Doctor Gabor Mate: I Regret My Interview With Prince Harry! The Shocking Link Between Kindness & Illness!

70% of the adult population is at least on one medication. Quarter of women are an antidepressants. The rate of childhood is going up. Worldwide, this is epidemic of distress. What can we do about that? So the first step would be to... Doctor Gabor Mate, Legendary Thinker, Celebrated Speaker and Best Selling Author.

The body will say no for them. That niceness is a repression of healthy anger. And that repression of healthy anger has huge implications for your health. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system to and against you. People with emotional repressed are more likely to get cancer. And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma.

We interrupt this film to tell you we are getting reports that the people's princess is dead. Here we go. It was a traumatized child. Highest told about his mother's death is that it was an accident your mother didn't make it. His father touches Harry on a knee and says, well it'll be okay and leaves the room. This 12 year old nobody held him. And children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them, but just by not having their needs met. By not being seen, not being heard, not being held. Those are wounding for a child.

What my into you with Prince Harry might have got feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to do at the end to it really got to me. I lost myself. What happened? Gabel, there's a question we often ask each other in flippant conversations, which we usually kind of brush away because it's the convenient thing to do. Yeah. That question is the question I wanted to start by asking you, which is, how are you?

Yeah. So that question is for me brings up two dimensions. I'm just, how am I at this moment, which is all there is? I'm well. I feel rather peaceful inside. I'm very happy to be here with you. If you'd asked me two days ago, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said I was feeling somewhat anxious and kind of troubled. So as a, in the moment answer, I'm well. And I also know how to keep well as long as I stick with what I know.

And when I forget what I know, then I can be very not well. And so the last year since we've met has been in many ways a tough year for me. I'm also one of deep learning. So if the question is how have I been, I'd say I've been up and down and I've had real challenges that I've had to learn from. How am I right now? I'm really well. Thank you. Two days ago, if I'd asked you that question, you're honest, would it been anxious and troubled? Yeah. Why?

I gave a talk on Monday night to 21 other people. And I just didn't think I did my best here in London. And I thought, oh boy, I could have done better. I let people down. I allowed myself judgments and self-dose to really dominate my thinking. And as much as I think I'm immune to that kind of self-doubt, everything I'm not. So that's what happened. When you say you let it clear, you're thinking, what were the symptoms of that?

So you gave a talk two days ago to 21 hundred people. And you didn't feel you did your best. You went home that night. What was going on in your head? What are the symptoms of that feeling? Constant cyclical self-criticism of I could have been more present. I could have been more grounded, more attuned with the audience perhaps. But you know, just all these self-criticisms, which then are accompanied by certain feelings in the body, like kind of a rewailing in my belly and so on.

And that's what I went through. And what was the remedy for that? Because we can all relate. Yeah. Earlier this year, also feeling in the state of this combination, just a few months ago, I did something radical. I did a two week total sabbatical from the internet, no cell phone, no emails, no checking on Amazon, how my books are doing you, all the self-referential, ego enhancement stuff. And it just really made a difference. By the end of the two weeks, I was a different person.

And so I'm keeping it up. And one of the things you learn is you start noticing these body states that you're in and the mental who's that you jump through, but you don't identify with them. So, what's the worst case scenario? I didn't do the best possible job. Okay, what's the headline in the newspaper? Human being fails to do his best on a particular occasion. What's the big deal?

So, it's a matter of observing this all, all this stuff and not identifying with it, not letting it take you over as it tends to. I was reading something that said, when we vocalize or share our stress, it moves it from the emotional center of our brain to the much more rational center of our brain, where we can kind of step outside of the video game and hold the controller per se. Exactly. Yeah, it's the midfrontal cortex of our brain that is in sight and social connection and awareness.

So, which so often goes offline, as soon as it's an emotion, takes over some anxiety or anger or resentment, takes over, the midfrontal cortex tends to go offline. And the more trauma you experience as a child, the more likely that is to happen so that you're insightful capacities, the executive functions get taken over by some deeper emotional dynamics.

And so, one of the benefits to me of meditation is it restores that executive function so that I'm not taken over or too long taken over by emotional dynamics that just sweep me away. For two weeks this year you said you went offline. Yeah, why? Sometimes people say to me, I've written this book that I know that you have on your desk when the body says no one, and my contention is when people don't know how to say no, the body was said in the form of illness.

And I can say hundreds of times people have said to me, your book has saved my life. And my response has always been, maybe I should read it myself, because the fact is I'm quite capable of giving advice and dispensing wisdom that I don't follow myself. And that was the case. So I became quite stressed and my relationship with my wife Ray became very fraught. She said enough, enough of this gap between who you are there and public and how you are and private.

So that was the big incentive for me because we're coming up to a 54th anniversary and on the whole I do others stay married, they're not. Everything I was being considered. But also for myself, I don't be that guy anymore who can speak the truth. A lot of people consider it to be a truth. So are take care of it Lee, but not follow it myself. So I just don't be that person. And that takes practice. And that's why we got that's why I take the break from the internet.

And what was interesting is I had my cell phone on airplane most of nobody could get through me. Couple of times a day, I still pick up the cell phone. And I say, what are you doing? There's nothing on it because it's an internet, but the the compulsion to try and get some from the outside to fill some some gap within. I just kept noticing it, but in the two weeks, it wasn't so strong anymore. So I did it because I needed to through the psycho mental health.

And up in down year for you, you said. Yeah. Yeah. Is that the down you were talking about? Well, I remember a conversation, my conversation with you. And I think I remember you telling me that you had this goal of becoming a millionaire. When I was younger, young. And then it's when you achieve that goal that you realize that that ain't all there is that you still left very much with your internal demons.

And that's a very common lesson. I mean, there's two ways to wake up. One is failure, but you keep asking yourself, you know, but but but success is even more because you think that once you get something, then you'll be happy. And, you know, so I thought, okay, well, geez, I could, you know, to this book, the methanol, you know, best seller internationally and published in thirty five languages. I should be happy.

No, the more I can involve with it, the more it towarded with it, the more engaged with the outside became the more miserable I became inside. So the very success of the book and it all just see it swept me away. And I lost myself, you know, so that was one thing. And I did this very long exhausting tour. I wasn't taking care of myself. And then that was the my interview with Prince Harry and all the frufer around it before it and after it and allow that allowed that to take me over as well.

Really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, retrospect, I can see what happened, but at the time I was too caught up in it to notice. You know, so what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what I know, if I don't pay attention, rigorous attention towards going on inside. And if I keep looking to the outside to give me meaning and give me validation, then I can lose myself. And that's what happened. Your interview with Prince Harry. How did that cause you to lose yourself?

Well, in two ways. One is I had a gut feeling all along, but I shouldn't agree to doing it the way they set it up. Because the way it was set up is in order to watch it, people have to buy a copy of Harry's book. And I thought this is not fair. Four million people have already bought the book. Why can't I watch this into you? Do they have to buy another copy? In other words, I believed that there should be a free public service.

I'm a part of two people who can have a very interesting conversation, but out of sheer opportunism, I agreed to it. So I didn't follow my gut feeling. So I lost myself, even in agreeing to the format. And afterwards, Harry and I both wanted to release to the public for free, but the lawyer said you can't do that. Because this was the other times, there's a one time only event, and there could be a class action suit.

So the result was that I agreed to something that I didn't really like. Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him. I didn't like the idea of putting this behind the paywall. So I lost my stuff just in agreeing to it. Number one. Number two, then there was the incredible social media and British media reaction to it. That was for the most part. So negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted, that I barely even know how to talk about it.

I thought by this age, I would know better, but you know what? It really got to me. It really got to me. I mean, I can give you examples. But eventually what happened was that I was really in a negative state of mind. Have you read the book, the Fox, the Mold, the Horse, the boy and the horse? I bought it last week. So it says in my bag. Wonderful. So great. It's a great little book, a great big book, although very few words in it. Most of these wonderful drawings.

Charlie McKeezy, he was really channeling wisdom in that book. And the horse is the most grounded of the four characters, of the four friends. And he's asked, what's the most courageous things you've ever said? And the horse says, help. So it's so difficult to ask for help. But I did, you know, in the middle of all this fru-fra in my upset, and I called a friend of mine a psychiatrist.

And I said, I'm just in a bad state. And he said, what's going on for you? And I said, well, there's all this bad press and all that social media distortion of who I am and my motives. He said, what is about the dead bodies used so much? And I said, not being seen. Not being seen is one of the needs of the child. But he said to me, okay, look, Gabbo, when you're in infant, you're not being seen for who you are or is it you're being almost cost your your life.

Which you did. As soon as he said that, I said, yeah, this isn't about the present. This is an old unresolved, not yet fully resolved. On the age of 79, I'm still upset at not being seen. I don't care if people agree with me or if you've viewed my ideas, but I want them to see me and what I'm actually saying, not some distorted version created by their own minds. And when he said that, that not being seen, really threatening your life, I said, yeah, that's what's going on.

And then I could relax. So what? What's somebody else's? I don't live in the British press. I don't live in somebody else's mind. Here I am. You know, let them think and say what they say, but it took somebody to wake me up to that. So that's what happened. You said you could share examples of how it got to you. Of, yeah. Well, oh boy. They called me a stern, overbearing merchant of pain.

You know, at some point in the end to you, you know, when Harry was, and the other thing was, see Harry, he was a traumatized child. And you can, when you read his book, you can see why, you know, he, and people couldn't understand how this is possible. How could somebody so privileged at the very apex of society and gilded palaces be traumatized, told him misunderstanding or trauma?

It's true. People have much tougher in many ways, but as an infant, as a sensitive infant, to be born into a, a loveless marriage with the father's having an affair, even before he's born.

But the mother's a troubled, very sensitive, recreative, warmhearted, but very unbalanced young woman. So Harry describes in his book, spare, that his 12 years old when his mother's killed, how he's told about his mother's death is that his father then pinched Charles comes in this room early in the morning and says,

something terrible happened, there was an accident, your mother didn't make it. Then there's a few moments of awkward silence. And finally, Charles touches Harry on the knee and says, what it'll be okay and leaves the room. And this is how this 12 year old was told, nobody held him. Charles himself was only doing what happened to him when, when Queen Elizabeth went on an international four or five months royal tour.

Leaving the five year old kid behind when she returned to England, she greeted him by shaking his hand. And now, what I said to Harry was that even animals hold and touch their kids. Their infants, mammals, that's what they do. Because mother rats, when the baby is born, they lick their babies. And the way the mother rat licks the baby, this has been shown in laboratory, influences the brain development of the child.

And those babies that get the right kind of licking, it's called grooming, they have better brains as adults. Premature infants used to put in incubators and nobody used to touch them. Then it was found out that if by just by stroking their backs 10 minutes a day, that promotes healthy brain development. And the great British American anthropologist, Ashley Montelieu, wrote a book called Skin, the Human Significance of Touch.

So I was saying that touch is important. You know it being held and not being touched was a deprivation. And I said, mammals, monkeys. You know what happens when the baby elephant is born? This is fascinating. The mother, I read this in the book called Evolvenous, for which I wrote the preface by a wonderful psychologist called Darcy on our Vez. When an infant element elephant is born, and the mother goes into labor, all the other mother elephants stand around in a circle.

When the infant plops on the ground, they all stroke them with their trunks. So touch and being held is so important for mammals. And I was saying animals do that. This journalist, who I don't know what she was listening to, said, I said, wrong family treats like he's like, I know it. I said, no, I wish they'd had. So I mean, the distortion is just laughable. If it wasn't, if I hadn't taken it so personally, for the reasons I already explained.

For you to take it. So personally, which led you to call a psychiatrist, a man like you with the knowledge you have that writes books about the mind and stress and the body and all these things. You must have been in a pretty dark place. I wasn't a dark place. But look, I'm a human like to rest. And what Charlie MacCasey says in that book is that the most courageous thing he knew is that for help. It's true.

You know, does that, I don't remember the Beatles song help. I need somebody. And John Lennon sings, when I was younger, so much younger than today, I didn't need anybody's help in any way. But now those days are gone. I'm much less still for sure. He's actually saying that when he was younger, he believed he didn't need help. But the reason he believed he didn't need help, that he has to make it on his own, because he was so traumatized as a child.

His father left him when he was born. His mother left. He was about to buy an ant. And Lennon goes up feeling abandoned that I can do this on my own. I don't need anybody. And later on he realizes I need help. But actually we are born needing help. We are born needing to be understood, to be attuned with, to be seen, to have emotions received and validated. That's one of the essential needs of children as I make the point in the myth of normal.

Children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them, but just by not having their needs met. By not being seen, not being heard, not being held, those are wounding for a child. Which is what the meaning of the word trauma means. So you don't need terrible things to happen. It's so difficult for people to understand that. You know, they think for trauma, you need horrific events. Well, horrific events can be very traumatic, but you can wound people sensitive people.

The sensitive child or any child can be hurt just because the parents are too stressed and unavailable emotionally to really see them for who they are. I've struggled with that in my life, especially being a CEO, I think. I've struggled to ask for help when I need it, because you can't see yourself as the helper. And also, I've struggled with the idea. Maybe I don't know where I got the story from that. People like me, maybe because I'm a man, maybe because I'm the head of businesses.

We have to figure it out on our own. And the cost of repressing how I feel has become more and more evident over time. Yeah, also. Just like, I think, when I was younger, I never experienced anxiety before. And then as I had more difficult moments in business, where I tried to solve the problem in my mind.

For the first time, at like 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 that I experienced, like fully fledged, what I'd call anxiety, where I just couldn't get a thought out of my head, and I felt it in my body, my breath was short, this constant state of like angst. Yeah. And yeah, I just thought I could deal with it myself. I thought I could think my way through it. Yeah. Was that the hardest, the hardest moment in terms of your own psychology and your adult life in recent times?

Let me answer that question, but let me ask you a question or a curse to me. If I may, please. It's like with beautiful women. They sometimes have a very hard time because they can never know. That's somebody want me for who I really am. Or they're just attracted to my physical features. So for somebody who at a young age becomes quite wealthy and successful.

How do you know when somebody's approaching you? Are they approaching you because they want something from you? Or because they really care about you? I mean, that must be a problem for you, I imagine. 100%. You never really know understand what your relationships are. Yeah. Yeah. So it must be confusing sometimes. It is. And you, I typically fall back onto the relationships I had before.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I can trust those ones. Yeah. So I have the same, my best friends, people I spend my time with on my birthday. There's five, you know, five people there. Yeah. Are the five people that were there 10 years ago? Yeah. Unless I think we get reconnected to our gut feelings. Then our gut feelings will tell us what is really and what isn't. But the problem for many of us is that we get disconnected from our gut feelings very early in life.

Like in this room of 2100 at the Trogsy on Monday night. I think I asked this question. I always do it. Have you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something not paying attention to it ignoring it and being sorry afterwards? Almost every report to hand up. That's a child's sign of child to the wounding because we're born connected to our gut feelings. No baby is disconnected from the gut feelings. Something happens to make us disconnect.

What is a gut feeling? From a physiological perspective because gut feeling is used as a word to describe an intuition or, you know, well, real gut feelings really happen in the gut. In the Western way of looking at it, we tend to look upon the intellect and the intellectual brain is the only brain that we have. But actually our brain is a formal complicated structure.

And our heart has a nervous system, which is connected to the brain up here. And there's a kind of knowing in the heart. Sometimes people say, I knew in my heart and they did. If they're connected, gut feelings are what all animals possess. It warns them of danger or when it's safe and when it isn't safe. Not in the brain. The gut is connected to the brain. The gut sends more connection to the brain than the brain sends to the gut.

And the gut has more of the neurotransmitter of serotonin in it than the brain does. So that the gut things are here to tell us about what is safe and what isn't. And when the brain in the gut and the brain in the heart and the brain in the head are connected, then we're grounded and present and very alert and very aware of what's going on.

But when childhood trauma interferes with those connections, which it does, then we start to just work from up here and we can figure things just from up here. But actually when you think about human beings, where did we evolve? We evolved from millions of years, other nature, how long does any creature in nature survive if they don't pay attention to the gut feelings?

So to go back to your question about me, I used to believe, I really used to believe into my 40s that everybody else could be stressed, but I couldn't be. And it's like you and your anxiety. I think the reason you, I didn't feel the stress because I had coping mechanisms like working hard and getting people's attention or using my smarts.

And having status and all this kind of stuff, you know, then that broke down. I realized I could be stressed like everybody else, but literally I had to, I had this belief, I mean, it's almost unbelievable to me now that I used to believe that everybody else could be stressed, but I couldn't be. So what I thought. Yeah. Your wife, when you went through that, that moment, if I was her, what would I have observed?

Well, first of all, and I talk about this in the middle normal, and really my wife came on stage at the Troxie on Monday night and talked about this, I asked her to. Women have 80% of autoimmune disease in this society. Diseases where the immune system attacks the body happens to women much more than to men, things like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, fraber, my ultra, inflammatory diseases of the gut, and so on. Why?

So those diseases tend to happen to people not just to go into my own observation, although it's very much my own observation, when I was working in family practice and palliative care, before I did addiction medicine, I noticed that who got sick and who didn't was an accidental.

As a subject of my book when the body says no, and then again in the methanol, people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own identified with duty role and responsibility. So they're working the world rather than their own true selves.

They tended to suppress healthy anger, so they tend to be very, very nice in peacemakers, and they tended to believe that they're responsible for other people feel, and that there was never the disappointment anybody to fatal beliefs. So these are the people that are going to my observation, but are going to a whole lot of research as well, that I didn't even know about, but have since found an elegant research.

These are the people that tend to develop autoimmune disease. Now in this society, which gender is more acculturated program to suppress their healthy anger, to be the peacemakers, to be the caregivers. Women, this is a function of a reality that a lot of people deny, but it's a patriarchal society which we can talk about, but it's not a conspiracy, it's just how it works.

So me and my marriage expect my wife to absorb my stresses, and if I'm unhappy, guess who I blame, and who do I take it out on? So she would experience somebody who's, can be hostile for no reason, and blaming, and she used to walk on eggshells. No, thank God, she's not the type to do that for too long, and at some point she'll call my bluff, and then either wake up, or she says, thank you very much, but enough for this.

And so she would experience somebody who's irritable, and unwisably blaming, and not taking care of their own needs, and then expecting her to take care of them for me. And we both had to go up. She was programmed that way as a child. Her parents had a lot of problems, and she became the peacemaker in a caregiver emotionally.

And then she cares that role into her marriage with me. And here's where the bad news is of her people. We always marry somebody at the same level of emotional development, or trauma resolution as we are. So when we met, we were two traumatized people, not even realizing it. And then we played out our traumas, and I played it out in a typical mailway, which is to be aggressive and demanding and resentful, if she wasn't around to mother me.

And that's what she would have seen. And this dynamic can still arise, except when it does, she puts a stop to it right away. And I have the grace and the wisdom, I know, to understand, yeah, I'm doing it again. In fact, I haven't done it since then, because I just don't want to be that guy. But that's what she would have seen. And what was going on inside your head? Were you anxious? Were you depressed? I was anxious. And then I want her soothing. I want her. I should say this.

There's an interesting sexual dynamic between men and women that men very often unconsciously expect their women to mother them. To give them a mothering that they didn't fully receive as kids. And the women take on that role, because they're acculturated and they're society to do that. But then what happens sexually?

No healthy guy wants to sleep with his mother. And no healthy woman wants to sleep with her son, so that the the the order and the, you know, the passion kind of drains out because of this unconscious dynamic of women, mothering men and men, demanding that they do. So then I become frustrated. And then who do I blame for that? I blame her rather than looking at how did I contribute to how do I have created this situation?

So all that stuff played out in our marriage. And we've had to learn a lot from what didn't work. In my relationship when I was most anxious, it's also when my relationship nearly ended with my partner, because like you said, I inadvertently took it out on her, because I felt that she should understand how I'm feeling and basically adapt to me.

Exactly. And she didn't. And so there was conflict because I felt like she was misunderstanding me. Yeah. And wasn't like acting in the right way to meet the needs that I had. Like she couldn't understand, you know, and say that. I think I wore her down. And then there was kind of like, as you say that, ultimately, to the moment where she's basically saying, listen, shall I just go?

Yeah. And what you probably didn't do, and what I didn't do for a long time, you just to go to her and say, you know, what I'm feeling anxious. Yeah, that was what happened after. You know, you know, I'm feeling unsettled. And I realized that I have resentful feelings towards you. Instead of owning it, we act it out.

And then why don't they understand us? You know, and actually, so what we're actually demanding is that we can be children emotionally, and they be the mothers who without any effort on our part will understand and see us. You know, and this is a strong dynamic in men, female relationships. And what tends to happen is, is that men then women at some point get to the, if they're healthy enough.

And not if they're not strong enough to assert themselves, you know what happens? They get sick. And I know this is a mouthful, but a lot of women's cancers and autoimmune disease are precisely because of this self repression. And I could talk about that at great length, the physiology of it. But either the body will somehow say no for them.

That's why women are much more like to be an antidepressants because they're taking a medication for both of them. You know, and so either the woman gets ill somehow or she asserts herself and says, I'm not doing this anymore. At which point the guy will go seeking a younger mother who's not yet mature enough to assert herself. And this happens all the time in relationships.

And then the other thing is, you know, the other thing is that if you're not a mature self repression, the cost of sort of emotional repression, I think everybody is guilty at some point in their life of repressing their emotions. I think men do it a lot as well. I mean, if you look at the suicidality in the UK, I'm just going to act it out on themselves like that.

What is the cost of self repression that you talked about the physiological mechanism of what's going on when we repress our emotions and how we feel? It's been well studied, not just by me, but others and documented that repression of healthy anger disturbs the immune system. Now, why should that be the case? Now, healthy anger is simply when somebody is intruding on your space and they won't resist.

You're in my space. Get out. That's healthy anger. It's in the moment. When it's done its job, it's finished with. It's different from chronic rage, which is a whole other thing. No. In other words, anger is a boundary defense. That's all it is. Animals do it. Ah, get out of my space. Now, the emotional system in general has the job, the human emotional system in general has the role of allowing in what is nurturing and loving and healthy and welcome and to keep out what isn't.

That's the job of the emotional system. Let me ask you a trick question. What's the job of the immune system? Okay, I'll answer. It's to keep out what is unhealthy and welcome and toxic and to let in what is nurturing and healthy. So, the immune system is like, it's been called a floating brain. It is a memory. It is reactive capacity. It allows in new two men's and vitamins and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and unhealthy, invading organisms and so on.

In other words, the immune system, an emotional system, is exactly the same role. That's the first point. The second point is they're not separate systems. Physiologically speaking, emotional system, the nervous system, human apparatus and immune system are all one system. There's a whole new science when I see a new 60, 70, 80 years old, called psycho-immune immunology that studies the unity. So, it's not even that all these things are connected. They're one.

So, therefore, when you're suppressing one aspect of it, you're also suppressing the other. So, people that repress healthy anger, they have diminished in immune activity. And this has been demonstrated. So, the repression of emotions has a physiological function. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you or to fail you when it comes to malignancy.

The immune system, like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day because nature makes mistakes. That's not a problem. The immune system recognizes them as cancer cells don't have on their surfaces, markers that are normal cells do. So, the immune system says, this is a foreigner. It's an enemy. I'm going to destroy it.

But when you repress your emotions, you can also undermine your immune system and now your immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it and allows it to proliferate. There was a bit of surgeon in the 1960s who were operated on. Am I talking too much? No, you're not. There's no such thing on this podcast.

Because I just get so passionate about this stuff. And the reason I get so passionate about it is that it's so important in healing and we as physicians could do so much more for people if we understood these scientific facts or we don't as a profession. Anyway, there was a thoracic surgeon called David Kissen in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice that people emotionally repressed are more likely to get lung cancer.

Now, it's true that most people who get lung cancers are smokers, but out of 100 smokers, only about 10 or 15 get lung cancer. Which doesn't mean that lung smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer. It is. But he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed, that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking. And the more repressed they were, the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer.

This is this guy noticed this in the 1960s. So emotional repression has huge implications physiologically. And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma. Why? The child is born with some fundamental needs. One of them is articulated earlier is for attachment, for closeness, proximity, un-conditioned loving acceptance by caring adults. Not just a human child, all mammalian children have that need, without that they don't survive.

So that's called attachment. Seeking of closeness and proximity for the purpose of being taken care of, or to take care of the other, and our brains are wired for attachment. We have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships. And that's so important all through our lives, but especially when we're infants and young children.

Now, we'll be of another need. We've already talked about it. I just haven't named it. The other need is for authenticity. We used to be ourselves connected to our bodies and our gut feelings. Because again, without access to our gut feelings, we don't survive. Out there in nature, where we evolved, and where we lived until 15,000 years ago.

So that authenticity is very important to be connected to yourself, so that you know when you're safe and when you're not, you know what you want and what you don't want. You know how to say no when you don't want something, you know how to say yes when you do. That's authenticity, auto-to-self, being ourselves.

And to go back to Harry, his challenge all his life was that he wasn't allowed to be authentic. He had to pay a certain role and fit into a certain set of expectations of how to be and who to be. And he could never figure out who am I really, you know, in that context. But that's so general. So many of us face that challenge of who are we really, who are we authentically, as opposed to what's expected of us.

Now, so we have these two needs. Attachment, on the one hand, authenticity and the other. Ideally, the two are not in conflict. Ideally, you can be in a relationship, or I can be in a relationship where we can be ourselves and be accepted and connected with. And that's ideal, all our lives. But what happens to a young child, where if they're authentic, they're not accepted. So for example, certain psychologists recommend that angry children should be punished for their anger.

Rather than their anger being understood as to what it's all about and the child being taught different ways to express it, they just to be punished for it. And by different ways. By the way, if you're a parent of a two-year-old and if you don't frustrate your child, you're probably not doing a good job because you two-year-old may want to cook you before dinner. And you say, no, cook you before dinner.

In a minute, they're throwing a tantrum because what do even adults do when they're frustrated? They throw tantrums. Children, that's just what they do. They have no self-regulation yet. So the two-year-old gets upset. Now you punish them. You give them a message, you're not acceptable to me when you're angry. You have to be a certain way from me to accept you. Or you mustn't be sad. Cheer up. What's wrong with you?

So when children are given this message of conditionality that you're acceptable to me only if you behave in ways that I approve of, otherwise the attached and relationship is threatened, then the child is faced with this choice. This is not a choice at all. Do I stay attached to my parents? If my father is an alcoholic. And the only way I can find acceptance is by repressing my emotions and not showing my sadness and my fear.

Do I show my sadness and my fear or my anger? Or do I threaten their relationship? Well, there's no choice at all. The child will choose the attachment. And therefore they give up connection to themselves, which is the essence of trauma. That disconnection from ourselves, not in my own words, in the words of other trauma, theirous, who I agree with.

The worst aspect of trauma is the disconnection from ourselves. And we do that for the sake of maintaining the attachments, which means for the rest of our lives will be afraid to be ourselves. Is this what they call people, pleases? People, exactly. So, Cheryl Crow, the American singer and musician, developed breast cancer. And she said that since my breast cancer had been a different person. Until then, it was always turned up, please others.

And now, and it used to be voices in my head that I was telling me that I was wrong. I don't listen to them anymore. So that people, pleases, are the ones who gave up, not by conscious choice, but as a matter of survival, their authenticity in order to stay liked and accepted and attached with. But then they carried that on in their rest of their lives. And they were at risk. I always worry for the very nice people.

I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.

I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time back to this episode.

You always worry for the very nice people. Yeah. You talk a lot about that in when the body says no. Yeah. Why is being nice a potential risk to one's health? Well, there's two places to be very nice from. One is just genuine human compassion and concern for others, but you still grow older than yourself. That's great.

But a lot of people are very nice because they are afraid not to be. Because they weren't liked who they were. They weren't loved who they were being nice was the way of getting the love and the attention they needed. Let me tell you a story in the in 1870 there was a French neurologist, Lajron Marta and Charco who was the first one to describe multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammation of the nervous system, very debilitating.

And Charco said in 1870 without any scientific research, but just from his own observation that this was a stress driven disease. Now since then, there's been a lot of research to show how stressed and trauma potentially multiple sclerosis. It's not even controversial. Not that any neurologist knows that they don't get taught the stuff in medical school, but the research is there. And I presented in in my books.

In any case, when I was writing when the body says no, a group of a self-help group of multiple sclerosis patients fall me and said, would you come and talk to us? Because I understand you're working on stress and illness. And I said, yeah, I sure I'll come and talk to you. And there's about 25 people in the group. This is a man, Cooper, Canada. And I gave them very tentatively, apologetically, apologetically.

I said, look, I don't know this for sure, but the sense I get from my work in family practice and palliative care is that the people that develop your condition and other conditions tend to be people to be pleasers. The inter- have difficulty saying no. They tend to be very nice people. And I said, you know, I'm sorry if I offended you. I don't mean to.

I'm just giving you something very tentative. I haven't done research yet. I'm just giving you my observations. They said, you just described us. And they all said that. And there's a woman who says in the group who says, I don't even know what to say no. I said, terrific. Give me $100 right now. She says, well, I don't have $100 with me right now. I said, it's not a problem.

I said, outside this building, there's an ATM machine. We can go on. After the meeting, we can go out. You can get $100 and give it to me. She says, I'm not comfortable doing that. I said, listen, I'm just trying to get you to say no to a ridiculous demand by a perfect stranger to whom you owe nothing whatsoever. She said, I can't say the word.

Because in childhood, by the way, when you have kids, you're going to find out what the word no means because age one and a half, all kids start saying no. They say that long before they say, yes, why? Because that no is the boundary defense of, I figure out who I am. I'm not going to exceed to your demands. I need to figure out what I want. But you choose on no, the pan thing. This is something wrong. There's nothing wrong. It's nature, individuating the child.

When families punish that, the child will repress the no and the body will say in the form of multiple sclerosis. For example, niceness, ALS, AMA traffic laddles, sclerosis or known in Britain as motor neuron disease. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with that at age 21. He was told he'd be dead within two years. He lived another 55 years. Doctors don't know everything. But there's been studies on ALS patients. They're extraordinarily nice.

So there was a, from a Cleveland clinic in Ohio, a major referral clinic, two neurologists published a paper at an international ALS or motor neuron congress. Why are ALS patients so nice? And what they describe was that when people came to their office for diagnosis before they met the physician, they had underwent EDX, electro-diagnostic testing of their nerves. And the technicians who performed the tests would write on the site of the test. This person can't have ALS. She's not nice enough.

Or I'm afraid this person has ALS. They're too nice. And their physicians, the neurologists specialists, said despite the shortness of their contact with their patients and the obviously unscientific nature of the observations invariably, they turned out to be right. And then I called Dr. Wilbur and who did this study and I said, what are the other neurologists, what are the other neurologists, say, when you presented this, they said,

yeah, we all noticed this. We just can't explain it. Since then, there's been a study where they've asked neurologists about their patients. And the answer is, all of ALS patients are so really nice. No, what the neurologists don't do is they don't make the connection. That niceness is a repression of healthy anger and that repression of healthy anger plays a role in the onset of that disease.

So it's not an accidental connection. So why do I ever want very nice people? Because they're putting themselves at risk. Again, niceness can come from genuine concern for others, but that's not accompanied by an ignoring of yourself. You also care for yourself. Then you can be as nice as you want. But you also know how to say no. And you also know how to set boundaries. You don't know how to be angry if you need to be. But the niceness that comes from self repression, that's the one that hurts.

There's clearly going to be a lot of very nice people hearing that. That know their nice. That know their people pleases. That know they've experienced in their lives, the consequences of putting everyone else before themselves. It's funny as you were talking, I was thinking about the person that I know who I think is nicest. And that individual is sick all the time. And I just connected that dot in my head that I remember making a joke to her about, oh, you're sick.

And then also thinking, oh my god, she is probably the nicest. Nice is an interesting word because that can be misconstrued as like, hey, you know, saying nice things to someone else, but it's really at a deeper level from what I've observed in that person, putting everyone else before them, or chronically serving other people's needs before their own. Well, so my contention is, as I said earlier, when people do not say no, the body will say no for them in the form of illness.

And for a lot of people with serious illness, the illness is the wake up call. Yeah. And they actually learn. And when they do, that can make a difference to the course of their illness. Sometimes not always, but I've seen examples of remarkable healing when people learn to say no and stop being people pleasers.

And I just only wish that physicians understood this. So when somebody comes to them with chronic exam or in all these other chronic conditions, they will not just provide the physical treatment, but they will also talk to the person about how much stress today taking on is very stressful to take on everybody else's issues and ignoring you own is very stressful. That stress is a physiological impact on the body. How does someone who is a people pleaser? How do they turn that ship around?

Because they'll hear that, but because they're niceness or their people pleasing is so deep within them and it started so early, they're not going to change. Most of them won't change. Well, they may change if they get sick, you know, and if they learn something from it, I've had a lot of people telling me that. But it is happens very early, but it's everybody's second nature, not their first nature. It's a very interesting phrase, second nature. It means that it is a first nature.

No baby is born as a people pleaser. No baby is lies there. No one day old baby lies there thinking, gosh, I'm hungry and wet and lonely. But gosh, mom and dad have been worked so hard, I better not bother them. You know, babies will express their needs very voluptly and very articulately and very loudly. That's how we're born. We're meant to be born that way, so that this suppression of that is our second nature.

And that first nature never goes away. We can always retrieve it, but you have to become conscious of it. So in the mind of body says, no, I lay out certain principles of healing. In the myth of normal, I actually teach this exercise. I just have this question, where in your life are you not saying no? Where no wants to be said, but you're not saying it? Let me give you an example. Let's say I come to London and I move friends and I call you up, even here I am, during a coffee.

But you've been up all night helping a sick friend or otherwise you're just stressed to want to meet me right now. You're desires to say no, but what if you suppress that no? And you say yes for the fear of this pleasing me or disappointing me or losing my friendship? If I say no, God won't like me anymore. What's going to be impact on you if you keep behaving that way? Physically, what's going to be impact?

I'm going to be going to be more tired, more exhausted, probably going to be more stressed. All that. Yeah, you can be resented from. Yeah, exactly. So this person, I teach this exercise in the book about where am I not saying no? And what is my belief behind saying no? I don't know if he's coming back. Exactly. And I depend on God was liking. Yes.

You know, which means as a child, you depend on your parents liking and you had to suppress your nose to be like, thirdly, where did I learn this belief? But if I say no, I'm not likable or I'm guilty or I'm not worthwhile. And the fourth question is, who would I be without that belief? And so if your friend does exercise regularly, believe me, she can turn it around, but it takes some practice. Who would I be without that belief?

Yeah. When I put myself in her shoes or I put myself in a people pleases shoes, I wouldn't, I'm a people pleaser in certain environments, but I wouldn't say I'm generally. Yeah. I can imagine someone would respond to that and say, well, I'd lose all my friends. She'd find out who her friends really were because the real friends would celebrate it. They'd say, oh, finally, we're so glad to see you being yourself.

The friends that were just using her or relying on her to be their supporter unconditionally will turn away. And I say this to people, this contest between attachment and authenticity can be a painful one, but you can decide which kind of pain you want. As a child, you have no choice. As an adult, it's true. If you're authentic, you might lose some attachment relationships. That's going to be painful.

But which pain would you rather have? The pain of being authentic and losing some friendships that were no friendships at all, or the pain of losing yourself and all this implications and all its impacts on the body. So it would be difficult for her and through some relationships that she has now, they would fade away, but my God, she would also attract Muslim or genuine and authentic relationships. And her true friends would really celebrate her.

Now let me tell you something, just to prove to me, forget it. There was a book written by an Australian nurse about 12 years ago. This nurse, like I used to work in palliative care with dying people, she works with in hospice, with dying people. And these are people who tend to die of malignancy and chronic illness well before that time.

I sure were a book called the top five regrets of dying people. For anyway. And you know what the top regret was that I wasn't being myself. That I wasn't true to myself. I wasn't being authentic. That's the top regret of dying people. And the third one was that I didn't express my feelings for fear of disturbing or displeasing others. So authenticity is not just a new age concept. It's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings.

Or one more thing. So yesterday I was in Westminster Abbey. And I was looking at all these beautifully and articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists, to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and dispoiled native people all over the world. They're the heroes of the British Empire.

And I think one of the reasons there's such a strong push back against the idea of trauma in this society is if you recognize trauma, which exists not only on the personal individual level, but very much on the collective level. The ruling elites in this country would have to come to 200 the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of foreign peoples, which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry is that he pointed that out.

Let's face it, the royalty, the wealth that I was born into was achieved that the dispoilation and oppression of people around the world. So trauma is not just a personal issue. It's very much a social and collective and historical issue. What's the cure? Because if we're many of us are byproducts of generational trauma and we're seeking different ways to ease our pain through the means of addiction,

whether it's pornography or heroin or alcohol, we can't all afford expensive therapists. But we exhibit those self-destructive behavior patterns maybe every single day, maybe with social media addictions or whatever. What do we do? Unfortunately, the healthcare systems in the world have very poor appreciation of the emotional contribution to people's physical or mental ill health. And most physicians and most psychiatrists are not trained in it.

Unfortunately, there's a huge gap between science and research and medical practice and the other. It's maddening sometimes to contemplate it. So the first step would be to educate the caregivers. Just educate doctors about the actual science of the mind-body connection and the impacts of trauma. Educate them. So when you go to a physician with sacronic fatigue or inflammation of your joints, they don't just give you the necessary medication which I'm not against.

But they also ask you what's going on. So that's the first thing. Second thing is let's prevent the problem. So let's support young families to be really there for their kids. So that families don't have to struggle economically and their parents are so stressed. As I may have mentioned, I've forgotten now, when parents are emotionally stressed, economically stressed, according to a number of studies, the kids' stress hormone levels are abnormal. And that is a harbinger of future disease.

And so let's look after young families. Let's make people feel secure. On certainty, lack of control, lack of information. These are some of the drivers of physiological stress. So let's create a society where there's a more sense of mutual acceptance and communality and social support. Let teachers be educated that the kids who are so-called misbehaving are kids who are actually troubled because of stuff at home.

And that the solution is not to exclude them or to punish them, but to actually give them emotional support in the classroom and in the schools. Let the schools be. The human brain, according to Harvard study, develops from before birth. It's an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. The necessary conditions for human brain development is safe, supportive, emotional relationship with adults.

Let everybody who deals with children, with social workers, to teachers, to daycare workers, to kindergarten supervisors, to parents, understand the emotional needs of kids, and provide that safety. Let the justice system, so-called, about which there's very little just, in Canada, 50% of the women in jail are indigenous.

They make up 6% of the population, 50% of the jail population. You call that justice. You take the most traumatized people who then act out their traumas and then you punish them for it. So let the medical system, let the educational system, let the legal system understand child development and trauma. Now, in terms of the adult to answer your question more specifically, so there's a social answer, but then there's an individual answer.

Yeah, a lot of people can't afford good therapy. It's true. It's expensive. And even if there's a lot of people who are get therapy, but not getting appropriate therapy. Well, if you can't afford therapy, go to the library, read some books, my own, but not just my own. I could rattle out five of the books you should read.

Read the Schwartz's book on an internal family system, it's called No Bad Parts. Read Bessel Vanderkos's book on trauma, called The Body Keep the Score. Read Peter Levine's book, Waking the Tiger on trauma. Read Oprah Winfrey's and Boost Perry book, what happened to you? Read Boost Perry's book called The Boy Was Raised as a Dog. I'm interviewing Peter Levine. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. Oh, good. Wonderful. I'm glad to hear that. He's one of my mentors and friends and we often work together.

So this is and and all of these books will have some advice about harder help yourself, including my books. Then there's a lot of stuff on the internet. So this, the interview that you and I had a year ago, I checked this morning has been seen by two and a half million people. I'm sure it's helped a lot of people. It's a lot that you can get just, you know, freely. Nobody's going to get in charge to, you know, on the YouTube. Lots of my talks are available.

Lots of talks about the really good people are available. Do that. They're self-help groups of all kinds. Is there a risk here? This is what the one side of the narrative sometimes argue that you can kind of over trauma ties your life in terms of over labeling everything that you do as a trauma. So, you know, and I mean that that always happens, right? When people become aware of something, they become over aware and they start over labeling and saying that's a trauma response.

That's a trauma response. That's a trauma response. And they kind of live with a feeling that they are inherently broken. Yeah, but my point is that nobody's broken. Actually, I talked about our first nature. That's always there. When people recover, it's an interesting word recovery. What does it mean to recover? When you recover something, what are you doing? Going back to... You're finding it. Oh, yeah. I'm sure, yeah. It's the definition of the word, isn't it?

What do people find when they recover? They find their two selves. That's what I'll tell you. That two self never went away. Nobody's damaged goods. Nobody's broken. To talk about trauma is not to disempower people but to empower them. If I learn that my response to the British media and the hairy issue was actually nothing to do with the present moment. It's actually some old programming. Oh, okay. Now I can drop it. Are you glad it happened?

I'm glad that everything happened because everything is learning. Nothing. This life is wasted if you know how to use it properly. So what I'm saying is that to be aware of trauma is not to lose power but to gain it because it's not an excuse. I can't keep going to my wife and saying, I'm being resentful of you and punishing you because my mother didn't take good care of me when I was a baby because she was too stressed. That's lack of responsibility.

But for me to understand that my demands on my wife to take care of me like a mother would of a baby, actually is my trauma response, then I can drop it. Because I'm not a baby anymore. I don't need. I'm not that helpless. I'm not that resourceless. I'm not that ungrounded so that when you recognize trauma, it's not in order to use it as an excuse but to actually to overcome it. That's the whole point.

When we talked about the suppression of our emotions and anger, you used the word healthy anger. There's a risk isn't there when you're saying that anger can be a positive thing that people will then assume that berating someone behind a counter or a waitress in a restaurant because they got one item when you're all wrong is standing up for your boundaries. I've done it. No, it's not.

So healthy anger is in a moment and it's just a boundary defense. It's not outrage. It's your misbased get out. That's its purpose. That's its only purpose. Or to protect something like a we want to see anger. Try and tell a mother bear not to be close to their to their cobs. You'll find out what healthy mother anger is all about. That's just healthy. The kind of rage you're talking about. Have you ever had that kind of rage?

Definitely on a spectrum. I've got. The reason I struggle with the answer is because I've got a friend that's fully shown me what the. That's the extreme side of that is where we used to call it the red mist with him where he would literally lose. Oh, really? My friend. So my friend. My friend one of my best friends in the world. He talks about this all the time is he had you could trigger him by saying something usually by saying he was wrong about something or something like that.

And then he would just lose it. So I remember the first the last time it happened was and the pandemic rolled in. I was staying with him in his apartment because the lockdown and I was living in America at the time and we were discussing the virus and I said to him.

I think people that are older and that have certain health situations are more at risk and he said to me no people that are younger are more at risk. And I said I showed it in an HS website which said no it's people that rolled are at more risk. Yeah. And he just went into this red mist. Okay. He was totally triggered and lost control of his emotions.

Okay. So if you observed and then what you would have noticed is my mother said about the healthy anger is in the present moment what is done is job. It's gone. Your friend the anger he gets the anger he gets. Yeah. So the rage just keeps building on itself. Now we talk about a fit of anger. It's a good word. You know, we'll talk about fits is epileptic fits in epileptic fits.

Certain electrical misfiring in the brain then recruits other brain circuits and it gets more and more and more until the whole body is shaking in the person even lose consciousness and soil themselves and so on. That's an epileptic fit. A fit of anger is the same. That a fit of rage is the same. So that the more severe gets the more brain circuits it recruits or rather than expanding itself doing his job and then being gone it actually gets worse and worse and worse.

That's unhealthy anger and triggering is a good word because look at what the word triggering means. Now if you look at a weapon how big a part of the weapon is the trigger. This big for the trigger to set off anything there's to be ammunition there there's to be explosive material there. So your friend is carrying a lot of explosive material. I can tell you your friend never felt understood or validated as a child and he's still carrying the rage of that.

So you trigger him and then by disagreeing with him and all the pain of invalidation all the rage of no being understood nuggets triggered and recruits more and more brain circuits. Now I can tell you something healthy anger is essential for our physical integrity.

That rage in the absolute in the aftermath of a rage episode your risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles for negative the next two hours according to studies because what happens your blood pressure goes up your blood vessels narrow and the clotting factors and your blood increase. So of course you had more risk so repression of anger you need to chronic illness but so can rage lead to heart attacks and and strokes and so on so anger is a delicate thing.

So I say something about my friend that we found out because he then went to a childhood psychologist or good to stand himself and that's why I said that was the last time so you can imagine that was three years ago. Yeah the pandemic two three years ago he went to childhood psychologist and what they uncovered through their work was that as a kid he he was not only a foot shorter than all the other kids.

Yeah. So he was both dyslexic and struggled a lot intellectually so the people around him and on his report card basically called him stupid as a child and then he actually found a I think you found a text message at some point between his mom and his man where they were diminishing his chances of success and he grew up with this deep sense of like I am not intelligent.

Deep deep sense of it and it's come out in all of these ways as an adult and that you're right that's what was going on that moment I was challenging I was taking him back probably well and you know what again to come back to you that's what happened to him they called him stupid and fickle and naughty. And he was none of those things he just had trouble of concentrating and paying attention because of all the stress.

And so in his book he describes that he'd been told he had post traumatic stress I didn't diagnose him with all the stuff in his book I said you know what but I think given the hard you you distracted as a kid you're trouble paying attention they call you stupid.

This is a D.D. and I wasn't saying he's got a disease I was saying you actually that was a normal response that you had to an abnormal situation where you were under a lot of stress and they made you wrong for it they called you naughty they called you stupid they called you a fickle you're not any of that.

Now the whole bunch of British psychiatrists got the nickers tied in a knot because I made that diagnosis you know my God people I was saying to the guy you don't have a disease you have an oral response to have no circumstances you were not stupid ever but children undergo this character assassination like you offended. Imagine the rage inside him so when you disagree with him you're triggering all that. It's just that's just how it works I understand enough people cause me stupid.

That's not a trigger for me because I know not you know I always grew up with the sense of my intelligence not over stated but I know never had any doubt about it but certain things you can do you like not see me. And that'll trigger me. And for context for anybody that doesn't know why you not being seen triggers you.

Well look I was born you know I may have mentioned this last year so I was born two months before the Nazis occupied Budapest then they started exterminating all the hangar and Jews so literally my life was under threat because they didn't seem as a human being the song is vermin you know now not that I knew that directly but my mother can you imagine what was like for her to have a two month old and living on the risk of death all the time for whole year.

And then as I mentioned before she gave me to a stranger to save my life and I didn't see her for five weeks but that's not being seen my father's not there to see me because he's in forced labor so literally not being seen threatened my life. So no wonder when people when that happens now you know that for me is the trigger no that of course the answer is is to see myself if I fully see myself it doesn't matter whether you see me or not you know so if you see me.

If you're not seeing me if you distorting who I am in your mind and in your words bothers me it's only because I'm still cutting on you. But other people to see me because I don't want to see myself if I'm fully confident myself I say gee it's too bad you know Steven doesn't see me well maybe we talk talk about it or maybe you'll never understand it but I don't live in his mind. How do I fully see myself it's hard to do right.

It's hard to do because when you were seeing it's not hard to do because you children see themselves with their parents eyes but when you're not seen then you have to learn it this is one of the things to go back to meditation that's not the only way first of all notice all the ways that you're not seeing yourself like two days ago when I had this anxiety about how I made I didn't get my best talk on Monday evening.

You know what I did my best may not be imperfect but I prepared for it I put myself out there for two hours and I spoke a lot of truth might have been the best but so what but but but at that moment I wasn't seeing myself you know I can still lose it so meditation which is the form of meditation that at least I am learning is about just noticing and seeing what's going on inside without judgment.

So being aware so it's practice and you also suggest removing the things from your life that will stop you from seeing yourself like social media well because that can be a lot of I can't remove social media from my life but what I can remove is my attachment to it.

For example I don't have to look at the comments on all my talks on YouTube who says what who likes it who doesn't like it you know I'm not on Facebook I don't have a professional Facebook page but I would administer it but people go on Facebook and who says what who likes me who doesn't like me you know they can win themselves off that so it's we may not be able to stay off social media

to write my books thank God for the internet but I don't have to be attached to it so it's it's it's it's using it but not letting it use you which is very hard. A new podcast sponsor that I'm super excited to talk about with all of you is LinkedIn jobs hiring as I would know is one of the most important steps in your business without good people there is no company trust me I found out along the way that your business is nothing without you.

You want to be 100% certain though that you have access to the best candidates available and that's why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs LinkedIn jobs helps you to find the right people for your team faster and for free so when I'm expanding my team LinkedIn is my first port of call I highly recommend it on LinkedIn jobs posting a job is super easy and you can add a purple hashtag hiring frame around your LinkedIn profile to spread the word LinkedIn jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to.

Faster post your job for free at LinkedIn dot com slash D O A C that's LinkedIn dot com slash D O A C to post your job for free terms and conditions apply as you may know this podcast is sponsored by he'll if you're living under a rock you might have missed that I discovered he was RTD about four years ago he was RTD is basically a meal in a bottle is nutritionally complete contains 26 of your essential vitamins and minerals

Scott your protein in their 20 grams of protein it's got slow release energy in there in the form of those slow release carbs it's just nutritionally complete not only have a good relationship with it in terms of health but it saves my life in terms of those busy days where there's a higher probability of me reaching for something on my regret if you haven't tried he was RTD you could probably see it in a couple of supermarkets but you can order it online in the link is in the description below let me know which flavor is your favorite and also tell me if it ends up adding value to your life in the form of making you nutritionally complete

on those difficult days the social media and all of these things these stimuli state I feel like they've I'm concerned that many of us are living in a state of chronic stress mild background yeah stress yeah and I say that a lot because the amount of times that I catch myself I spoke to James Nesta who talks a lot about breathing in breath yeah and the amount of times that I now catch myself very shallow in breath after just looking at my my phone or thinking about something

yeah to get my get some oxygen back into me in bed at 1 a.m. as I'm trying to sleep catch my breath being shallow during this podcast when I start thinking about something my breath gets really shallow looking at my phone my breath gets really shallow I live in this I feel like I'm living in the state of like constant subtle background stress yeah well I'm glad you mentioned breath because it's one of the to go back to the question of what people can do for themselves they can learn to breathe

and a cartolio is a spiritual teacher he says that broad and quarter retreats and therapists just take a few conscious breaths several times a day I mean not that not to dismiss the other but that's more important than anything else and interestingly enough the Buddha when he was teaching his monks in fact one of the Buddha's assistants and aanda asked him

or holy one do you still meditate then he said yes and what kind of meditation do you practice says ananda and Buddha says observing the breath so in Buddhist meditation and I'm not here to advocate for any particular pathway and I'm not the practitioner of any religion but he this is this very wise man he thought awareness of breath as the most important portal into into reality

what do you think that the antidote is for the way we've designed our lives to be constant in this sort of stressful stimulation and because we're clearly I was just wondering if human beings are supposed to endure this much

constant stimulus and stress in their lives and with you know chronic inflammation and all these kinds of things and now killing people at alarming rates that the you know the diseases that are caused by inflammation what can we do about our stress and is it okay maybe it's okay well it's the norm so you can say it's normal is it okay well the question is to be answered by looking at what the impacts are and what are the impacts you know the impacts are very serious

for you can see it on the individual level in terms of mental health conditions as I said earlier are burgeoning internationally or in the conditions are but if you look around also on a social level there's more conflict there's more division there's more intolerance in our culture then it has been for quite a while these are the impacts of the stressful culture that we're living so is it okay yeah if you want if you want this it's okay but if you don't it's not okay it depends what you want

relationships yeah romantic relationships yeah full lot about the role that our trauma plays in our ability to form relationships obviously society's changed quite profoundly in the last couple of decades difference sort of gender transformations have caused certain mismatches and difficulties with people connecting the world has gone very digital now so dating apps run a lot of dating I think 50% of people originally meet online

at first point of contact dating is very very hard for people and there's a lot of people that are kind of giving up on it attachment dating trauma I've come to learn that we are mirrors I think I found love in my life when not when I discovered anything externally but when I did a lot of work to figure out the barriers that were standing in my way of connection

well you just answered your own question really yeah we can't form proper relationships until we have the capacity to be alone and become to work with ourselves you know and the more comfortable you can be alone which is different from being lonely by the way

the more capacity to be actually to be allowed to be with yourself and to grind yourself in your own truth the more likely to be able to form meaningful and positive relationships rather than asking me a lot of people want into relationship to solve their problems then there's the initial in love phase where everything is just ideal you know and then reality hits

and then all of a sudden that person who you're so infatuated with becomes your enemy and you hate them so much you know I mean I've experienced such hatred for my life over the years and when I've been disappointed or dissatisfied you know because I was looking to her to fill me with and nobody can fill you from the outside

so once you no longer need it once you no longer are dependent on it then you can enter into a healthy relationship or to put it more positively a relationship can be a real ground for mutual growth so you can enter into a relationship you're not going to be perfect you're never going to be perfect carry a certain degree of trauma or a certain degree of dysfunction certain things that trigger you as we said earlier

but you but if both people are committed to the truth which my wife Ray and I have been I mean that's one thing you can say about ourselves you know for all the stuff that we've been through ultimately the truth mattered more than who's right and who's wrong

so if you committed to the truth and working it out and it's a fundamental love is there then you can grow together and so for me the relationship has been the most important growth going ground of my life not the therapy that I've had or the reading that I've done

not that I'm dismissing any of that but the actual relationship has been my most important schooling and how to become authentic there's no real chance of a good relationship if one or more parties in that relationship aren't committed to truth and they're committed to being right or to victory or it happens all the time as I said earlier people always meet at the same level of emotional development or trauma resolution so that water finding its own level

but when one person starts growing and the other doesn't it becomes impossible either the person that does the growing gives it up and goes back to their previous cells which is almost impossible or the other person is challenged to start growing themselves or they're going to split that's just what's going to happen and again to go back to the situation being men and women this is what tends to happen and I've seen it in my own marriage I've seen it

as a physician as an observer of human beings the couple are kind of getting along but then the children come along now the mother's caring energy has to go towards the children where it needs to go the father may feel now better that their nose is a bit out of joint because now they're not getting the attention

another woman is a decision to make though I look after the three day old baby or the three-month-old baby would I look after the 35-year-old baby and to the extent that the mother chooses to look after the 35-year-old baby she's depriving the three-month-old a lot of women then make a choice that I need to look after my kids and I can't put all this caring energy mothering caring energy into my husband anymore

and then relationships get into trouble because the guy can't stand it I've seen this over and over and over and I'm not saying it's universal but it's very common sex in your practice I imagine you've come across this quite quite often where there's a sexless relationship and that's causing issues

what is typically the true cause of that disconnect in the with intimacy with sex in the bedroom because a lot of people are struggling with that yeah well first of all I think today we jump into sexuality way too early in other words we talk about intimacy

but intimacy really means the innermost and we tend to have physical intimacy before every emotional intimacy so that people jump into bed rather quickly I'm not being pro-i- I'm not being pro-liss share I'm not prescribing that you should only get have sex when you get married or anything like that

but when we enter into sexuality early without the emotional intimacy and emotional authenticity then the sex becomes divorced from our real needs and especially for women who tend to I can't speak of everybody but in general women tend to want to have more intimacy emotionally

that becomes very hard and if the emotional intimacy doesn't follow sex becomes rather mechanical because mechanical yeah so that's one big reason the other reason we already talked about this sort of parenting dynamic between the genders no I know we're only talking about the two major genders now there's all kinds of gender variations these days and but these dynamics exist in all kinds of context

but when my partner is doing all the emotional carrying or most of the emotional carrying this is parent child relationship that really deadens the sexual drive you know Marissa peer? sorry? Marissa peer? She's a psychologist she actually said to me the other day never call your partner mummy or daddy for this very reason yeah well oh good that's a good way to put it I think it's because we put sexuality in this society of course just glorify sexuality

you know and if you look at some of the most famous sex symbols who were they abused women in like a Marilyn Monroe deeply traumatized child and abused as an adult by president Kennedy and just about everybody and she was the woman everyone who to sleep with you know so that is really distorted sexuality here and for women especially safety is so important for sexuality

yeah we talk about frigid women but when do people freeze it's a fear response is nobody is true nature it's just a response and usually something happened to them or something is happening now so that that unmelting can happen in a condition of safety and then the intimacy the emotional intimacy is there which creates the safety for the sexual opening and that's the dynamic in my marriage as well you know in what my wife says she says truth is sexy

it's such a good point yeah is there anything in your practice that you're increasingly being confronted with in the last couple of years that you weren't seeing as much as you first started what I see a tears increasing distress in this society and people are more confused and young people are just so challenged and in the United States the rate of childhood suicide is going up

you know suicide you know more and more kids are being medicated for all kinds of conditions in the US 70% of the adult population is at least on one medication quarter of women at least in the US or an antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications those numbers are going up in Britain as well from all the statistics that I see is going manifestations of distress what I call a toxic culture

I see that all the time and look I mean the fact that this book the myth of normal is being published in North Macedonia and Thailand in Vietnam and in Northern Europe and in Eastern Europe it's just worldwide there's this epidemic of distress that's what I'm seeing and I'm saying people either we can look upon this as some unexplainable misfortune and bad luck

or we can actually look for the actual causes of it in a way with that relate to each other in a way that we raise our children in a way that we approach ourselves and I'm saying that solutions are possible but yeah the world is getting more and more difficult for a lot of people I do see that and I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon

you know optimistic so no one Tromsky once said that when he was asked if he's optimistic or pessimistic he says he says strategically I'm an optimist and tactically I'm a pessimist which means that in the long term I do believe in people I mean I am in the same way I do believe in human beings I do believe in a human capacity to grow, to transform, to come to a deeper grounded sanity in themselves both on individual and social

I do believe in that if I didn't believe that I would just stay at home and read books and listen to music I do believe in that I'm optimistic in that sense but at the same time I think in a short term it's getting darker and darker and you can see that Sony manifestations of that so yeah I am optimistic I believe in humanity and human beings and I think we have a hard road to travel before we get to our better sense of self

and I have to close this conversation by seeking some solutions you use the word solutions there and you talked about this better sense of self we talked about this from a social level what governments can do to change education systems and on an individual level on a family level what can I do?

Well first of all you need to define what your actual goals are Okay so let me try I want to be I want to do work that serves others I want to do work that I find fulfilling and that keeps me challenged and I want to which incidentally serves your health because it's been shown that people that live a life of purpose and meaning they're physiologically healthier

I want to be healthy because I want to do all of these things for longer yeah I want to have relationships that are full and true and raw and honest okay and I want to think that's it that's the working part and then I want to raise a family that is beautiful and pure and free of as much trauma as I can possibly make them be and I want to be close to my children in a way that I wasn't close to my parents

yeah well then the question you're going to have to ask yourself is what factors in your life support those goals and what don't what activities are you engaged in that will support those aims what will undermine them and seek to diminish or eliminate the ones that are undermining your goals and and strengthen the ones that are supporting it you know that's what it is and you know and your intentions by the way are not only superficially the ones you articulate

if owner or your real intentions I have to look at how you live your life not what you say about it so when I was a young parent if you ask me what is your goal what's your intention I would have said this is the happiness of my children and I would have said that totally sincerely if you look at how I live my life as a work colleague doctor not available to my kids always are out there looking for

being important and serving others and you know being at the center of people's lives because I was so essential to them my actual intention was self importance my stated intention the happiness of my children as much as I would have meant it sincerely did not jive with how I was living my life

so what you need to ask yourself is when anybody in to ask themselves is look at your intentions both the conscience ones and also the ones that show up when you look at how you actually live your life and bring the tune to alignment so look at again what serves your intentions and what undermines it and look at that seriously that would be my answer it's so difficult to distinguish between the two sometimes because I mean on the surface the system you gave there

actually looking at how I'm allocating my time and is my time being allocated towards things that would further what I'm saying my intentions I is a very useful exercise to run but you know as I said those things that I said as my stated goals I do find a disconnect I think

I think those things have been handed to us when we when you ask them when they're goals they will say things that will make the person asking the question think well of them because there's one goal that you didn't state which is I stayed away from the selfish goals no what was only didn't stay

inner peace because without inner peace you're not going to be able to serve any of those goals properly or if you were you do that some risk to yourself and so how would that be for you as a goal inner peace and then if running around serving others in the name of this so-called higher goal under my zero inner peace then you're not on the right track and you know what I'm talking to I'm talking to myself talking to me as well inner peace is not a selfish goal

it's from a position of safety sorry a position of inner peace that we can speak compassionately and truthfully to others that we can serve our other goals but you know Eckhart told he talks about our inner purpose and our external purpose

and you stated the bunch of external purposes and that's why there's this I believe if I'm pardoned the diagnosis or the analysis but that's why that disconnect that you mentioned because the goals that you stated were largely external and what are the internal goals and inner peace very good

no you have to put that into the mix and once you do I don't believe that now nobody handed that to you I just I think this is the issue with the work of holics is we think that the path to inner peace is just by aiming at the external goals like I think maybe it's some level that's what I believe

work-holics think they can work their way or validate external validate or trophy their way or number one book their way to inner peace because temporarily when your book shows up as number one on the best cellar list it shows up at all you feel some inner peace but it's addictive

and there's a wonderful physician and researcher Vince Feliti, the study child to trauma quite a bit and showing its relationship to adult negative outcomes and he said it's hard to get enough of something that almost works and so yeah you can get that temporary inner peace

but look at the long-term consequences of the work-holism it's not inner peace I can tell you that you know I can tell you have to long experience it doesn't matter even how successful you are there we started the conversation with this it's never going to give you inner peace

inner peace it doesn't come from the outside that's not a goal anybody ever handed to you that's something that you have to come to yourself you know this how are you acting in line with what you know are you doing it well? you know what?

I'm not going to give myself 100% by any means I mean just look at this week but I'm doing so much better than I ever did and I'm so much more comfortable about it then so much more comfortable about the future as well you know I am what is the one thing that we didn't discuss that maybe is the most important thing for my audience that are listening right now?

that not that we should impose suffering on any children or anybody in order to teach them anything life will bring its own suffering but when suffering comes along there's two things we can do with it we can try and just get rid of it not to feel it, to numb ourselves

or we can actually learn from it so suffering and pain can be big teachers if you know how to relate to them so when illness comes along when a crisis comes along in your life you might know that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of two character letters meaning danger and opportunity really?

so when there's a crisis there's danger but there's also an opportunity to learn and to grow and there's such a thing as growing older in other words not just getting older but actually growing older and actually still keep growing as you get older and that growing older actually has to do with

becoming more and more authentic to yourself so sometimes I do that successfully sometimes I don't but that's certainly the journey and I'd recommend that journey to everybody you can actually grow older in other words you don't have to shrink you can actually grow

when you said the word growth there it reminded me of something you said and a topic we haven't actually talked about which I did want to speak to you about which is vulnerability I remember you making this interesting connection I saw it somewhere online between vulnerability and growth and vulnerability is a risk for a lot of people it always felt like a risk for me so vulnerability comes from the Latin word vulnerable to wound to wound?

yeah that's vulnerability to wound and so as human beings or as any living creature we're all profoundly vulnerable from the moment that we're conceived to the moment we die we can be wounded we can be wounded physically we can be wounded emotionally that's just a given when children are safe

and seen and understood they can accept their vulnerability because they have the confidence that they can deal with it when children are traumatized or not understood, not seen and they're alone emotionally the vulnerability becomes too painful to bear so be shut down or sense of vulnerability

it will not to feel the pain but when you look at life nothing goes without vulnerability so a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick it does it it goes where it's tender and soft and it's these shoots that are very vulnerable they can be eaten by animals or insects a crustacean animal like a crab cannot grow inside a hard shell what does it have to do when it needs to grow?

it molds and becomes this soft creature that's very vulnerable but without that vulnerability there's no growth without emotional vulnerability there's also no growth and so much of our culture is designed to deny vulnerability and to shut it down or to somehow distract ourselves from it

and the cost and the cost is that we stay mature and that we lose ourselves that's what the cost is I also think vulnerability is the and I've just learnt this from doing this podcast that vulnerability is a great connector yeah when I much of the reason why I have good conversations on this podcast

I think it's because I'm willing to be open myself yeah which is what allows your client your guest the safety to open up themselves and in your personal life with your friends I mean, you can talk about the scandal of Newcastle beating Manchester City in some game recently by one to nothing

I don't say talk about it if it's interesting to you but which is more meaningful to you that or when you actually share what's your struggle what's your struggle and what's going on for you no contest but so much of this culture designed to distract ourselves from our vulnerability

but we have a closing tradition on this podcast whether last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and that's been left for you it's quite a long one today is your last day on earth yeah you're allowed to make two phone calls one phone call to the person you love the most and the second phone call to the entire world what do you say on both of those phone calls?

what John Lennon sang all those years ago all you need is love and the phone call to the person you love the most to the person I love the most I don't have to say anything at all why? because she knows but if you were cooling her on that last day I say thank you for everything and you know what?

I may even say that to the world I might even say thank you you know I mean for all the struggles and the trails and troubles and tribulations of childhood and parenting and career and all this thank you you've given me so much that's what I would say I mean if I wasn't giving advice she's all you need is love forget that I would say I just say thank you how do you want to be remembered? as somebody who did his best to make a difference and who made a difference?

which I know I have by the way so not that everybody agrees with me but I also know I've made a difference what difference do you think you've made? how to say this without funnigating I go distical but I get so many messages from around the world I mean literally from around the world but reading my books I've transformed people's relationship to themselves so made them understand themselves I think I mentioned maybe in a different interview

that the best review I have ever had of the myth of normal was that some young guy said to me thank you I read that book and I remembered myself so my work for those who are open to it really helps to connect to the world and I think I'm going to be able to open to it

really helps to connect them to themselves and to see themselves clearly and that's a gift in a world where it's increasingly hard to see and it's hard for people to see themselves and so people don't see themselves as broken or as the tree will be damaged

but actually they can begin to see their capacity for wholeness which incidentally is the root of the word health is wholeness and so that's the difference I'm making is that people can see themselves not as broken and damaged but it's actually fundamentally whole with some stuff to work through

that's it we can learn so much from children can't we so much of your work brings us back to the first nature as you describe it as children yeah well a lot of parents will tell you and you'll find out is that the greatest teachers are your children if you want to learn Gabel thank you

thank you so much it's a difficult question to ask someone else about the impact they've made on the world but even what you said I think is a huge understatement because the people that I know close to me like my partner who just I mean her life I think has been

changed personally but also professionally much of the reason she does the work she does the reason why she's not here to meet you because she would have she would have got the next flight to fly here it's because she's doing a retreat in the south of France with a big group of women

and much of the work she does there is built on the work that you've written about in your books and taught online so not only have you impacted people but personally but you've impacted the next generation of teachers and therapists which is going to be a generational

it's like a dominoes effect it was counteracting the generational trauma is the generational trauma is the generational healing that has come about because of people like you who are wizards in our culture and that are willing in the face of often great you know adversaries

who take a different stance to persist with truth but thank you and one of the things that most and hearten me is that when I go about London or any city in the world just about these days it's all kinds of young people coming up to me thanking me it's not people my I mean people all ages

but I'm just so enthused by how young generations like people on quarter of my age are coming up to me to thank me well that shows me that is making a difference 100% if she could have been here and actually was so annoyed she realized she'd booked a retreat

on the same day that you were coming to London because you didn't get to meet you last time because she was in Bali so she'll be watching this transformation it's probably watching live right now but thank you so much couple again for your generosity

and your wisdom it's changed my life and it continues to change many other people that are listening to this but all around the world so thank you thanks so much as you guys may know this podcast is sponsored by one of my favorite bands in all the world which is Woop

AI is a topic I spoken about various times on this podcast and it's a topic that I'm pretty obsessed with but we don't often talk about how it could be used as a force to make our lives even better Woop is using the power of AI to drive meaningful positive change my Woop doesn't leave my wrist

I'm going to give you a feature which is called Woop Coach uses the power of advanced AI to synthesize all of your health and fitness data and to provide you with personalized recommendations to support you on your health and fitness journey you can literally ask it questions like why am I so tired

or can you help me build a strength training program and it's advanced AI system will provide you with answers that are unique to you so if you would like to check it out and level up your health and fitness journey in the process join.woop.com slash CEO to get a free month's Woop membership