I'll get a team. Welcome to another installment of the Youth Project. It's Harps, it's doctor Blaze, who we're going to meet in a moment, but Firs Tiffany and Cuck, who is of course the life force, the blood that flows through the typ veins and keeps us all in check. Because like Melissa, who's the other boss, she's a little bit terrifying. How are you this morning, Queen of the world.
It is a big, exhausting job, Harps, And as we near the end of the year, I'll be ready to take a breather from that big job you give me.
Oh wow, how good will it be for you? It'd be like somebody pulling a thorn out of your side for you not to have to talk to me, for like, do you fantasize about having time away from me?
That is not true, That is not true. You are a breath of fresh air. And I do love to laugh, which happens one hundred percent of the time.
So do you know what's great is that you love to laugh? Melissa loves to laugh, and I think I'm mildly amusing, which is my mostly not true. But you two are so fucking easy to make laugh that you build my self esteem in a way that you probably shouldn't, and I get a little bit ahead of myself. Then I get out with real humans realize how unfunny I am. Right, Ah, doctor blaize a Geary, Sorry for mangling that. Hi buddy, how are you good?
How's it going? We're in the middle of We're in the middle of winter or just starting winter. You're going to you're starting your summer now?
Well, dude, it was in Melbourne yesterday. It was thirty eight degrees which is fahrenheit somewhere around one oh five or something. So it's gone. But the thing about Melbourne is Melbourne could be can be in Celsius. It can be literally sixteen or seventeen one day and then thirty five the next. It's just a city of extremes. But nonetheless it's a beautiful place live. And you've been here, You've been here a few times I have.
I loved it. There was a I first went in twenty eleven when I went to actually I went to the Sydney Olympics and then I shot over to Melbourne, and that was in two thousand and then twenty eleven I went to the National Associate International Association for the Study of Personality Disorders. That was in Melbourne, and then and then I don't know why I went a third time, but I loved it. I loved the botanical gardens, and
I loved the restaurants. Of food was just crazy. And then the wine was was criminal.
Really Yeah, Melbourne prides itself on being the best place in Australia for restaurants and bars and coffee and wine and food and fine dining and ti as Tiff will tell you the best cookies in the world. Is that right, Yeah, you are. Tiff is the best cook No, she's the best cookies as in the best you know, like.
Tell cookies, you know, cookies like biscuits.
I love pistachios.
Oh my god, they'll change your life next time here. Yeah.
No, for somebody who allegedly works in the space of health, wellness, fitness and high performance, she's a very bad influence on a lot of people. A lot of people with with with pre diabetes are being fed cookies bytes if so, I don't know, do you try to get people sick so you can then charge to get them? Well, Tiff, it's not.
It's not a bad business.
Plan is it. It's not. It's probably a moral one, but could be profitable. There's a lot of issues going on here. Prof. Now, I was listening to you on dak Shephard. What a great conversation that was, and I went down by the way two hours. You're killing me, but it was amazing. So I went down the rabbit hole. I went on. I'm just going to listen to twenty minutes of the prof talk to these guys, and it
was a great conversation. And give us, give my audience a little bit of a snapshot of your background, because it's like you grew up in thirty two different countries and I think your mom was Spanish and your dad was Irish, but you grew up for a while in South Africa, and yeah, give us some insight into childhood.
Yeah, oldest of eight children. I was actually born in the States. I left when I was tiny, I am. We then moved to London. My brother was born there.
I moved to Spain, four siblings born there, and then South Africa where I grew up and I went to medical school in South Africa, and then after that I came to the States and I actually played rugby and so I played rugby from my high school, a Catholic boys' school, and I was tight head prop So then I came to the States in nineteen ninety and I've joined the Harvard faculty in two thousand and I've been with Harvard ever since, and you know, and I've lived in the
Boston area for the last yeah, since then, so thirty five years.
We always fascinated with human behavior in the mind and the brain, and like that was that I was always fascinated with that. I didn't necessarily, I didn't start researching until much lighter, but you.
Yeah, no, I always was. And I think that maybe because I traveled so much, I just saw different people in very similar circumstances, doing very very different things. I just sort of like, what is going on? And I was also very interesting in philosophy, and you know, so I just I loved questions of the human mind and
how the world sees things. And I think it's just been remarkable, you know, living in Spain, living in South Africa, living in the United States, living in England, different places, just how how people interact with each other and react to each other, and in some situations, uh, the very same behavior that we pathologize in one country is just
normal in another country. For instance, on my mother's side, all my cousins are Spanish, and I was trying to explain borderline personality disorder to them as like a disorder of like high emotions and high reactivity and a lot of like intensity and everything that sounds like that sounds like every single Spaniard on the planet, you know, and so like in the one situation, it's you know, but in in countries where you expected to have like super
control of yourself, you know, high expressions of emotions, especially if they're paired with self destructive behaviors obviously problematic. So yeah, So I was always interested in in human nature and human behavior.
Do we know a lot more now than we did fifty years ago? Do we know a lot more than two thousand years ago when the Stoics were talking about, you know, to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom?
Probably not.
I mean, I think you know, we've we've evolved technologically, you know, but a lot of our basic instincts and a lot of our prime fears and all of that.
I'm still the same. You know. We still get jealous, we still get angry, we still get scared. You know, we're still very very non reflective. We still don't look inwardly to understand ourselves very much. So a lot of that stuff. But yeah, on the other hand, you know, and understayd aage we don't even need to because we can ask chat GPT who we are and it'll tell us. Yeah, So that.
Is terrifying, and I wish that that was a joke, but I think that is more true than we want to believe. I remember about before I started my PhD, which is in psych but about seven years ago or something, I did a presentation and it just happened to be to a room full of psychologists, which was hilarious because I was I was talking. So a friend of mine is a psychologist, who organized for me to do this talk to this group. And so I spent you know, the first kind of thirty years of my working life
helping people get in shape, whatever that means. But getting in shape physically is a psychological, emotional, sociological, behavioral, practical, multi dimensional process. It's almost like it's not even about
your body. It's like your body is the consequence. It's like, you know, and so I often talked to her about how I would help people change, because everyone that comes to a trainer, personal trainer, or a gym owner, like I owned multiple gyms and I worked with I was an excise physiologist all that, but everyone came for the same reason, and that is they wanted to be different. They wanted to look different, or feel different, or function differently,
or see the world or see themselves differently. And so I got to a point where I realized how much I knew about anatomy and physiology and energy systems and nutrition was almost irrelevant unless I understood the human living in the body so much of like and so anyway, I did this talk to all of these syches, and they're like, how do you know all this stuff? You haven't studied psychology. I go, but I've been having conversations with humans for thirty years about the same stuff, and
so you end up you know. So there's this academic process, but there's also there's this experiential classroom where for me and I've been in both a fair bid. It's like, I think I almost learned more out in the world at the coal face of change.
I mean, some of the most brilliant psychologists I've ever met are car mechanics, physical trainers, musicians, artists, because they they pay very very careful attention to human nature and to and to how things interact with each other and how they impact each other. And actually I think that in some ways, I mean I remember a lot of my psych training early on was you know, when did Pierre J develop his stages of data? Okay, so you know I could recite all those things, but it didn't
teach you anything about like human nature and psychology. So I mean anybody who is psychologically minded emostly intelligent as a person who can can see the way that there that the circumstances and biology interact with each other to two to cause something, so that there's there's there's a cause, and that there's effect to that course, and if you pay careful attention, you don't need a degree in psychology to be able to do that. You just need to
be someone who pays attention. And you know, and I think that most of us don't want to do that, or we're not trained to do that, or we try to to to just follow you know.
Yeah, yeah, And I guess is that a challenge because when you when you went to through your training, And I think you said, Dax something like you were just talking about how one of the one of the lenses through which you were viewing human behavioral, one of the fields or one of the areas you've got training was I think it was fraudy and psychology, right, or whatever
it is. You know, It's like then, which is great, and you're trying to understand Freud or Jung or Whoever's theories or but then at the same time, you don't want to live in that echo chamber of ideology or philosophy, like you want to know that, but also you want to be able to think critically outside of somebody else's ideas, right you as you know you as Blaze, I'm like cool. I want to know what they think and what they taught.
I want to understand this approach to borderline personality disorder or whatever it is. But I also want to know just what you instinctively and intuitively think, because I know one of the things I heard you saying you've treated over five thousand people with bb bp D and a lot of those are suicidal. And but I would I'm more interested in just what you've learned than what the textbooks sell me.
Yeah, you know, I think you know, if you think about, like, you know, whatever car you're driving that you drove to work, and you could say, you know, it'd be interesting to know what Ford did when he made the model T forward and you know what a car looked like then, and all of that sort of stuff. It's sort of interesting stuff. And obviously things built on each other to
get to where you are now. And so so some of these ideas and some of these theories are you know, you don't want to throw everything out and sort of interesting. But at the same time, you know that that as we understand the brain a little bit better, as we understand the nature of you know, neurons that fire together, wire together, as we understand the nature of transmitters, but
also as we understand behavior isn't better. As we understand interconnectedness better, as we understand and you know, the way that the mind works better, we have to continue to adapt our technology and behavioral technology and therapy technology to
what's going on. But you know, so that on the one hand, which which talk me about critical thinking, on the one hand, is offset with that that you know, when I was young, there was a thing and you know, you're a young man yourself, but so you wouldn't know about these things. But there's a thing, a thing called a map. A map was a thing for the young listeners. It was a paper. You would like look at it and then you would calculate how far it took, you know, to go from point A two point b, and how
long it would take and all sorts of things. And you know, you had to use that part of your brain. Now you just put on your you know, Google Maps and it says, you know, in three one hundred meters at your next McDonald's, take a ride. And yeah, so you don't have to think critically in some ways. But then at the same time, human beings are suffering and we don't have a roadmap for every single brain to tell us when to turn right and when to turn left.
So you know, you have to understand the very nature of the person. And then how you know that you don't have that much time to get them on the right track. You know, Freudian psychoanalysis was like twenty years of sitting there, you know, four times a week in therapy talking about yourself. No one has that kind of time anymore. And and but yeah, somebody's suffering. Somebody's suffering
right now. And by suffering, I mean there's psychological suffering, but there's this kind of suffering that you're talking about. Let's just say that somebody's overweight and they come to you and they say, I want to change my body. I want to change my aerobic capacity. I start working out a lot. Yes, you know, they're suffering in a different kind of way, but they're presenting the problem of
what it is that they want to change. So maybe it's how they interact with with lovers, how they interact with food, how they interact with their physical body, how they interact with government, how they interact with the environment, how they interact with you know, stingrays. I mean, I don't know whatever it is that they want to change.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, And I guess also, like I would have five people come and they would want let's just say, in this hypothetical, they'd want the same outcome. They want to build muscle, they want to lower body fat, they want to be stronger, they want to change their shape.
Very common. Well, even those five people with almost identical desired outcomes goals, well, it depends on a bunch of variables as to how I would train them and how I would treat and manage and guide and educate and inform them, because the producers say, outcome might require five different paths even though they want to achieve the same thing,
because everybody's genetically different. So exactly, I'm wondering with mental health challenges and conditions and disorders, even if somebody shows up with the exact same what seems to be the exact same challenge or disorder, might it be true that there are a myriad of different paths to achieve a good outcome with that person beyond just the straight diagnosis of the condition.
Yeah, absolutely, Because you know, you can say there's a person who is suffering with a lot of suissidality and they have said borderland personality or call it whatever, depression, they're suicidal. But okay, so then you said, what I'm going to do is this is the treatment approach that
that I'm going to recommend. Now, let's just say you had ten people in the same way that you have showing up to your gym wanting similar outcomes, but without exploring the context under which those people are living in. You know, you don't have a fighting chance because one of them is in an abusive relationship, the other one has five children who are all struggling. The other one has alcoholism in the family. The other one is just about to lose their job. The other one has had
horrible side effects to antidepressant medication. And so, you know, I think that we can become very, very formulaic, and many of those cases formulas do work. But you know, I think that when we're talking about life and death without really deeply understanding where a person is coming from and what the true want is, I don't think you have a fighting chance of helping them.
I don't know if this is true, but it seems to me that somebody in your position, like I know that you're academically brilliant and very qualified and your knowledge is vast. I listened to you for two hours. It's fucking amazing. By the way, everyone have a listen to that conversation. It's so good. It's on the armchair expert with Blaze. But clearly you are a gifted human, like
you have high emotional intelligence, social intelligence, situational awareness. Like I feel like, yeah, you're good, your world class amazing good. But I also think you're pretty gifted as well, right.
I mean, look, I so I have a second degree black belt in judo, and I trained with until I was fifty seven with a lot of members who were training for the Olympic judo team. I was a little bit too old, because you know, when you're fifty seven and these guys are twenty five. But why did I do that? I did that because my coach, Jimmy Petro, who actually won a bronze medal in the Sydney Olympics, is a very talented, gifted, in so full intuitive person.
And I've had many, many, many coaches in different sports who who you know, who go through the formulas, but they don't have that wisdom that sort of allows them to differentiate, differentiate you from another judoka or you know, or run you know, fifty seven marathons and including one in Melbourne where I did a six hour track race. We ran three hours one way and then three hours the other way. But the thing is in all of
those conditions were very, very different. And the thing about you know, what you want is you want somebody who knows how to follow the book and understands the physiology and the anatomy in the way that you do. If you're working the rear delts, that's one thing. If you're working the the abs, that's another thing. And who can say, okay, this is how we go into work the you know, the different this head of the delta and then versus
this or whatever it is. You want to have someone who has but at the same time, somebody might have rheumatorial arthritis, somebody might have fibromiologist, somebody might have the eating TIFFs cookies, the one that she's poising everybody with, and you know, and have different kinds of problems. So the so I think that understanding those kinds of things in context and then and that the person that you're looking for is somebody who does know the techniques but
also can see you in the context. And I think that's the blend. And I've tried to shape my understanding of people to sort of say, Okay, I get it, you're depressed, you're anxious, you bipolar, your substance using, but this is also the context under which you live. And it seems to me, Craig that that that's one of
the things that you do. You know, when you're talking about you know, the people that you would meet in your gym's just like there aren't just five people who want the exact same outcome, is that you're you're understanding them in context. And I think that that's what the difference is.
To what extent I'm just opening the theory of mind or to what extent do you think people can understand someone else's reality? And I know that's a very messy broad but I feel like it's something most people don't even really think about, like what is Blaze's experience right now in this conversation on this podcast with this Australian guy and this Australian girl. You know, I try to be at least aware of that. To what extent do people have that capacity? Do you think?
Yeah? I mean I think, like with almost any talent and ability, there are things that can be trained. You know that there's ways in it which we can pay attention to each other and sort of you know, in terms of theory of mind saying oh, I wonder why he did this, or I wonder why that joke, or I wonder why the sort of engagement. I think that we all have to a certain degree some capacity to
do it. I think that there are certain conditions you know, so, for instance, in people with autism, it seems that that that ability to understand somebody else's mind is can be somewhat compromised. But I'll, you know, look, in as much as I've done some really great work, I have a friend who's got significant obsessive compulsive personality disorder o CPD, who are very very rigid, and we were going to go to a restaurant and you know, and on the way there, I said, oh, they said, like, I'm really
really hungry. And I said, oh, what about this restaurant that was over there, just thinking, okay, if you're that hungry, maybe we could stop somewhere else. And they got really angry at me, and then I got pissed off at them, like why are you getting so angry at me? You know, I thought you said you were hungry, and I was
making this other recommendation. So even somebody who understands the mind, you know, I have my own reactions and then, you know, and then I have to then stop and see that I've reacted in a certain kind of way, step back from it, and then say, okay, you I understand that this person has got this rigid way of thinking. And then I you know, I reacted to their react reactivity.
But that's because as human beings, we're emotional beings before we're cognitive beings, and we react to other people's reactions. And and how often do people have discussions with each other and then just piss each other off? You know, So even if you if you're talented and a certain thing. You know, when I've run marathons, my last smile is often but slower than my first one because I'm more
exhausted to my conditions have changed in that moment. So when I'm reacting to people, and when I'm reacting to patients and friends and stuff like that, you know, at times I'm at my best and at times, you know, even an expert is going to fall apart.
Yeah, it's a big gap between what you know and how you respond. I think it's like I talk about things all the time to groups. You know, the medical constructs. I could talk about it, you know, overthinking and internal myhem and imposter syndrome and you know, obsessing and rumination and all of these things that aren't super healthy for us. While putting up my hand going I still do most of them exactly. By the way, I'm pretty fucking good at all of that, so.
Exactly, you know.
And I also say, if I wait till I've got all my shit together before I tell you, or teach you or support you, I'm never fucking leaving the house.
Exactly now that you're exact, You're exactly right, I mean, I see, you know, it's interesting that I was. I was reflecting on the on the diagnostic criteria of Borline personality disorder, and the second criterion is intense interpersonal relationships characterized by extremes of idealization devaluation. I am an intense dude, you know, Like I identify with that criteria, Like I get into it with people. I love it. I get, you know, and and it can get you know, that
intensity can be a bit too much for people. And so it's great because you know, I can use it in uh in therapy, but it's you know, in your you know, ordery garden variety relationships, it's just too much. You know, the fire that cooks your food is also the fire that burns your house down. So there's quality of intensity which could be like you know, delicious, and under some circumstances, it's just overbearing in others. So, you know, I also think that the context under which who you
are shows up. You know, you going to teach, you know, physical education to a group of I don't know, maybe the accountants here are going to be insulted, you know who want to just like learn about balance sheets. You know, they'd say, what are you doing here? That's all we want? Did you hear for you're in the face? You know?
Yeah? I asked not everybody, but a lot of guests this similar question, just because it's for my own curiosity. So my my research is around metapception, which is, you know, understanding how people see us and perceive and experience us like almost like the question at the center of the research is what's it like being around me for others? What do you think? How do you do you ever think about that? Do you ever think about and not in a self loathing way, but a self awareness curiosity way.
I probably think about it too much because I've spent six years studying it. But do you ever think about what's it like being around me for them? And do you have an insight?
Yeah? So there's a couple of ways, you know, and I'm going to have a very broad answer. So I remember Bob Marley was asked what's it like to be famous? And he sort of thought about as he says, I don't know, I'm not famous to me and and you know, so so so the only way in which I know, you know, that people have a certain experience with me
is that a they tell me. But but then I also get like letters, you know, and emails saying, you know, my child was very suicidal and just like so grateful for you, and you know, so you get that kind of feedback. I think I would drive myself nuts if I had somebody like myself around, because I'm so constantly you know, kind of into the mind and into questioning and that you know, metacognition that I think I can
get to be a little bit too much. But at the same time that you know, you know, like being on Dacshapard, being on your show, you know that there's there's a certain dose of who I am that people can tolerate and find interesting, and you know, so so I get it to a certain point. But you know, on the other hand, you know, I travel all around
the world, I teach all over the world. I don't have that many friends, you know, and I understand why, you know, I think I'm a bit much and so so there's also this concept of sollipsism, you know that the ancient Greek philosophy that you know, the only thing that you can ever really know is your own mind, and so anything that you can know to be, you know, perhaps true. You know, you can get into that kind of philosophy that even you and for all just projections of my mind, you know.
And everything like that.
You can get caught up in that kind of thinking, solecistic thinking. But you know, I I think that in the context of the work that I do. I think that, you know, like people that sort of appreciate me, in the context of of ordinary life, I turn everything into a philosophical question, and I think it's you know, it can be a that much. I mean, you know, it
would be I remember speaking about accountants. I once went to a fundraiser that was being held by an accounting firm, and I don't think I've ever been suicidal except that one time, because we were talking about were the latest uh you know, internal revenue service software, uh you know software and regulations and stuff like that, and they were so into it, and I just not only did I not understand it. I wasn't actually that interested, but I
can under see. I can see that. You know, if if crickets your game, you know, that's what you're going to follow. But in the States they'll play basketball or baseball, you know. So it's it's that's where theory of mind actually sort of comes in. But yeah, so how I'm experienced, Uh, I think like a curiosity really, you know, it's like it's kind of an odd guy.
Yeah, I have a bunch of mates who, like most most drink, smoke, party, do all the things and not so much smoking but drinking. And I've never been drunk. I've never had alcohol. I don't drink, and not that I'm suggesting that's a recommendation for anyone. And like, I've always just been fascinated with training and the mind and human performance and potential. And sometimes I sit and talk to some of my mates and I just see their eyes glaze over. Oh shut the fuck up.
There you go exactly.
Yeah, I was.
In Iceland, and I did. I spent twenty minutes in a in a ice bath that was it was a two degree celsius wow, and it was cold. It was cold, and you know, it's just through you know, them of methodology and just like breathing technique and stuff like that, and you know, and I look at the science of aging and the science of cellular health and stuff like that, and you know, so the thing is, I'm speaking about it in a very earnest way about not only not
necessarily longevity, but healthy healthy living. You know that what we put into our body, what we how we what we surround our body with. I'm thinking about that, and they just thinking like, wow, that was crazy, man, Like what'd you do? You know, like, no, it's not about that. And then you know, it's not about that. It's about like, how do you take care of the mitochondria in yourselves?
Uh?
You know, your the ability of the mind to regulate itself, to sort of treat itself with kindness and compassion. You know that you can do techniques and it's sort of I mean, you know, when I do five days silent meditations, it's like what you can't stop talking? What are you talking about? You know, it's it's but these are like
I'm not saying it for saying it. I'm saying it because these are like the things that drive the best version of yourself, you know, and you know I get a bit extreme at times, you know, but but it's not about that. But you know, to your point you start talking about there's either like okay, you're or that gleazing over that you described.
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. And then they will sometimes, like my training partner, who I love, he will start talking about an engine in a car, and I'm like, oh, get me out of here, Like I like cars, but I don't talk to you about the manifold or the gasket or whatever.
The fuck you.
I'm like, oh, help, help anyone. So tell us about your work, tell us about and I know you do a lot of different things, but you know, the bulk of your work over the last decade, or to tell us what that is if you would.
Yeah. So I've I've been profoundly impacted, you know, by a human suffering and impacted in the sense of like it's impacted me. But I've also seen the impact on other people psychological and emotional pains so severe that people want to die, that people want to know kill themselves.
I am. I think I'm a bit naive and sort of I live in a not quite wicked like fairy tale but just like I tend to, I see so much ore and so much potential in life and I and I want people to have that same experience, but I know that they don't, and I know that they
suffer tremendously because of emotional pain. And any single one of us who's had severe emotional pain, maybe you lost your loved one, and you can remember just how much pain you were in, and if you were to think about that pain for eternity, for the rest of your life, you could think about, like, I don't want to do this anymore, that I would want to die rather than
have to suffer with so much emotional pain. And in the people that I treat as a very high suicide rate, and you know, you can you know, we have a lot of empathy with people who have, say pain because of cancer or something like that. Yes, and you see the cancer, you say, Okay, yeah, I can see how much you're suffering. But emotional pain can be maybe worse
than that kind of physical pain. And then all the techniques that I tried to help people emotional pain, none of them seem to work as well as Dialectical behavior therapy also known as DBT that incorporates some of the things that we were talking about, you know, healthier living through emotion regulation, mindfulness strategies, being more effective inter personally, being able to tolerate difficult moments more effectively, and using
that technology with this group of patients and seeing tremendous benefit. But most recently, the thing that I was observing was that a lot of suffering came because we were dissatisfied with who we were. And that could just be something like, oh, I'm a little bit overweight, you know, I'm not intelligent enough,
and that sort of stuff. So some sort of minor self criticism all the way to extreme self hatred, and often the experience of just never having felt good enough from early childhood and just being told that you weren't good enough and then beginning to believe it yourself then led to a point where self hatred consumed the person, and it was beyond self criticism, beyond self blame, beyond
self judgment. It sort of encompassed the whole and people felt that the world would be better off without them, And so tragically, some of the people who took their lives had a lot of self hatred. And so I decided to start, you know, to write a book on self hatred, which is I Hate Myself, which was the reason I was on the Dak Shepherd show. Yeah, and you know, and now in a few months my book I Hate Myself? Now why it is a workbook to accompany that that book so amazing.
So the book everyone is called I Hate Myself. Overcome self loathing and realize why you're wrong about you? Tif Do you want to talk? Do you want to talk about what you have to talk about or do you just want to sit and listen? I want to be sensitive?
Go ahead, go ahead, and well, what don't.
You tell Blaze or Okay, So Tiff coaches a few people, a bunch of people, and last week one of the people that you coached committed suicide, like literally four or five days ago. And this has been you know, we muck around him. We're silly here. But that's why when I listened to Blaze a small and I spoke to you before I went, I think this is going to be an interesting and relevant and perhaps powerful conversation for you.
So I'm going to ask you a question. Then I'm going to get out of the way for the professional who all of a sudden is becoming the interviewer not the interviewee. How are you going with it?
As expected? I think so it's today, will be one week, it was last Friday, and it's Friday Friday morning now. Yeah, And it's been a ride. It's been very different every day, and I feel like it's some days it's real and some days it's not. And it's yeah, I don't know, it's hard, and it's different every day.
And to put this in context, you and this guy, ye, can we say his name.
Or no, just let's go first name.
Perhaps, So you and Ben were in contact every day. Yes, so you spoke to him regularly, but at the very least there was me sing every day because you were kind of working with him.
Yes.
So I've worked with him for a year.
We did sessions every two weeks and checked in every single day for interactions to yeah, stay accountable and stay in touch.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess this is not uncommon what you're hearing, bis, Yeah.
I mean this is this is you know, I started my program in two thousand and seven and there hasn't been a single day where I haven't worked with a suicidal individual or maybe multiple suicidal people, and and sort of just like sending you compassion so much love, it's to lose somebody that you cared about so much. I think it's sort of it. You know, you you question, you know, did I do something wrong? Could I have done something differently? What was going on? What did I miss?
And all of that stuff, and you know, and we never know that li of others. We never know the minds of others. You know, we can know some as aspects of it, but you know, they're you know, they're probably suffering tremendously. And and you know, like I always think that a person's always doing the best that they can do at any given moment, and and you know, they tried their best, you know, until they couldn't try anymore.
And and you know maybe you know, I mean, we can always second guess ourselves, but you know, we always second guess ourselves why when people die, But we never second guess ourselves when people live. You know, we don't say, you know, like, oh, this person you know tragically took their life. Could I have done something different? But when we say, wow, this person's living, they're living their best life, Like what could I have done differently? Or what should
I do? Or you know, it's it's it's it's only in this kind of context, so you know, so anyways, just sending you, you know, love, compassion, and just like you know, just recognizing how absolutely devastating and painful that is to lose somebody that you care about and somebody that you work with.
What is the relationship to feel free to jump in blaze? What is the correlational relationship between borderline personality disorder and suicidal ideation?
Well, I don't remember having a patient with bortline percentage disorder who hasn't had suicidal ideation. I think, I mean, I think, I think that the statistics are that almost anyone who's got bortline percent he disorder has had either passive or active suicidal ideation. Passive suicidal ideation is more the idea that you know, I just wish I wasn't around. I wish I would die, you know, if an accident happened,
I wouldn't care. Active suicidal ideation is the idea that you're going to take active measures to make that happen, and then there's suicidal behavior. But I'd say ninety five percent of not more certainly of the patients that I've treated have had either active or or either active or passive suicidal ideation, and many of them have had suicide attempts.
And I remember, I can't remember the exact number, but I remember you sharing the statistics, the comparative statistics between what the normal outcomes are versus the five thousand patients that you've worked with, and you know, it's quite a contrast.
Yeah, you know, So what the research had said is that if you look up, you know, what's the suicide rate and boradline personality disorder, they'll say, you know, for people who are hospitalized, it's about ten percent. That's you know, there's some debate about that number, but that's the number that's most often thrown out, you know. And so we've had more than five thousand people come through our program.
So if you're to say you're going to lose ten percent of them, like we should have had ten percent or five hundred day by suicide, you know, as far as we know, we've lost fewer than thirty. So thirty people. So I mean, any death by suicide is a tragedy, of course, but you know that means that there's at least four hundred people who might have died, who haven't you.
Know, I know this is very big and very complicated, but for somebody who has got somebody in there, or but who who is in that state? And I know there's no three step plan, but is there anything that you can help us with too, even to how do we approach it or them? How do we have a conversation? Is there something that we should do or shouldn't do? Like for a lot of people, this is overwhelming and it's almost like too hard basket, I'm just not going to do anything about it.
Yeah. Well, one thing is, first of all, never ever ever think that it's attention seeking. So sometimes you know, they say, oh, you know, they're saying they're suicidal, they're not. Really, it's it's it's you know, it's it's attention seeking behavior. If if you were to say to me that you were going to get a Kiwi tattooed in your forehead,
I could say, well, it's it's attention seeking behavior. But I say, okay, well maybe you go and you do that and then you look ridiculous, And then I say, okay, well you did that, But so what you know, you're going to have to deal with it. And I might say that it's attention seeking or not attention seeking. But whenever somebody says to me that they're going to kill themselves, I never even if it is attention seeking, I always
take it seriously. That's the first thing. The second thing is that talking about suicide does not make somebody more suicidal. You know, if you say you don't drink alcohol, if I start talking about wine and vodka, that you're not likely to go and drink wine and vodka just because I'm talking about it, you know, So just be Sometimes people say, oh, if you start talking about it, then people are going to think about it. I talk about suicide all the time. I've never been suicidal. I don't
think about it as entertainer. It's not my you know, the thing that I think about. But so if somebody is struggling, and I think especially if somebody is struggling with darkness, with depression, with anxiety, with substance use, I think it's a very fair question to say, hey, you know, do you ever does it ever get really bad? Do you think that you want to end it all? And many people will, but just because you've asked the question
doesn't mean that they're going to do that. It just tells you that they're like, hey, we can talk about this, you know, we can talk about this stuff, and it's not the end of the world until you actually kill yourself, and then that is the end of the world. So it's like, let's like, let's you know, you actually not talking about it puts people much more risk than talking
about it. So I'm just saying, you know, like bringing up suicide and public awareness campaigns, speaking to friends who are very depressed, you know, who've or who maybe are shutting down. But sometimes, I mean there are people who you had absolutely no idea that that's what was on their mind. They seem to be having perfectly happy lives.
But for many people that you can see that there's a darkness that's come over them, that there's a withdrawal, there's there's a there's a change in how they interact with you that you know, you might start saying, you know, I see you're isolating more, you're withdrawing more, You're you know, more depressed, you're having a harder time. Maybe they've lost
their job or something like that. I think it's you know, it's not like every time say hey, are you suicidal, but it's it's in those in those contexts, you know, to sort of to sort of quest wonder about that sometimes, could.
You just quick define, just for some of our listeners who are going, what exactly is borderline personality disorder? Could you give us a layman's kind of explanation of what that is?
Yeah, Bordline personity disorder is a condition where a person has a difficult time regulating or controlling their emotional responses, and that when their emotions are very all over the place, like excessive happiness, excessive anger, jealousy, sadness, they then turn to what we would call us maladapted or self destructive waste in order to regulate them. So people might turn to cutting, They might turn to cutting themselves. They might turn to alcohol, They might tend to spending. Now that
can you know? People might say, well, that sounds like bipolar disorder. The difference is that the kind of mood states that people with borderline personality to get into are or don't last very long. They last for sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes a day or so, but they don't last weeks so and often often that reactivity of mood, that disregulation, that inability to control their emotions has to
do with how they interact with other people. So, you know, you say something to me, I react to what you say, and then it escalates. You know, people feel judged, people feel criticized, and and you know, I might say something you know, critical of you, Craig, and then and then you might say, well, f you. And but you know what, I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to work it out and then I'm going to hang
out with some friends. But if you were then to take it so personally that you you know, uh, restruggling with it. So they have struggled in regulating their emotional experience. They have struggled in regulating their friendships. So they can get very reconnected very quickly to people. They can then suddenly fall out of connection with people. They can then idealize that person by you know, just thinking they're the best person in the world, and then they can devalue
them the next day. They have trouble regulating their thinking, so they can get very paranoid. They can make a lot of bad interpretations of, you know, of what a person's thinking. So I don't know, is that a pen that you've got to your lips? I might say, I might say to myself, oh, you know, he's actually not that interested in what I'm saying. The reason he's holding his pen is because he wants to, you know, write
something and doodle. You know. So what happens in people with boreline person you or they'll see some sort of action that another person is doing it, they'll misinterpret or they'll make wrong assumptions. And partly they do that because they've been right in the past, so sometimes you know that that's what's happened. You know, they have trouble regulating their sense of self. So there's and these inabilities to
regulate cause a lot of emotional pain. So when a person has a cluster of engagement with the world where they can control their emotions very well, where they have very chaotic relationships, where they have an unstable sense of who they are, and when they can get very paranoid about other people's intentions, you know, you'd want to think about borderline personality disorder.
Does everybody who has they pay a hide themselves?
No? No, And that's an interesting an important question, you know, it's you know, one of the criteria is that the fourth criterion might include eating disorder behaviors and BPD, but you only need five out of nine criteria in order to meet the diagnostic criteria for bortline personality disorder. So a person could have normal eating habits and not have BPD, or they could have you know, disordered eating, or they could have disordered eating and not have BPD. So you
don't have to have self hatred to have BPD. But I have found that many people with born on personality you just sort of do, have self hatred. I've also found a group of very very high functioning people athletes, artists, musicians, CEOs of company who are very very self critical, very
self judgmental, very self blaming, very self hating. But they've used that as the rocket fudal to get themselves to the top of their profession, you know, by saying like I am going to prove like I'm so worthless, I'm going to prove to the world that I'm not worthless.
So that's a cohort that has come out of the work that I've done, because initially I was thinking about it just in the context of BB but all of a sudden I had doctors and musicians and artists and CEOs reaching out to me and saying, hey, I don't have born on percentives for but I also don't like myself very much.
I feel like there's a or there can be a relationship between, you know, self loathing and self awareness, like self loathing as I'm a fucking idiot every time I get in this situation, I do that I am. I'm such a more for me, that's versus you know, so I didn't do a great job there? What did I get wrong? What could I do better? How did I plan if I was going to do that tomorrow? What might I do different? You know? It seems like me
one's destructive ones potentially you know, hopefully productive. Can they Can one become the other? Can we kind of morph the self loathing if we try to pull the emotion out of its good point?
And thought about that, and I steal it as an idea for my next book, Welcome but Welcome. But it's you know, it's it's if if you know, if you keep walking into a door and then you keep like wondering what that is, and if you can just stand back from it and just say, I'm doing this thing called walking, and there's something called a door there, and every single time I do this, I get you know, like I bump into it and my head hurts. So when a second, okay, I see what's going on here. Wait,
there's this thing called a handle. What about that thing? You know? So that so I think, like being able to stand back from the automaticity of behavior, the automaticity of thinking allows for the kind of self reflection that you're describing.
It's very hard to when you're trying to have any any level of self awareness and self regulation. Like, obviously, I can't be objective about me because I'm me, right, I'm always looking at me through the me lens and everything that I you know, the whole. But trying to move at least to move towards some consciousness of that,
you know. So when I like, I was a morbidly obese kid, and I talk about being the fattest kid in the school, and people say to me, don't say that about yourself, I go, but I literally was the fattest kid in the school. That's an objective reality. That's not me throwing myself under the bus, you know. That's like, well, I was morbidly obese, I was over two hundred pounds in your language, when I was fourteen, So I was a big kid. Now that doesn't mean I hate me.
That means that was part of my journey. And I understand how I ended up in that state. And what I did was I got better. I learned, I asked better questions. I recognize self destructive behaviors, you know, which is not say I created this perfect version of myself. I definitely didn't. But yeah, the amount of people who hide it when I when I tell stories about myself, historical stories, because they think I'm hiding myself, whereas I'm
not at all. I'm just glading insights from where I was and where I went.
Well, so this is another interesting point. So so Jimmy Pedro, my judo coach, was my my judo trainer. I've got this marine. His name is Billy, and he's my personal trainer and I just work out with him all the time and he is, you know, he's as marine as they get. And one of the things that he told me recently is that when he was a kid, he was very, very overweight. I mean, you look at him now,
he's just like this lean, shredded guy. And to this day, if if you call him fat, if unravels him because because what happened is is that you know, that was paired with a very very painful time in his life, and and and you know, and so you know, I said, listen, you do you do you train me physically, I'll train you mentally. But it's it's you know, because I think that there's a difference between an objective truth that you were morbidly obese and that you were overweight, but it
was paired with a ridicule. If that was paired with teasing and tormenting and all of those sorts of things and some of the you know, rejection by you know, girls and whatever it was, that then could become painful for you. And if you had an identical twin brother raised in a completely different school system where they were compassionate to you and they said, you know, don't treat yourself that way, don't say those things about you, you know, the outcome is going to be different because of the
pairing of narrative to that physical state. And you know, if you know, people like you say hey, you know, hey that guy, you know, you might react differently than if if somebody just you know, like if you never
had weight problems in Spanish, my mother. There's Spanish, and there's a, there's a there's a So the word gordodal geo r d o means fat one and if if if you say it's it's it's a it's a term of endearment, like hey dude, hey bro, hey guy, it's hey in Spanish, it's hey fat one to them, and so it's like but if you were really fat, then you know you might sort of take take it personally. Yeah, I love it.
My name all through school, by the way, was Jumbo. So that'll give you an insight. Yeah, okay, so we need to wind up, but let's let's give us a quick snapshot of the book. You know what amazed me when you were talking uh to Dax was that you said when you when you started to think about how many people hate themselves and all of the intersecting kind of variables around that you went, oh, I wonder what the research and I wonder what the research says, and
I'll go and find those ten thousand papers. And I think you said something like you found three and I basically said fuck all, Like it seems like a really common phenomenon that is very under researched.
Exactly and so that was exactly it. You know, when I was starting to see the correlation between suicidality and and self hatred, I thought, you know, people study the correlation between substance use and suicidality or depression in sucidiality, its schizophrenian suicidality. But why was this construct, this idea that was so powerful not being studied. And so I thought, okay, well there must be studies out there, and there was nothing.
And you know, it was shocking to me. You know that the that that we are you know, earlier on you talked about have we advanced since over the last two thousand years. I mean, these are fundamental questions about a sense of self that includes this kind of thing. It just isn't that much research on it. And yet it is an experience that so many people experience, many many more than I imagined. And again it doesn't have to be fundamental core self hatred, but just a self dissatisfaction.
I mean, many listeners are going to be not so happy with themselves because you know, of self judgment or self criticism of self dissatisfaction. But if left unchecked, that can become you know, self hatred, and what happens is if you're a self hating person and you have children, you're transmitting an okayness, not in an explicit way, but an implicit way that you know, like that that self dissatisfaction that there's something okay about it.
So wow, I'm excited to get that book and read it. It's so good to talk to you. I know how those those two spoke to you for two hours? Now, how can people find you, doc? How can they follow you? Connect with you? Once again? Just quickly, I'll do the prim i for you. The book is called I Hate Myself, Overcome Self Loathing and Realize why You're wrong about you, Doctor BLASEE Guare. Yeah, how can people connect with you and follow you?
Yeah?
So, I mean I used to be a very big it wasn't social media, and then I started getting rid of everything except that I didn't need it for us, you know, sort of promotional material and everything. So I'm on Instagram, you know, at blaze, m D b l A I S E M D. And I have a friend who's just told me I have to start doing TikTok because that's the way I'm going to get the message across and so I guess you know. So I started a TikTok, but I haven't that posted anything just yet.
And my program here at Harvard is the number three the worst East so three east dot org.
Yeah, yes, cool. Well, we appreciate you so much, thank you for being so generous with your time and wisdom and energy. We'll say goodbye off air, but TIF did you enjoy that, Tiff?
I did very much?
Thank you?
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks again. I'm sorry for everything that you've you've gone through, and no, I appreciate you and your listeners for tuning in and putting up with you. Craig, so that's a good thing.
I'm a lot. You've already diagnized me. I'm a fucking even. I don't like me, and I am me. Maybe I should get your book exactly
Good two coffee so it'll make you better