Russell: Hi, and welcome back to Resilience and Ravelled. And it's a gloomy day in Britain, but I'm being cheered up by the sunny smile of Dr Friedemann Schaub, who's. I don't know if he's standing in front of me, but he's certainly appearing in front of me in all majesty.
Russell: So, Good afternoon, Friedemann. How the devil are you?
Friedemann: I am very good, thank you. High level of happiness, as I just stated.
Russell: That's very good. Well, tell us about first, where in the world are you?
Friedemann: I'm in the south of France. And yeah, enjoying my life in the middle of nowhere and happy to be connected to you now.
Russell: Very good indeed. So, tell me a little bit about yourself because you don't sound French. I'm suspecting there's an intriguing history.
Friedemann: Well, I am born as a German, lived in the US for almost 20 years, then ten years ago came to France, and now I don't know what I am, but I am here, at least. Well, if you want to know more about my journey, as I'm now also talking about my work, I was a physician originally, specialising in cardiology. Then I got moved to Seattle, Washington, to do a postdoc. And I have to say that was one of the best things that ever happened to me because I realised, I don't really like being a physician in a big hospital where people are just treated like numbers. And for a while at least, I really enjoyed going into the depth of each cell of us and learning more about the miracles that happen within. So, I got then a degree in molecular biology and after, again, almost ten years, I decided, no, that's not really what I want to do either, because I like to work with people and I want to help them, but I want them to help themselves and I want to help people to tap into that.
Friedemann: What I discovered or saw more clearly in molecular biology, which is this self-healing capacity that we all have and how to get there was then the next episode of my journey. And this is when I got specialised more into the mind body connection into the subconscious mind, et cetera.
Russell: Very good. Now, I meet a lot of people on this podcast, and they talk about mind body, and they head into the realms of woo, if you know what I mean by that. Soft, fluffy, make it up as you go along. But I'm hoping you as a scientist have got some provenance for the mind body spirit thing. I'm with you. I agree with you. I'm interested healing, but with caveats and warnings and such lack of suitable things. Tell me about your stance on mind body healing.
Friedemann: Well, basically, I believe that a lot of what causes illness are our thoughts and our emotions. And this is something I saw all the time as a physician, that people are stressed, people are anxious, people feel trapped just entering the hospital, which is not very conducive to healing. But as physicians, you don't really have the means or the time to help them to get more to the root of also their high blood pressure, which we know is very related to stress, or high cholesterol, which can also then lead to heart issues. I believe that we can do a lot simply by balancing our mind, by balancing our emotions, by overcoming anxiety and all those things. And there are also ways to stimulate more our innate healing by being more on a place where we want to get well. I mean, that's a whole other topic.
Friedemann: But I tell you, I had clients that told me, I know why I have cancer. I have cancer because I don't want to live anymore. And that's the best way out. And so that's the power that we must can create disease. And if we can create disease, we certainly can also help us healing the disease. And that is something where we must be more empowered and less relying just on the doctor and the pills.
Russell: Yes, and I totally buy that. And I buy that their self-healing is part of a holistic package that sometimes does involve pills and sometimes it doesn't involve pills. But there's a correlation between good diet, positive mental attitude, and general wellness. And I think that's indisputable these days. The problem seems to be there's a lot of people who don't believe it, and there's a lot of people who, if they do believe it, don't know how to achieve it. Where do you start with that?
Friedemann: Well, I feel that when I was thinking back, my head of the department, he didn't believe that stress was related to illness. And then fast forward ten years, it's very clear that 70% of doctor visits are stress related illnesses, whether it's autoimmune diseases or chronic pain, etc etc. So, I think medicine often catches up. But my approach is not necessarily to also put negative labels on our emotions like anxiety or stress and basically now chase those things with pills or any kind of diagnosis. I think we must always go a little bit deeper and see ourselves more as we have been evolving since hundreds of thousands of years. So, I mean, there is a reason why anxiety has been staying with us. We probably had this in the caves already. There is a reason why stress is a survival mechanism which is also evolutionary preserved.
Friedemann: We just don't necessarily know how to respond to those emotions and to understand why they are there in the first place and why we're creating them and how to uncreate them. And this is when I really got interested in getting out of the head, the conscious mind, and getting more into this subconscious, ominous part of the mind and learning more how to work with that, which I think that's where a lot of the power resides.
Russell: But you make an interesting point, which is that anxiety is totally useful because it has a purpose, otherwise it would have been self-selected to be reduced. The connotation that stress is all evil and terrible is a terrible thing. It's just a physical response which becomes from you, stress into distress. And we've forgotten those words, we've forgotten that it's a physical process, a physical manifestation, rather than anxiety. Rather, it is a feature of anxiety, not the other way around.
Friedemann: Yeah.
Russell: And it is interesting, isn't it, how I was talking to someone quite recently who had been using the opposite approach. So, we're discovering over this part of the world that most female mental health issues, anxiety, stress, whatever it might be, to do with perimenopausal and menopausal situations, and the budget and the NHS is now going on HRT. So, for me it's about using the appropriate medication or the using the appropriate approach in a truly holistic way. I mean, there are drugs that you should never take, but people are now looking at some micro doses of hallucinogenic and those sorts of drugs. Everything has its place that's natural in the world. And I think it's interesting that some of the things you've talked about are natural, that they've just gone out of your word. They've gone out of balance, haven't they? That seems to be the issue.
Friedemann: Yeah. Well, I'm not opposed to medication or any kind of forms of treatments. The problem is just that I found when people do take medication, they don't necessarily change the things that need to change, like their beliefs, their thinking patterns, their behavioural patterns. So, medication gives you a nice relief and it certainly changes your brain chemistry, but it doesn't teach you how to navigate through life in a more balanced or empowered way. And those are the things that are important. And there were studies that showed that, unfortunately, with the rise of medication, people went less to do the work, went less to go to therapists or coaches because they rely more on that pill. And I think that the numbers that are rising in anxiety and how it becomes more and more an epidemic and leads more and more to depression shows you this is not enough.
Friedemann: We cannot just drug ourselves. We must learn to navigate with our emotions. And, well, you and I certainly haven't learned this from our parents, I assume, or in school or anything like this. We are kind of left on our own with our emotions, having to figure it out. And often we are seeing our parents reacting to their insecurities with anger or their anxiety with over worry. And then we pick up those patterns and repeat them, but it's not helpful.
Russell: There's two issues that come from here. One which is Young's idea of the collective unconscious. And we’re all infecting each other with our anxiety because I think that's fascinating. But also, it says something about the way we have treated people with things like anxiety, that it has got worse. I mean, catastrophic numbers of mental health issues before COVID are even worse, and yet we're still using the same approaches, going to the doctor and get an SSRIs for antidepressant depression. It isn't the solution, and maybe it may hold you for a month, but it isn't the answer, is it? And I think I like what you're saying here. You've got to do the work that makes the change, because just dowsing people with effectively a trance state isn't useful for anybody. Where do you start assessing people's balance? Where will you start with your process?
Friedemann: Well, I mean, most people that come to me do deal with anxiety or some self-sabotaging patterns, or just a general sense of feeling stuck in their emotions. And so, what I'm really interested in is always the root cause. Where does it start? Of course, we must look at the current symptoms, but the thought is really there is usually something like a learned behaviour. There are some root causes, and especially when anxiety, I find there is certainly what happened to us in the past. It's so interesting when people tell me right from the start, you know what, I don't want to go into my childhood because everything was fine. And then when we dig a little bit deeper because I can't resist, then we find out, yes, everything was fine. But your father also told you are so smart, you can just be a better version than myself.
Friedemann: And that put so much stress and pressure on that person that every time they did something, it brought up this fear of failure and disappointing the dead. And that's a red line that was creating more and more anxiety in their life. So, we must really dig in and investigate the past. We must also understand that we often are not whole beings. We are constantly fighting with each other inside of ourselves. There is a part of us that may feel very ambitious and outgoing and going also for greater and further goals. And then there is a part that may feel totally insecure and that part of us may always somehow hold us back, make us procrastinate, make us self-doubt the inner critic. So, understanding also that we are not necessarily dealing with just one version of ourselves, but that there are different aspects that we must bring in line.
Friedemann: And then of course, what I'm also interested in is our belief system. What do you really believe? And I'm the best example because for many years, based on some childhood experiences, I believed I'm not smart enough well to compensate for this. I was just reaching for the stars. Two doctorates later, two books later and whatever, I still felt not smart enough because I was never replacing the belief. I was chasing the belief by trying to outperform it. But it doesn't really change anything because a belief needs to be changed, really to make a difference. We cannot just rely on reacting to our beliefs or emotions. We must replace them.
Friedemann: We must accept them. Because they’ve made you extremely successful.
Russell: Yeah, but also stressed out.
Russell: But I think we do spend a lot of time in therapy changing people rather than recognise that self-acceptance thing is saying, well, hey, it got you to where you are. It might not be useful anymore. But I do think when we're changing beliefs, we often sort of demonise the previous belief and you couldn't be the person you are today without the pre-existing belief.
Friedemann: I very much agree with that, totally. And I think there is an owner's manual that got us to the point where we are realising it's no longer working for me. And looking back at myself, I knew this owner's manual is not working for me. When I had unhealthy compensatory patterns of eating too much, drinking too much, smoking too much, and pretty much when I went to a party introducing myself as doctor because I had no personality, no sense of self, and all I could see was just my work and my successes. And that was simply getting me into a crisis until I woke up with panic attacks and I realized something got to give. This is not who I'm supposed to be. Or at least not the happy version of myself that was.
Russell: An English person would have gone to the party and introduced herself as Dr. Doctor. That's our sense of humour. As you know, joking aside, maybe I'll cut that out. Well, look, so I love everything you're saying. I think it makes so much sense. So, you've written a book called The Empowerment Solution. So why that title?
Friedemann: Although the first book was called The Fear and Anxiety Solution. So, it lends the solution. I think the third book going to be just called The Solution, not The Final Solution. Yeah.
Russell: The final solution.
Friedemann: Exactly. No, I mean, the solution was basically because we're really looking for something that so many people are feeling, which is disempowered not only during COVID but also before. The sense of disempowerment is something that I would say 80% of my clients have been feeling, and they are disempowered with their emotions, with their circumstances, all those things.
Russell: So, they need to be empowered from themselves.
Friedemann: Well, they need to be empowered in a way that they feel like that life is not done to them, but that they are creating their life, that they are not any longer stuck in these patterns of self-sabotage. But that they have more choices and ways to turn this around. So self-empowerment is not that you have power over something, but that you're empowered enough to choose your direction or to have the resilience to deal with the circumstances that you cannot change.
Russell: Yes, and it seems to be very based on positive psychology, which is a great thing, obviously very proven.
Friedemann: It is also very much based on conscious subconscious collaboration, which basically means that we are bringing our conscious intellectual mind into alignment with our subconscious. See, a lot of those patterns, let's say for example, procrastination, which is one of the survival patterns I talk about. Who wants to procrastinate, who feels to be I feel good, I procrastinated 6 hours today watching YouTube. No. Everyone feels ashamed, doesn't want to talk about it, calls themselves lazy, but somehow the next day they do the same thing. That is not a conscious decision. That's a subconscious decision that we just feel powerless to override. So how do you turn this into something empowering? This is what the book describes. How can you understand why you procrastinate in the first place? And then how can you create new patterns that your subconscious doesn't any longer use procrastination to protect you, which ultimately this is all about.
Friedemann: Protect you from failure, protecting from being visible, protect you from discomfort, but seeing this more as you are hurting yourself when you procrastinate rather than helping yourself. And there are certain steps that use the language of the subconscious to make that new way of thinking and feeling clear. And that's where it's not just positive psychology. It's really like a step by step, you could say rewiring reprogramming of your subconscious self-defence so that it switches from surviving into more thriving, for lack of a better word.
Russell: So, what's the language of the subconscious?
Friedemann: Well, it's basically emotions. So, any feeling is what the subconscious understands. It understands visualizations. These especially imaginations sensations if we can put ourselves into, let's say, your beach and I could imagine myself there laying down, the waves splashing over me, the wind nicely caressing my face, I would be there. And that's only the subconscious doing it. But if I would tell myself this without any visualisation, any feeling, any sensation, the subconscious would just see words and doesn't really care about it. And so that's what often is a problem when we use affirmations or forcing ourselves to think positively, but we don't really feel it, we don't really feel the positivity, or we don't really feel the compassion for ourselves or anything like that. It just stays here, and it doesn't go deeper.
Russell: Yes, that's the mind body connection. You're looking for the emotional affect in the body.
Friedemann: Yes.
Russell: Interesting. Okay, so I've just been rampaging around your site, not when you were talking, obviously, because I was giving but you've got some very interesting free resources on your site. Normally I ask people how you find you and find out more information. But you've got some very useful tools. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the pattern’s resolution process because that's very interesting.
Friedemann: Yeah, that's something that I described in my first book, the Fear and Anxiety Solution. What I love about the pattern resolution process is basically it shows you that your past is not written in stone. It's not something that you would have to say, it's hanging over you like the Damocles sword for the rest of your life. It's all a matter of our perception. And we know that you'd say you had a big disappointment because your friend didn't call you on your birthday. And usually, this friend is always there, and you feel mad. And then suddenly you realise after the friend calls you, two days later, hey, I was in the hospital, I had an accident. Of course, you don't feel mad anymore. Everything is resolved. This is the same thing with all these anxiety events from the past. We can look at them whether it's abuse, whether it's neglect, whether we have messed up from a different perspective.
Friedemann: And this is what the pattern resolution process teaches. You look at yourself not as that victim of your past, but how can you learn from the past? How can you see the nuggets of teachings those events have brought you? And how can you then, using the language of the subconscious, find the resolution for these events? It's almost like neutralizing what you see because you got what you needed to get. Yes.
Russell: And I'm guessing when you talk to referring about the balance of the subconscious earlier, it is about getting those emotional other feelings, the body sensations in check.
Friedemann: Really?
Russell: So, they're working for you so that's when you begin to thrive, is that right? So, the cortisol release is reduced and the survival instinct sort of goes away.
Friedemann: Yeah. And your impulses go away. This feeling of I need to immediately react with either avoiding something or blaming someone. Or we also have the pleasing patterns where you are like this chameleon immediately when you feel like, oh, there is an alpha male in the room, I need to find out what I need to say, how do I need to talk with this person? What beliefs do I need to take on? And you completely abandon yourself. And that's a knee jerk reflex. That when it's deeply ingrained, feels like, well, that's who I am. But it's only a small part of you, it's not who you are, but keep you stuck.
Russell: And of course, it's very useful until it's not.
Friedemann: That's the thing about all these patterns. They are very useful, but they have two downsides. We heavily rely on others versus on ourselves. So that's kind of where we feel disempowered or we're giving our power away. Whether we are feeling that we must avoid people and keep them on arm's length or whether we are feeling like they must give us approval so that we can feel good about ourselves. It's very much about them, not about ourselves. And we are missing out and spending time with ourselves. We are not asking questions on who am I, what do I want? What's my purpose? All those important questions to live a fulfilled life. They go down by the wayside because it's all about just living in this mode and yeah, we can live with this forever, but we will eventually find out that we have lived a smaller life than we should, a smaller existence than what's possible for us.
Russell: Yeah. And many people go through their lives in a small, happy existence and you often find people who open themselves to self-development become extraordinarily miserable, don't they? I'm not trying to joke here. It's this sense that you must get through the hurdle, don't you? That it is about doing the work. You don't just hope it's going to work, you must do stuff. You must apply yourself to your own balance process.
Friedemann: Now, small is not necessarily bad, so don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm living in the middle of the country where there are like 700 people in this town and you could say, well, most of them have never left. So, is that a small life? Small has nothing to do with your radius of moving on the world or through the world. Small is more could you be yourself or did you always have to suppress yourself? Did you always have to somehow make yourself a little bit quieter or not really going for your dreams or not really expressing what your needs are? That small. And so, if you are living in a small town, you never leave, you have your same job, you are very happy with your family, but you feel like you're absolutely your happy, full expressed self. Well, you are lucky, and you should kiss the ground that you're walking on because that's cool.
Russell: It was the old story, isn't it, about the rich person seeing someone sitting on the beach by a boat, selling himself and saying you should sell your boat, you should go and work. And then if you hire the boat out and go and rent people and work 27 hours a day and the person say’s why, then you said, so you can sit on the beach and enjoy yourself. There is something in that, isn't there?
Friedemann: Yes, exactly.
Russell: So, if we can tell people how they can find out more about you and sort of remind us about the book, that's name and where you can find it.
Friedemann: Well, my website is always the best way to get started. It's Dr Friedemann.com I also have a YouTube channel with the same name and my podcast, Empowerment Solutions you can find on Instagram, TikTok and so on. Yeah, and the book is called The Empowerment Solution and it can be found everywhere as well. But of course, Amazon always comes first to mind. But I'm also Barnes and Nobles and local bookstores, and it will be soon as an audible version available too, with me as a narrator.
Russell: Fantastic. And then the next book coming soon. When is that one arriving?
Russell: I have no idea. It took me ten years to get this one out.
Russell: I'm not the fastest procrastination thing. We should talk about it.
Friedemann: Yeah, I should better read my book again.
Russell: What is that? All therapist work in progress. That's why we do it. It's been a joy to talk to you today. Thank you so much. And that name again is Dr. Friedemann.com. All the notes show notes will have all this information in and hop onto Amazon for the book. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. I think it's been brilliant. Well, I certainly thoroughly enjoyed it myself.
Friedemann: Me too.
Russell: Everybody else has too.
Friedemann: Me too, for sure. Thank you.
Russell: Thanks for your time. You take care.