
Her name is Darcia Narvaez, and she studied hunter-gatherer groups.
It might be interesting for you to talk to her once.
She 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?
I'll write it down for you afterwards.
It's Darcia Narvez, and actually she's written a new book, which when it comes out, you really might want to talk to her.
I 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.
Anyway, Darcia could really tell you about her studies of hunter-gatherer groups.
And not only about that, but about how...
Her 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.
Yes, and unfortunately, once that intelligence becomes disconnected from our emotional lives, it becomes a dangerous weapon, which is largely what's happened.
I'm talking about our real emotional lives.
Darcy'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.
Most species will seek out and cultivate, like beavers, will create environments that will support the protection and nurturing of the young.
I mean, look, I mean, as a Jewish kid growing up in Eastern Europe, With the awareness of what had happened.
I had some awareness of what had happened.
My grandfather was 54 and he was a wonderful doctor in a town and he was taken to Auschwitz and died that same day.
So I grew up with this huge question in my mind of just how can people do this?
And human beings are the only ones that will gratuitously and for no practical reason Turn on each other.
And they do this habitually.
It's not even like conquest and war.
I mean, that experience didn't serve anybody's needs.
It 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?
So 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.
Like 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.
It works in their mind.
Oh, that makes sense.
Okay, now I understand it.
And 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.
And then the process of change Is gradual and slow.
I 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.
Like 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.
Well, I mean, two things occurred to me when you said that.
What was the first thing?
Oh 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.
Not with self-judgment of moral condemnation of themselves, but why did I do that?
What made me do that?
Not as a way of excusing it, but as a way of understanding it so I don't have to do it again.
So that's the first point.
You talked about using natural chemistry, so let's look at opiate addiction.
It's a really interesting example.
So 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.
I mean, if you've never been there, it's an eye-opener.
Yeah, 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.
So opiate addictions and what you said about natural human chemistry.
So why do people get hooked on opiates?
Well, Opium works in the human brain because we have receptors for it.
But why do we have receptors from a plant that comes from Afghanistan?
Well, we don't.
We have, as you said, receptors, I should say, our internal opiate system.
This is our own natural chemical.
Now, why do we have opiates?
Well, 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.
So why do we have endorphins?
What do endorphins do?
But the first thing they do is they're pain relievers.
And they relieve not only physical pain, but emotional pain.
So people have this natural painkiller, which is good.
You know, if I bang my knee, then these endorphins...
By the way, when people cut themselves, That's what they're doing?
They're looking after the endorphin hit.
Wow.
So the pain relievers, physical and emotional pain relievers, that's the first thing they do.
Second thing they do is they make possible the experience of pleasure and reward and joy and elation.
So those are important experiences because life is tough.
What would our life be like if we had no joy, elation and pleasure?
So endorphins help with that experience.
The third thing they do is the most important thing.
Then it's possible this little thing called love.
Endorphins promote the loving contact between mother or father and infant.
So 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.
Now 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.
Now, 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.
When they do heroin, they feel normal for the first time in their lives, as many people have told me.
Russell Brand told me about this experience of love that he had when he did endorphin, you know?
And when somebody told me, this sex trade worker with HIV, I said, what does it do for you?
She said, when I first did heroin, it felt like a warm, soft hug.
In other words, mother.
Father, love, parenting.
Why do people who are addicted to heroin?
Because they didn't have those experiences.
And very often they had really negative and abusive experiences.
And then we punish these people.
We ostracize them.
We cast them out of society.
It'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.
Iboga 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.
And 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.
And their ego grows and they feed off the adulation and attention and then they get lost.
So you have to really have some due diligence before you go to a place.
And 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...
The psychiatrists who have, the doctors who have, the politicians who have.
It's just once you have power and you don't know yourself, Right.
It 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.
And 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.
There'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.
The doctor who abused all these young women and the acrobats.
He 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.
And 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.
Yeah, 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.
They should know better.
I 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.
And when you hear them talk, it's so obvious.
And 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?
They may have been good at leading a war party, but that didn't give them authority to rule over the others.
What 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.
When 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.
And neuroscientifically speaking, we think of the brain as sort of the ruler of everything.
Actually, we have three brains, at least three brains.
We have a brain up here, then there's a brain in the heart.
There's a nervous system in the heart that has got important Predictive and knowledge.
So is the gut.
Ideally, the gut and the heart and the nervous system up here will be all connected and in sync.
And if we are, we're very grounded and present and wise.
And if we're not, if we cut off anyone from the others, and that's what trauma does, is it cuts us into little parts.
So we're no longer this whole.
That means that certain parts of ourselves can then take over and rule the roost to the detriment of ourselves and to others.
And that's the essence of trauma, this disconnection from our whole selves.
It'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.
Again, that's the essence of trauma.
And so the subtitle is Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Cultures.
How do we get back to that wholeness?
That's my whole, not just mine, but it's one of my, that's the essential question.
And 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.
Yeah, 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.
Like 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.
So 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.
In 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.
Therefore, the defense mechanism is to suppress the rage.
Okay?
That's just a natural defense of the organism.
Okay?
Now, 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.
The mind and the body are not separable.
What happens in the mind happens in the body and vice versa.
They're one unit.
In fact, one great researcher, Candice Peart, called it body-mind.
It's one unit.
So our emotional system is part and parcel of the same apparatus as governs our immune system and our nervous system and our hormonal apparatus.
It's all one system.
It's not separate.
They're different manifestations of the same system.
Now, what is the role of a healthy anger?
Like we've already talked about is to protect your boundaries.
What is the role of emotions in general?
It's to let in what's healthy and nurturing and welcome and to keep out what is not.
When 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.
Then they learn to suppress their anger all their lives.
That represses the immune system.
Now the immune system turns against you.
Or it can not fight off malignancy.
The physiology is straightforward.
It's elegant.
It's being worked out.
Most physicians never hear this.
Now, there was a study out of Massachusetts, I think, which I quote in the book.
I think 2,000 women are followed over 10 years.
Followed over 10 years.
Those 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.
Four times?
Four times, yeah.
You can't separate your emotional life from your physiological life.
So 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.
It's because women in this society are particularly acculturated not to be angry.
It's also why black people have more illness in society, because they can't be angry.
For a black person to be angry is the core danger.
And so, if you look at the biological markers, they're different.
That'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.
What are the underlying factors that are leading me to these bad decisions?
What are the underlying factors that lead me to this general feeling of distress and being upset?
Well, 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.
Give 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.