How to Rebuild Mental Health and Heal Emotional Wounds | Dr. Paul Conti - EP 766

25:22But most are trusting the systems. And if the systems aren't saying, we're going to help you by helping you understand you, we're interested in understanding you, then that's how people are not helped. And they can go through a system that then is interested in throughput. Right. A VA system, all health care systems are very busy with mental health. Right. Why? Because we're not solving problems. If we polish the hood and call it good. Right. That problem is going to come back. Right. The car is going to come back to the mechanic if we just polish the hood and called it good when there's something going on in the engine.

25:54so the systems are designed for throughput and what we make by not actually addressing what's going on is more need for throughput people keep coming back to the systems so they're just trying to get people through to the other side of the system and that's not how we make people better again the proof this isn't me making a projection that oh if we do this it's not going to work i'm saying here's the data in front of us we've done this and it doesn't work and we need to take an approach to it that is more simple. Acknowledge, can we have mental health problems? Yes. Just like we can have physical health problems.

26:27Depression, for example, is a neurochemical imbalance in us. It's a health problem, right? So those health problems are real, but it's how we conceive of them. If we start saying, we want to help you understand yourself and build good mental health. Now let's look at all the ways in which, for example, in your case, you're resilient, you're perseverant, right? You're able to bring health to yourself when the helping mechanisms are failing you. We say there's a lot going right in you, right? To be at the place that you're at. Now, from that real and true perspective, we're also going to look at what's not the way you want it to be.

27:01We're going to look right at that depression and we're going to help you get to the roots of it. Now we're talking, right? Now we're in a place where we can solve problems. I love what you're alluding to because for most of us, our primary care provider is the gateway into our health ecosystem. And my wife is a primary care provider. And one of the things she talks about all the time is how the insurance system is a thorn in their side because it really pays them based on volume. And because of that volume, they're expecting you to see a patient every 15 to 20 minutes. Now, luckily, when I was at the VA earlier this week for my yearly physical, my doctor, who's a DO, was using AI to help him circumvent having to do written medical records.

27:53And he was telling me that it's been profound because it's given him an extra 10 to 15 minutes that he's now able to spend on patients instead of having to leave and write all it up. But when you're that consumed on time, obviously you're not going to have the time to do what I did was start looking at every aspect of what was working and what's not. So you approach this structure of the self using five different parts. And I found these to be really interesting. And they're unconscious, conscious, defense mechanisms, character structure, sense of self. I'm going to start with unconscious and conscious because my first book that I wrote a few years ago, I have a chapter that basically goes into unconscious and conscious.

28:42Mine is looking at it through a different lens. I was looking at it more on how we're living our lives. And I was saying most of us are doing it unconsciously. We're living like we're pinballs bouncing off of things, system one, as Danny Kahneman would say, instead of being consciously engaging and being the master of the game who's learning how to play the ball. But I think the same thing goes with a lot of our mental health journeys. Would you say that's an accurate analogy? I think that's true. Yes, I think if we don't have a method of understanding, then we will not understand. right so just as if you go to see a doctor for a physical medicine complaint there's a method of understanding like you okay you have a human body it has organs in it right we have an idea of how those organs function right there's a basic premise the same is true for mental health because you have a human brain and a human mind so there is now a process to go through that that that starts with an unconscious mind we all have an unconscious mind and the vast majority of what goes on inside of us goes on in the unconscious mind.

29:51And that sets the climate inside of us. Then what sits on top of that is the conscious mind. What I'm actually thinking about now, which is a very small subset of everything that's going on inside of me. And that climate inside of me has a big effect on what is in my conscious mind. How am I thinking about it? How am I feeling about it? Then we have an array of defense mechanisms that we use to protect ourself in the world. And that also comes from the unconscious mind and it grows up around the conscious mind to protect it. Then we have a character structure based on that set of characteristics of us as we interface with the world.

30:26And then there's a sense of self that this is an I, right? That I am an I. And just as I can conceive of the I physically, how my body is doing, how my organs are doing, how my health is doing, the same is true for our mental health. So the idea is we can understand physical health problems because we have a route of approach, right? So we need that route of approach for mental health saying, just as we can examine you, get labs done, get studies done, we can do the same. You have a structure of self and a function of self, just like you have a structure of your body and a function of your body.

30:59And you have those things because you are human, right? So now we're off to the races of helping because this applies to everyone. And we're also doing justice to it. You were saying before, I want to say also a real word of gratitude to your wife and to all people out there who are primary care medical providers. It is so difficult to do, right? That more than half of all complaints brought to physical health doctors are coming from a mental health origin. So now they're trying to deal with physical health and mental health. And you think your doctor said, oh, with this AI tool, I get 10 minutes back.

31:34why should a doctor ever have had 10 minutes of the 15 minute appointment taken by documentation right why should we as patients allow this to happen right i think our primary care doctors are so put upon and we owe them a debt of gratitude for operating in a system that just inundates and buries them in paperwork right in numbers in order to just try and get their job done and then they're trying to take care of people in a single digit number of minutes to actually pay attention to them. That is not fair to the primary doctors. It is not fair to the patients, meaning it's not fair to any of us, right?

32:09We may not all be primary care docs, but we're all patients at one time or another. So to look at that and say, this doesn't work and the insurance systems, within the rules we give them, they're going to do whatever they do to try and optimize and be a successful business. The blame rests upon us as humans, as people who have accepted that This is how we're going to get our health care met, let alone that we're driving the primary doctors to greater mental illness, greater substance abuse, higher rates of suicide. So, yes, we're doing that to the demographic that's on the front lines of helping us.

32:43And as we're doing that to them, we're ensuring that we as a population are not adequately understood and helped. Paul, I want to sit with this unconscious and conscious for another minute. To me, one of the book's organizing ideas was that we as human beings are governed by three major drives. Something assertion, so agency, protection, autonomy, those types of things. The next one is pleasure, which has healthy and unhealthy elements to it. But then you bring up something that really piqued my interest. Because when I think of the word passion struck, to me, people mislabel it. to me, it's really about our drive, like what drives us.

33:29And so I loved your word that you used, generative drive. Can you talk about those three things, how they impact us, and specifically this defining term generative drive? Yes, yes. Thank you for asking. It's one of the main points of the book. In addition to saying, hey, we can understand our mental health and build good mental health like we do our physical health. And here's a route to it, right? I'm making this point that we have been misguided in how we conceive of ourselves. The field of mental health has traditionally and across time seen us as having just assertion and pleasure drives in us.

34:08So that was considered as gospel. There are two drives in people. Assertion, we want to assert ourselves because we want to be able to do something and change the world around us. And why is that? Because we want pleasure, right? And that pleasure could be things that we associate with pleasurable things, food, sex, et cetera. But it can also be the pleasure of safety, right? Of knowing there's a roof over my head. So we're just asserting ourselves so we can massage or manipulate the world around us so we can find our way to pleasure. To conceive of humans this way is so patently and obviously false, right?

34:42Like we would not be here as a species if that is all that was going on in us. There would be no altruism. There would be no people who join the military and put their own health at risk in order to protect others, right? None of this would happen. We would not create art, right? We wouldn't offer a hand up to someone who's down when no one is watching, right? All the things that are best about our humanness come from our generative drive, our traditions of philosophy, literature, history. We've known this across hundreds and thousands and not hundreds, but thousands of years, right? We have understood this, but we haven't acknowledged it in modern psychology that what we want is to be generative.

35:24We want the world to be better. We want to leave the world better than we found it. And it's not just at our deaths, right? It's each day. Even if someone gets up and has a quiet victory of getting through their day, right? No one's going to celebrate them. Their day is difficult from when they wake up to when they go to bed. And they might think, all I'm doing is getting through all this, so I can do it again tomorrow. That person is being generated. That person isn't driven by, oh, I just want to massage the world and find some pleasure in it. That person sees a value higher than themselves, right?

35:55Maybe they're taking care of their family, right? Maybe there's a primary care doc getting up and doing the job because people rely on that person, right? There's something in us that's at the core of our humanness. And this is when we're happy. Again, it's not a Pollyanna concept. Like when you see humans that are happy, and we have a lot of data about this too, people who age happily, who've had a lot of trauma or tragedy in their life, and they feel good about life. They're living through the generative drive. And we can't expect it makes sense in a sad way that if we're just going to conceive of ourselves as assertion and pleasure machines, right, then of course, why would we not try and understand our mental health completely in an 1100 page book of numbers, right?

36:39It would make sense, right? Except none of it makes sense at all because the overarching concept is wrong. If we have to see ourselves as humans, right, what is it that we want? We're driving towards happiness. We want a sense of peace. We want contentment when we're considering our own lives, right? Even the things that are negative, we want a capacity for delight. This is when we enjoy life. We feel good about life. We age healthily. We take care of our physical health. We're good people in the world around us. This is what we want and we're missing entirely the point that it's that we should be striving towards and how do we do that forget whatever plans you have this weekend because you're staying at home and playing on spin quest and there's never been a better time to sign up than right now new users get 30 coin packs for just 10 all the table games you love with hundreds of slot games and real cash prizes.

37:32That's at spinquest.com. S-P-I-N-Q-U-E-S-T dot com. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Avoid where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Well, we build good mental health. Yes, we look at what's wrong. We look at if I'm having panic attacks or I'm having depression or look at what's wrong, but we look in an orientation that says we know what we're striving for and we know what good mental health looks like. and we know that there's a process to go through right in order to get ourselves there so now we're not afraid we're not turning away from mental health we're saying yo that makes sense right i'm going to approach my whole life through a lens determined by my mental health i want to look at that i don't want to be afraid of that i don't want to polish the hood or look at the leaves when there's when we need to go to the roots hey let's go do that because here's the good news there are mechanisms of understanding we can understand the structure of self the function of self, how our drives are balanced, and we can make change, that is the sea change that I'm really advocating for, because I think it's there in front of us, and we know enough to do it.

38:39I like to think that there's some things in the book where there's some things that are original, I hope, right? But by and large, what I'm doing is taking what we know, right, through years of human experience in psychology, in literature, in philosophy, in our understanding of history and sociology, in modern neuroscience, in modern psychiatry, there's so much that we know that when we pull all this together, I think this is what we get. I'm not making it up in the sense that I'm just seeing this is in front of us. We know enough to put this out there and say, why maybe we should adhere to this, right?

39:14Because this is how we really take control of our lives, right? By taking control of our mental health. Now, even if you go back to Henry David Thoreau or William James or other great philosophers, a lot of them are really talking about this container. When Thoreau talked about quiet desperation, he was really putting a box around the architecture of the human self and that we were living differently from the way we should. So what I really enjoyed about the book is this underlying notion that you have that if you're going to emotions, behaviors that you want to change, it gets well beyond just symptoms management and it really gets into the core architecture.

40:03And that's one of the core aspects that I thought was this linchpin to the five-part structure that you bring up. Is that how you think of it as an architecture and operating system? I think yes, in the sense that we have these two foundational pillars and one is our structure of self and the other is our function of self. And upon those pillars, if we have health in those foundational pillars and we go and look and we see what isn't healthy. OK, let me go change that. What is healthy? Let me make that stronger. Then we end up with these really good things. We end up with a sense of empowerment inside that lets us meet the world with agency.

40:45we end up with a sense of humility inside we let ourselves be human including all the trials and tribulations and failures and everything else that comes along with being human then we meet the world with a sense of active gratitude now we're engaged in the world with agency and gratitude and they're grounded in good real healthy places and it's a pond that we can keep our drives in balance and keeping our drives in balance where we're governed by the generative drive helps those foundational pillars stay healthy right and now it helps us find that happiness that we're looking for, the peace, contentment, and delight.

41:18And that helps keep the system all in check. So you can see how we can have an upcycle of goodness where the foundational pillars are in check and the things that ride on top of it are in a good place and we're governed by our generative drives. So our assertion and pleasure drives are in balance. And I've seen over a quarter century of being a physician, this is what health looks like, when people are mentally healthy. And it doesn't mean that it's perfect. If we're alive, We all have our issues, right? Okay, that's part of being alive. We can meet the world from a place of good mental health.

41:49And then we're ready if difficult things come our way and difficult things will always come our way. And we're also ready if they don't. And when they don't, we're ready to get the most and the best out of life. It is this that we want. And you're mentioning Thoreau and James, and we can go back farther. We can go back to Shakespeare and Cervantes were writing about this several hundred years ago. And we can go back to mythology and we can go back to folklore traditions around the world. We're like, this is what we feel as humans. We're aware of the generative drive in us. We're aware of the purpose that we want to feel, but we haven't taken that knowledge, which is historical human knowledge and integrated it to our conception of mental health right now.

42:32And then we end up with this giant book with 1100 pages of diagnoses. And then you end up going to a system that wants to help you. And at some point you realize I'm just a jumble of numbers that I don't understand. And when I go look at those numbers, I certainly don't feel understood. And that's not, we have to bring ourselves current. We owe it to ourselves to take everything we know as humans that have a species that survived across all this time and to put it together and say, Hey, let's use what we know to take care of ourselves. And yes, of course it's about us, right? And it's about the generations that come.

43:05It's about children. And if we don't have children, it's about young people, right? It's about doing the right thing for ourselves and for those who come after us. Paul, one of the things I experienced and I was diagnosed with dysthymia. I can never pronounce the word dysthymia. Oh, dysthymia. Yeah, dysthymia. Dysthymia along my journey is the world was changing and I didn't understand how, but I knew parts of me were starting to vanish and the world around me was starting to seem less bright. And I couldn't put my finger on it, which was one of the reasons that I went to get help. But an important part of my journey was I shifted the question I was asking myself and from what's wrong with me to what's happening inside of me.

43:57And when you think about that question, And someone who's listening might think, well, that's a small difference. But to me, it was actually a huge shift. Oh, no, it's a huge difference. Why is that such a big difference? And I'll let you talk and then I'll explain it for me. No, I think this is talking about something very important. Think about what you said, and I'm not trying to diagnose you during this time together, but it's interesting to say dysthymia, which just means chronically low mood, right? And I think given what you're describing, you're going to have a chronically low mood. It's like me coming in and saying my knee hurts.

44:35And then if you say back, oh, you have hurt knee. Okay, you told me something true, but it doesn't help me understand and it doesn't help me change anything. So the idea of why would a person have dysthymia, the whole concept there is there are people whose neurobiology, whose brain chemistry mean that even if everything is going really well in their life, there aren't traumas weighing on them. There aren't worries and anxieties intruding onto them. They'll still have a low mood. It's meant to capture something neurobiological that is not what's going on here, right? There aren't a lot of people who have life where it's running along very well, but their mood is chronically low no matter what.

45:14We're like, that's interesting. And it's a brain biology, a brain chemistry issue. And we should look at that. You're telling me about a person, you, who's had a lot go on in his life. And because of all the stress and responses to that, right, then you get your mind pulled off into some aspect of unhealthy behaviors or thoughts or conceptions of self. Of course, you're going to have a low grade, low mood. It's not that thing dysthymia is meant to capture. Right. But now someone gives you that diagnosis as if somehow that tells us anything. Right. It doesn't tell us anything. Right. And I think it leads us astray because now you probably felt worse.

45:49Okay, you have low mood. Let's give you another number. and you realize this isn't helping me at all. And instead of thinking about what's wrong with me, that wasn't helping you, right? You got a lot of numbers that told you that, right? What you say is what's going on inside of me? You made the gigantic leap across the chasm, right? Here, the chasm comes from the position, the place that modern mental health is at, which is not a healthy one, right? So you cross that chasm of being curious about yourself, of doing something the system didn't invite you to do. how about why don't we get curious about you why don't we the system or the treaters and you collaborate in a way that says let's get curious about you and what's going on inside of you were you like this when you were younger okay you had some childhood trauma do you remember before then what your mood was like if you don't okay how were you after that how are you between then and military related trauma i want to understand you as best i can because that's going to be the route to finding solutions to this and you realize that this what's wrong with me diagnostic paradigm was getting you nowhere.

46:49So you leaped across the chasm to say, hey, how about I bring curiosity to myself, compassionate curiosity, not beat myself up, what's wrong with me, curiosity, but real curiosity. And it sets you down a path of understanding yourself better and making your life healthier. One of the things I realized I was doing is I was following in the trap of the unconscious narratives I was telling myself, such as this feeling I wasn't enough, that I was broken, that I didn't matter, that I wasn't seen by other people. But what I learned when I started to understand myself and look at the underlying things that were going on was that whole story of myself could be rewritten.

47:32But you have to be conscious of it first. I think I had to become aware of the patterns that I was reinforcing in order to overcome them. And then And once I understood that, I started taking the steps to then consciously engage with my life and to start trying to figure out what was at the root of them. Because I figured if I'm having all these things, there's got to be something that was the starting point. And so that became my mission was how do I get at if there are tons of things bothering me, what was the core of that? And so that's what I ended up doing. And when I was able to do that and became conscious of it, I was then able to respond.

48:19And that restoration gave me back my agency. And I think through that, then I came back to center and back to self. And I think this is what your whole book parallels. Yes. That journey. Yes. I think the example you're giving of your own life is a beautiful, it's a beautiful example you got yourself to a healthier place because you realized i i need to understand myself and i need to understand what is this story i'm telling myself right and how am i telling myself this story am i saying to myself over and over again you're not enough you're not enough you're not good enough what's wrong with you if that's my dialogue to myself maybe in those words or in similar words how am i ever going to understand anything right i painted myself into a corner here and I need to stop and look at what it is that I've done.

49:13Why are these voices in my head? No, not where the voices are your own, it's your own thoughts, right? Saying that you're not enough. Wow. Like, why would that be? Right? Why would I say that to myself? Right? You start becoming interested in that and then that's your route to change. And I would argue it makes sense that you could not have gotten yourself better through any other route, right? How could it have been through any route other than understanding yourself. Then you start realizing, oh, I'm inclined, even though I'm doing all these things and I've done these things in life to feel good about myself, I feel like I'm not enough.

49:45Wow, where did that come into me? Do I want to tell that story to myself? I write in the book, there's two different descriptions of my own life. And they're both true. They're both based in fact. One is very negative and the other is quite positive, which the truth is whichever one I choose. The same was true of you. You could decide that you're not enough by telling yourself you're not. Now you've made that declaration, but is that really fair? Is that really what you want to choose? Right? It becomes a choice. And if you know, there's another conception of you that doesn't involve, oh, what's wrong with me?

50:18Why am I not enough? There's another conception that looks at perseverance and resilience and lets you own the things that you maybe don't feel great about in your life and still feel good enough. Right. Right. That this is the difference that allows for health. But I think that it is really quite amazing that you would have to come to that on your own, right? And you're a person who, you know, who has a lot of agency in him, just from what I know of you, that you're able, your brain and light bulb goes off. This isn't getting me anywhere. And I have to understand myself, just like in me, after the loss of my brother, when I was having unhealthy relationships, unhealthy friendships, drinking more than I should, becoming less healthy, there was something that said, hey, you need help.

50:56And I called the number on the back of the insurance card for mental health help, even though I was embarrassed about it because of the environment I'd grown up in. We were able to do those things, but people shouldn't have to find their way to that, right? The system should say, here's how we're going to come at whatever's going on with you. We want to help you understand yourself, right? Now let's talk about practical change. The system has to bring that to people. Otherwise we're not going to, most of us won't find our way to it, right? And maybe we find our way to it just from some element of good fortune, or I was fortunate to have an insurance card that had that number I was afraid to call.

51:33But at least I had the card and I called it. What if I didn't? Or what if you didn't have that light bulb go off? We are losing people to so much loss of good life that could be in life, loss of people having better lives, and at times actual loss of life because the system isn't framing things the way that you just said. Let's help you understand yourself and bring change. This is not what we're doing, but this is what we need to do to make our lives better. And sometimes it's what we need to do just to survive. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Paul. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Stanford professor Jamil Zaki.

52:10Very little bit to very small. So please help me understand more. Jamil, I love his books and his work because he studies cynicism. And where I'm going with this is I was a complete cynic for a long time. And I love the way you describe this. You say cynicism is a self-made prison. And that's basically what I had created for myself. And out of that prison, I became this term I use is a visionary arsonist. I wanted all these things in my life. And because of that cynicism and the statements I was making to my inner self, I was arsoning the very things that I wanted to better my relationships, my work environment, how I was interacting with my kids, all those things.

53:02And I think, as you suggest, cynicism masquerades as intelligence. How does that function for a listener to understand this? cynicism is a very unhealthy defense mechanism right it justifies in us it's also as aspects of denial and avoidance and rationalization it's false justification for stepping away from in our life so someone who's had their last three romantic relationships didn't go well who says i don't no one ever wants to be a good partner there's no one good out there to be found right i'm just i'm not I'm too smart for that to try and go find another partner or someone who is in a job they really don't like and they're miserable in the job and says there's no better jobs.

53:49Everybody's the same everywhere. Right. What it is, it's a rationalization for giving up on life, vitality, generativeness in your life. Right. And because it's rooted in us thinking we understand something, it provides another little bit of payoff to us that is just short term and is bad for us. It makes us feel smart and not naive, right? Anybody who thinks there could be a good relationship or a better job, that person is naive, right? So now we feel good about ourselves. We're feeling cynical. I'm smart enough and I know enough about the world to know, no, there's no goodness out there, right?

54:24But think about how dramatic, talk about making a prison, right? It's like the prison is made of cynicism wrapped in all that feeling of I feel good about myself, like I'm smart and I know the world, right? Boy, we seal ourselves inside of a prison, right because that is a lie right is it true that it's difficult to find a good partner and a mutual relationship yes is it true that it's difficult to find a good job in a good environment yes but difficult is 100 different from the lie of saying that it's impossible if we recognize that things are difficult we could say okay let's talk about how you could do this difficult thing maybe you could go about it differently than you've been going about it Let's help you do something difficult.

55:08But now that is inspirational. Aspiration, we say, come on, you can do it, right? Let's just figure out how things have not gone the way you want them to. Let's help you understand yourself and bring routes to change. We're acknowledging something is difficult and helping a person understand themselves and get to the other side of it, as opposed to this lie of saying, well, there's no good to be found anyway. And that, I think, is really the curse of cynicism. Paul, earlier this week, I was interviewing a gentleman named Walter Green. And Walter is 83 years old. And he reminded me of someone you talk about in the book, a gentleman in the book named Fred.

55:50Walter has the typical things that an 83-year-old would. But the reason I interviewed him is he is one of the most optimistic people I have met in a long time. And as a person who's 83, if I hadn't seen him in the camera, I would have thought he was 27 or 28 because he had so much passion and rigor for life and for this cause that he has to get people to start telling others how much they matter to you before it's too late. And it made me think about Fred because in Walter's case, it seemed like what was helping him remain as active and vibrant as he was remaining mentally and physically active.

56:35Maybe you can take this story of Fred and my story of Walter and build upon it. What does this tell us about Joyful Presence? I think Walter and Fred are role models for all of us, and they give us insight. right what it tells us about i think is the seduction that the society we live in brings to us and seduction isn't just about romance and sex it's anything that promises you something good and gives you something bad right so here there's a seduction in the world that's trying to tell fred and tell walter you should feel bad about yourself you should feel bad about your life you're 83 might not live that long you're not going to live 30 years right feel bad about that feel like, oh, there can't be a meaning to your life.

57:19You can't feel good about your life and your best years are behind you. This is all a lie, right? This is not bringing truth to us. It may be that, okay, I have more years behind me than in front of me, but so what, I'm alive right now. I'm not alive in the past and I'm not alive in some future I'm trying to think to. So then these are people who have within them, right? They have a healthy generative drive. I can say this for sure, that Walter and Fred are living through the generative drive. Well, I'm 83 years old. Walter must understand, look at what I've learned over these years. And I can bring something good to the world around me and say, talk to people, tell them you care about them before it's too late.

57:55It's something I've learned over 83 years. I'm overjoyed to bring that to people, to bring that realness. Walter's finding a value beyond himself, right? He is being generative. This isn't about manipulating the world so that he has some pleasure and enough food on the table. This is about the best of humanness saying, I want to live this way, right? And these are people who are not afraid of dying. We can learn a lot from people who are, say, in their 80s and not afraid of death. And they can find peace. They can have just peace, this freedom inside of themselves. They can have contentment. They can think about their lives, including things that haven't been the way that they want them to be, or tragedies.

58:31And they can feel good about their lives and how they've made their lives. They have the capacity for delight and getting excited about things. This is how people age happily. So shouldn't all of us be looking and saying, if there's a group of people who are really happy when they're in their 80s, say, or their 90s. Let's look at that, right? And when we look at that, lo and behold, we think they are living through their generative drive. And they're not buying society's lies that say, feel over the hill and feel sad for yourself and just feel bad and talk about death all the time and lament. The world is telling us to do that around this.

59:06And when we deny that, oh, that's someone who's happy, who realizes that he's 83 and isn't pretending he's likely to be here in 30 years, right? But gets it and is okay with that. Why? Because he's aware of the 83 years that have been, and he's aware of the things that are difficult and sad in that time. He's also aware of the things that he's learned, and he's so excited to bring something that he's learned that can change the lives of others. This is a way for all of us to live, and the answer is how is Walter living or Fred living through the generative drive. I'm bringing this all up because when people I talk to, especially those who are Fred and Walter's age, hear about passion struck, they always say to me, I would say 95 % of the time, that's for someone much younger.

59:52It's not for me. And what I love about your definition of generative drive, because it really speaks to what I think of being passion struck, you write generative drive is something where more is always better. It doesn't sit on a spectrum. Rather, think of it as something boundless, an endless ocean or the cosmos itself that you'll always be able to tap into and pull from as a resource. And then you go on to say the generative drive is an incessant drive towards goodness for yourself and others and everything else on the planet. And whether that impact is small or significant, it doesn't matter.

1:00:32It always is the case that kindness, creativity, altruism, art, feeling grateful are the compelling expressions of the generative drive for making life better. And what I love about what you wrote there is if you utilize that at any age, because that is what I came to embrace after going through this examination of self that I was going to focus on, man, it has completely changed the whole way I look at life. And it's why I do this podcast, because if I can live this way and think of life this way, I want everyone to feel this way. Because I think if more of us were living with generative drive, which I think is the point of your book, how much would the world be different and how much of the polarization, divisiveness, everything else that we're facing would go away.

1:01:25Is that part of what you're hoping to inspire with the book? Yes. The generative drive is a human birthright, right? We're human. We have bodies like this with organs like this. One example, we're human. So we have a generative drive in us and that generative drive, because it's the human goodness in us, what's kept our species alive and what leads people to do altruistic things. I think you learn something and you want to bring the news. You want to do something good for the world, right? What you're doing isn't just for you. It's good that it brings goodness to you, but you're doing it because you want to be a healthy, a good presence in the world, right?

1:02:00This is what inspires people. It inspires people to self-sacrifice. It inspires people to great things. This is the best of our humanness. More is always better. More goodness, more human goodness is always better. And it keeps everything else in balance. Like assertiveness, like too much assertiveness becomes over control. Too little assertiveness can be learned helplessness, right? So we want balance in the rest of us. We want our unconscious mind to be in a healthy place. We want to keep balance, our whole structure of self, our whole function of self. We're trying to keep something that's living and breathing us and our mental health and our structure and function and drives.

1:02:34We're trying to keep all this in balance. The way to do that is to be governed by what is core to our humanness. right and that's what saves us from cynicism right and it's what leads us to realness right it's not saying just feel good about everything and everything will be okay it's the exact opposite if you approach life through the generative drive then we will acknowledge to ourselves what isn't good right and saying okay you know what i'm doing okay except i'm interfacing with the world in a way that i'm too irritable it's making this up i'm snapping i'm jumping at people right what is going on to me, I want to go look at that instead of turning away from it.

1:03:11That's how I stay generative. When I'm generative, I can look at the problems in me because I'm coming from what's going right, including the human birthright of the generative drive and the good that it leads me to do each day. So an example would be the person who gets up in the morning and says, oh, all I'm going to do is I'm going to wake up. I'm going to do things for other people. I'm going to check boxes and check. I'm going to be exhausted at the end of the day. And I'm going to get in bed. And you tell me how that's generative or how there's any goodness in that, I would say, no, don't fall victim to cynicism.

1:03:40That's all generative. You have no expectation that pleasure is going to come to you from any of this all day, but you get up and you do it anyway. There's a lot going right in you. There's a lot that's inspiring you. Look how resilient you are. Look at your perseverance. Let's talk about why you're doing that. Why you get up in the morning. Is it someone you love? Is it spiritual? Is it religious? Hey, let's talk about that because you're being generative all the time, but you're not letting yourself even feel good about it. Right. That I'm going to be generative. I'm not even going to get any reward for it.

1:04:10Right. Today. So I should be able to understand what is going on in me when I'm able to do this and feel good that I'm able to do it. Right. It tells us we can look at ourselves and that's how we bring our lives. maybe that person who doesn't have any pleasure in the day, we'd say, come on, can you take, carve out 15 minutes of something that can be about you? Or can you take pleasure in that you're making sacrifices for others? Can we look at what you're doing and why? Is there a time horizon when things could get better? Now we're strategizing, right? We're looking at what's real and we're only going to look at what's real if we have to have a mechanism of understanding ourselves and a mechanism of bringing change, but we have to be like positioned about ourselves in the right way that says we're human.

1:04:53Our birthright is the generative drive. Let's look at how we're being generative. Let's cultivate more of that in us. And it's just guaranteed we are not steering ourselves down the wrong path if we're doing that. Paul, I want to end by giving the listener how they can apply what they're hearing, start using this in their lives. So in the last chapter of your book, you give three reminders. You say, start or return to yourself. I think the next one was communicate often. And then the third one was fight well. Can you explain those to the listener and why these three things can help propel them to use all the concept we've been talking about today?

1:05:38I think, yes, what they're intended to do is just to help us ground to ourselves, right? Touch base with ourselves, but then stay there. So what is going on in me? There's so much temptation to look outside of us, right? If I feel upset, it's like, who am I upset at? Who's making me upset? What am I mad about in the world, right? How is something else getting to me from outside? And we have to bring the spotlight back to ourselves and say, okay, I don't have to be afraid of looking at myself. What is going on in me? If I'm having conflict with another person, okay, what is that person bringing?

1:06:18What am I bringing to the table? What can I do to bring a solution state to this? Or maybe I want to disengage, right? I'm the person who has agency over me. Let me try and understand myself as best I can so that I can solve these problems. So in bringing the spotlight, the idea is to help us be intentional and to remind us that we can look at ourselves. And I don't need to be afraid to say, hey, if I want to really see who's behind most of what's not going right in my life, who has responsibility for most of it, I can go look in the mirror. right i can go look in the mirror and i'll see right the answer to that is me and i don't have to beat up on myself because i can find that empowering what can i bring to understanding myself and having a better and making my own life better if i'm doing that i will be healthier and happier and i'll bring that to the world around me so i'm having conflict with someone and i stop and think that person always wants to have conflict they're cynical that's how they go about life, then I think, well, do I think I have to set a boundary between me and this person?

1:07:24Right. Or maybe I'm having conflict with a person because whenever I get more frustrated with life, I feel less patient with that person. Let me bring this spotlight back to me. We don't have to be afraid. Am I going to find the problem in self or other or both? Right. Because I have a route to understanding myself. I'm not beating up on myself. I'm bringing compassionate curiosity. Why am I doing all this? Because I want things to be better. And I try and bring in the book a lot of routes of inquiry. Here are steps of how you can make this better. And I want to bring that message here that we're only scared to have the spotlight on us, right?

1:08:01If we feel ashamed because of some reflexive stigma about mental health and we feel disempowered, how about we get rid of both of those things and say, if you're having mental health issues, that's because you're human, right? So it's okay to look at yourself. And if you're looking at yourself, right, and you have a structure around doing all of that, then the thought is like, you're going to find a route to healthy change. That's okay. Right now we've taken away so much of the fear and confusion that makes us turn away from mental health. Paula, I'm smiling because of my solo episode tomorrow, I capture the Truman show, the movie in it.

1:08:38And I use this analogy of a spotlight, but I used it differently. When people think of the Truman Show, they often think of the last moment when he runs into the side of the sphere that he's in. And I think the real moment of transformation that initially gets not even noticed is when the spotlight falls from the sky as he's driving down the road and he's, what is going on? And yet everyone around him is acting as if everything is normal. And I think a key point is we need to look for those moments because I think we do what Truman does in our own lives. And we have these things that are pent up and we just go along with life as normal instead of looking at the sign and then starting to build the structure of ourselves.

1:09:30So I thought I would just end there. I think that's a beautiful way to end. And I think we could think of that as saying, if it's my life, it's okay. The spotlight is on me. I don't have to be afraid of that. And if I let the spotlight be on me, it's not a selfish thing either. I'll be the healthiest I can be for myself and others. It's okay. It's your life. It's okay that the spotlight is on you, right? Because if the spotlight is on you and you're looking at yourself, well, you're going to bring understanding. You're going to be better able to define your life that way. Paul, I always try to end by having the audience have the opportunity to understand more where they can reach out to you, where's the best place for them to learn more about you and your work?

1:10:08So there are two websites. One is drpaulconti.com, and it's just D-R, and then my first name, Paul, and my last name, Conti. So drpaulconti.com. And then I work with about 30 like-minded people, and we do a lot of different direct mental health and consulting-based work. We do general work. We do intensive work with people and with couples. And to see a little bit about me and then also how do we work here? How do we feel like this is the approach to helping people? How do we feel mental health should be practiced? The website there is pacificpremiergroup.com. So just pacificpremiergroupstrungtogether.com.

1:10:49And then there are links there to the podcast and to media and to the book. So from there, there can be links to anything else. Paul, it was such an honor to have you today. and congratulations on this fantastic new book, What's Going Right. I highly encourage it for all my listeners. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Dr. Paul Conte. And what stayed with me most is this. Transformation begins the moment we become curious about ourselves instead of ashamed of ourselves. Because so many people move through adversity carrying invisible narratives, that they're broken, that they're damaged, that something is fundamentally wrong with them.

1:11:28But as Paul shared today, lasting mental health is not built through self-condemnation. It's built through self-understanding, through compassionate curiosity, through awareness, and through reconnecting with what he calls our generative drive, that deeply human desire to grow, to contribute, and to make life better for ourselves and others. Because maybe transformation isn't about becoming someone entirely new. Maybe it's about reconnecting to the parts of ourselves adversity tried to bury. And next up in our Forged in Adversity series, I'll be joined by psychologist and bestselling author, Dr.

1:12:00Guy Winch. In that conversation, we explore emotional first aid and why heartbreak, rejection, failure, loneliness, and shame often leave wounds just as real as physical injuries. Because transformation doesn't only happen through major life events. Sometimes it begins the moment we learn how to care for our emotional lives with the same seriousness we give our physical health. moods are extremely contagious as when somebody comes home irritable or preoccupied or anxious or worried or tense it radiates to the it creates that vibe in the home and so there are all these ways in which we really bring work home not to mention that so many people are dealing with after emails that they have to check in all the time so they're not even they're still really at work.

1:12:49They're still dealing with it. They're still in that mindset. They don't even get the evenings or the weekends to fully detach and to be somewhere else mentally, physically. For all of those reasons, we absolutely bring it home and then it really infects the home. If today's conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who may need it. Leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and explore more at theignitedlife.net. Until next time, remember, adversity may shape your story, but it doesn't have to define your future. I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck.

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