Hi, Catherine.
Oh hello Chelsea.
Hi.
I'm just trying myself in my work ut. It's so hot here, so hot. I'm just trying to figure out where I'm going to go next because I might have to leave before my next guests get here.
It's too hot. Oh no, Well, were your first guests fun at least?
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
No, everyone's been fun.
We've had a lot of good laughs.
We've had a lot of good You know, everything's legal in Spain, mushrooms, LSD, even cocaine is legal in Spain. Cocaine's legal in Canada. Now I've just found out. I'm like cocaine. Every time you think cocaine is out of style, it makes some sort of comeback.
I mean I was like, wait, this is like a thing again now, and I feel like it's happening all over again, although now I'm too afraid to try it because of all the additives.
Well in America that's a thing, fence and all. In London and everyone was doing blow, I was like what. I was like, people are still doing cocaine here. I mean not everybody, but a good portion of people. I was like, wait, what about fentanyl. They're like we don't have that problem here. I'm like, oh, really, we don't have fentanyl here. Only America has up problem because we have people like Gronda Santis and Trump to deal with, so we need the fentanel.
I was going to ask, you've spent a lot of family time this summer. Do you get sick of being around family after a certain amount of time?
I think of everybody, I mean, I just like to I mean, it's better, you know, like post therapy now, I know, I'm just better at modulating my moods and not freaking out or losing my shit. Like I don't really do that anymore, luckily. I mean, I don't want to write it off completely because we watch it will happen tonight. But I'm pretty good about that. And when I want to be alone, I'm just pretty obvious about it. I just remove myself from a situation. And I just
read that book Lessons in Chemistry. That was I keep trying to stop reading books so I could just focus on writing my book. But then I'm like, fuck, I love reading so much, and I feel like every time you read something, you gain something for writing. So but when I don't have time, like if I'm over people. I just go and read my book somewhere. The thing that annoys me the most is when you are reading a book and someone starts talking to you. It's like,
what do you think I'm doing? What does this fucking look like?
I'm reading, I'm busy. I'm looking at something else. That happens to be quite often. And I won't say who it is, but it's definitely the person who lives with me. Yeah, it's like, hey, do you want to have a conversation right now?
We got that, We got that very loud and clear. I went and got this MRI called like praneuva or something, which is like a body MRI to like detect any early, like tumors or anything you're It's supposed to be like a pre deetection. But once you do it, you open yourself up to everything because everyone has nodules or gross or like little things. So but my doctor was like, oh, I see something in like your L five L six.
I was like, what's that?
He's like your neck and I'm like really, He goes, yeah, something's off in your neck. I have to order you a spinal MRI and see how bad it is. If it's something that we need to look at or whatever. And as soon as he said that, my neck hasn't stopped killing me.
Oh no, how is that though? Oh it's psychosomatic.
Yeah, I mean I'm like, oh fuck, now my neck is killing me.
No, okay, So I have to tell you. I I've never talked about this with you before, I don't think. But my therapist I go to is a sematic pain therapist. And I found her about a year ago or a year and a half ago. Now, maybe because I was having terrible pain in my feet. I had been having like really bad plantar fasci iis for like six years, and I had had these painful episodes where I just had this like terrible pelvic pain and they would come and go, and I didn't know what was setting them off.
And so I started seeing this sematic pain therapist after several symptoms told me like, maybe this isn't a physical pain, maybe this is something else. Like I would move around my body some days my left knee would hurt, some days my right knee would hurt. Which if it's structural, that's not gonna happen, right, So I can't tell you the difference that this therapy has made in my life.
I no longer have any foot pain. Instead of feeling pain when I wake up in the morning, when I set my feet on the ground, I feel like, oh, I might need to stretch a little bit. It has helped me totally reframe all of my pain. My pain events when they do happen, they're very, very mild, and I can sort of like breathe through them and meditate through them, which is something that like surgery to not fix.
But yeah, it's a lot about people pleasing, a lot about stress and this therapy, which really I kept thinking, like, what's it going to be, like, are they going to give me special meditations that are going to fix all these things because it's specifically about pain, But it's just really normal therapy where they kind of help you figure out all your pain stuff and how to fix your stress stuff so that the pain goes away or is much reduced or you have a different relationship to it.
So yeah, that's something I haven't talked about on.
This before, saying interesting somatic therapist.
Thematic is body uh huh.
And the thing about sematic pain, like we used to call it psychosomatic pain, it is real pain. It's like you're really feeling this pain, but it's sort of your brain misinterpreting signals from your body that it thinks are pain, but really they're really just sort of like warning signals of like maybe you're too tired, maybe you're this I had a couple friends who had really bad back pain, and they had sort of done similar therapies, and they
like don't have back pain anymore. Like my one girlfriend says, you know, when I start to have like a twinge in my back and I feel like a throw my back out coming on, I know that I need to like sit and rest and journal, you know, in journal and like get her stress and stuff out. So I went to the La Pain Psychology Center and they helped me tremendously.
I can't general no, I just I can't handwrite stuff. My answer always.
If I write a card, a birthday card, my hand hurts for an hour after.
Oh.
I would argue that you write many journals, they just get published as books.
Well, I type those. I can type. I have no problem typing, but I can't i'm writing.
I'm like, oh, that's why I'm scared to put out another book, because I don't want to do that I do.
Know why I can't sign those books again.
So many books you have to sign when you have a book cover, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like your hand on you get carpal tunnel totally.
I mean I when I go on.
Book tours and like do book signings you have, I literally go in after and.
Put my hand in an ice c my gosh.
Yeah, I've got to learn how to sign with.
My toes or something, or like a stamp.
Or Bernice needs to fucking chip in.
She's so lazy.
Oh, Bernie is my lover. Okay.
Our next guest is a very well known Canadian physician and author. He has written the books When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He's also written a book called Hold Onto Your Kids, and his most recent book, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for nineteen weeks, is called The Myth of Normal.
Please welcome gadbor mate.
Hello, oh, hello doctor, good morning, well, good afternoonsh nice to meet you.
I'm Chelsea.
Is a gobor and I wish you'd row up the doctor's stuff.
Okay, I'm so used to everyone calling me a doctor. So I was just projecting and you know, Catherine, my co host.
Hi there, Hi, I can clear a doctor if.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure whatever. It's very nice to speak with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm very much looking forward to asking you some questions and having you help some of our callers with their life advice and life questions.
Well if I can, if I can do it, I'll try. So.
Your new book, which has been on the New York Times best seller list, is called The Myth of Normal, and your book before that was also a huge success, and it is called When the Body Says No, which has been brought up on our podcast multiple times.
So I wanted to talk to you.
A little bit about the relationship between trauma and ADHD and how add and ADHD differentiate with their relationship to trauma. If you could speak to that a little bit, I'm very curious.
Sure.
Well, that's actually my favoritt book which I wrote when I was in my mid fifties and just diagnosed freshly with attention deficit hyperactive disorder. That book is called Scattered Minds. Now, the characteristics of this condition are the people have trouble staying focused. They tend to tune out, kind of absu mind it a lot. So they tend to lose things, forget things, mix up appointments, this kind of stuff, miss
parts of conversations. They tend to pour impulse control. So when they want to do something, even if they know it's not so good for them, they tend to do it.
So people they did the slip very easily into addictions.
And the hyperactive part is some of them have trouble sitting still there restless. They have to move all the time. You can see their feet tapping on the floor, their thumbs fidgetting on the table. You know, that's the hyperactive part. So now, the usual medical view of it, which I don't agree with, is that this is the genetic brain
disorder that passed on for Munde to the next. Now I was diagnosed with it, so repove my kids, and I don't think it's either a disease of the brain, nor do I think it's a genetic So what is it actually? And this is where life experience comes into it. Tuning out is an actual capacity of the human brain. As an example, if I were to stress you right now by being rude and appropriate aggressive, you'd have some
healthy options. You could just hang up on me, say heck with you, or you could fight back and tell me God, but you're not the right to talk to me that way. What if you couldn't either escape or fight back, then how would you handle it? I tell you how you handle it. When there's a lot of stress and a person is helpless, the brain tunes out
as a defense mechanism. If this happens early in life, if the parents are stressed because the relationship troubles, or because they're on on result trauma, or because of economic stress or racialist stress or whatever stress, the child is very sensitive. The infant is very insitive to the parents' emotional states. When the parent is stressed, the child is stressed. When the infant and the young child is stressed, there's not much they can do about it. They tune out.
There's a defense mechanism they don't do deliberately. And when they're doing this when their brain is developing. So how the human brain develops is an interaction with the environment. And if you look at the studies of human brain development, the biggest influence on new chemicals, the secretry the netflix of the brain is the emotional.
Relationship with the adults. If that relationship is stressed, not because the parents don't love their kids. It's not because they're not trying to do their best, because they themselves are stressed. The child is stressed, and what happens is that the tuning ug gets wired into the brain and then ten years later or fifty years later in my case, the person is diagnosed with the so called brain disease
that they inherited. Now, what happened to me was I was a Jewish infant under the Nazis in Hungary in the Second World or I don't have to go into it here, but you can imagine how stressed it was, how stressed my mother was. How did I deal with that stress? I tune out. And this is where my brain is developing now. My own kids grew up in Canada in a loving home, but with a father who was a workaholic, add driven personality. And when I was at home, I was very often in a bad mood.
And since I hate to tell you guys this, but we always marry somebody at the same level of trauma that we're at. It means I met and married a woman who was as traumatized as I was not in the same way, but to the same degree. So now we have two traumatized parents, two young people who remember that traumas acting out on each other in a form of family conflict, and our kids live in a stressed environment so they tune out. So yeah, what was passed
on here is not DD. What was passed on was the stress and the trauma, which is multi generous.
You've talked quite a bit about those things that we develop as children as coping mechanisms, ADHD being one of them. I know that's my situation as well, But how we take those into adulthood in ways that don't serve us? Can you talk a little bit more about that well.
So, first of all, the tuning out, which is a coping mechanism, gets wired into the brain, so it does become a matter of brain physiology. But the deproblem didn't start in the brain. It started with how the environment acted on the brain. It's difficult in adult life to be in relationship with somebody who's about ADHD because the
poor tension span, the poor impulse control. Sometimes my wife would say, you're not listening to me, you know, thinking I was not doing it deliberately but actually what would actually happening is that, especially when the emotional environment.
Gets a bit heavy, I tend to tune out.
Can I ask you a question when you say tune out when you're talking about that, are you talking about disassociation or is that a separate category?
Yeah, about this situation simply means disconnecting from the present moment.
So same thing, the degrees of it.
So I would say that ADHD is a milder form of dissociation, and it's not all the time. When you're very interested in something where you're motivated, oh, you can pay perfect attention. So partly it's also a matter of motivation, emotional safety, comfort, and so on. But the point is, if you came to me as a parent with a kid with ADHD, what would you rather hear, sir or madam. You've got this kid with this genetic brand disease, or you've got a kid who probably grew up in a
stressed environment. Not your fault, you did your best. But if you provide the right environment, that kid can develop new brain circuits and can grow in very healthy ways. So the second message puts more responsibly on the parent, not guilt, but responsibility. But at the same time, if you're a parent, which would you rather hear?
Yeah, And that's very helpful, you know, for people to be able to know that they can change their behavior if they put it, the work towards it, and the effort needed.
What do you think the contribution.
Of social media and all of that has on add and ADHD.
Well, First of all, let me say something about the contribution of social culture in general, because if you look at what's happening with bad diagnosis, or i should say, any other childhood diagnosis, childhood depression, childhood anxiety, self cutting, bulimia, anorexia, childhood soucides, these numbers are going up and up and up and up and up here in North America. Now, if these are genetic disorders, why would they be going up. Genes don't change in a population over ten or fifteen
or twenty or thirty or fifty years. So if the numbers are going up, there's something happening in the culture. And what's happening in the culture is that people are much more isolated and much more stressed than they used to be, and parents are much more isolated and stressed that they used to be. Ghost parents are even together, but there's a high divorce rate, and there is a high rate of depression amongst adults, and that's affecting the children.
So what I'm saying is that the reason we're seeing more and more these childhood disorders is not because they're any genetic epidemic, but because the conditions on the region, means developed and thrive are less and less available. And that's really the essential motif of my most recent book, The Myth of Normal.
The subtitle is the Myth of.
Normal, Trauma, illness and healing and a toxic culture. And I'm basically saying we're living in a toxic culture now. Now social media comes into it. How First of all, one of the essential needs of children is free play, spontaneous play out there in nature. As soon as you introduce screens into the kid's life, that's over with. Because these things, these devices, normally are they highly addictive. They're
designed to be addictive. They call it neural marketing. They design and to hook in the brains of young kids. And if you look at the brains of children who are a lot on social media, they don't look normal. Circuits that involve thinking and emotional regulation are attenuated or not well developed as a result of screen news. Number one. Number two, there's the addiction addictive thing. You take a kid on social media. If you're a parent and you get addicted to social media, you try and get them
to stop it. I've worked with drug addicts. One of my books is on addiction, and I worked with some of the most severe drug addicts in North America. Actually trying to separate a child who's hooked on their social media from their devices. It's like trying to get a severely opiate dependent individual off their heroin. They hate you, they attack you, they fight back, their hostile they're really upset. Why Because they're addicted, and they're respawning, like any addicted person,
to the threatened deprivation of the addictive preference. Thirdly, a lot of parents use social media as a way of babysitting their kids. Now, I don't blame them for it. Painting was never meant to be as difficult and as isolated and as stressed as it is in this culture, but the result is that people are no longer relating to adults in their lives. How we evolved as human beings is we lived in small tribes, but the adults
were all around us the whole day. No kids can spend the whole day relating to each other, which means they lose respect for the adults because we tend to get our orientation and our guidance from the people that we're connecting with. When kids have connected with other kids most of the time, they can't care less what the adults think, and they start getting obstreperous and resistant, and the adults thinking, what's wrong with these kids? Nothing's wrong
with the kids. What's wrong with the kids is that the healthy relationship with adults has been so weekend in this culture, the kids are influencing each other. I mean, look at all the child influencers out there, immature creatures. I don't mean that as a pejority of I just mean objectively, they're immature and i having matured yet influencing millions of their peers.
I mean that's a frightening phenomenon.
Yeah, but with what you said earlier, I mean, you can retrain that neural circuitry, right, You can create new habits at any time almost, I mean, unless you have some other inhibiting factor.
Yeah.
Yeah, So it's not a hopeless situation if you address the situation and try to limit.
The addictive behavior of children on their devices.
I mean, I saw my friend's four year old son throw an iPad at her face when she tried to take it away from him, and I thought, oh my god, that's an addict that's like taking away. Yeah, so it is very disturbing.
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
I know you discuss in your books, all of your books, the mind body connection. So when you're talking about retraining the neural circuitry, how does.
The body fall in step with that?
Again, if you look at how you evolved as human creatures, they didn't involve in cities and pavements and isolated apartments. Revolved out there in nature, living with other human beings in small groups and traveling with them and hunting with them and collecting food with them. But there was a real sense of community.
And in Canada, as in the United States, indigenous people suffered the most in terms of addictions and suicides and autoimmune diseases and domestic violence.
Why because of what was done to them in Canada and in samples the United States, there were this state enforced, church run residential schools with an indigenous child as much as spoke their own tribal language, they pinned stuck to that to discourage them when speak their language. Where they were sexually abused, physically abused, they often died, starved, beaten as a result of all that multigenational trauma. These people have a lot of addictions, a lot of mental health issues,
a lot of physical health issues. So I'm often asked to both of these communities and help with their healing process. So that's one reason I go there. They have such wisdom, their traditional wisdom is so much more holistic and connected, and they see themselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of our universe, really very much in their bodies, in their natural states, and in their God feelings connected
to their God feelings. No, one of the things that happens in trauma is that people get disconnected from their God feelings. Have you ever met the one day old baby not connected to their God feelings?
So something happened, Something happened that is connected to film your body. And what happened was that at some point you learned that to be accepted by your environment, you kind of have to disconnect from yourself. Now that also means that healing also happens to the body, and so that when you're ignoring, you've got feelings, you're knowing your body. That's what you're doing.
So when I teach people healing modalities, it is very much to do with reconnecting with the body.
Actually being aware of what's in your body, what's in your throat, what's in your belly's what's happening in your chest, are your muscle's feelings? You know, So be reconnecting with the body because of the brain in the mind can't be separated. When you're present with your body, you're present with your brain as well.
And you've said when a no comes up for you, it's begging to be said, and if you don't say no, that the body will do it for you in the form of illness. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Sure? Well, you guys live on where in LA or where?
Okay, let's say you live in LA and we're friends and I fly into LA and Catherine, I call you up and I say, can we go for coffee? But you don't want to because you has spin up all night tending a sick friend or a sick dog or a sick child. I don't know, or maybe you just don't feel like a period, you know, but you don't say no. What's going to be the impact on you if you don't say no, If you're in that state, you don't say no, you have coffee with me? What's going to be impact on you?
I can already feel that feeling in my stomach.
I mean I do that all the time. I do things I don't feel like doing all the time.
What is the impact on you?
I mean I don't know specifically, but I definitely it's so hard because that's life.
You know, so many no notice, that's life as you've created it. Okay, now, and you don't say no, will you agree that you're more likely to be tired?
Oh yeah, yes, irritable, more.
Likely to be irritable, stressed, monetly, a difficulty sleeping, or you know, there's going to be some impact. Not only that, you're going to be more resentful as well. Now all
those states are body states. When you don't know how to say no, And we can talk about white people have such trouble saying no. I totally understand what you're saying, but it tells me a certain history I mean, you don't know how to say no, and the body sends you these messages like whatever fiting in your belly or the fatigue of it, and you don't pay attention, it might end up saying no in a big way.
And when I study.
Chronic illness like autoimmunities, is rumor too, that's writer, it's multiple scrosses collidis, these chronic fatigue, pablomy alge, chronic services, examma, asthma, I could go on. Typical of the people that develop those conditions is that they don't know how to say no, so they take on too much stress. Why because they're afraid of disappointing the other person, and they think it's their responsibility to make other people happy and never to
let anybody down. And what it's good to be kind, it's dangerous to be kind only to others and not to yourself. Now, not blaming anybody. These patterns develop in childhood. It meant that as a child you were discouraged from saying no because you were thought to be nice and
pleasant and compliant and appeasing people and pleasing people. Or maybe your parents were so stressed, maybe they were alcoholics, or maybe they were fighting, or maybe they were economically overwhelmed and you kind of took on the responsibility or making them feel better by meeting their needs and forgetting your own.
So this is not how life has to be. It's to be a lot of.
Children in this society of programmed. Now, if you ask the question, and I have a chapter on it in a metal normal, why is it that women have eighty percent of autommune disease? Why is it of the two major genders in this culture, which is the one that's acculturated and programmed into pleasing other people, ignoring their own needs, repressing their healthy anger, so they always should be nice. It's women not to disappoint others and think responsible for
other people feelings. It's women, And that's why women have more auto immun disease because the mind and body being inseparable scientifically, when your emotions and your psychic apparatus in your brain. By psychic, I mean the emotional appetist in your brain is connected to the immune system, to your guts, to your heart, to your lungs, to your nervous system. When things are disturbed in your emotional apparatus, they're going
to be disturbed in your immune apparatus as well. I mean, you don't know how to say no, which is a boundary defense. Your immune system gets confused as well. Now that may sound radical to a lot of people who are not familiar with what I'm talking about. Certainly most of my fellow physicians wouldn't know what the heck I was talking about. That's not their fault, and it's not because I'm not talking science. I am talking science. It's just that the science of mind body unity is still
not taught in most medical schools. The doctors learned purely the physiological fighter things, but not the unity of mind and.
Body right, which is a much more holistic approach to everything. What do you think the correlation is, Well, I think I know the answer to this. But between you know, trauma losing like a family member. My brother died when we were young, and my sister was diagnosed with lupus like two and a half years later. My mother was diagnosed with cancer two and a half years later, exactly at the same time, and that's when we started to learn more about what trauma does.
And how it can cause disease. Can you speak to that a little bit.
First of all, it's striking.
How many families are similar to yours, where a whole lot of supposedly unrelated diseases show up, But they're not unrelated if you understand that trauma is at the basis of them. And that's the point I keep making in the book The Myth of Normal. But on my computer I prepared this, I could go show you a photograph of a young woman who I met four years ago in Britain. Her face was covered with the red rash, a butterfly looking rash, and her fingers were white as chalk.
She had lupas and her fingers were white because they've been deprived of blood supply. The arteries had narrowed. She came to a lecture I gave in London four years ago on when the body says no and a connection between stretch, trauma and autom disease light Lupas's. I could show the photographs now. Her face is totally normal looking, her fingers are pink as anything. She's got no disease and she's on no medication. Why Because she learned how to say no, She learned start how to start looking
after herself. She learned to stand up for herself, not to live her life to please other people, but to get to know her real self that she got disconnected from long ago in childhood. And she's healthy as anything, And it's not an unusual story. So what happened in your family is your sister, I bet it is one of these personalities that took on the emotional needs of
others and ignored her own. Probably didn't know how to express anger in any kind of a healthy way, Probably had no idea how to say no. Probably that goes back to your childhoods and your childhood we should took on a certain role in the family. Probably there was a lot of stress in your family of origin, and you guys are small, So all these different diseases or manifestations of trauma and disconnection from the south.
Yeah, I would say the two people in my family, my mother and my sister, had the quietest, the biggest people pleasers in our family. I certainly haven't been a people pleaser for a long time, even though I still continue to do things I don't feel like doing. But yes,
and how scientifically is that measured? Is there a measure for something like that, because, as you're saying, it's kind of almost nascent in medicine for most doctors to even take the mind body connection seriously, So how does one measure that?
But Chelsea, that's so weird is that none of these ideas on you. Jean Mattan Charcot, a French neurologist to first describe multiple sclerosis, said that this disease caused by stress. A great Canadian, American, British position. Sir William Mosler said the same thing about women the elite writers in eighteen ninety.
In nineteen thirty nine, there was a very famous lecture given at Harvard University by a doctor who's still revered at Harvard, and this lecture was published in the Journal of the Medical American Medical Association, where he said that emotional factors are as important in the causation of illness as physical ones, and they have to be at least
as important in treatment. And this article is published in Drama Journal of the American Medical Association in nineteen forty And to this day, even his member's name, they don't remember what he taught.
They don't teach what he talked.
Now, in a decade since this famous physician at Harvard made that statement, we've had eighty years of research showing that it's not that the emotional system in the brain is connected to the nervous system or to the immune system.
They're not connected.
They're the same system like people who and to look after people with Alzheimer's who tend to be women. By the way, the caregivers, their chromosomes suffer, their immune system is diminished, the more likely to get colds.
If they get a cold, it's all lasts longer if you wound them on the skin, as the test that wound will take longer to heal. So the emotional stress of caregiving actually diminishes immunity.
Okay, well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back, and we're going to take some callers and we're back.
We're back.
So our first color today is Mina. Dear Chelsea, She says, a few years ago, my anxiety started taking a toll on my relationship and my physical health. After hearing your experience with doctor Dan, which is Chelsea's therapist, Dan Seagull.
Oh the therapist. Oh yes, yes, we're good friends.
Then I oh good. Good to know.
As a matter of fact, about five weeks ago, going through a very difficult time and guess what I call it?
Oh wow, well perfect, Mina says, I have embarked on EMDR therapy for what my therapist calls complex trauma, and I've been facing things I never thought I would have to relive so that I can process them in a healthy way. That being said, I still really struggle with mind body connection. Unless I engage four out of my five senses, I simply cannot shut my brain off. So essentially, unless I'm listening to exotic flute music while submerged in an ice bath with a eucalyptus leaf under my nose,
It's impossible for me to meditate. Do you have any suggestions on forms of meditation or other therapies that engage several senses at once, or any other tactics Just listening to something doesn't cut it for me. Thank you for everything, Mina.
Hi, Mina, Hi Chelsea.
Hi.
Our special guest today is Gobormate. So I think you are going to be in good hands.
Oh oh are you so excited? Look at that face?
Oh yeah, I'm yeah wow, okay, okay, yeah, okay.
Well hi, Hi, let me just go back to the original statement that the anxiety was hard on your relationship.
Yeah.
So I wrote this a couple of months ago, and since I have written through to Kelsy and Catherine, I've started EMDR, Yeah, which has been amazing and incredibly helpful. I've been in therapy for a while, but the EMDR has also been quite difficult, to be.
Honest, Yeah, what was difficult about it?
Honestly, it resurfaced a lot of trauma that I had about ten or twelve years ago that I had not I mean, I knew was there, but it hadn't really come up for me until I sort of want in this deep dive. The first couple of times I did the reprocessing, I didn't actually notice anything, to be honest, I sort of felt a bit like nothing was happening.
And then I did it a few more times and I felt extremely uncomfortable and I didn't sleep well, and I started having very vivid dreams and a lot of anxiety.
All right, And did you tell you a therapist then?
Yeah, yeah, she's she's aware.
And when you told you a therapist what happened, she said that.
It was completely normal and part of the process.
And did you want to continue with that process?
I have continued.
Yes, is that because you wanted to continue with it. Yes, can you check in with yourself right now? So what's happening for you at the present moment?
A little bit of a pit in the base of my stomach.
Tell me what that feels like? Is that? Okay?
If I ask you that, Yeah, it's similar to Actually it's similar to when I actually do amdr and my therapist ask me. She goes, how are you feeling after or during? And I always say, oh, I have a bit of a like a little pit in my stomach and it feels really uncomfortable.
Okay, so this is a discomfort there. Yeah, can you put your attention on that for a moment? Half familiar?
Is it to you? Is it you? Is it old?
Very?
Is it very? Halfway?
Does it go back my whole life?
Okay?
That means they have some difficult news for you. Okay, yeah, but it's intended to be helpful. Yeah, your trauma didn't start kind of twelve years.
Ago, No, I know, it goes way back.
Yeah, Okay, Now, so that's the first point. Okay, an your therapy, have you dealt with that long ago stuff or not.
We've done exercises where it's what's the strongest memory and what's the earliest memory. And then when I go into the earliest memory, I do the reprocessing.
So hawway have you gone back like four years old? Four years old? So it does go back a long way.
Yeah.
First of all, what I'm hearing is you've had some traumas in childhood that you're still working on right now.
Yeah.
That's sometimes when you do the NDR or even talk about it, but somebody like me, it brings up these physical feelings that are so familiar to you. Yeah, okay, and that you know, I agree with your therapist. I mean that's going to happen. The method I'd recommend for you and actually probably to talk to you about this is Dan Seagull's wheel overweareness so familiar with that one, I'm not known. It's very simple, a very easy to learn mindful awareness.
Technique, but I think it's way effective because it allows you to identify your calm center even as you're having these experiences, You're going to find that sort of grounded center in the middle of it all that will help you get through it.
Yeah.
So I get like intense panic, really really intense.
Panic, and what happens when you get into panic.
I basically just disassociate.
But what happens to you high to ventilate, the.
Shape hyperventilate, I get nauseous, cold sweats, I can't see straight.
It's a full, just full pedic attack.
Okay, well, look here's what I have to tell you.
I cannot, in this short conversation in the context of our podcast, really help you as much as i'd want to. I'd really have to spend time with you, being your presence, talk about some of your stuff, have you experience whatever you're going through, be there with you, and then I could tell you how it would help you. In this case, you're dealing with a tough problem. But sounds like you've
got some good support. So that's the good news. You have good support professionally, and you have good support sounds like personally. I cannot solve the problem for you in the short I wish I could.
No, of course not, but I want to jump in and just say a couple of things to you. First of all, the Wheel of Awareness is a great reference, and this is Dan Siegel. He's got tons of books that he's written as well.
It's basically can wait, Chelsea.
Dan's you're a therapist, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you guys are why I went into therapy.
Oh great, love it, love it.
So it's basically your center, and you are spokes on a wheel, and everything that's coming out of you is kind of your wheel of awareness.
Right.
And it's almost like if you're a plane and you're flying over yourself the center of your gravity, you're looking down like your emotions are this flying over and this is your center. So anything that's happening within you you can be an observer of instead of being in reaction to it. Right, You don't need to necessarily because when you are having these panic attacks, I suspect it's because you're trying to escape the feeling that you're having.
Yeah, right, that pit in your stomach.
Yeah, it's almost like anxiety about having anxiety exactly.
So this is something that is going to be very helpful to you because it was very helpful to me. When you're having such a negative feeling or a feeling that is bringing you to a place that you don't want to recall, you have the power to sit with it instead of trying to push it away and saying I don't want to think about this.
I don't want to think about it.
You take it in and feel it holy and that is the way for it to move through your body and also your brain without sending you into a flurry and sending you into a panic attack.
And it is a practice, so you get these feelings that scares me so much, the idea of sitting with it, I know.
But this is what's going to set you free from panic attacks.
But you know what, you can also listen to Dan guiding you through it, so you're not actually as alone as you think you are. Yes, there's the one final thing I want to say to you. There's nothing wrong with you. Okay, you don't have a mental illness. What you've got is a perfectly normal response to something. I'm normal that happened to you.
That's really comforting to hear because nobody's phrase.
It like that.
Whatever the circumstances were. Whereas the four year old you first developed this anxiety, there's two things that can tell you you were being hurt and there was nobody there to listen to you, to hear you, and to hold you. Yeah, and our brains, you know what, Our brains have a circuit in it for panic. We actually have a panic circuit. Because if an infant is left alone and they're in danger or they're lonely, they should panic. And when they panic,
what did they do? They scream for help? And when they scream for help, what should happen? The adults should come running. Yeah, in your case, nobody came running exactly. Yeah, you were being hurt and.
There was nobody there to help.
Your panic is a perfectly normal human response to something abnormal that never should have happened, and if it did happen, you never should have been alone with it.
So we had to just really rest in the idea that there's nothing wrong with you. That it's uncomfortable, it's scary, but there's nothing.
Wrong with you that is really comforting to hear and to give yourself the time I'm to deal with those difficult emotions. I know it's said, like you just said, it sounds so scary, but if you sit with yourself, it's just a feeling and it will pass as long as and as soon as you resist it, it persists. Right Like we know that as soon as you say no, I don't want to feel this way, then that's when you start to scramble. That's when you start to panic.
If you allow it to sit with you and you sit there and let it work its way through your body, as scary as that may be, it most likely won't result in the way it has been resulting for you.
That's what's so crazy, is like there are times where I'll like, let it sit through and I'll be like, oh wow, look at that. It passed and I was totally fine. And then there are other times where I'm like, I'm going to die from this feeling like that. That's overwhelming.
Yeah. And whenever you have that thought and then and may have that pension in you, what you're actually having is a memory of childhood. Yeah, that's what's happening. Might want to remind yourself if you can. I'm having a memory right now. When I say a memory, I mean a body memory.
Yeah, And just to remember like I'm an adult and.
You're saying exactly, yeah, that's not happening to you anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah, And try not to resist it, like you know what I mean.
I know it's you don't want it, but when it comes to go, okay, try a different exercise, try and bring it in and say okay.
Because you've experienced it before, and it will pass.
Everything passes, and the more control you gain over it, the more you minimize this happening to you.
There's a huge difference, not only that you're an adult and you were a child then, but then you had no opportunity to ask for help and all you do. Yeah, so it'll never be as bad as it was then.
Okay, yeah, well, thank you, Thank you so so much, seriously amazing, You're welcome, good luck to you. Thank you guys so much. Thanks me, and take care, take care, bye bye bye.
I love that advice you gave when I had told Chelsea beforehand, I had done some work on somatic pain therapy, and a lot of it was what's the feeling you're feeling, focusing on it, And there is something wild about when you focus on the pain, it feels different. It diminishes,
whether that's emotional pain, whether that's physical pain. But I also think for Mina, the fact that she's having this anger and this anxiety come up that she's been repressing for so long, like that's the work being done.
You know.
It's messy and it's sticky, and it affects those around us while we're going through it. But I think she's really well on her way to healing.
Look, exactly what I say to people often is you can have two kinds of pain. You can have the pain of trying to escape into denial, into addictions, into addictions they're all about escaping pain, all of them, or into relationships, or into mindless watching television or whatever you can. You can have and then have the.
Consequences of those behaviors of eating or whatever, you know, Or you can have the pain of discovering the truth.
You may not have a choice of whether you're gonna have a pain or that. It's a question of which pain are you gonna do you want? Do you want the pain that's going to help you grow, or do you want the pain that's going to keep you stuck? And one of one of the toxicity, one of the poisonous aspects as I concerned of this culture. It's it's so much about escaping pain rather than dealing with the sources of it.
It's funny when you talk about that mindlessly watching TV. You know a lot of people don't think about that. They think, oh, you're relaxing. You know, I've been I've done that so many times where I just it's such an escapism, I mean, and it's just like any other addiction. So yeah, mindlessly watching TV isn't always mindlessly watching TV.
And when you actually look at the content of it, so much of it so bad for people, you know, like the violence they watch or the degraded relationships they're ingesting, some really toxic stuff.
Yeah, and they say, you know, our brains can't tell the difference between watching something violent on TV and when it's happening to us. You know, our brains aren't that that evolved. We experience that stress from whatever we're watching on television.
By the way, I'm not saying people should never watch TV, nor is it always about to escape, But if you're gonna do it, don't do it mindlessly. Right right, I'm gonna think half an hour, an hour, an hour, I'm totally veg ou so vegio consciously.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like eating, right, you got to eat mindfully.
Well, Marion says, this is really a question about dealing with trauma as it's happening. I'm forty one and I have twin girls who are four and a son who's three, practice triplets. I just found out in February that my husband has had a girlfriend, and I've begun the divorce process. He was my best friend and even though things were hard, sometimes I was still so in love with him. But
cheating was my limit and he knew it. I've been reading the book you so highly recommend, Letting Go, which is when we talk about a lot on the podcast here, and I'm applying the lessons in other areas of my life that I was holding on to too tightly. And I like the lightness that brings to me. But how can I get through a custody battle and still wish him well and send him love? Or must I let
this horrible battle go? I understand how to let go of things that are in the rear view mirror, but how do you let go of something when it's something you can't let go of that you're still in the middle of.
Mirian.
Well, a bunch of things come up for me.
First of all, most people when they're being light too, they get some sense of something is not quite right. This person who I would ask you first, well, before you found out about the affair, do you have any sense that maybe things go are quite way with this guy? Is there some gut feeling that you ignored in yourself. Most of the time I asked that question, I don't know what her answer would be, but most of the time I asked that question, people say, yeah, I had
the gut thing, but I ignored it. So the betrayal wasn't just a partner betraying you. It's also you betraying yourself, not that you meant to. Again, I had to do with child and conditioning, and unfortunately this scenario I've seen too often that small kids come into the family and then the big kid can't stand it because mommy and all of suddenly isn't available, so he goes in he an affair. Because men very often relate to women like surrogate mothers as well as partners. So I don't know
if that's happened here. But here's the point. You probably didn't pay attention. Not your fault, it's your program, but not pay attention. So when you say you want to send them in love and so on, why the hell do you want to do that. I mean, if love comes up for you, if forgiveness till letting go genuinely come up for you, I'm.
Very happy for you. You be a fear for it. But don't force yourself, don't put a trip on yourself.
This guy was dishonest with you when you had small children to look after, when you most needed support, when you most needed somebody to be there for you. He decided that this is the moment that he's going to go and please his own desires. How do you feel about that? I hope there's anger for you there. That's the healthy response. I'm not saying you should get stuck in the anger, but if it's there, for God's sake,
don't ignore it. And furthermore, it's going to be a custody battle, which is really tough on you, and if it curse to the courts.
I tell you what's going to happen in the course. His lawyer is going to try and make you look like an incompetent mother, because that's what lawyers do. Not Maybe it'll be resolved amicably, Maybe they'll mediation. I hope so.
But in so far as there's a custody battle, you really have to look at to your own integrity, your own physical and emotion integrity, look at to yourn emotions. Don't make it your job to send him love and all that kind of stuff. If you get to that point by all means, but right now, put the attention on taking care of yourself and allowing your stuff to feel whatever is there.
Yeah, I would agree.
I would say that that book Letting Go by David Hawkins is good for I mean, it's very hard to apply that book into a situation where you are actively in combat with somebody.
I would echo everything that.
A boor said, and especially sometimes you have to fight, you know what I mean, to get custody of your children or to do what's right in a situation, and while you're in it, I think the biggest gift you can give yourself is to look at your behavior, you know, from a level of consciousness, rather than being mired in your own behavior and your reactivity, and understand when it's
necessary for you to react or when it's not. And so just kind of it's almost like you're watching over yourself, you know, to be very mindful of how you're using that energy and what the best use of your time within this argument and this divorce and this custody battle is. And then once it's over, then you can really work
on forgiveness and sending love. And I think that is a that's something that you cannot push and like fast forward, you have to really wait until everything is resolved and you're in a position where it's in your past, because it's not yet in your past. And I think that book is really about letting go of your past, not the present necessarily of the past. So while they're great tools, don't pressure yourself into applying them in a situation like this, because you need your wits about you and.
You're going to your feelings while you're going through this.
Absolutely, you don't want to deny yourself what's happening to you right now or what's happening with you right now. But I wish you well in that and I'm glad that you put your foot down and kicked them out of the house and are starting divorce proceedings because you don't deserve that. Okay, well, that's our episode today. This is serious business with Yukabora. Thank you for imparting us with your wisdom.
My pleasure. Thank you, thanks for having me.
Yes, I'll see you in Canada. Okay, Okay, take care, thank you so much, so much.
Pake sure, bye bye bye bye.
Okay, guys, we have added more shows to my Little Big Bitch Tour.
I added another second show in Toronto, so I have two shows in Toronto now to December seventh, December eighth, December ninth, I'm in Ottawa and two new shows at December fifteenth. On a Friday, We're doing a seven thirty and ten pm show with Kevin Hart and Friends that's in Thackerville, Oklahoma. And all my other shows that you
can buy tickets at Chelseahandler dot com. I'm starting my tour backup on September twenty ninth in New York City at the Beacon, which is sold out, but the next night there are tickets available September thirtieth at the Beacon, So for all fall dates, you can go to Chelseamandler dot com for tickets.
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