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March 27, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:12:01

1623 'PTSD Nation' - Dr John Omaha Interviewed on Freedomain Radio

Dr. Omaha, an innovator in the field of emotion regulation, created Affect Centered Therapy. He has trained hundreds of therapists in ACT and AMST throughout the United States, in Australia, and in Europe. Dr. Omaha conducts outcome research on ACT and AMST through the Institute for Affect Centered Therapy, a non-profit he established in Chico, in northern California.

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	I have on the line the esteemed John Omaha, who is Dr.
	Omaha is an innovator in the field of emotion regulation, created affect-centered therapy.
	He has trained hundreds of therapists in ACT and AMST throughout the United States in Australia.
	And in Europe, Dr.
	Omaha conducts outcome research on ACT and AMST through the Institute of Affect-Centered Therapy, a non-profit he established in Chico in Northern California.
	And Dr. Omaha came to my attention through, I thought, a just wonderfully incisive and brilliant article that he wrote for Truthout.
	It was PTSD Nation, was that the name of the article?
	Yes, that's correct. And he's kindly agreed to share the article with us, and he will also talk a little bit about his approach to self-knowledge, to healing, and to growth in humanity, which I think is a wonderful approach.
	And I just wanted to mention that the idea of a national character that can be subject to a review or a commentary from psychologists I think is very, very important.
	There is such a thing as national character, in my opinion, And I think it can mimic, in many ways, the life of an individual or the personality of an individual.
	And that's why I was particularly drawn to Dr.
	Omaha's article. So thank you so much, John, for taking the time.
	I know you have a bit of a sore throat, so we will try and battle our way through the viruses to get to the kernels of truth that you've brought forward.
	So I appreciate that.
	And if you'd like to give a reading of the article, I think that would be fantastic.
	Sure enough, Stefan. It's really a great honor to be on your show.
	So first, let me just start out.
	PTSD Nation.
	Can a nation have PTSD? Can a diagnosis created to understand the dysregulated behavior of individuals be applied to an entire nation?
	I argue yes on both counts.
	If a diagnosis can help us understand and treat aberrant behavior, then it doesn't matter if the aberrantly behaving thing is an individual or a nation of 350 million people.
	The nation's functioning manifests the collective activity of its individual members just as the human organism is a collective of the trillions of cells that make it up.
	The notion that a nation can have PTSD proposes we analyze current events from a psychological perspective rather than an historical or political orientation.
	A nation can have PTSD if it meets criteria for the diagnosis.
	The DSM-IV, the Bible of Psychotherapy and Psychiatry, lists six symptoms for PTSD, America has them all.
	Trauma. For an individual, the diagnosis of PTSD requires that the person have experienced a traumatic event involving the actual death of another or the threat of death or loss of physical integrity to the self.
	PTSD also requires that the person felt terror, helplessness, or horror.
	Individuals in war often experience such traumas.
	Killing another human being induces horror.
	Seeing one's fellow soldiers killed or dismembered by bombs induces horror.
	Under fire or in close personal combat, soldiers feel terror and helplessness.
	How has America experienced helpless terror and horror?
	America was born in death and destruction.
	Europeans imported terror and horror to America in the form of disease, slavery, and massacre.
	The native people were helpless against the invasion.
	The Spanish brought the horror of smallpox with them when they invaded the New World.
	The Spanish also brutally subdued the indigenous people.
	According to one English observer, they, quote, did scorch and roast them to death, close quote.
	The native people experienced terror as they were brutalized, and their relatives experienced horror as they watched their kin burned alive with, quote, all cruel inhumanity, close quote.
	The Portuguese brought slavery to the New World, importing 150,000 Africans to the Americas by 1600.
	Slavery brought helplessness and terror to America.
	The invaders perpetrated terror on their own as well as on the natives.
	The French had established a colony at Fort Caroline in northern Florida, and when the Spanish discovered them, they attacked the colony in 1565 and massacred everyone—men, women, and children.
	America was established through terror, horror, and helplessness.
	Re-enactment. Individuals with combat-related PTSD experience two distinct sets of symptoms, re-experiencing the traumatic event and avoidance of it.
	I will look first at the re-experiencing symptom because it explains how, across the last 400 years, America has perpetuated and re-perpetuated the trauma in which it was established.
	One way individuals re-experience the trauma is through re-enacting it.
	Freud called this a repetition compulsion.
	America has re-enacted and continues to re-enact the trauma from its origins through wars of aggression.
	In the first 150 years of his life, America re-enacted the trauma of its birth through the genocide perpetrated on the indigenous peoples.
	America also re-enacted its trauma in lynchings of helpless black people.
	During the last 50 years, America has terrorized helpless peoples in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Grenada, and now Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
	America has induced terror through carpet bombings, from B-52s, through napalming, and now with rocket attacks from drones.
	America has re-enacted massacres with strikes on wedding parties, on women, on children.
	In Iraq alone, America has massacred more than one million helpless human beings.
	In addition to re-enactment of traumatic events, re-experiencing for an individual can take the form of reliving the trauma through mental imagery.
	Combat PTSD often presents in soldiers Through dreams, nightmares, or flashbacks.
	Nightmares and flashbacks of the trauma are major symptoms of PTSD in a traumatized individual.
	How does America experience nightmares and flashbacks as a nation?
	We broadcast them to ourselves.
	News media and pundits constantly blast citizens with traumatic imagery and narrative.
	Images of 9-11 or references to it in political speeches constitute a national flashback, because every time a politician or commentator speaks the words 9-1-1, the horrific television images stored in every listener's brain are recalled, along with the emotions of fear and hatred and helplessness felt at the time.
	Broadcast traumatic imagery and narrative exemplify the re-experiencing phase of PTSD. Movies are another form in which America re-experiences trauma.
	America re-experienced earlier trauma as the so-called cowboy and Indian movies that were popular in the 50s.
	War movies like Battle Cry and Tora Tora Tora constituted a national re-experiencing of the trauma of World War II. After Vietnam, a series of movies, including Platoon and Apocalypse Now, re-experienced that traumatic war for the nation.
	Currently, Hurt Locker provides America the imagistic reliving of the trauma of Iraq that is a central feature of our national PTSD. Our American nightmare has boogeymen who assault us with horrific scenarios.
	Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity broadcast night terrors.
	Ann Coulter is a shrieking succubus.
	Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are the monsters chasing us through bomb-cratered nightmare streets, our leg muscles stiffening as we have more and more difficulty running.
	Re-experiencing trauma is a core symptom of PTSD. As a nation, we re-experience our national trauma by means of Roe, Cheney, Coulter, Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, and dozens of other commentators in print and broadcast media.
	Roe, Cheney, Coulter, Beck et al.
	manifest the symptom of re-experiencing.
	They embody one major symptom expression of our national PTSD. Re-experiencing through media imagery and actual re-enactments induce a state of hyper-vigilance in the PTSD nation as well as in individuals with PTSD. As a nation, we obsess on security because we do not feel safe and see threats everywhere.
	Hypervigilance is the condition of maintaining an abnormal awareness of environmental stimuli and it includes a heightened startle response that often accompanies the flashbacks.
	America's obsessive hypervigilance manifests in electronic surveillance of its own citizens through wiretaps, cameras, spy satellites, bank account tracking, and domestic spying using informants.
	The same techniques are employed in countries around the world.
	Reagan's strategic defense initiative comprised a form of hypervigilance that America, under Bush and Obama, continues to experience through the missiles we are placing around Russia.
	Avoidance Avoidance is the second major symptom of PTSD. In individuals, avoidance takes the form of persistent attempts to steer clear of reminders of the traumatic event.
	PTSD nation mobilizes powerful forces to avoid arousal of recollection of the traumatic events.
	The George W. Bush administration's refusal to allow photographs of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq constitute a national avoidance, as did Bush's own refusal, in his iconic function as the nation's leader, to visit wounded soldiers or to salute the returning coffins.
	Recently, the nation convulsed in avoidance when an image of a bleeding, mortally wounded soldier appeared on the Internet.
	Psychic numbing is a manifestation of avoidance in which a person experiences diminished responsiveness to the external world.
	America has become numb to the devastation it has wreaked in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, through its violent acting out.
	PTSD Nation is not outraged by the fact that we have killed over a million Iraqi citizens, many of them women and children.
	Americans have an emotional anesthesia for the deaths of more than 5,000 of our own citizens in Iraq, or for the traumatic brain injuries and catastrophic amputations soldiers have suffered.
	PTSD Nation marginalizes the wounded soldiers and servicemen and women driven insane by the horrors they have perpetrated and participated in.
	Homelessness is marginalization.
	Emotional anesthesia in America is a manifestation of avoidance of trauma-coded memories.
	Fragmentation and Loss of Behavioral Control PTSD induces a state of fragmentation in individuals and in a nation.
	Fragmentation means that the structure of the self breaks up into parts that are called ego-states or part-selves.
	Dissociative identity disorder, which was formerly known as multiple personality disorder, exemplifies the most severe form of fragmentation.
	When fragmentation occurs in an individual, coherence among the parts of the personality is lost.
	America is increasingly fragmented and coherent communication among its parts is rapidly disappearing.
	The Tea Party clack represents a fragment of the PTSD nation's psyche that is not communicating coherently with the society as a whole.
	The Sarah Palin phenomenon and the fragmenting off of the party of no within the Republicans and the blue dog faction within the Democrats illustrate how America has split into parts that no longer communicate.
	Limbaugh, Beck and their ilk are the crazy voices manifesting the delusions of the fanatical fragments.
	PTSD engenders a loss of behavioral control in individuals and in PTSD Nation.
	Among PTSD service persons, loss of behavioral control manifests as domestic violence, alcoholism, addiction, and suicide.
	PTSD Nation has experienced wave after wave of aberrant behavior.
	America has lost control of its financial behavior.
	As a nation, we're trillions of dollars in debt to foreign investors, notably China.
	America lost control of the SEC, the Fed, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and its other financial institutions, creating the financial bubble that burst in 2009.
	PTSD Nation lost control of its housing and mortgage market, and many people are homeless now.
	Legions of examples illustrate our national loss of behavioral control.
	The national infrastructure is crumbling.
	Water supplies are contaminated.
	Our national health system is broken, and millions have no health care.
	Education is collapsing, and we have lost control of our electoral system, our congress, our judiciary, our executive, our media, and our agriculture to the corporations that now operate the country for their benefit.
	Healing PTSD Nation America suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
	As a nation, we've been diagnosable for generations.
	Our national symptoms are worsening with each passing year.
	The prognosis for the nation is poor.
	What does it do for us to say that America has PTSD? It tells us that as individuals and as a nation, we need treatment.
	We need therapy. We need a recovery program.
	And we could do well to start with the 12 steps that were originally formulated by AA. An accurate diagnosis is the first step in treatment of any mental disorder.
	My article has summarized the diagnosis and given an accurate and complete enough case report to enable us to go forward with treatment.
	PTSD Nation must begin treatment by admitting that it has been powerless over its behavior and that its life is unmanageable.
	This is step one.
	Having admitted to its powerlessness, PTSD Nation can stop re-enacting.
	America can withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and the 168 other nations where we have established bases to perpetuate our violent acting out.
	America can stop re-experiencing through violent movies and talk shows that serve only to maintain that hyper-vigilant state.
	It is time to focus on healing America.
	National therapy for national PTSD also demands that we stop avoiding.
	We have avoided making reparations to Native Americans for the genocide we perpetrated on them.
	We have avoided promoting reconciliation with the African-American people brought here as slaves.
	We have never made amends to the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians for the destruction we wreaked on them.
	We need to cease avoiding the horror and terror we are perpetrating on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
	We must also raise to national consciousness the trauma we have enacted worldwide.
	Step 2 tells us that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.
	For America, that power is not a theological power.
	It is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
	As citizens of PTSD nation, we must thoroughly examine our insane behavior.
	We must rediscover the sanity of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
	In recovery from national PTSD, we must surrender our thoughts and our actions, our will and our life, as the 12 steps have it, to the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, where it tells us that all people are created equal and endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	Following the 12-step approach, America can begin local meetings, hundreds of meetings, in every city, every day, meetings where citizens can talk through and work through the application of these principles in their daily lives, guided always by a surrender to the Constitution and the Declaration.
	We must not be seduced into forming yet another national organization to carry out the healing.
	This must be a populist phenomenon, a movement of, by, and for the people.
	Forming another bureaucratic or corporate entity to provide the healing will only perpetuate the PTSD. There must be no corporate sponsorship, no advertising.
	Like AA, we must be self-supporting through our own contributions, our donations of a few dollars to support the local meeting, and mostly by giving of our time, our intention And our honesty, open-mindedness and willingness.
	Through our own collective action, we can restore America to sanity.
	America is PTSD nation, and America is also a nation of citizens, all of whom have been affected by our national PTSD. To recover, we must stop acting out.
	To recover, we must come together to support each other in working through the trauma that has impacted each of our lives and all of us as a nation.
	We must stop re-enacting and stop re-experiencing and cease avoiding.
	In order to form a more perfect union, it is time to begin the recovery process.
	Thank you. Thank you.
	I think that's a wonderfully powerful article and I completely agree with you that the subjugation of trauma to rational and objective morality and standards I think is the only way for individuals or nations really to move forward.
	My listeners are pretty sophisticated when it comes to concepts in psychology, but I think one aspect of PTSD is baffling to the majority of people and that's you talk about the avoidance and the reenactment and those would seem to be opposing principles because if you avoid something it's hard to understand why you would continually reenact it and I think that you talk about this in terms of substitute reenactments through movies and other kinds of media and But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between the avoidance and the reenactment.
	Well, you know, it is a paradox, Stefan.
	And yet it is a key to understanding PTSD, that people cycle back and forth.
	Individuals cycle back and forth between avoidance and re-experiencing.
	The soldiers who have combat-related PTSD, for example, will try and avoid reminders of their traumatic events, and so they become very constricted, very contracted. They tend not to go out.
	They tend to remove themselves from society.
	And yet, through violent behavior, for example, Returning combat veterans with PTSD often will act out violently against their families.
	A car backfiring can suddenly put the person right back into the combat situation where they first were traumatized and they find themselves suddenly On the ground looking for the source of weapons fires if they were back in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s or back in Iraq.
	So there are a number of ways that individuals with PTSD both re-enact and re-experience and it is a paradox and it's also a primary symptom of PTSD. Does that help?
	I think it does. I'm going to try and put it in lay terms for people who might still find it confusing.
	And of course, as the expert, please tell me where I go astray.
	When there is an original trauma that can't be processed in the moment due to whatever extremity is going on.
	I mean, you can't process the trauma of combat while you're in combat because you need to be dissociated in order to survive the dangers of the situation.
	The trauma is not processed in the moment because it's impossible to both process and survive and then what happens in the future is the trauma needs to be processed but people don't want to process the trauma and so they will avoid that but because the trauma is continually in a sense clamoring for expression and integration People find themselves drawn like a criminal back to the scene of a crime.
	They find themselves drawn to stimuli which mimics but does not directly trigger the original trauma.
	Is that a fair way to put it?
	Perfect. Exactly.
	What happens in trauma is that the event is so horrific, so terrifying and renders the person so helpless that it exceeds the capacity of their brain To integrate it and then that traumatic event or those traumatic events exist as a sort of separate isolated unit within their brain and that periodically surfaces to influence their behavior through acting out.
	And then that they try and avoid it because through acting out or I should say also through nightmares and other forms of re-experiencing and like flashbacks and then also Because it's so horrific, they try and avoid it by ignoring it.
	So it's hard to get veterans to come in for therapy, for example, because they think that simply by staying home and turning the TV set off, the traumatic material won't come up again.
	Right. But it always tends to.
	And I think the other challenge is finding psychologists or therapists who veterans would take seriously as non-veterans to be able to help them to process this material would be quite overwhelming, I would assume, for a mental health professional.
	Well, there aren't a lot who can do it.
	One of the advances In the field that came through in 1995 was Francine Shapiro's invention of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
	EMDR, as it's known, has become one of the two principal ways that's empirically supported for the treatment of combat-related PTSD. What scientists,
	what psychologists are learning is that through the agency of alternating bilateral stimulation, which can be applied by eye movements like this or through the use of tactile stimulus, It facilitates an integration of the two hemispheres of the brain.
	And there are a number of protocols now that have emerged.
	My own affect-centered therapy is one of them as well as the EMDR. There are a number of protocols that have emerged.
	To help people and to facilitate this integration and it's possible for those that isolated what I and others call trauma-coded information to be integrated into the whole mind and then people are largely free of symptoms.
	It's a lot of work.
	And there aren't many therapists who are doing it, and the number of potential clients is enormous.
	Right. And I wanted to mention as well, one thing that struck me about your article was not many people are very aware of the relationship, the close relationship, between the origination of psychoanalysis and war trauma.
	Freud, of course, who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th century, Words to a large degree ignored until the problem of shell shock arose out of World War One and it was called a shell shock because you know healthy individuals who had displayed no shortage of courage under combat suddenly became incapacitated mentally incapacitated subject to to night terrors and incoherence and what we would now I think or what you would now call PTSD And one of the things that helped psychoanalysis move more into the forefront was the need to try and find a way to deal with this non-organic or non-specifically medical problem of shell shock.
	So psychoanalysis really had its birth as a contemporary discipline.
	In the war trauma of World War One, and I think that there is another opportunity.
	You can't make war into a good thing, but you can extract some good things out of war.
	And if this can help to raise the awareness of the need for self-knowledge and the processing of emotional trauma, I think that the trauma will not have been entirely in vain, if that makes any sense.
	Oh, it makes perfect sense.
	You know, in my article and in the other writing that I'm doing, I'm trying to see the larger picture rather than getting to see the process of our society and step back a little bit from the individual events.
	People tend to get caught up in Iraq and not see that Iraq is simply part of a process that's been going on In our human civilization for tens of thousands of years, one of the things that you call attention to when you mention shell shock and the difficulty of treating PTSD is that for individuals and for the PTSD nation,
	there's tremendous shame around Having these symptoms of PTSD. You mentioned the word courage and soldiers are trained to be detached, even dissociated from what they have to do.
	and they're taught soldierly militaristic values that stress among other things courage under fire and yet when something horrific happens that exceeds their ability to process it and they become trauma-coded they feel that they maybe contributed to the death of their fellows by their incapacity and they feel tremendous shame that they can't come home And simply function like they think other returning soldiers do.
	And the same as a nation we experience but don't acknowledge tremendous shame around what we've done to native peoples for example.
	And so when we put them on reservations as we did in the 19th and 20th centuries, that's a way of avoiding It's an avoidance symptom of our national PTSD and it's motivated in large part by shame I think that's quite right and I think when people establish a false identity based on a glowing view of American or any country's history It is a challenge to a sort of false self identity to look at the dark side of that power I mean most Americans can quote you the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam and And Cambodia,
	but they can't quote you the two to three million and it's not even known within a million numbers of Asians who died in that conflagration and that is a very difficult thing for people to to process.
	Exactly. And of course, the murder and massacre of two million Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians, that's a trauma for them as well, that's unresolved.
	And that they will find ways to reenact in the future.
	Right. I was wondering this aspect that I don't think a lot of people are very comfortable with, and it seems to be emerging over the last decade or two of research and experimentation in the field of psychology, this idea of multiple selves or alter egos, or they're sometimes called alters as well.
	I mean, my general theory is that this is part of human nature to begin with, that we all have conversations with ourselves and are composed of multiple perspectives just because we are raised by multiple people and have multiple influences.
	But there's an aspect where the impact of trauma Like one asteroid hitting another causes a shattering and a continual escalation of polarity and opposition, which as you mentioned in the article is showing up in the American political discourse with the extremity on the left wing, the extremities on the right wing, and this increasing lack of cooperation and curiosity about opposing positions.
	I was wondering if you could talk about the mechanics, as you see them, by which the impact of trauma causes an escalation and polarization of opposing personality structures.
	Well, let's start off by talking about what happens to people who are traumatized in childhood, because it makes the point, I think, pretty well.
	And it's important, I think, to understand That people who choose the military path are already conditioned by their society and they've already experienced trauma and loss in childhood.
	There was a study that demonstrated that Vietnam War veterans were more likely to have been physically abused as youngsters, young people, than people who did not go to Vietnam and people with PTSD were more likely to have been more severely abused.
	So there's a preconditioning that goes on.
	People are preconditioned to choose a path or a life in the military.
	So the important thing about development, it's important to understand about development and this is a central area that I'm addressing in my work, is that there are Psychology over the last 100 years has taught us that there are important milestones that must be met.
	Children are not going to simply become healthy, adaptively and positively functioning adults.
	If they don't have really basic resources supplied to them in childhood and increasingly our society is set up to deny supplying those resources.
	One of the primary things that happens in childhood is The formation of an attachment between the mother, usually, or the primary maternal object because some kids are not raised by mothers, I understand that, and the infant.
	And within the context of this attachment, children learn emotion regulation.
	And this is a key element and I hope we can come back to it because it's the source of my work and it's what I propose as part of the healing.
	The children must learn emotional regulation, what some people have called emotion intelligence.
	Now, the approach that you take to helping reparent people in the realm of emotional self-regulation as adults would seem to me to be an enormously challenging piece of work confronting serious and core issues around perceptions of social or parental virtue and effectiveness and so on.
	I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your approach to the challenges of helping adults learn emotional self-regulation if it was absence or attacked as children.
	Sure. It's important to realize that I give these skills to every person who comes to see me because if a person comes to my office and identifies themselves as a client, it indicates that they are having problems regulating their emotions no matter what their presenting problem is.
	Eating disorder, anxiety disorder, anger management issues, drugs and alcohol, sexual compulsivity disorders.
	These are the kinds of things I work with.
	Now the skills are described in my book.
	Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Emotion Regulation which is available through my website or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.
	These are basically the skills that individuals need and that we need as a nation.
	The skills teach the person to Identify how their bodies tell them they're feeling an emotion.
	That then tells them how to stay grounded and present in order to tolerate the experience of that emotion.
	And then how to down-regulate emotions that are uncomfortable or up-regulate emotions that are positive.
	And so the skills I teach, I will ask a person, for example, tell me a time that you felt a low level.
	On a scale, say from 0 to 10, a level 3 or 4 of the emotion fear.
	This might be getting stopped by a police officer for speeding.
	Often it is. But people don't recognize how their body tells them they're feeling fear.
	They'll say, boy, that scared me.
	But as far as really noticing the clammy hands, The racing heart rate that often comes up or shaking someplace in the body, these are the symptoms that they avoid awareness of.
	And so part of my work is to raise that to awareness and that's really what we need as a nation, as a nation of individuals.
	Then I teach them a skill of grounding.
	That keeps them in the present moment.
	One of the things that comes up for us, and the talk show hosts that I mentioned in the PTSD Nation article are experts at this, is that when a current issue that causes fear is brought up, if people are unable to stay grounded and present,
	All the other fearful events of their lifetime are suddenly active in their brains, and so they're much more fearful than the event that's right in front of them would be.
	For example, when somebody is stopped by a police officer, they feel fear, but Because they have difficulty staying grounded and present often, every other fear, fear of their dad beating them, fear of the bullies at school, all of those fears surface and the skill of grounded and present helps them stay in the present moment where there's only one fear in front of them.
	And then I teach a skill to down-regulate These negative emotions using an unimaginable intervention like compost shredder or sink disposal is just a way of helping the person decrease a negative emotion and then when they decrease that emotion they can more accurately assess the present instance.
	Does that help? Yeah, I think so.
	A trauma which is a current, quote, frightening, it's not really a trauma, but a current event which is stimulating fear.
	If there's lots of unprocessed trauma that is somewhat similar in the history, it activates the entire system, which causes an overwhelming fear response relative to the present stimuli.
	And so you help people to deal with that onrush.
	And manage it so that they can try to stay present in the situation and deal with what is empirically happening rather than the accumulation of what historically happened.
	Absolutely. Somebody who has combat PTSD and if he's stopped by a police officer, it raises every single one of his past traumatic experiences with people of authority or people who have a gun, people who appear to him threatening.
	And so he becomes much more activated than he would be if he could stay in the present moment.
	The thought has just struck me, John, that it could be that if you activate as a traumatized child, you may, in a sense, provoke the activation of a traumatizing parent on the part of the police officer, thus creating a dynamic where both parties are acting out prior trauma to the detriment of the moment.
	Absolutely. You can see this in the Tea Party movement today.
	The Tea Party movement leaders and the people in the crowd activate each other.
	They're very much acting out unresolved childhood issues that they have.
	It takes, I think, a fair amount of self-knowledge, and this of course is one of the key trainings of a mental health professional.
	When someone enters into an unconscious roleplay in your presence, it takes a fair amount of self-knowledge to not enter into a complementary roleplay yourself.
	And I think that's one of the things that just we, as human beings, need to help each other with, is not to, in a sense, accept the invitation to roleplay, but rather to try and deal with things in the present.
	Well, that's why part of the training of therapists, I wish it were more explicit, but when I train therapists in my workshops, I'm not only training them how to help their client, they go through the same process and become familiar with their own emotion responding, often in ways that they didn't know before.
	How their body teaches them that they feel anger, for example, or An emotion that is largely ignored in America and it's one of the more powerful and in the world, one of the more powerful ones we feel, which is the emotion of disgust.
	Yes, therapists learn how to manage their own emotions so that when their client becomes activated, they can stay in the moment with the client and help them.
	People can learn this. It's called compassion and empathy.
	Yeah, I've read about this in parental effectiveness training, empathetic listening, open listening, which is the idea that you are trying to absorb what the person is telling you without bouncing it back through your own projections and defenses.
	And it is something that I think everybody can enormously profit from pursuing.
	We should be teaching this in junior high school and in high school.
	Actually, the program that I'm creating has three different modules.
	Early in kindergarten, not quite kindergarten, first grade, children should be taught In an age-appropriate way, these skills, and then they should be reintroduced in junior high and then brought forth again in high school at three different important periods in individual's lifespan.
	Right. Well, I think that would be hugely important.
	I think one of the challenges, and I mean, to get into a discussion of education is a whole other show, but one of the challenges is that a public school education, it does not exactly solicit the needs and requirements of children, but tends to be a very top-down hierarchy that comes from,
	you know, experts in the field and school boards, and to some smaller degree, the participation of parents, but the very school system itself is not Client-centered in the way that it should be, so I think that empathetic listening is going to run up a little bit, if not a lot, into the hierarchy of the school system.
	I mean, nobody asked me when I was a kid what I wanted to study or what excited me, and that may be different now, but I think that would be one of the challenges that approach would take.
	Absolutely, and this goes to healing PTSD Nation, and how do we bring this to the population?
	One of the very surprising aspects of your website, John, was the degree to which you tackled what I think most mental health professionals would say is a multi-year challenge such as narcissism.
	And you have some very encouraging, and to me at least as an amateur, surprising response rates and rapidity of response to your approach to treatment.
	I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how what you're doing is different from the general multi-month or multi-year psychoanalytic approach.
	Well, it's the difference between traditional so-called talk therapy and affect-centered therapy.
	What I use, and I'm going to reach off camera for a minute here.
	Sure. Still there?
	Yeah. I want to show a little device here that I use that provides, see here's Stephan, what therapists and neurophysiologists have learned is that when there is neglect in childhood and or trauma and it turns out the neglect That neglect is even worse than or more serious than overtrauma.
	It imposes a structure on the brain.
	Neglect and trauma do.
	It has these factors.
	The right side of the brain, where most emotional responding occurs, The left side is activated when there's neglect and or trauma and the left side does not develop as fully as it would in healthy individuals and more significantly there's poor communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.
	Shapiro was the first person with EMDR to discover that alternating bilateral stimulation can have an effect.
	And a positive effect.
	Subsequently, researchers have proposed that the reason alternating bilateral stimulation works is because it integrates the functioning of the two hemispheres.
	What I'm holding up here now is a little device called a TheraTapper that gives a gentle vibrating sensation through these probes that are held in each hand.
	What it does is get the two hemispheres communicating with each other.
	This is part of the whole protocol, but it facilitates a much more rapid integration of the skills that I teach.
	In talk therapy, people can spend literally months trying to Help their clients manage their emotions better.
	What I have in the protocol that I've created that also employs tactile, alternating bilateral stimulation is I've created a way to much more effectively and much more efficiently transmit these skills.
	Right. So this is something that helps to create pathways or strengthen the pathways between these two hemispheres, which is essential for emotional self-regulation?
	Absolutely. And so this would be sort of, again, I'm trying to metaphorize it for the people who may not be that down on the lingo.
	This would be sort of like if you have a wasted muscle that is too painful for you to move initially, you might have some external electrical stimuli in order to strengthen it to the point where you can begin to exercise it more quickly.
	Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
	Okay, good. Good.
	And so you have 10, 12 weeks recessions as a way of beginning to help people deal with really character logic disorders.
	Is that fair to say? Well, the emotion regulation piece begins it, and that usually takes just six one-hour visits, four to six.
	I sometimes work intensively.
	But what happens, I consistently observe this, is as people acquire the skills of emotion regulation, the self begins to reorganize itself in a much more adaptively functioning, positively functioning way.
	And when clients have the skills to manage difficult emotions, like the emotion of shame that underlies the narcissistic personality disorder, when they have that ability, then they can revisit or revisit again the traumatic events of childhood that set their disorder in motion.
	So, there are thought to be three different levels.
	Let me say this about narcissistic personality disorder.
	There are thought to be three different levels.
	A low-level narcissism, a median level and a high-level narcissism.
	Now, the people, the so-called banksters that have bankrupted this country, those are high-level narcissists and until they have a sufficient Negative experience that's going to bring them into treatment, their life is working for them.
	They're making the millions of dollars and so their narcissism pays off.
	It's the people in the mid-level and the low-level for whom narcissism isn't working that are more likely to come to therapy.
	Right, right. And again, I really wanted to applaud and praise you for the linking of high-level society effects with low-level family causes.
	It's been an argument of mine for many years that the state or society or politics or high-level abstract economics Should be first of all understood as an effect of early childhood experiences that most people want to get into politics to sort of fix the system without realizing that the system is a reflection of what happens very early on in people's lives and That's why I think a lot of political movements get frustrated and fail whereas the other approach which is sort of the bottom-up approach that if you want to reform society the first thing that you need to do is to create the conditions for better parenting That is how you change society in a permanent manner,
	not by tweaking the laws, which in many ways are the result of these early childhood experiences.
	Absolutely. Let's take as an example alcoholism, for example.
	The society or the nation made an attempt to deal with alcoholism by a constitutional amendment making alcohol illegal and it didn't work at all.
	What finally What began to work for the treatment of alcoholism is when alcoholics came together in small local meetings and began to practice the 12 steps when they made a decision to quit going into the bar and instead to go to meetings.
	Now, this is what we need nationally, is not yet another bureaucracy, not yet another corporation to try and help us recover.
	What we need is a movement of people who begin talking to each other, learning these skills within the movement, and talking through and working through the application of these skills in their lives.
	Sorry, go on. You were about to have another thought, and I don't want to interrupt.
	Well, I want to go then to the banksters.
	So much of the behavior that we see in just thinking of the banksters, which I love that term from FDRs, kind of brings gangster and banker together.
	But someplace in the childhood of every one of those people, I believe firmly, If I could work with them, we could uncover an experience in which shame had been elicited and its companion disgust that were elicited at levels that they were unable to tolerate because they didn't have the emotion regulation skills.
	And so, as they moved through adolescence and into adulthood, they developed behaviors The behavior of being a banker, a financier, they developed behaviors that allowed them to manage their unresolved shame and disgust through the compensatory emotions of grandiosity and greed.
	And so, you're absolutely right that childhood events constrain the person to a developmental path that ends up with them acting out.
	Yeah, and again, I don't want to make this about my theories, but I think one complimentary thought that I've had over the years is there is a very powerful but subtle degree of vengeance that is exacted upon society by people who have been traumatized By a society that does not recognize and help them with that trauma.
	And so I wonder the degree to which people who've been wounded in childhood who then did not receive any help from priests or parents, and parents of course very often are the inflictors, from extended family, from teachers,
	from people in the neighborhood who might have heard their cries for help, who then grow up with a great desire to enact or exact a kind of vengeance against the society that did not help them and even as adults is not talking to them about their childhoods or their histories or things that may be wrong in their lives and I think there is this kind of very big lashing out that occurs Through the destruction of people's finances,
	it seems to me that there's a kind of vengeance, which is the brutalized child acting out against a society that did not intervene to help.
	And it is not in the present even that much intervening to help.
	Oh, absolutely. Anger is always going to be a component of...
	And people who were shamed in childhood who had discussed affect broadcasts and almost always they come from families in which people who are unaware That they're angry,
	unaware that they anger, and unaware of how they're acting them out.
	People will come for treatment until they recognize that there's a problem.
	And that's why I wrote this article, is to try and bring to people's attention that it's not just alcoholics who have problems.
	It's not just drug addicts.
	It's the people who have destroyed our banking system, for example, have serious childhood issues that they've reenacted on the whole society.
	Yeah, I think it has to start with childhood and to attempt to manage the effects of childhood without actually dealing with the childhood issues is always doomed to failure and is a really tragic misallocation of resources.
	But, of course, I think to To help others with their childhood issues, whether as a professional or, you know, just an empathetic and caring human being, you have to have dealt with your own childhood issues, which, given where our culture is in the sort of ladder of human progress, we all have issues that we need to deal with from our own childhood, and you can't really, you know, it's like what they say in the airplanes, you know, if there's a sudden loss in cabin pressure...
	Put the oxygen mask over your own face before helping other people.
	And I think that's something. You have to look at these things within your own life if you want to help the world as a whole.
	And that's why I think Socrates said, know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.
	Because without that, you can't see other people or know them clearly enough to actually help them.
	Absolutely. Within the 12-step community, this occurs through the agency of sponsorship.
	The sponsor is somebody who has already worked the steps, who can help the newcomer work the steps in his own life.
	If I were allocating the resources of this country, I would have stimulated the job market by beginning to train Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young people to become psychotherapists and would have provided these trainings that the society does to promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	We're not a society of happy people.
	How to be happy and we're so stuck in our trauma reenactments that we don't live a happy, abundant life.
	And people can.
	Well, I think that's true.
	And the other thing that I would say is the studies seem to be very clear that an increase in material wealth has not resulted in an increase of happiness.
	In fact, quite the contrary, that increases in material wealth have led to increases in unhappiness.
	And in a strange kind of way, you could look at the nation as a whole destroying the wealth In order to try and find the happiness that the wealth isn't solving?
	In the same way that somebody who has unjustly acquired an income will often find ways of destroying that income until the original traumas are dealt with.
	Yes. Our trauma, not just as a nation, but as a people, with a history, the first mother was 200,000 years ago and there's a developmental history to our civilization as well as to each of our lives and to our nation's life and it's important to understand that this is a process that's been going on since we first came to consciousness and that As a civilization,
	we've discovered, or as a species, we've had a succession of ways of being that we've created in attempts to deal with the first trauma.
	This is the subject of my forthcoming book.
	It's called The Long Wound.
	Our first wound Coming to the awareness, what we felt so cavalierly, but was huge in our evolution, was self-aware self-consciousness.
	And although we evolved as a feast, About 200,000 years ago, somewhere around 40,000, 50,000 years ago, it seems to me that the first humans came to self-aware, self-consciousness.
	And this was the first trauma.
	Because if you think about it, there was nobody there to help us manage the terror of knowing we were going to die.
	Most animal species don't know they're going to die.
	Their brains aren't set up for that.
	But somewhere about 50,000 years ago as a species, that evolved.
	And everything that we've done since has been an attempt to manage that terror.
	Ernest Becker, a very influential writer, published a Pulitzer Prize winning book in 1973 called The Denial of Death.
	And it's important to realize, business enterprise, I'm coming back to that, that you call attention to, was a primary invention of the 1300s in Italy that has since evolved into things like the derivative market and securities and insurance and so forth.
	But these are all ways of trying to manage the terror Of knowing, of being aware of our own mortality.
	And so people are constantly, Becker called these immortality projects.
	Religion has been a huge one.
	Business enterprise is another.
	Most of the efforts that we humans do are attempts to manage our fear of our own mortality.
	Yeah, and I would highly, highly recommend that book to people.
	It is such a foundational aspect of being a living organism with consciousness that we know we're going to die.
	I think also the nation-state is something which people attempt to wed themselves to, to gain a sense of continuity beyond their own lifespan, that they're part of a larger tribe that has continuity and, I mean, that has some sentimental benefits, but it has enormous dangers when it comes to moral self-actualization and integrity.
	You're absolutely right.
	When people say, I am an American, they're identifying with the 250 odd years of our nation's history, or I am an Englishman, thousand years of history.
	And that gives them a sense of immortality.
	Reproduction is another one.
	If you make enough money, you can have a building at the college that you graduated from with your name on it.
	And then when you die, you'll know that this is what people think, that their name lives on in some way.
	That's what an immortality project does.
	And I believe that if you live as richly actualized and humane and mature a life as possible, at least I've never found any particular desire to have my name live on after death.
	I think if you live as richly as possible, you don't need, in a sense, to project your life into the future beyond your own death, in the same way that if you have a great meal, you don't need to think about the future when you're eating.
	You're absolutely right.
	If you look at religion, for example, what does it promise?
	Most of them promise some sort of a life after death.
	One of the beauties of Native spirituality was its acceptance that we are here on what they call the Red Road.
	We will eventually die because that's the normal course of things.
	But our own religions are denials of that and defenses against it.
	You're absolutely right. A richly lived life, as Tibetan Buddhists say in the Oh, let's see.
	The Preparation for Living and Dying.
	I think that's the name of the book.
	But in any case, the well-lived life is the purpose of being here.
	Yeah, and I think for a lot of people as well, if they have an inability to process shame and humiliation and other of these negative emotions, I think it's hard for people to look forward in their life because, I mean, there is a bookend aspect and a similarity between early childhood or infancy and late life and infirmity.
	We are limited when we become elderly in the same way that we're limited when we're babies.
	We need other people to take care of us when we become elderly in the same way that we needed people to take care of us when we were children.
	Our powers are weak in both situations.
	Our dependency is great.
	And I think for people who have not experienced tender care as children, I think that they fear and avoid, and out of that avoidance grows megalomania and narcissism and grandiosity.
	They avoid the inevitable decline of old age because I think it reminds them in an unbearable way of what was unbearable for them as infants.
	Absolutely. Our current national obsession with Botox injections and all kinds of surgery and trying to live 120 years is part of this.
	Another part of it is that we also marginalize our older people and don't see them as having wisdom and so forth.
	We put them in retirement homes.
	And put them largely out of sight because no one wants to be reminded by seeing an old person of their own mortality.
	Right, right. Well, I think it's a very, very powerful book and do give me a shout when it's out and I will do what I can to help get the word out because I think that it is a very, very powerful topic that people need to deal with and it is the tragedy of consciousness that we have this amazing ability to conceptualize and create this technology that we are chatting with right now and with that, the price of that is the shadow of death which we see ahead.
	In my work and the work of others, I have the protocol.
	Others have approaches but the protocol that I've created is, as far as I know, the only one and certainly the most effective one for helping people learn to manage their emotions.
	And here's the point, there was no support for us coming to consciousness As our consciousness has developed over the We have now the skills and we can, as a society, re-parent ourselves.
	That's through the skills that I and others are teaching.
	And we can provide to this generation and then to the next generation these skills and we can interrupt the cycle of abuse.
	That's the promise of birth.
	Now, I wanted to, and I really do appreciate your time, I really wanted to end on a sort of practical note for people who are interested in the therapeutic approach that you take, either as a mental health professional who would be interested in learning more or possibly even receiving training.
	Or somebody who would like to take your approach to emotional self-regulation, where is a good place?
	Your website, John Omaha Enterprises, I'm sure would be worth a visit.
	But where is it that people should go to try and find people who are accredited or at least able to train others in your approach?
	The website right now is going to be The Hub and I'm holding up a DVD that I created which describes Affect Centered Therapy.
	It's about four hours long.
	It's called Introduction to Affect Centered Therapy.
	I sell them for $29.50 and it's a really good introduction to the work that I'm doing.
	Right now, I am Teaching therapists through my workshops how to do this work.
	And as you mentioned, I've trained several hundred worldwide.
	And what I'm now hoping to do through an organization that I've created called Humanity Rising, and this is just in the beginning stages, but is based on a 12-step model.
	The steps are somewhat reformulated.
	Because this isn't about treating alcoholism, it's about treating national, individual and national PTSD. It's forming this organization.
	So stay posted.
	I'm hoping that I can reach like-minded individuals through this kind of a show and through the article who'd be willing to collaborate with me in bringing Humanity Rising, which is a 12-step oriented approach to people.
	An essential element of it is that our leaders are but trusted servants.
	They do not govern.
	Meaning that and also that we're self-supporting through our own contributions.
	These are fundamental principles.
	I'm not in this to make money.
	I'm in this to break the cycle of addiction.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I was just going to say, the first way is seeking out therapists who are trained in this protocol and the more therapists the better and then secondly is through the non-profit that is in formation right now called Humanity Rising.
	Well, I really wanted to thank you for your time and also to thank you, human being to human being, for the work that you're doing to bring a greater sense of self-awareness to the world, to help people to understand that if you've had early childhood trauma,
	that you have A brain that is in a sense scarred or damaged and there are ways to repair, to heal, to bring the joy and you can in fact, in my experience and opinion, you can become stronger through even having been traumatized and dealt with it in the same way that if you have a broken leg And you go through physiotherapy,
	you can end up with a stronger leg than if it had never been broken because you get into the habit of exercise in the same way that if you have a heart attack and survive it, you can become even healthier than if you'd never had one because you will reform your lifestyle.
	And so it is not a bottomless tragedy to have experienced early trauma.
	It is a tragedy. But it is also an opportunity to gain a kind of happiness that may have been impossible without the trauma that leads you to self-knowledge.
	So I really wanted to just express my appreciation for the work that you're doing to help people to understand these enormously important issues for the progress and peace and future of humanity.
	Thank you very much, Stefan.

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