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

27:24Things like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, frabo, my ultra, inflammatory diseases of the gut, and so on. Why?

27:39So those diseases tend to happen to people not just to go into my own observation, although it's very much my own observation when I was working in family practice and palliative care. Before I did addiction medicine, I noticed that who got sick and who didn't, it wasn't accidental. It's a subject of my book when the body says no, and then again, in the methanolorma, people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own. I identified with duty role and responsibility, so they're working the world rather than their own true selves. They tended to suppress healthy anger.

28:23So they tend to be very, very nice in peacemakers, and they tended to believe that they're responsible for other people's field, and that there was never the disappointment anybody, two fatal beliefs. So these are the people that are going to my observation, but are going to a whole lot of research as well, that I didn't even know about, but have since found elegant research. These are the people that tend to develop autoimmune disease. Now in this society, which gender is more acculturated, programmed, to suppress their healthy anger, to be the peacemakers, to be the caregivers. Women, this is a function of a reality that a lot of people deny, but it's a patriarchal society, which we can talk about, but it's not a conspiracy, it's just how it works.

29:07So me and my marriage expect my wife to absorb my stresses. And if I'm unhappy, guess who I blame, and who do I take it out on? So she would experience somebody who's, can be hostile for no reason, and blaming, and she used to walk on her neck shells. No. Thank God, she's not the type to do that for too long, and at some point she'll call my bluff, and then either wake up, or she says, thank you very much, but enough of this. And so she would experience somebody who's irritable, and unwisably blaming, and not taking care of their own needs, and then expecting her to take care of them for me. And we both had to go up.

29:55Now she was programmed that way as a child. Her parents had a lot of problems, and she became the peacemaker and a caregiver emotionally, and then she cares that role into her marriage with me. And here's what the bad news is, for people, we always marry somebody at the same level of emotional development, or trauma resolution as we are. So when we met, we were two traumatized people, not even realizing it. And then we played out our traumas, and I played it out in a typical mailway, which is to be aggressive and demanding, and resentful if she wasn't around to mother me. And that's what she would have seen.

30:35And this dynamic can still arise, except when it does, she puts a stop to it right away. And I have the grace and the wisdom, I know, to understand, yeah, I'm doing it again. In fact, I haven't done it since then, because I just don't want to be that guy. But that's what she would have seen. And what was going on inside your head? Were you anxious? Were you depressed? I was anxious, and then I want her soothing. I want her... How should I say this? There's an interesting sexual dynamic between men and women, that men very often, unconsciously expect their women to mother them, to give them a mothering that they didn't fully receive as kids.

31:25And the women take on that role, because they are culture -rated and in society to do that. But then what happens sexually? No healthy guy wants to sleep with his mother, and no healthy woman wants to sleep with her son, so that the the the order and the you know, the passion kind of drains out because of this unconscious dynamic of women mothering men and men demanding that they do. So then I become frustrated. And then who do I blame for that? I blame her rather than looking at how do I contribute? How do I have to create this situation? So all that stuff played out in our marriage, and we've had to learn a lot from what didn't work.

32:10In my relationship, when I was most anxious, it's also when my relationship nearly ended, with my partner, because like you said, I inadvertently took it out on her, because I felt that she should understand how I'm feeling and basically adapt to me. Exactly. And she didn't, and so there was conflict, because I felt like she was misunderstanding me. Yeah. And wasn't like acting in the right way to meet the needs that I had. Like she couldn't understand, you know, and say that, I think I wore her down, and then there was kind of like, as you say, that ultimatum moment, where she's basically saying this, and shall I just go?

32:54Yeah. And what you probably didn't do, and what I didn't do for a long time, is just to go over and say, you know what, I'm feeling anxious. Yeah, that was what happened after. You know, you know, and I'm feeling unsettled, and I realized that I have resentful feelings towards you. You know, instead of owning it, we act it out. Yeah. And then why don't they understand us? You know, and actually, so what we're actually demanding is that, we can be children emotionally, and they be the mothers who, without any effort on our part, will understand and see us. You know, and this is a strong dynamic, in men, female relationships.

33:35And what tends to happen is, is that men then, women at some point, get to the, if they're healthy enough, and if they're not strong enough to assert themselves, you know what happens, they get sick. And, you know, this is a mouthful, but a lot of women's cancers and autoimmune disease are precisely because of this self -repressuring. And I could talk about that at great length, the physiology of it. But either the body will somehow say no for them. That's why women are much more like to be an antidepressants, because they're taking a medication for both of them. You know, and so either the woman gets ill, somehow, or she asserts herself, and says, I'm not doing this anymore.

34:18At which point, the guy will go seeking a younger mother, who's not yet mature enough to assert herself. And this happens all the time in relationships. The cost of self -repressure, the cost of sort of emotional repression. I think everybody is guilty at some point in their life of repressing their emotions. I think men do it a lot as well. I mean, if you look at the suicidality in the UK, I'm just going to direct it out on themselves like that. What is the cost of self -repressure? Now you talked about the physiological mechanism of what's going on when we repress our emotions and how we feel.

34:51It's been well studied, not just by me, but others and documented, that repression of healthy anger disturbs the immune system. Now, why should that be the case? Now, healthy anger is simply when somebody is intruding on your space, and they won't resist. You say, you're in my space, get out. That's healthy anger. It's in the moment. When it's done its job, it's finished with. It's different from chronic rage, which is a whole other thing. No. In other words, anger is a boundary defense. That's all it is. Animals do it. Ah! Get out of my space. You know, no. The emotional system in general has the job of the human emotional system.

35:44In general, has the role of allowing in what is nurturing and loving and healthy and welcome and to keep out what isn't. That's the job of the emotional system. Let me ask you a trick question. What's the job of the immune system?

36:05Okay, I'll answer. It's to keep out what is unhealthy and unwelcome and toxic and to let in what is nurturing and healthy. So the immune system is like, it's been called a floating brain. It is a memory. It is reactive capacity.

36:23And it allows in new two -man's and vitamins and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and unhealthy, invading organisms and so on. In other words, the immune system, an emotional system, is exactly the same role. That's the first point. The second point is they're not separate systems. Physiologically speaking, emotionally similar to the nervous system, hormonal apparatus, and immune system, are all one system. And there's a whole new science when I see a new 60, 70, 80 years old, called psychoanuminology, that studies the unity. So it's not even that all these things are connected.

37:06They're one. So therefore, when you're suppressing one aspect of it, you're also suppressing the other. So people that repress healthy anger, they have diminished the immune activity. And this has been demonstrated. So the repression of emotions has a physiological function. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turned against you or to fail you when it comes to malignancy. The immune system, like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day, because nature makes mistakes. That's not a problem. The immune system recognizes them as...

37:43Cancer cells don't have on their surfaces, markers that are normal cells do. So the immune system says, this is a foreigner. It's an enemy. I'm going to destroy it. But when you repress your emotions, you can also undermine your immune system. And now your immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it and allows it to... to proliferate. There was a British surgeon in the 1960s who operated on, am I talking too much? No, you're not. There's no such thing on this podcast. Okay. Because I just get so passionate about this stuff. And the reason I get so passionate about it is because it's so important in healing.

38:23And we as physicians could do so much more for people if we understood these scientific facts what we don't as a profession. Anyway, there was a British thoracic surgeon called David Kissen in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice that people emotionally repressed or more likely to get lung cancer. Now, it's true that most people who get lung cancers are smokers, but out of 100 smokers, only about 10 or 15 gets lung cancer. Which doesn't mean that lung smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer. It is. But he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed, that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking.

39:14And the more repressed they were, the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer. This guy noticed this in the 1960s. So emotional repression has huge implications physiologically. And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma. Why? The child is born with some fundamental needs. One of them, as I've articulated earlier, is for attachment, for closeness, proximity, unconditional loving acceptance by caring adults. Not just a human child, all mammalian children have that need. We thought that they don't survive. So that's called attachment. Seeking of closeness and proximity for the purpose of being taken care of, or to take care of the other.

40:04And our brains are wired for attachment. We have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships. And that's so important all through our lives. But especially when we're infants and young children. No, we have another need. We've already talked about it. I just haven't named it. The other need is for authenticity. We used to be ourselves connected to our bodies and our gut feelings. Because again, without access to our gut feelings, we don't survive. Out there in nature, where we evolved and where we lived until 15 ,000 years ago. And so that authenticity is very important to be connected to yourself, so that you know when you're safe and when you're not.

40:46You know what you want and what you don't want. You know how to say no when you don't want something. You know how to say yes when you do. That's authenticity, auto the self, being ourselves. And to go back to Harry, his challenge all his life was that he wasn't allowed to be authentic. He had to pay a certain role and fit into a certain set of expectations of how to be and who to be. And he could never figure out who am I really, you know, in that context. But that's so general. So many of us face that challenge of who are we really, who are we authentically, as opposed to what's expected of us.

41:23Now, so we have these two needs. Attachment, on the one hand, authenticity and the other. Ideally, the two are not in conflict. Ideally, you can be in a relationship or I can be in a relationship where we can be ourselves and be accepted and connected with. And that's ideal, all our lives. But what happens to a young child where if they're authentic, they're not accepted. So for example, certain psychologists recommend that angry children should be punished for their anger. Rather than their anger being understood as to what it's all about and the child being taught different ways to express it, they just to be punished for it.

42:12And by different ways. By the way, if you're a parent of a two -year -old and if you don't frustrate your child, you're probably not doing a good job because you two -year -old may want to cookie before dinner. And you say, no, cookie before dinner. Oh, cookie, yeah. In a minute, they're throwing a tantrum because what do even adults do when they're frustrated? They throw tantrums. Children, that's just what they do. They have no self -regulation yet. So the two -year -old gets upset. Now you punish them. You give them a message. You're not acceptable to me when you're angry. You have to be a certain way for me to accept you.

42:52Well, you mustn't be sad. Cheer up. What's wrong with you? So when children are given this message of conditionality that you're acceptable to me, only if you behave in ways that I approve of, otherwise the attached and relationship is threatened, then the child is faced with this choice. This is not a choice at all. Do I stay attached to my parents? If my father is an alcoholic and the only way I can find acceptance is by repressing my emotions and not showing my sadness in my fear. Do I show my sadness in my fear or my anger? Or do I threaten their relationship? Well, there's no choice at all.

43:43The child will choose the attachment and therefore they give up connection to themselves, which is the essence of trauma, that disconnection from ourselves, not in my own words, in the words of other trauma, the theorists who I agree with, the worst aspect of trauma is the disconnection from ourselves. And we do that for the sake of maintaining the attachments, which means for the rest of our lives will be afraid to be ourselves. This is what they call people, pleases. People, exactly. So, Cheryl Crow, the American singer or musician, developed breast cancer. And she said that since my breast cancer I've been a different person.

44:25Until then, I was always trying to please others. And now, and it used to be voices in my head that I was telling me that I was wrong. I don't listen to them anymore. So that people, pleasers, are the ones who gave up, not by conscious choice, but as a matter of survival, their authenticity in order to stay liked and accepted and not touched with. But then they carried that on in their rest of their lives. And they were at risk. I always worry for the very nice people. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this.

45:08I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time back to this episode.

45:35You always worry for the very nice people. Yeah. You talk a lot about that in when the body says no. Yeah. Why is being nice a potential risk to one's health? Well, there's two places to be very nice from. One is just genuine human compassion and concern for others, but you still grow older than yourself. That's great. But a lot of people are very nice because they are afraid not to be. Because they weren't like who they were. They weren't love for who they were being nice. It was the way of getting the love and the attention they needed. Let me tell you a story. In 1870, there was a French neurologist, a Jean -Martin Scharco, who was the first one to describe multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammation of the nervous system, very debilitating.

46:27And Scharco said, in 1870, without any scientific research, but just from his own observation, that this was a stress -driven disease. Since then, there's been a lot of research to show how stressed and trauma potentially had multiple sclerosis. It's not even controversial. Not that any neurologist knows that. They don't get taught to stuff at medical school, but the research is there. And I presented in my books. In any case, when I was writing when the body says, no, a group of a self -help group of multiple sclerosis patients formed me and said, would you come and talk to us? Because I understand you're working on stress and illness.

47:09And I say, yeah, I sure will come and talk to you. And there's about 25 people in the group. This is the Vancouver, Canada. And I gave them very tentatively, apologetically, apologetically. I said, look, I don't know this for sure, but the sense I get from my work in family practice and palliative care is that the people that develop your condition and other conditions tend to be people to be pleasers. They tend to have difficulties saying, no, they tend to be very nice people. And I said, you know, I'm sorry if I offended you. I don't mean to. I'm just giving you something very tentative. I haven't done a research yet.

47:42I'm just giving you my observations. They said, you just described us. And they all said that. And there's a woman who says, in the group who says, I don't know what to say, no. I said, terrific. Give me $100 right now. She says, well, I don't have $100 with me right now. I said, it's not a problem. I said, outside this building, there's an ATM machine. We can go on after the meeting. We can go out. You can get $100 to give it to me. She says, I'm not comfortable doing that. I said, listen, I'm just trying to get you to say no to a ridiculous demand by a perfect stranger to whom you own nothing whatsoever.

48:28She said, I can't say the word because in childhood, by the way, when you have kids, you're going to find out what the word no means because age one and a half, all kids start saying no. They say that long before they say yes. Why? Because that no is the boundary defense of, I figure out who I am. I'm not going to exceed to your demands. I need to figure out what I want. Put your shoes on. No. The pen thing, this is something wrong. There's nothing wrong. It's nature, individuating the child. When families punish that, the child will repress the no and the body will say in the form of multiple sclerosis.

49:11For example, niceness, ALS, amertrophic lateral sclerosis or known and Britain has more or no on disease. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with it. At age 21, he was told he'd be dead within two years. He lived another 55 years. Doctors don't know everything. But there's been studies on ALS patients. They're extraordinarily nice. So there was a, from a Cleveland clinic in Ohio, a major referral clinic, two neurologists published a paper at an international ALS or more than neuron in Congress. Why are ALS patients so nice? And what they describe was that when people came to their office for diagnosis before they met the physician, they had underwent EDX, electro -diagnostic testing of their nerves.

50:05And the technicians who performed the tests would write on the side of the test. This person can't have ALS. She's not nice enough. Or I'm afraid this person has ALS. They're too nice. And their physicians, the neurologist specialists, said, despite the shortness of their contact with their patients and the, obviously, unscientific nature of the observations, invariably, they turned out to be right. And then I called Dr. Wilbur and who did this study. And I said, what are the other neurologists say when you presented this, they said, oh, said, yeah, we all noticed this. We just can't explain it.

50:39Since then, there's been a study where they've asked neurologists about their patients. And the answer is, all our ALS patients are so really nice. No. What the neurologists don't do is they don't make the connection. That that, that, that, that, that, that niceness is a repression of healthy anger. And that repression of healthy anger plays a role in the onset of that disease. So it's not an accidental connection. So why do I ever word very nice people? Because they're putting themselves at risk. Again, niceness can come from genuine, concerned brothers. But that's not accompanied by an ignoring of yourself.

51:20You also care for yourself. Then you can be as nice as you want. But you also know how to say no. And you also know how to say boundaries. You don't know how to say, and you know how to be angry if you need to be. But the niceness that comes from self repression, that's the one that hurts. There's clearly going to be a lot of very nice people hearing that. That know their nice, that know their people pleases, that know they've experienced in their lives, the consequences of putting everyone else before themselves. It's funny as you were talking, I was thinking about the person that I know who I think is nicest.

51:57And that individual is sick all the time. And I just connected that dot in my head. But I remember making a joke to her about, oh, you're sick. So I'm like, whatever, you're sick a lot. And then also thinking, oh my god, she is probably the nicest. Nice is an interesting word because that can be misconstrued as like, hiya, or like, you know, saying nice things to someone else. But it's really at a deeper level from what I've observed in that person, putting everyone else before them, or chronically serving other people's needs before their own. Well, so my contention is, as I said earlier, when people don't know how to say no, the body will say no for them in the form of illness.

52:38And for a lot of people with serious illness, the illness is the wake up call. And they actually learn. And when they do, that can make a difference to the course of their illness. Sometimes not always, but I've seen examples of remarkable healing when people learn to say no, and stop being people, pleasers. And I just only wish that physicians understood this. So when somebody comes to them with chronic eczema and all these other chronic conditions, they will not just provide the physical treatment, but they will also talk to the person about how much stress they're taking on. It's very stressful to take on everybody else's issues and ignoring you on.

53:16It's very stressful. That stress is a physiological impact on the body. How does someone who is a people pleaser? How do they turn that ship around? Because they'll hear that, but because their niceness or their people pleasing is so deep within them, and it started so early, they're not going to change. Most of them won't change. Well, they may change if they get sick, you know, and if they learn something from it. I've had a lot of people tell me that. But it happens very early, but it's everybody's second nature, not their first nature. It's a very interesting phase, second nature. It means that there's a first nature.

53:56Now, no baby is born as a people pleaser. No baby is lies there. No one day old baby lies there thinking, gosh, I'm hungry and wet and lonely. But gosh, mom and dad have been worked so hard. I better not bother them. You know, babies will express their needs very voluptly and very articulately and very loudly. That's how we're born. We're meant to be born that way. So that this suppression of that is our second nature. And that first nature never goes away. We can always retrieve it, but you have the outcome conscious of it. So in the mind of body says, no, I lay out certain principles of healing.

54:37In the myth of normal, I actually teach this exercise. Ask yourself this question. Where in your life are you not saying no? Where no wants to be said, but you're not saying it. Let me give you an example. Let's say I come to London and move friends and I call you up here. Even here I am, during a coffee. But you've been up all night helping a sick friend. Or otherwise you're just stressed to want to meet me right now. You're desires to say no. But what if you suppress that no? And you say yes for the fear of displacing me or disappointing me or losing my friendship? If I say no, God, or won't like me anymore.

55:21What's going to be impact on you if you keep behaving that way? Physically, what's going to be impact? I'm going to be more tired, more exhausted, probably going to be more stressed. All that. Yeah, you can be resurrected from... Yeah, exactly. So it's not a... This person, they need to... I teach this exercise in the book about where am I not saying no? And what is my belief behind saying no? I don't know if he's coming back to me. And I depend on galbos liking. Yes. Which means as a child you depend on your parents liking. And you have to suppress your nose to be like, thirdly, where did I learn this belief?

56:07But if I say no, I'm not likable or I'm guilty or I'm not worthwhile. And the fourth question is, who would I be without that belief? You know, and so if your friend does exercise regularly, believe me, she can turn it around. But it takes some practice. Who would I be without that belief? Yeah. When I put myself in her shoes or I put myself in a people pleases shoes, I wouldn't... I'm a people pleaser in certain environments, but I wouldn't say I'm generally. Yeah. I can imagine someone would respond to that and say, well, I'd lose all my friends. She'd find out who her friends really were. Because the real friends would celebrate it.

56:49They'd say, oh, finally, we're so glad to see you being yourself. The friends that were just using her or relying on her to be their supporter unconditionally will turn away. And I say this to people, this contest between attachment and authenticity can be a painful one. But you can decide which kind of pain you want. As a child, you have no choice. As an adult, it's true. If you're authentic, you might lose some attachment relationships. That's going to be painful. But which pain would you rather have? The pain of being authentic and losing some friendships that were no friendships at all? Or the pain of losing yourself and all this implications and all this impacts on the body?

57:34So it would be difficult for her and through some relationships that she has now. They would fade away, but my God, she would also attract Muslim or genuine and authentic relationships. And her true friends would really celebrate her. You know, let me tell you something. They just recruited me. Forget it. There was a book written by an Australian nurse about 12 years ago. This nurse, like I used to work in palliative care with dying people, she works with in hospice, with dying people. And these are people who tend to die of malignancy and chronic illness well before their time. I showed a book called The Top 5 Regrets of dying people.

58:15For anyone. And you know what the top regret was that I wasn't being myself. That I wasn't true to myself. I wasn't being authentic. That's the top regret of dying people. And the third one was that I didn't express my feelings for fear of disturbing or displeasing others. So authenticity is not just a new age concept. It's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings. Or one more thing. So yesterday I was in Westminster Abbey. And I was looking at all these beautifully and articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists, to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and dispoiled native people all over the world.

59:12They're the heroes of the British Empire. And I think one of the reasons there's such a strong pushback against the idea of trauma in this society is if you recognize trauma which exists not only on the personal individual level, but very much on the collective level. The ruling elites in this country would have to come to the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of foreign peoples. Which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry. Is that a point of that out? Let's face it, the royalty, the wealth that I was born into was achieved that the dispoilation on oppression of people around the world.

59:56So trauma is not just a personal issue. It's very much a social and collective and historical issue. What's the cure? Because if we're many of us are byproducts of generational trauma and we're seeking different ways to ease our pain through the means of addiction, whether it's pornography or heroin or alcohol, we can't all afford expensive therapists. But we exhibit those self -destructive behavior patterns maybe every single day, maybe with social media addictions or whatever. What do we do? Unfortunately, the healthcare systems in the world have very poor appreciation of the emotional contribution to people's physical or mental ill health.

1:00:44And most physicians and most psychiatrists are not trained in it. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap between science and research and medical practice and the other. It's maddening sometimes to contemplate it. So the first step would be to educate the caregivers. Just educate doctors about the actual science of the mind -body connection and the impacts of trauma. Educate them. So when you go to a physician with sacronic fatigue or inflammation of your joints, they don't just give you the necessary medication which I'm not against. But they also ask you what's going on. So that's the first thing.

1:01:31The second thing is let's prevent the problem. So let's support young families to be really there for their kids. So that families don't have to struggle economically. And their parents are so stressed. As I may have mentioned, I've forgotten now, when parents are emotionally stressed, economically stressed, according to a number of studies, the kids' stress hormone levels are abnormal. And that is a harbinger of future disease. And so let's look after young families. Let's make people feel secure. Uncertainty, lack of control, lack of information. These are some of the drivers of physiological stress.

1:02:17So let's create a society where there's a more sense of mutual acceptance and communality and social support. Let teachers be educated that the kids who are so -called misbehaving or kids who are actually troubled, troubled because of stuff at home. And that solution is not to exclude them or to punish them, but to actually give them emotional support in the classroom and in the schools. Let the schools be. The human brain, according to Harvard study, develops from before birth. It's an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. The necessary conditions for human brain development is safe, supportive, emotional relationship with adults.

1:03:09Let everybody who deals with children, social workers to teachers, to daycare workers, to kindergarten supervisors, to parents, understand the emotional needs of kids and provide that safety. Let the justice system, so -called, about which there's very little just, in Canada, 50 % of the women in jail are indigenous. They make up 6 % of the population. 50 % of the jail population. You call that justice. You take the most traumatized people who then act out their traumas and then you punish them for it. So let the medical system, let the educational system, let the legal system understand child development and trauma.

1:03:54Now, in terms of the adult, to answer your question more specifically, so there's a social answer, but then there's the individual answer. Yeah, a lot of people can't afford good therapy. It's true. It's expensive and even if there's a lot of people who are good therapy, but not getting appropriate therapy. Well, if you can't afford therapy, go to the library, read some books. My own, but not just my own. I could rattle out five of the books you should read. Read Dick Schwartz's book on an internal family system, it's called No Bad Parts. Read Best of Vandercos's book on trauma called The Body Keep the Score.

1:04:31Read Peter Levine's book, Waking the Tiger on trauma. Read Oprah Winfrey's and Boost Perry's book, What Happened to You? Read Boost Perry's book called The Boy Was Raised as a Dog. I'm interviewing Peter Levine. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. Oh, good. Wonderful. I'm glad to hear that. He's one of my mentors and friends. And we often work together. So this is, and, and, and all of these books will have some advice about how to help yourself, including my books. Then there's a lot of stuff on the internet. So this, the interview that you and I had a year ago, I checked this morning, has been seen by a two and a half million people.

1:05:14I'm sure it's helped a lot of people. It's a lot that you can get. Just, you know, freely. Nobody's going to get in charge to, you know, on the YouTube. Lots of my talks are available. Lots of talks about the really good people are available. Do that. They're self -help groups of all kinds. Is there a risk here? This is what the, the one side of the narrative sometimes argue that you can kind of over -traumatize your life in terms of over -labeling everything that you do as a trauma. So, you know, and, I mean, that always happens, right? When, when people become aware of something, they become over -aware, and they start over -labeling and saying, that's a trauma response, that's a trauma response, that's a trauma response.

1:05:59And they kind of live with a feeling that they are inherently broken. Yeah, but my point is that nobody's broken. Actually, I talked about our first nature. That's always there. When people recover, it's an interesting word recovery. What does it mean to recover? When you recover something, what are you doing? Going back, sir. You're finding it. Oh, yeah, I'm sure you're the definition of the word, isn't it? What do people find when they recover? They find their true selves. That's what they'll tell you. That true self never went away. Nobody's damaged goods. Nobody's broken. To talk about trauma is not to disempower people but to empower them.

1:06:38If I learn that my response to the British media and the hairy issue was actually nothing to do with the present moment, it's actually some old programming. Oh, okay, now I can drop it. Are you glad it happened? I'm glad that everything happened because everything is learning. Nothing in this life is wasted if you know how to use it properly. So what I'm saying is that to be aware of trauma is not to lose power but to gain it because it's not an excuse. I can't keep going to my wife and saying, I'm being resentful of you and punishing you because my mother didn't take good care of me when I was a baby because she was too stressed.

1:07:20You know, I mean that's lack of responsibility but for me to understand that my demands on my wife to take care of me like a mother would of a baby, actually is my trauma response, then I can drop it because I'm not a baby anymore. I don't need, I'm not that helpless, I'm not that resourceless, I'm not that ungrounded so that when you recognize trauma, it's not in order to use it as an excuse. But actually to overcome it, that's the whole point. When we talked about the suppression of our emotions in anger, you used the word healthy anger. Yeah. Because there's a risk isn't there when you're saying that anger can be a positive thing that people will then assume that berating someone behind a counter or a waitress in a restaurant because they got one item when you're all wrong is standing up for your boundaries.

1:08:14I've done it. No, it's not. So healthy anger is in a moment and it's just a boundary defense. It's not outrage. It's your my space, get out. That's its purpose. That's its only purpose or to protect something like a we want to see anger.

1:08:37Try and tell a mother bear not to be close to their to their cobs. You know, you'll find out what healthy mother anger is all about. You know, that's just healthy. The kind of rage you're talking about. Have you ever had that kind of rage? Definitely on a spectrum. I've got, I've got, so the reason I struggle with the answer is because I've got a friend that's fully shown me what the. That's the extreme side of that is where we used to call it the red mist with him where he would literally lose control. Which is instantly what a hair used to call his anger. Oh, really? Yeah. My friend, so my friend, my friend, one of my best friends in the world, he talks about this all the time is he had, you could trigger him by saying something, usually by saying he was wrong about something or something like that.

1:09:24And then he would just lose it. So I remember the last time it happened was, and the pandemic rolled in, I was staying with him in his apartment because the lockdown and I was living in America at the time. And we were discussing the virus. And I said to him, I think people that are older and that have certain health situations are more at risk. And he said to me, no, people that are younger are more at risk. And I said, I showed it in an HS website which said, no, it's people that are older at more at risk. Yeah. And he just went into this red mist where he was totally triggered and lost control of his emotions.

1:10:04Okay. So if you observed and then what you would have noticed is, remember what I said about healthy anger. It's in a present moment. Once it's done, it's gone. Yeah. Your friend, the anger he gets, the anger he gets. Yeah. So the rage just keeps building on itself. Now we talk about a fit of anger. It's a good word. You know what else we talk about fits is epileptic fits. In epileptic fits, certain electrical misfiring in the brain, then recruits other brain circuits and it gets more and more and more, until the whole body is shaking and the person even loses consciousness and soiled themselves and so on.

1:10:39That's an epileptic fit. A fit of anger is the same. That a fit of rage is the same. So that the more severe it gets, the more brain circuits it recruits or rather than expanding itself, doing his job and then being gone, it actually gets worse and worse and worse. That's unhealthy anger and triggering is a good word. Because look at what the word triggering means. Now if you look at a weapon, how big a part of the weapon is the trigger? This big. For the trigger to set off anything, there has to be ammunition there. There has to be explosive material there. So your friend is carrying a lot of explosive material.

1:11:22I can tell you, your friend never felt understood or validated as a child and he's still carrying the rage of that. So you trigger him and then by disagreeing with him and all the pain of invalidation, all the rage of not being understood, nuggets triggered and recruits more and more brain circuits, not can tell you something. Healthy anger is essential for our physical integrity. That rage in the aftermath of a rage episode, your risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles for negative the next two hours according to studies. Because what happens? Your blood pressure goes up, your blood vessels narrow and the clotting factors and your blood increase.

1:12:04So of course you have more risk. So the repression of anger can lead to chronic illness but so can rage, lead to heart attacks and strokes and so on. So anger is a delicate thing. Should I tell you something about my friend that we found out because he then went to a childhood psychologist. Oh good. And that's why I said that was the last time. So you can imagine that was three years ago. Yeah. The pandemic two, three years ago. He went to a childhood psychologist and what they uncovered through their work was that as a kid, he was not only a foot shorter than all the other kids. Yeah. But he was both dyslexic and struggled a lot intellectually.

1:12:41So the people around him and on his report card basically called him stupid as a child. And then he actually found a text message at some point between his mum and his nan where they were diminishing his chances of success. And he grew up with this deep sense of like, I am not intelligent, a deep deep sense of it. And it's come out in all of these ways as an adult and that you're right. That's what was going on in that moment. I was challenging. I was taking him back probably. Well, and you know what, again, to come back to you, that's what happened to him. They called him stupid and fickle and naughty.

1:13:19And he was none of those things. He just had trouble of concentrating and paying attention because of all the stress. I found out that he had a 30 -HT as well. Yeah, yeah. And so in his book he describes that he had been told he had had post -traumatic stress. I didn't diagnose him with all the stuff. It's in his book. I said, you know what? But I think given that you were distracted as a kid, you're trouble paying attention. They called you stupid. This is ADD. And I wasn't saying he's got a disease. I was saying, you actually, that was a normal response that you had to an abnormal situation where you were under a lot of stress and they made you wrong for it.

1:13:59They called you naughty. They called you stupid. They called you fickle. You're not any of that. Now the whole bunch of British psychiatrists got the nickers tied in a knot because I made that diagnosis. You know, my God, people, I was saying to the guy, you don't have a disease, you have an oral response. So, circumstances, you were not stupid ever. But children undergo this character assassination like you offended. And imagine the rage inside him. So when you disagree with him, you're triggering all that. It's just, that's just how it works. Now, interestingly enough, people call me stupid.

1:14:39That's not a trigger for me. Yes, not for me. Because I know not. You know, I always grew up with a sense of my own intelligence, not over -stated, but I know never had any doubt about it. But certain things you can do, like not see me and that'll trigger me. And for context for anybody that doesn't know why you not being seen triggers you. Well, look, I was born, you know, I may have mentioned this last year. So I was born two months before the Nazis occupied Budapest. Then they started exterminating all the Hungarian Jews. So literally, my life was under threat because they didn't seem as a human being.

1:15:19They saw me as a vermin. Now, not that I knew that directly, but my mother, can you imagine what it was like for her to have a two -month -old and living under the risk of death all the time for whole year. And then, as I mentioned before, she gave me to a stranger to save my life. And I didn't see her for five weeks. Well, that's not being seen. My father's not there to see me because he's in forced labor. So literally, not being seen threatened my life. So no wonder when people, when that happens now, you know, that for me is the trigger. No, of course the answer is, is to see myself. If I fully see myself, it doesn't matter whether you see me or not.

1:16:06So if you see me, if you're not seeing me, if you're distorting who I am in your mind and in your words bothers me, it's only because I'm still cunning on you, at other people to see me because I don't want to see myself. If I'm fully confident in myself, I say, gee, it's too bad. Stephen doesn't see me. Well, maybe we talk about it or maybe he'll never understand it, but I don't live in his mind. How do I fully see myself? It's hard to do, right? It's hard to do because when you were seen, it's not hard to do because you children see themselves through their parents' eyes. But when you were not seen, then you have to learn it.

1:16:58This is one of the things to go back to meditation. That's not the only way. First of all, notice all the ways that you're not seeing yourself. Like two days ago, when I had this anxiety about how I made it, I didn't give my best talk on Monday evening. You know what I did my best? I mean, I'd been perfect, but I prepared for it. I put myself out there for two hours and I spoke a lot of truth. Might have been the best, but so what? But at that moment, I wasn't seeing myself. You know, I can still lose it. So meditation, which is the form of meditation that at least I am learning, is about just noticing and seeing what's going on inside without judgment.

1:17:40So being aware. So let's practice. And you also suggested removing the things from your life that will stop you from seeing yourself. Like social media. Well, because that can be an off. I can't remove social media from my life, but what I can remove is my attachment to it. For example, I don't have to look at the comments on all my talks on YouTube. Who says what? Who likes it? Who doesn't like it? You know, I'm not on Facebook. I don't have a professional Facebook page, but I don't administer it. But people go on Facebook. And who says what? Who likes me? Who doesn't like me? You know, they can win themselves off that.

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1:19:37That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. The social media and all of these things, these stimuli, I feel like they've... I'm concerned that many of us are living in a state of chronic stress, mild background, stress. And I say that a lot because the amount of times that I catch myself, I speak to James Nesta, who talks a lot about breathing and breath. And the amount of times that I now catch myself, very shallow in breath, after just looking at my phone or thinking about something, to get my skin to get some oxygen back into me, in bed at 1 a .m. as I'm trying to sleep, catch my breath being shallow.

1:20:15During this podcast, when I start thinking about something, my breath gets really shallow. Looking at my phone, my breath gets really shallow. I feel like I'm living in a state of like constant subtle background stress. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned breath because it's one of the... To go back to the question of what people can do for themselves, they can learn to breathe. And Eckhart Toli is a spiritual teacher. He says that... Broad and Gorda retreats and therapists just take a few conscious breaths several times a day. I mean, not that, not to dismiss the other, but that's more important than anything else.

1:20:54And interestingly enough, the Buddha, when he was teaching his monks, in fact, one of the Buddha's assistants, Ananda, asked him, or holy one, do you still meditate? And he said, yes. And what kind of meditation do you practice? And Buddha says observing the breath. So in Buddha's meditation, I'm not here to educate for any particular pathway and I'm not a practitioner of any religion, but he... This is very wise man. He taught awareness of breath as the most important portal into reality. What do you think the antidote is for the way we've designed our lives to be constant in this sort of stressful stimulation?

1:21:44Because we're clearly... I was just wondering if human beings are supposed to enjoy this much constant stimulus and stress in their lives. And with chronic inflammation and all these kinds of things, and now killing people at alarming rates, the diseases that are caused by inflammation, what can we do about our stress? And is it okay? Maybe it's okay? Well, it's the norm. So you can say it's normal. Is it okay? Well, the question is to be answered by looking at what the impacts are. And what are the impacts? You know, the impacts are very serious. You can see it on the individual level in terms of mental health conditions, as I said earlier, are burgeoning internationally.

1:22:29Or in my own conditions are... But if you look at also on the social level, there's more conflict, there's more division, there's more intolerance in our culture than it has been for quite a while. These are the impacts of the stressful culture that we're living. So is it okay? Yeah, if you want this, it's okay. But if you don't, it's not okay. It depends what you want. Relationships. Yeah. Romantic relationships. I feel a lot about the role that our trauma plays in our ability to form relationships. Obviously, societies changed quite profoundly in the last couple of decades. Different sort of gender transformations have caused certain mismatches and difficulties with people connecting.

1:23:15The world has gone very digital now. So dating apps run a lot of dating. I think 50 % of people originally meet online. That's their first point of contact. Dating is very, very hard for people. And there's a lot of people that are kind of giving up on it. Attachment, dating, trauma. I've come to learn that we are mirrors. I think I found love in my life when not when I discovered anything externally, but when I did a lot of work to figure out the barriers that were standing in my way of connection. Well, you just answered your own question? Oh, really? Yeah. We can't form proper relationships until we have the capacity to be alone and become to work with ourselves.

1:23:57You know, and the more comfortable we can be alone, which is different from being lonely, by the way. The more capacity to be with yourself and to grant yourself in your own truth, the more likely to be able to form meaningful and positive relationships. And rather than asking me, a lot of people are wanting to relationship to solve their problems. Then there's the initial in love phase where everything is just ideal. And then reality hits. And then all of a sudden that person who you're so infatuated with becomes your enemy and you hate them so much. You know, I mean, I've experienced such hatred for my life over the years.

1:24:41And when I've been disappointed or dissatisfied, you know, because I was looking to her to fill me with, and nobody can fill you from the outside. So once you no longer need it, once you no longer are dependent on it, then you can enter into a healthy relationship. Or to put it more positively, a relationship can be a real ground for mutual growth. So you can enter into a relationship. You're not going to be perfect. You're never going to be perfect. I'm carrying a certain degree of trauma, a certain degree of dysfunction, certain things that trigger you as we said earlier. But if both people are committed to the truth, which my wife, Ray and I have been, I mean, that's one thing you can say about ourselves, you know, for all the stuff that we've been through, ultimately the truth mattered more than who's right and who's wrong.

1:25:37So if you're committed to the truth and working it out, and if the fundamental love is there, then you can grow together. And so for me, the relationship has been a most important growth going ground of my life, not the therapy that I've had or the reading that I've done. Not that I'm dismissing any of that, but the actual relationship has been my most important schooling and how to become authentic. There's no real chance of a good relationship if one or more parties in that relationship aren't committed to truth and they're committed to being right or to victory or... It happens all the time.

1:26:17As I said earlier, people always meet at the same level of emotional development or trauma resolution so that water finding its own level. But when one person starts growing and the other doesn't, it becomes impossible. Either the person that does the growing gives it up and goes back to their previous selves, which is almost impossible, or the other person is challenged to start growing themselves or they're going to split. That's just what's going to happen. And again, to go back to the situation being men and women, this is what tends to happen. And I've seen it in my own marriage. I've seen it as a physician, as an observer of human beings.

1:27:02The couple are kind of getting along, but then the children come along. Now the mother's caring energy has to go towards the children. Where it needs to go. The father may feel now better than knows as a bit out of joint, because now they're not getting the attention. Another woman is a decision to make. Do I look after the three -day old baby or the three -month -old baby? Do I look after the 35 -year -old baby? And to the extent that the mother chooses to look after the 35 -year -old baby, she's depriving the three -month -old. A lot of women then make a choice that I need to look after my kids.

1:27:44And I can't put all this caring energy, mothering, caring energy into my husband anymore. And then relationships get into trouble, because the guys can't stand it. I've seen this over and over and over. I'm not saying it's universal, but it's very common. Sex. In your practice, I imagine you've come across this quite often where there's a sexless relationship and that's causing issues. What is typically the true cause of that, that disconnect with intimacy with sex in the bedroom? Because a lot of people are struggling with that. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think today we jump into sexuality way too early.

1:28:27In other words, we talk about intimacy. But intimacy really means the innermost. And we tend to have physical intimacy before we have emotional intimacy. So that people jump into bed rather quickly. I'm not being prudent, I'm not being prudent share. I'm not prescribing that you should only have sex when you get married or anything like that. But when we enter into sexuality early, without the emotional intimacy and the emotional authenticity, then the sex becomes divorced, becomes divorced from our real needs. And especially for women who tend to... I can't speak of everybody, but in general, women tend to want to have more intimacy emotionally.

1:29:16That becomes very hard. And if the emotional intimacy doesn't follow, sex becomes rather mechanical. Because mechanical? Yeah. So that's one big reason. The other reason we already talked about is sort of parenting dynamic between the genders. No, I know we only talking about the two major genders now. There's all kinds of gender variations these days. But these dynamics exist in all kinds of context. So that when my partner is doing all the emotional carrying or most of the emotional carrying, this is parent child relationship that really dedens the sexual drive. You know Marissa Peir? Sorry?

1:29:50Marissa Peir? She's a psychologist. She actually said to me the other day, never call your partner, mommy or daddy for this very reason. Yeah, well, or good. That's a good way to put it. I think it's because we put sexuality in this society, of course, it just glorifies sexuality. And if you look at some of the most famous sex symbols, who were they? Abuse women. In like a Marilyn Monroe, deeply traumatized child, and abused as an adult by President Kennedy and just about everybody. And she was the woman, everyone who was to sleep with. You know, so that is really distorted sexuality here. And for women, especially safety is so important for sexuality.

1:30:46Yeah. We talk about frigid women. But when do people freeze? It's a fear response. There's nobody who's true nature. It's just a response. And it's usually something happened to them or something is happening now. So that unmelting can happen in a condition of safety. And then the intimacy, the emotional intimacy is there, which creates the safety for the sexual opening. And that's the dynamic in my marriage as well. You know, my wife says, she says, truth is sexy. Ha ha ha ha. Such a good point. Is there anything in your practice that you're increasingly being confronted with in the last couple of years that you weren't seeing as much as you first started?

1:31:34What I see out there is increasing distress in this society and people are more of a confused. And young people are just so challenged. And in the United States, the rate of childhood suicide is going up. You know, suicide. You know, more and more kids are being medicated for all kinds of conditions. In the US, 70 % of the adult population is at least on one medication. A quarter of women, at least in the US or an antidepressants or antidemetications. Those numbers are growing up in Britain as well from all the statistics that I see. I see these are going manifestations of distress, what I call a toxic culture.

1:32:19I see that all the time. And look, I mean, the fact that this book, the myth of normal, is being published in North Macedonia and Thailand, in Vietnam, and in northern Europe and in Eastern Europe. It's just worldwide there's this epidemic of distress. That's what I'm seeing. And I'm saying people, either we can look upon this as some unexplainable misfortune and bad luck, or we can actually look for the actual causes of it in no way with that relate to each other, in a way that we raise our children, in a way that we approach ourselves. And I'm saying that solutions are possible. But yeah, the world is getting more and more difficult for a lot of people.

1:33:03I do see that. And I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon. You're not optimistic. So, Noam Chomsky once said that, when he was asked if he's optimistic or pessimistic, he says, strategically, I'm an optimist, and tactically, I'm a pessimist, which means that in the long term, I do believe in people. I mean, I am the same way. I do believe in human beings. I do believe in a human capacity to grow, to transform, to come to a deeper grounded sanity in themselves, both on the individual and the social level. I do believe in that. If I didn't believe that, I would just stay at home and read books and listen to music.

1:33:46I do believe in that. I'm optimistic in that sense. But at the same time, I think in a short term, it's getting darker and darker. And you can see that, Sony manifestations of that. So, yeah, I am optimistic. I believe in humanity and human beings. And I think we have a hard road to travel before we get to our better sense of self. And I have to close this conversation by seeking some solutions. You use the word solutions there and you talked about this better sense of self. We've talked about this from a social level. What governments can do to change the education systems and on an individual level, on a family level?

1:34:32What can I do? Well, first of all, you need to define what your actual goals are. Okay, so let me try. I want to be, I want to do work that serves others. I want to do work that I, I find fulfilling. And that keeps me challenged. And I want to, which incidentally serves your health, because it's been shown that people that live a life of purpose and meaning, they're physiologically healthier. I want to be healthy, because I want to do all of these things for longer. Yeah. I want to have relationships that are full and true and raw and honest. Okay. And I want to, I think that's it, that's the work in personal.

1:35:20And then I want to raise a family that is beautiful and pure and free of as much trauma as I can possibly make them be. And I want to be close to my children in a way that I wasn't close to my parents. Yeah. Well then, the question you're going to have to ask yourself is, what factors in your life support those goals? And what don't? What activities are you engaged in that will support those aims? What will undermine them? And seek to diminish or eliminate the ones that are undermining your goals and strengthen the ones that are supporting it. That's what it is. And you know, and your intentions, by the way, are not only superficially the ones you articulate.

1:36:10If owner or your real intentions, I have to look at how you live your life, not what you say about it. So, when I was a young parent, if you had asked me, what is your goal, what's your intention? I would have said this to happiness of my children. And I would have said that totally sincerely. If you had looked at how I live my life, as a work colleague, doctor, not available to my kids, always are out there looking for being important and serving others and being at the center of people's lives because I was so essential to them, my intention was self -importance. My stated intention, the happiness of my children, as much as I would have meant it sincerely, did not jive with how I was living my life.

1:36:59So, what you need to ask yourself is, when anybody in two -assum solvices, look at your intentions, both the conscious ones, and also the ones that show up when you look at how you actually live your life, and bring the tune to alignment. So, look at, again, what serves your intentions, and what undermines it. And look at that seriously. That would be my answer. It's so difficult to distinguish between the two sometimes, because, I mean, on the surface, the system you gave there are actually looking at how I'm allocating my time, and is my time being allocated towards things that would further what I'm saying my intentions are.

1:37:40It's a very useful exercise to run. But, you know, as I said, those things that I said, as my stated goals, I do find a disconnect, I think. I think those things have been handed to us. When we, when you ask them when they're goals, they will say things that will make the person asking the question, think well of them. Because there's one goal that you didn't state. Which is, I stay away from the selfish goals. No. What's, what was, what was, what I didn't say? Inner peace.

1:38:12Because without inner peace, you're not going to be able to serve any of those goals properly. Or if you were, you do that some risk to yourself. And so, how would that be for you as a goal? Inner peace.

1:38:26And then, if running around serving others in the name of this so -called higher goal, on the mind of your inner peace, then you're not on the right track. And, you know, I'm talking to myself. Talking to me as well. Yeah, yeah. Inner peace is not a selfish goal. It's from a position of safety, sorry, a position of inner peace that we can speak compassionately and truthfully to others that we can serve our other goals. But, you know, Eckhart Toly talks about our inner purpose and our external purpose. And you stated a bunch of external purposes. And that's why there's this, I believe, pardon the diagnosis or the analysis.

1:39:12But that's why that disconnect that you mentioned. Because the goals that you stated were largely external. And what are the internal goals? Inner peace. Very good. Yeah. Now, you have to put that into the mix. And once you do, I don't believe that. Now, nobody handed that to you. I just, I think this is the issue with the work of holics is we think that the path to inner peace is just by aiming at the external goals. I think, maybe it's some level that's what I believe. Work, holics, they can work their way or validate external validate or trophy their way or number one, but their way to inner peace.

1:39:52Because temporarily, when your book shows up as number one and the best seller's list shows up at all, you feel some inner peace. But it's addictive. And there's a wonderful physician and researcher Vince Feliti, who studied cell to trauma quite a bit and showing his relationship to adult negative outcomes. And he said, it's hard to get enough of something that almost works. And so, yeah, you can get that temporary inner peace, but look at the long -term consequences of the work holism. It's not inner peace. I can tell you that. You know, I can tell you how long your experience doesn't matter even how successfully you're out there.

1:40:32We started the conversation with this. It's never going to give you inner peace. Inner peace doesn't come from the outside. That's not a goal anybody ever handed to you. That's something that you have to come to yourself. You know this. How are you acting in line with what you know? Are you doing it well? You know what? I'm not going to give myself 100 % by any means. I mean, just look at this week. But I'm doing so much better than I ever did. And I'm so much more comfortable about it than so much more comfortable about the future as well. You know, I am. What is the one thing that we didn't discuss that maybe is the most important thing for my audience that are listening right now?

1:41:21That not that we should impose suffering on any children or anybody in order to teach them anything, life will bring its own suffering. But when suffering comes along, there's two things we can do with it. We can try and just get rid of it, not to feel it, to numb ourselves, or we can actually learn from it. So suffering and pain can be big teachers if you know how to relate to them. So when illness comes along, when a crisis comes along in your life, you might not know that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of two character letters, meaning danger and opportunity. So when there's a crisis, there's danger, but there's an also opportunity to learn and to grow.

1:42:07And there's such a thing as growing older. In other words, not just getting older, but actually growing older, and actually still keep growing as you get older. And that growing older actually has to do with becoming more and more authentic to yourself. So sometimes I do that successfully. Sometimes I don't, but that's the need of the journey. And I'd recommend that journey to everybody. You can actually grow older. In other words, you don't have to shrink. You can actually grow. When you said the word growth there, it reminded me of something you said in a topic we haven't actually talked about, which I did want to speak to you about, which is vulnerability.

1:42:45Yeah. I remember you making this interesting connection. I saw it somewhere online between vulnerability and growth. Yeah. And vulnerability is a risk for a lot of people. It's always felt like a risk for me. So vulnerability comes from the Latin word vulnerable to wound. To wound? Yeah. That's vulnerable to wound. And so as human beings, or as any living creature, we're all profoundly vulnerable. From the moment that we're conceived, to the moment we die, we can be wounded. We can be wounded physically. We can be wounded emotionally. That's just a given. When children are safe and seen and understood, they can accept their vulnerability, because they have the confidence that they can deal with it.

1:43:36When children are traumatized or not understood, not seen, and they're alone, emotionally, the vulnerability becomes too painful to bear. So be shut down or sense of vulnerability, not to feel the pain. But when you look at life, nothing goes without vulnerability. So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It goes where it's tender and soft, and there's these shoots that are very vulnerable. They can be eaten by animals or insects. A crustacean animal, like a crab, cannot grow inside a hard shell. What does it have to do when it needs to grow? It molds and becomes this soft creature.

1:44:19That's very vulnerable. But without that vulnerability, there's no growth. Without emotional vulnerability, there's also no growth. And so much of our culture is designed to deny vulnerability and to shut it down or to somehow distract ourselves from it. It was the cost. And the cost is that we stay mature and that we lose ourselves. That's what the cost is. So I also think vulnerability is, and I've just learned this from doing this podcast, that vulnerability is a great connector. Yeah. When I, much of the reason why I have good conversations on this podcast, I think is because I'm willing to be open myself.

1:44:57Yeah. Which, which then allows your client, your guest, the safety to open up themselves. And in your personal life with your friends, I mean, what's more, you can talk about the scandal of Newcastle beating Manchester City in some game recently by one to nothing. Which, I don't say to talk about a living test. Interesting to you, but which is more meaningful to you, that or when you actually share. What's your struggle? You struggle, then, what's going on for you? I mean, it's no contest. But so much of this culture is designed to distract ourselves from our vulnerability.

1:45:42Okay, but we have a closing tradition on this podcast, whether last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. Yeah. Question that's been left for you. It's quite a long one. Today is your last day on Earth. Yeah. You're allowed to make two phone calls. One phone call to the person you love the most. And the second phone call to the entire world. What'd you say on both of those phone calls?

1:46:21We're John Lennon saying all those years ago. All you need is love. And the phone call to the person you love the most? To the person I love the most, I don't have to say anything at all. Why? Because she knows.

1:46:43But if you were cooling her on that last day. I'd say thank you. What for? For everything. And, you know what? I may even say that to the world. I might even say thank you. You know, for all those struggles and the trials and troubles and tribulations of childhood and adulthood and parenting and career and all this. Thank you. You've given me so much. That's what I would say. If I wasn't giving advice, which is all you need is love, which is advice. No, forget that. I would say I just say thank you. How do you want to be remembered? As somebody who did his best to make a difference.

1:47:37And who made a difference? Which I know I have, by the way. So, not that everybody agrees with me. But I also know I've made a difference. What difference do you think you've made? How to say this without having to go, I go distical. But I get so many messages from around the world. I mean, literally from around the world. But reading my books, I've transformed people's relationship to themselves. So, made them understand themselves. I think I mentioned maybe in a different interview that the best review I have ever had of the myth of normal was that some young guy said to me, thank you for that book and I remembered myself.

1:48:23So, my work for those who are open to it really helps to connect them to themselves and to see them something clearly. And that's a gift. In a world where it's increasingly hard to see, it's really hard. Yeah, and it's hard for people to see themselves. And so, people don't see themselves as broken or as the tree will be damaged. But actually, they can begin to see their capacity for wholeness, which incidentally is the root of the word health, is wholeness. And so, that's the difference I'm making is that people can see themselves not as broken and damaged, but there's actually fundamentally wholen with some stuff to work through.

1:49:06That's it. We can learn so much from children, can't we? So much of your work brings us back to the first nature as you describe it as children. Yeah, well, a lot of parents will tell you and you'll find out is that the greatest teachers are your children, if you willing to learn.

1:49:26Gabel, thank you. Thank you so much. It's a difficult question to ask someone else about the impact they've made on the world, but even what you said I think is a huge understatement, because the people that I know close to me, like my partner, who just I mean her life, I think, has been changed personally, but also professionally. Much of the reason she does the work she does, the reason why she's not here to meet you, because she would have, she would have gotten the next flight to fly here, is because she's doing a retreat in the South of France with a big group of women. And much of the work she does there is built on the work that you've written about in your books and taught online.

1:50:04So not only have you impacted people personally, but you've impacted the next generation of teachers and therapists, which is going to be a generational, it's like a dominoes effect. It was counteracting the generational trauma is the generational healing that has come about because of people like you, who are wizards in our culture and that are willing in the face of often great, you know, adversaries who take a different stance to persist with truth. But thank you. And one of the things that most and hearten me is that when I go about London or any city in the world, just about these days, it's all kinds of young people coming up to me, thanking me.

1:50:44It's not people, I mean, people all ages, but I'm just so enthused by how young generations, like people on quarter of my age are coming up to me to thank me. Well, that shows me that it's making a difference. And if she could have been here and actually was so annoyed, I should have realized she'd booked a retreat on the same day that you were coming to London because she didn't get to meet you last time because she was in Bali. Oh, wow. Some other time. She'll be watching this, trust me. She's probably watching live right now. But thank you so much, cover again for your general, esteen, your wisdom.

1:51:12It's changed my life and it continues to change many other people that are listening to this, but all around the world. So thank you. Thanks so much.

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