The Body Trauma Expert: Medicating Kids Can Harm Brain Development! Eye Movement Trick That Fixes Trauma! The Secret To EMDR Therapy! - Bessel van Der Kolk

26:25And my son was a neurotic, typical child, very hard to control much at the time, many physical reactions. Very bright, but reactive, staying in bed, only playing computer games, and growing up to be one of the most loving, thoughtful adult parents, you can hope to meet. So both my kids have become very different people who I thought they were, but I have a very good relationship with both of them, even though we don't quite understand either of them. When we see dysfunctional behavior in children, I think one of the natural reactions is to give them some kind of medication or to attach some labels to them and say that they're broken in this way.

27:16How do you feel about that? Well, that is about saved by some, because I am a psychiatrist, and I know about how these labels are little crutches that never quite capture what somebody is suffering from. And people started wanting to put my son on medications, but I was a psychopharmacologist. I've been a study doctor, but I cannot do. And it's very clear that they were not helping him, and I didn't have to submit to authority as most parents would do, and say, oh, my doctor says this, and I say, I'm a doctor. I know about brains, and I know about kids, and I don't know what the hell is going on with my kids, but he doesn't have bipolar disorder, and he is not responsible to respond to lithium.

28:04And so, both my kids were major inspirations for really exploring what was good for them. And particularly grateful for my son, who was such a very scary kid in many ways, that my wife, whom I'm not a word from, she was really great also in terms of exploring what might be helpful. And so, but the medical to also be aware of is the issue of privilege, that I made enough money, that we could spend the longest time trying to find things that would help my son. If we were living in the housing projects, my son would have been terrible, misfit. But because we were able to give him so much supporting care by exploration, that he actually found a way of your age, his mental state.

29:02I mean, just on that point, there's a star -irad that children from the low -income families of four times more likely as the privately ensured to receive anti -psychotic medicines.

29:13That's true. 400 % more likely to receive anti -psychotic medications, if you want. Yeah, and that's a very big issue. It's not really my area of the rich produce, but giving drugs to kids is potentially very dangerous, because you interfere with natural processes of grain growth. Brain growth. Yeah. So if you give people medication that changes certain chemicals in their brain at the development of phase, it may actually change the way that that brain gets for it. And may not allow, as it happened with my son, who was able to compensate for many things, and his brain was able to learn how to react differently.

29:56If you suppress all that, your brain may not learn these new adaptations. You think we should be looking at social conditions before we look at... Social conditions, physical conditions, movement, touch, synchrony, music. I say, in our world, we go to stock in Western people are allowed to do things. They can do one thing, what they call take a swig, if you feel bad, you take alcohol, and that makes you feel better. So that's part of our respected tradition. It's taking chemical to change the way you feel, and anybody who says you should take that chemical, nobody ever says you're crazy. And the other thing that's Western people are very good at is yacking.

30:44So let's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and other things. And then I'd like to tell people a story that the first time we happened to Beijing in 1992, and China was still very poor and deprived, miserable, and coming back from the cultural revolution, and nobody could talk about anything, no, nothing happened on the mind, or nothing happened, no, China and Square didn't happen, it didn't happen. And China was filled with every park, then as now, is filled with people doing Chigong and Tai Chi. And I go down into the park and do Tai Chi Gong with the Chinese. What's that?

31:25Chigong, you said, the Chinese movements of it, and I do the best and I go like, oh my god, that's how this is a life, by making these Chigong Tai Chi movements. Which if you use embossed, people say you're crazy. But in China, you cannot talk, you can come that body down by the way you move. And I became very interested in how culture is about the world actually, have very different ways of helping people to regulate their physiology and their synchronicity. I want to talk about one of that, specifically this idea of movement and the role it plays in healing, just to close off from the part of childhood trauma.

32:04Yeah. Why is it so important for a child to grow up with a secure attachment to a caregiver? You become how people see you. You become how people see you. Yeah. So if you're a kid, and most people, most kids, the parents find me cute, or you have a music band parent, they say, oh, you're cute. If you're lovely, you're so sweet. And no kid is able to say, I'm just average. Now, look at building kids in the world, and I'm not any cute in anybody else. Now, when the kids get told you're really cute, that is your reality. And if the kids get told you're really ugly and nasty, I mean, that comes to identity.

32:46So you really become how people treat you early on in your life. And that's a very big legacy that I, as a therapist, deal with is these imprints of early experience, which are very difficult to change. Imprints of early experience, are they changeable? Yes, that is the great news. And also the amazing news that even though we know how to do some of that, we're not going there. So you can't heal from your childhood trauma? Absolutely. Everyone? That's my assumption, let's see, people. In your experience, you've dealt with patients your whole life, your whole professional life. How many of those patients do you think were healable?

33:31I really think that if given a chance and giving the resources, you can pretty much do something for everybody. One of the other. But the problem is, again, we go back to where he started before the microphone was on, is that our focus these days is on productivity and behavioral change, and not in how do we find out how to help you. All the things that I've described in my book, almost most of the things that I've described in my book, has been helpful, and that's 10 years ago, I know some other things since the time, are unconventional methods that do not get practiced in mainstream psychology.

34:18Because they need to be productive, and they need to be cheap, and whether you get better or not doesn't matter, who you cheap is the main motivation.

34:32I think the profit point of it is killing good practice. Your book was very interesting, because when I read the cover, and then I watched a video you had made talking about this, and it was sort of six treatments and stuff that exists within the body, things like yoga, you talk about theater and acting, and how that helps you to get out of your trauma centers. The body keeps the score. This was a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma. It became a meme, which is an interesting thing to see. Well, I use it in my life every day language with my partner. And I've heard people say the body keeps the score, when we're talking about how our body is holding on to those traumatic memories, traumatic things that have happened to us.

35:22For someone who is never read your book, and doesn't even understand the base premise here, what is the base premise of the title there? It's really that trauma is a visceral experience. What is a visceral? It's in your body, heartbreak and God bench. You're stiffening up. You've... Savannah, you lose your power. You tighten up. That's really where trauma is lives. I kind of see it as two approaches. You can either go, let's try and change the mind, which will then change the body downstream, or you can say, let's change the body, which will then change the mind. But is that... You could. But I do a lot of CBT with my wife, let's say.

36:08Yeah. I've poined out her irrational behavior, and then she should really see things from a different angle, and then she should really seek things correctly. And I really have much success with those. And I'm a bit surprised at psychology, does things that most spouses have failed in using very well? This somatic approach, I've only recently had this time for my partner, and she says it's amazing, and she's told me, to speak to you on this podcast, because she says, you know, you'll really help to change her opinion on this. What is this somatic approach to healing? It's very important to really experience what your body feels, and also allowing your body to do things that it has been afraid to do, and to explore how your body moves to the world in some ways.

36:59Why women just seem to be so much better than at this stuff than men? Because they're doing like Pilates. Sure. Pilates, yoga, these are all things dancing. These are things typically when and do more than men. And it seems women are just more in touch with it. Yeah. I think it's intriguing for us, because it's not exclusively women. Of course, men have always done it in armies, and basic training, and the military. And what's intriguing to me is that, you know, when people join the military, they often say, not very well put together people, and they go through basic training, and they really march together.

37:38They sing with people, and they climb barricades, and they go through composite physical experience with other people. At the end of 12 weeks, they feel competence, and they feel connected, and they have found a band of brothers. How did they do it? Not by yacking, but by having very deep shared physical experiences. One of the interesting things that you write about, which I found particularly interesting, because I saw little flashes of myself in the words, is you said, I found that the more traumas your patients have in their background, the more creative and successful they often become. Often, often.

38:17And we don't know how often that is, but I get to meet quite a few of you. It's the people who have had to struggle, who often see new possibilities, and have no choice but to discover new options. That's true. That's true. But, you know, but those are the people who manage to get into my practice. The people who don't find those solutions, don't have to wear with all and the capacity to make it into therapy with me. They might be outside with a drug addiction. Getting drugs, lying on the streets, etc. And to largely, I see it as an issue of accident. You know, this past year, I visited a program in Los Angeles called Homeboy Industries.

39:04It's a program for formerly incarcerated, largely that and man who had no fathers who had been criminals. And it's a spectacular program where they honor, they say, what do you need, how we can be together, how can we make safe place for you? And I saw a real treatment there, St. Quentin Hospital. St. Quentin Prison, famous prison in California, is now a genre based. I used my book as a protector, and they're transforming people's lives. By acknowledging the reality of what they dealt with, helping people to be part of the healing system, working in groups, working with movements. Like, it's in Quentin.

39:49They have hula dancing classes. I go like, yeah, moving together with other people, if you have some connection, some of the pleasure. I mean, they're really beginning to understand you can do it. It's a heart of the hospital. You wouldn't do the hula with people. You wouldn't dance with people.

40:09I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment community that says, you'll get better returns if you invest in someone, an entrepreneur or a founder. That is a little bit traumatized. I actually think, I don't want to miss Quentin, but Barbara Cockrin, who's a shark on shark tank in the USA here, on the show, and one of the things she said to me was, with all of her investments, the ones that tend to do the best are those that have a little bit of a trauma in their past. And she says, because when they call me with a problem, they call me with the solution attached. First, people who have never had trauma, they call me and just tell me the problem.

40:46So they call me and say, listen, Barbara, this has happened, and this is what we're going to do about it. And that was her, you know, she said it in a slightly humorous way, but I wondered if you thought there's any truth in this idea that. Yeah, I think that's again a selection bias of people she works with. I know certainly plenty of people have had plenty of people working for me, who really get paralyzed in the face of challenges. And how don't have a solution and become very dependent on getting the vaccines? So I think she has a bit of an unusual sample actually. Because I wondered if you've had an anomalous early upbringing.

41:24Does that make you an anomalous adult? Does it increase the probability that you become a anomalous, slightly different adult? Oh, absolutely. And I can go everywhere. You develop a mind and brain to fit with that particular situation. And if that particular situation doesn't help, you need to find new solutions. And so trauma and abuse really forces you to find, try to find new solutions. But many of them are not successful. Is trauma a story in your brain? No, trauma is a perception of your brain. A perception of what's the difference? So the issue is something happens. And your brain and mind takes it in and then makes an adaptation to that particular event.

42:07That depends on how old you are in a circumstances. And it's very different for different people. You mean example of a perception? If you would beat me up right now, I'd go, this guy is crazy. And I'd call people and ruin your reputation, etc. If I'm three years old, you start hitting me as a kid. I don't know what to do about it. And I'll likely think, I did something wrong that I cost the guy to beat me up in a terrible prison and no wonder that he beat me up because I'm a horrible creature. And that was almost everybody who I know who was beaten as a child, has the internal understanding of it, not by your age or 15 years old, but when you're very young, that becomes your experience.

42:56Because you're still forming your perception of the world? Yeah. You bring, creates some map of the world. Very, very deep ways. And so, experiences form an internal wasser of the world that makes you expect certain things at certain times. So if I walk into a room and I see a person who looks like my old uncle who we have to play with, I start filing up to you because you're on the top deep level. It might be of that very nice uncle that everyone said. I don't know that, but my brain is set to interpret the world in a particular way. So, one of the things most profound research experience was purely accidental.

43:40We started to do war short tests on people. What's that? In blood tests. So you showed some formless ink picture and we showed it to people. And we saw that people had completely different interpretations of what they projected on that ink blood test. And that really brought hope to me that we all are living in different worlds. And that are like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those cards. People had never been in combat, didn't see that. Waved victims saw torn for ginors and torn bodies. Other people didn't see this. So once that becomes large into your perceptual system, you continue to interpret the world in that particular way, having to do with what you have the answer in the past.

44:31And an ink blood test for anyone that doesn't know is basically just a piece of paper with random ink. As I was saying, yeah. But it's been analyzed on about 100 ,000 people over the years. So there's certain patterns you can detect in it. I've never done an ink blood test. I feel like I should do one. I learned as much from my ink blood test as I learned from my brain imaging. But brain imaging is respectable. And the mind is disappeared. But for example, in our psychedelic research, I still very much hope to do ink blood test because as Michael Collins says, how do you change your minds? But you know, measuring how people change their minds.

45:10How many people do you think, I mean, this is maybe a ridiculous question, but how many people, what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form? How you define it? You know, the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused. One of five people got sexually abused. One of eight kids with his father has been their parents. Et cetera, et cetera. So you know, if I sit in the room, it's not a binary issue. It's not either you're trying to tell you, you didn't get traumatized. But when I talk to a room of professionals, which I do a lot, I assume that at least half the group visibly knows what trauma means.

45:55And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging from scans. If I was traumatized and you scans my brain, is there something you could see? Not necessarily. I can see how your brain may be different from other people's brains. I may take a particular population, you can average it out, and you can say, there's a little more activation of the barrier act, or to gray a little bit less of the bite insular. So you see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, you know, I think we learn a lot about the brain, but we don't know much about the brain.

46:36And I think people tend to offer states how much the brain pictures can teach us. You know, I love the Hubel's telescope or the web telescope. You know, our brain is like a universe, and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably complex connections in the brain. But we have learned a few things from the last 20 years. So how does trauma affect the brain? The effects of brain that you tend to, there's one part of your brain that I call the Cockroach Center of your brain, the peri -across gray, that lights up on the neatly amygdala every noose to birth. The mix of these days, the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger.

47:20But you traumatize your likely that that little part of your brain way back in the brain, your brain's time is firing all the time. You're all the time you go like, I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm in danger. And that's where it starts in a very elementary sensory level. You don't know what the danger is, but you just feel that you should be scared. And then there's certain parts, other parts of your brain, for example, insula, which makes the connection with your physical sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down. Because the experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gutvenge.

48:07And if you have a lot of that, you can learn to shut that part of your brain down. So you don't feel your body so much anymore. I mean, you don't feel your body so much, you don't feel very alive either. You don't feel so scared all the time. But it's likely that you will want to take some drugs to make yourself feel alive sometimes. And stuff like that. So the part of my brain, you said just around the amygdala. Below the amygdala. People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically. This function keeps firing. And how does that answer you? And then the amygdala.

48:44So there's a constant sense of subliminal dread. Is that anxiety? Exiting already too high of mental actually. It's more elementary. It's like you're dog shaking. And my dog has adopted a dog. And two years later, the dog still walks through my heart. You've adopted a dog in a shakes in your house, though. But still never quite comfortable. And that's how many times you meet a never quite comfortable. So when someone says they trigger it? Now trigger isn't a higher level thing. Okay. So then the next level is indeed the trigger that is imparted mediated by the amygdala. Is your amygdala if you smoke the tecta.

49:30That tends to become hypersensitive. So that minor things can blown up. And a minor thing that you may say to me, I take it's the most insulting thing in the world. And so you're constantly triggered by things. And that makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me. And it's not like I'm hypersensitive. And when you have an off day, that's your issue and not my issue. No, when you have an off day, I feel you off day. And we start getting in trouble together. I've got a picture of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector goes off. Is that what it looks like on the brain when you're...

50:13I just want particular guy. Nobody is exactly the same as everybody else. Can you explain this to me? But basically, but you see here is... This is a guy who has been living terrible car accident he was involved with. What you see here is that the right posterior part of the brain is temporal parallel junction on the right side of the brain fires. And that's the feeding part of your brain. So you go, oh my god, oh my god, I'm terrified. But there's no cognition. Basically the left side of the brain starts to down. So when you're in your trauma, you don't become... You're not a reasonable person.

50:52You actually become a little bit of a blubbering idiot. All of us, when we really are angry, upset, and not very articulate. But we have a lot of feelings. And then the piece that I showed is that as he is this guy who is living his trauma, these two parts of the brain go offline. This is the dorsal natural, perform the cortex. That's the part of the brain that's the time keeper of your brain. So if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say, I go, oh, it's not a high level. I have an LB okay, so let me just put off with this. But when you get traumatized, the time keeper disappears. And this is all there is.

51:35Illusion, sense of perspective. And that is what's happened when you're in your trauma. You don't know the difference between the past and the present. Because the time keeper of your brain goes offline. And whatever is your feeling is real. It's supposed to be feeling like a memory. So if you get it, yeah, so if people that can't see it in this brain scan, what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated. The left side looks like it's off off. And then there's these two blank empty spaces that are not activated, called the doors. The lateral pre -fall cortex. That's the system in the brain that give you a sense of time.

52:15Okay. As long as you have a sense of, it's like little babies only a sense of time either. Whatever happens, happens totally. Do you see a child slowly grow in the sense of perspective? It's happening right now, but tomorrow it will be different. Okay, so that's when, I mean, you'll be that's when you get anxiety right when you start thinking about the future. It is about having a perspective of this is happening right now. So I'm really scared, but the moment I go home, the moment I call my friend, I feel better. So you need to have the capacity for perspective and the perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma.

52:55And you become a trauma disperse. So this particular person, this brain scan that I have here, this guy was in a car accident. And the the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in a, an FMR eye scanner. And he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain. So he was showing maybe a car accident or something? No, no, we specifically his car accident. Oh, you showed him a picture of his car. What did you see? What did you hear? What did you smell? What were you thinking? Very specific sensory details. Okay, so you're... Somebody else is sensory. You were sensory details.

53:30And the right side of his brain was illuminated. Yeah, lighter being became very active. Yeah. But what got inactivated was the time keeper of his brain. So he could not lie there and say, oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday. He is believing what happened yesterday. Instantly. You feel like it's happening right now. And that's the nature of trauma. Trauma is not a memory. It's a reliving. Are you consciously reliving it or is your subconscious living? We feel like it's happening right now. With all forms of trauma. But not... It's happening right now, but my feeling is happening right now.

54:11And my body... You don't know that the feeling is actually belong to the time that your dad used to be to you. It is now I feel the same way because I disagree with you. So I've been triggered in the past and I felt that sort of instant final fly response because something's happened or whatever. And it's instantaneous. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's over. And so people are confused about it and say, oh, you've relived the past. Now, actually, you're not aware that you relived the past because the past is the present. So you don't think all this remains to be about the time that my dad used to beat me around for years old.

54:52No, it feels like you are beating me right now. And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering? Yeah, he did quite well. He did EMDR actually. I moved from disinsertion. And what was his results? He is an alright guy. He's functioning. He's not a longer -term desperate. What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice? Oh, really? People really come into life. People just saying it's over. Give me the most... The best example. The good example is the videotape I showed you people yesterday of a woman, again, terrible car accident, freezing, upset, freaked out.

55:42And then three sessions later, we go talk about it. He says, yeah, this shitty thing happened to me. I was in his car accident and I jolted for it and my head was full. And boy, that was terrible back then. But I'm not ever granddaughter and I drive my car to my granddaughters. I have five. Three sessions it took. Three sessions, yeah. Every sergeant, psychedelic, therapy, all the time. What did you do in those three sessions? Bigel, your fingers in front of people's eyes. For me, EMDR was the gateway to work. Sorry. I've written three books about PTSD. I actually wrote a very first book in which the word PTSD exists in 84 or something.

56:26But they didn't know how to treat it. So I'm a world renowned expert, but I have no idea how to treat it, because people keep reliving that trauma and they don't know how to stop that. And so many starts telling me about EMDR and I don't believe it. A word of it. And they say, just, you move your fingers in front of people's eyes. I mean, you move your eye from side to side as you relive the trauma. And I go, that's crazy. Everybody who hears it, that's crazy. And then people start doing it. And they show me how it works. I go like, wow. And people indeed have a certain sub sample of people we studied, indeed.

57:07After a few sessions of EMDR go like, yeah, that's really sucked. But it's over. It belongs to the past. It's not happening right now. You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal that trauma? Well, then of course, we had to do a little research, which took us 15 years to get enough funding to do it, to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth. And then we discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you recall, a traumatic experience is you activate certain pathways between the temporal parietal junction, which gives you a sense of self and your insolventures, your body.

57:45So your brain is able to say, oh yeah, this would happen to me, but it would happen to me in the past. So these are pathways that make it possible for your brain to make that distinction. And in the research that's been done on this, what did the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy? Oh, in terms of, in our research, 78 % of the people who had adult cancer trauma, so being assaulted or raped by a stranger, 78 % of them were completely cured. But that's not the majority of people we see it because most people we see have early childhood trauma, which is much more complicated history.

58:33Early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment. Yeah, because your early childhood experiences create who you are. As if you go to fancy college when you're 18, you do become identified with a college, but it doesn't radically change into a new person. How about it comes part of your identity? But if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life, you actually become that. The imprint is very deep early on. So it's called eye movement desensitation and reprocessing treatment. I was just looking up some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions, with PTSD, a 2014 metronautist of 26 randomized control trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size.

59:30Depression, a 2024 systemic review and metronautist encompassing 25 studies and more than 1 ,000 participants reported that it alleviated the pressures, depressive symptoms. The same 2014 metronautist noted that EMDR, a insignificant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect. And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data metronautists concluded that EMDR is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates. So can you show me how it works? Can you do it on me? I could.

1:00:14Can I move my chair? Of course you can. You're going to come closer. So can you bring to mind and really to rather unpleasant experience you have had not to long ago? Yeah. And when can you bring to mind what you saw at that point? Yeah. Can you remember what the voice sounded like at that point, or whatever it was, any sounds come to mind? Yeah. Do you remember what your body felt like back then? Yeah. Can you remember what you were thinking or bring to mind what you were thinking?

1:01:05Yeah. Okay. So how vivid is your feeling right now of recollecting it? Like a six, seven out of ten. Okay. So stay there. Now follow my finger with your eyes. So look at me right now.

1:01:40Okay. You could do both.

1:01:46So what comes to your mind right now is we're doing this. I feel calm. Yeah. I just don't feel calm. Okay. So when you go back to what we're just feeling, what's it like now? It's.

1:02:09It's hard to recall why I was bothered. That's the best way to describe it. That is the weird stuff. Why is that? Is that just because it's a why is that? No, it's a that is that is what's so great about this work. We don't know the linearity. And we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint is gone now, but it is. And you know, of course, if you bring up something much worse than what you had gone through, it takes a much longer and a lot of other stuff comes up. But somehow EMDR seems to do it creates new associative processes in the brain. So let's say, first of people that EMDR on me, something really very, very nasty that happened to me.

1:02:59And I started off being very upset. And then during the EMDR, I'd know if this happened to you. I had images of sitting in my dining room table as a kid. And that images of playing in a playground in primary school. So I don't really, don't come in mind. And then we stopped it and needed. So that really sucked time to go on. And the important part is you did not tell me what you were going through. Because I'm suspicious of language. Because language is always an interactive process. And if I ask you to tell me what happened, you will filter yourself. Because certain things may be embarrassing or you don't want me to know about it.

1:03:44And so we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it. And we organized some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this. So you saw a little bit of this way in mind away. For me, when I first saw this, I was blown away by it and saw it. I need to study this. So when they called the studies, the main study was done by me. NIH funded it. But there was also last time that so many good funders for NIH, for EMDR. Breathwork. Yeah. What role did Breathwork become a really big topic? My partner runs business called By Breathwork, hashtag ad. And she takes women away. She does these breathwork retreats all around the world, has a studio, etc.

1:04:31What do you think of Breathwork as a way to withdraw? It makes perfect sense. For one thing that's been used since I'm a time immoral in certain cultures. People say people always discover it. In India, people know it. Not in Europe, nobody knows about breathwork. These are culturally dependent things. I think the closest may know it. I don't know. God has, if you know it. And so people are so conformist to be approved of by their teachers and their peers. But when people do something innovative, they tend to be very quickly, or they're cookie, they're crazy. I really go into bodywork. I've not done Breathwork myself, but I hear a lot of people.

1:05:25So it's perfectly legitimate to me. But when we do something new, like after the first person who studied yoga for PTSD, people go like putting your butt in the air and twisting your spine and the best of your trauma. I like, I said, well, find out. And so we did the study. And it turned out that yoga was very effective for treatment of PTSD. But the overwhelming reaction of my academic colleagues was, oh, there he goes again, he's gone off to depend. And now yoga, so if people accept it as if. So you can use yoga to treat trauma. No, you don't treat trauma. You yoga to treat your relationship to your body.

1:06:12It's not the same thing. But trauma really distorts your relationship to your body. And what I research also shows is that when you start doing yoga, certain brain areas that tend to get dampened by trauma come to life. What did you find in those studies? I've got one particular sort of screen show here. What's the, what's, explain here what's going on. And this is a tiny study. So what you see here is that after doing yoga, your insula gets more activated. Your insula is the placing your brain and make sure you know what your body feels. Like when it rains and you have no raincoat on, you go, I better get an umbrella.

1:06:57So that you need to know what your body experiences and needs and it's dissipated. And that dimension of self -experience tends to get very damaged by trauma. The reason for that is it's an adaptive thing because trauma is so we lived in physical. Physical experiences, as Darwin said, heartbreak and gut ventures is the visual sensations. And so if you're constantly heartbroken and gut ventures, you try to put that down and so you lose contact with your body as a defensive maneuver of feeling overwhelmed by these physical sensations. So I want to make sure I'm done this. So the insular part of the brain is the part of that links how we're, what we do with how we feel.

1:07:43How we viscerally feel, yeah, what's happening in our bodies? Okay, so it links how we're feeling in our bodies to, to, but we know about ourselves. The stories we have in our head about ourselves. So that's what the insular does and trauma interrupts that, which causes what kind of dysfunction on a day -to -day basis. You are out of touch with your feet and you feel numbed out. You don't feel alive. You don't feel connected to you. You can't feel pleasure. Or you feel hypersensitive. And you feel hypersensitive. Because you talk about the two, the responses being disconnection or hypersensitive.

1:08:17So there's always these two conflicted things that coexist, remember it too much and remember it's a little. Feeling too much and feeling too little. There is no happy medium. You go from one extreme to another. You're agitated and numbed out at the same time. And I bet you know what it's like, because we all have been there, that we feel agitated. And at the same time, we feel completely nothing at all. And there's almost no mind there. And I think it's a very, I'm coming here in an experience. And the insular is playing a role, the insular. It's a very big role in that and many other brain structures.

1:08:58So if I start doing yoga, what is that then doing to that hypersensitivity disconnection? Yoga makes it possible for you to reconnect your senses in a way, to feel what you feel, to make it safe what you feel. So as we go to yoga studio with a teacher with a nice voice, who really helps you to not take a deep breath, just flat out your arms, feel that warrior three pose. And then you start feeling it. And for many people doing yoga can be actually quite agitating, scary actually, in a way. For traumatized people, we see it all the time, is that something gets triggers. And you start getting upset just doing a simple down dog, let's say, or certainly the yoga post that's all sexually -beused, and the symptoms have great trouble with, is the happy baby pose.

1:09:53Happy baby pose is when you put your feet in the air, you lie in your back, you hold your toes, and you spread your legs wide, so your pelvis up against the air. For most of us, that's a very pleasant part, makes you relaxed. If you're a sexual abuse survivor, that's going to trigger a lot of stuff. Really? Yeah. And you have to be very careful doing this. Because it's... Stringing. And so because these positions may be triggering, you may hold your body in a frozen position, in order not to trigger those feelings of sexual abuse. I was just thinking, as you were speaking, about a friend of mine who tends to go through life where they sort of crumpled that body.

1:10:40And they're low self -esteem, they're quite low confident. I've never, I don't know if they're traumatized in any way, compost judgment on that. But they started doing yoga, and it really has helped them in a health and a profound way. And I'm just wondering what you think the link is between someone who I'm just telling you on the surface is crumpled up through their life. Oh, absolutely. And I thought you were a sickly child. I was really sickly until I had asked me when I was 13. And I think the most helpful thing I ever did was rolling. Rolling is a very intense form of massage, really. So, tear your muscles from your fascia.

1:11:16And I kept living in a new body. I no longer live frozen in that body of this little child who almost died. That has profound effect on me as much as anything you have ever done. Why in hell? Because you get stuck in habits. In a way, trauma becomes a habit. My habit is that when I see a fungi in a room, I get scared. Happens at a physical situation. And so, you have habitual responses. And part of what you do therapy for is to get to realize your habitual responses. And become curious about it. Like, you know, whenever a person like that comes to the room, I freeze and I sound like an idiot. And your therapist says, so what happens to your body?

1:12:05And how long have you felt this way? You feel this way when you were six or three or eight. And then at some point people get a narrative that may begin to explain it. And that narrative may say, oh, I was bullied by somebody. And that feeling comes back when I meet somebody who reminds me of my bully. And then you go like, have you ever tried martial arts? It seems like we like for you to actually learn to use your body to fight somebody. And that's for example, dreaming that I have never studied. But I was amazed how many of my close colleagues were very much into trauma. Tell me at some point, oh, now I have to go to my martial arts class.

1:12:55And that is, nobody sees that as a legitimate way of dealing with what they're dealing with. But I think people are doing their martial arts because they have memories of being victimized. And tell it gives me a visual experience of my body can defend itself. I can use my body to take care of myself. And that's not an intellectual process. That's a visual experience. People often describe meeting somebody and their body just being off. So they say, I met this person and my body was just, I just felt something in my body. That they can't consciously articulate, but they just feel it in their body.

1:13:33This person's a bit off. What do you think they're describing there? I think they're describing two things. We pick up each other's energy. That's such a thing as the mere neuron system, which hasn't received much attention to pastries. But I think it's a very important invention that I pick up your energy. And if, let's say, you're depressed, but you have a job to do some, to talk with me today, it's very likely that I, on some level, will pick up your depression. And it will affect our conversation. I'm not saying that they do that. It's hypothetical thing. But we pick up each other's energy.

1:14:14And so we may be somebody who is very angry, but who's trying to behave themselves, may favor, but you may pick up that anger. And that's really very complicated stuff in psychotherapy. Am I picking up your energy? Am I picking up my energy? And so, if I feel uncomfortable in your presence, is that because you're triggering something in me, about my past, or am I picking something up about you? And that is the complexity of our interaction. And from an evolutionary standpoint, as you were speaking, I was thinking, where has this come from? You know, this ability to subconsciously just get a read for someone and then form a pattern of, okay, this type of person helped me in the past.

1:15:03And 20 years later, I meet someone in the street and I immediately feel the same. Yeah. Is that just a survival thing? I think the next perfect sense to me. Because we are primates. Something that came up in your interview with Trevor, the deep degree to which we're interconnected creatures that we really don't exist as individuals. So we are meant to be without people. And so what is safe as out of people becomes a critical issue of our survival. The reason that humans have survived is not because your individual gives a mind, it's because we can band together and build buildings and airplanes and all that stuff.

1:15:46It's all communal things. So it's not central in our science anywhere today, but it's got the core of the understanding of human beings. We are collective bunch of creatures who collectively create something. And so knowing how to do that and how to adjust to each other is at the core of who we are. Are we losing that a little bit? People are getting lonely and lonely and more individualistic? Huge, huge, huge screen as virtual realities is our biggest challenge, I think. Yeah. Why? Because screens give you a virtual reality of pleasure, etc., etc. But it's not real and it's not a part of your efforts of doing something.

1:16:33You get a cheap reward, but ordinarily it takes a lot of activity. And so you get your little depth, don't be a rush. It feels like you had experience, but you don't learn how to get along with other people. You don't learn that visceral reaction of pleasure, of we are friends. What role does community and social connection play in trauma? Everything. Critical. And there's another thing that troubles something about the development of our field. Namely, in our generation, Thomas, who started with experiences like buying, worked with combat veterans. I'm not the combat veteran. I was a conchanger, you objectored your new Vietnam War.

1:17:19I don't know, I think about the US Marine Corps. And so I couldn't have told people what it was like, but I mean groups. They talked to each other and they learned about what it's like to be a combat veteran from each other. And the moment they made this connection with each other, they were becoming a band of brothers. And that's how people survive trauma, by bonding with other people. It seems that women are better at forming those connections than men. I think so. I think so. Elder, no, that's not entirely true. I learned a lot about love for my combat veterans. To some degree, I think most human beings don't know what love is until you have know what it's like to be in combat together with other people.

1:18:05It creates an enormously deep bond between people. So I know something about male love, more from the combat veterans, say, when you're a great danger, guys are there for each other. They really protect each other. They really look after each other. What is it about that environment that forms what you're describing there as real love? It's danger. The natural instincts when you are in danger, you know, we can merge better friends than we are. If something bad happens to us right now, we'll start cleaning each other. Is that because we would probably need each other? Yeah, you need each other.

1:18:47And you count in each other and you have each other's back. And you're saying to me, I have your back. I'm making commitment to each other is a very profound human experience. You don't get that from a screen. Well, there's also in an individualistic society, you're almost trained to not need anyone else but yourself. Well, but, you know, I have friends who went to eaten. Actually, sorry, the definition for me of many Englishmen is you mother H .A .N .C .E. and sent you off the boarding school when you're six years old. And every looks after you anymore. And what helped my friends who went to the Padmix schools in England was sports.

1:19:25And normally powerful. People felt really close to each other, moving together, throwing balls together, fighting in the field. That's additionally has been the way that guys get close together. Yeah. That may ring a bell with you somewhere. Of course, yeah, I was thinking back to playing football growing up. And you're one unit effectively. And there's a problem in this part of the pitch that's my problem too. If you're in trouble, I'm there to help you. And I bet you you still make easy contact with your friends who you played football. 20 years ago. It's really interesting because as you were talking to us, wondering how we can bring that back into our lives in the modern world.

1:20:06Yeah. In a modern world where we live on screens and. Exactly. White walls alone. Yeah. You know, the study say that. Yep. I think it's said something like the average American has an average of zero people that they feel they could turn to at a time of crisis, which is down from like three, I think two decades of age. I'll have a look. I'll have a look at the stats. I'll pull up the stats. But the general idea of like us being lonelyer than ever before. And how do we in a society that's like designed to be lonely? How do I on an individual level fix that? I think that's the big challenge actually.

1:20:39We have a foundation now. And the main thing that we're interested is in finding funding for projects like that. Of how do you help people connect to each other, be in sync with each other? We're very much into people making music together, making theater together, creating projects together. That is who we are. That's our glory as human beings is this collaborative, active, physical creation of things. And that sort of has not been part of mental health. We talk and make it bills, but we don't really connect people on a very deep level. Is that is are you optimistic about this? Not after the last election.

1:21:25Really? I'm very desperate after the election. You're very desperate after the last election. Why? Because the last election was based on othering. You were different projection. You're evil. These immigrants come and kill us. And they project their own discomfort themselves on people from different religions and different skin colors etc. It's all projection of people's own discomfort with themselves. And there's no honesty about the problem is inside of me and not you. So I think you're not a fan of Trump.

1:22:09That's that's the leave of the death. No, I think no, you're not of your psychopath who doesn't give a shit about anybody else. Are you able to point to anything good about him? And I've when I've had people on this show that a pro Trump I asked them the same questions. I say, can you point about anything bad about him? Because he's got a family. Anybody who goes to China says, I've been received better than anybody else in Chinese history. Is it full?

1:22:40The guy has gone bankrupt any number of times. He says terrible things to other people. He insults other people all the time. I'm sure there's something good about him. Ivanka seems to have loved him at some point.

1:22:56He's a terrible person. Going back to this point of trauma, you said that there's three broad ways to reverse the damage of trauma. So if I came to you and I was a traumatized person, whenever that trauma might be, what would step one be if I came to you for support with my trauma? Step one is tell me about yourself. Who are you? What do you value? What is working? What do you want to work and what gets in the way? So at start of really language is terribly important. I don't make a list of how screwed up you are. I help to create a DSM at some point in my mind or role. But the DSM is not a good way of starting off, namely how sick are you?

1:23:44I don't know who you are, what is working, what isn't working, what is helping you, what hasn't helped you, what gets in the way. So we create a map together of who you are and to some degree who you are in relation with me. And I would check a lot with people about this is helping you. So I don't prescribe. At some point I may say, well, have you thought about doing some martial arts? We should be interested in going to yoga studio. But bar and large I give very little advice. But I help people to discover what is going on and where they have reached them in a way. And then once you've done that, say you find out that I had some early traumatic experience, how do you know what treatment would you give me?

1:24:41That is a tricky thing. And that is something in my book, I try to do that and I failed. And my new book, I'm not doing very much better. I would see how agitated you get, how much you stay in focus. And if I would see that whenever a particular subject comes up, I see you're getting agitated or shut down, I would focus on that particular experience. And if I would see that you are chronically agitated and unable to focus, I would say, let's just do something. You should do something that's helped to calm your body, your brain down. And let's say when you're sort of overall overwhelmed, let's start with yoga or Chigong or whatever makes sense to see you in terms of how to move your body.

1:25:29And I probably do neurofeedback. What's neurofeedback? neurofeedback is you hook your skull up to electrodes that can harvest underlying brain waves. So you can project your brain activity on a computer screen. And then you can play computer games with your own brain waves to organize your brain waves in a way that you can be more focused and pay more attention. So I've got some graph what I put on the screen for anybody watching. And it shows five different types of brain waves, gamma brain waves, which are very close brain waves, beta less close alpha less close, beta less close and then delta, which is when you're sort of sleep and dreaming, the waves are very, very far apart from almost flat.

1:26:17So looking at these different types of brain waves, if we just categorize them from one being when the brain waves are really tight and close to five, which is delta when they're really far apart is one gamma is that like anxiety or something. No, anxiety is very focused thinking. Okay, fine. But it depends on where it is. So the back of your brain is supposed to have these slow waves because your back of the brain is dealing with the housekeeping of your body. The back of your brain tells you you have to breathe a little bit more, you have to go to the bathroom, you have to eat, you have to sort of a bodily regulation, very large percentage of brain is about your body regulation, which got messed up in the major way by trauma.

1:27:02So, for example, when you close your eyes, the back of your brain is supposed to develop nice slow waves to tell you I'm feeling peaceful. When you traumatize, when they ask you to close your eyes, it is very likely that the back of your brain gets, they'll get agitated and create much faster waves than you should. And so you get a sense of agitation in what would you close your eyes, which scores very detrimental to your health. So my job then becomes how to train your brain so that when you close your eyes, your back of your brain becomes very calm. For example, again, this is not about trauma, it's about brain organization.

1:27:48So trauma leads to brain organization, you don't treat the trauma, you treat the brain organization. So if the average person that comes to you, what you typically end up telling them to do, that the average person, some people these days, I think it would be very good for you to have a psychedelic experience. A psychedelic experience. And you found yourself telling people that more and more recently? Well, because I have done the research now and our results were really quite stunning, much better than I ever expected actually. But I may tell you, no, you're not very first psychedelic. I think you should do some neurofeedback and some body practices to live more in your body before we start blowing your mind off.

1:28:31When you say body practices, we'll get on to psychedelics, but body practices, these are the things you're talking about like the yoga, the martial arts, massages, any massage? Well, I happen to know some very good body people. Okay. So if you have been beaten up or molested, human touch tends to become very complicated. And so you may not feel comforted by human touch. And other humans may not have a calming effect in your body, which is really what we're supposed to have in each other. So learning to live in a body that can be touched is quite important. It's touch healing. Oh, absolutely. Well, you don't have kids yet.

1:29:17No. Well, you have to go for it. You know, you've got touches, touches, elemental human comfort thing. You described these three broad ways of reversing trauma, the top down approach, which is, I guess, talk therapy. Yeah, yeah. Talk is understanding inside, etc. And you're a fan of that? No, basically, I'm such a cerebral person. So I'm very suspicious of that piece. That's, you know, explaining things on the same things is not my greatest handicap. So it's not the downplay that the importance of that. Number two is taking medications, which is to shut down the body's alarm system signals essentially.

1:29:59Are you a fan of that? Well, that's how I started the life off as a psychopharmacologist. I did the first studies ever on Prozec and Zorro for PTSD. And so they're not bad. They can be helpful to people. And the third approach, the bottom -up approach, is allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the helplessness or rage or trauma. And this is really what you focus on, which are called somatic therapies, which target the body rather than the mind. Well, it's a very important piece. And I very much think that's a very big missing piece in the therapy, mental health and medical field in general.

1:30:37To give people experiences of connection and pleasure. That's terribly important. But when I, you know, I wrote this book before I got into psychedelic therapies, I would add another dimension of experiences that really blow your mind. That really allow you to have an alternate reality experience also. In terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I'm a big matchup fan if you don't already know by now. And so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading match a company called Perfect Ted. And one of my favorite perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavor from salted caramel to peach flavor to mint flavor to very flavor.

1:31:19One of my favorites is this vanilla flavor, which I'm going to make in just two seconds. You just take this mixer here, get a little bit of a powder, pop it on top of the shaker like that. Put the lid on.

1:31:35Shake, shake, shake.

1:31:39Delicious. If you haven't tried this yet, you can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores or online where you can get 40 % off with my code, diary40. Head to Perfect Ted .com and put in code diary40 to try this delicious multi -flavored matcha now. Highly recommended. If you do it, please tag me some of your message online. Can the gym help? Yeah. But that tends to become a very solid tier experience also. You're seeing a little treadmill watching Fox News is not my idea of traumat treatment. Because I go to the gym, I lift weights. And so I'm wondering if that's, if that's going to help me.

1:32:19But that's interesting. Like, one of my close colleagues from a friend is a weightlifting. And she really is very committed at weightlifting. Lifting weights can be extremely helpful for trauma. And when she says that, I'm sure that's true for her. And I wonder for how many other people that's true. The trouble is that in their current system, you're not going to get the money to study weightlifting for trauma. Even though you say it's helpful for you, my friend Riot has helped her. I go like, interesting. That's see for how many people are helpful. Yeah. One of the ways I think about it is actually a lot of the people that have interviewed that are weightlifters are bullied kids.

1:33:02I think about Mike who had a show, Chris, he chelé her out on the show, both of them speak to, even Laynaughton actually, I think he speaks to some early trauma as well. Their kids that were bullied in some form or had a traumatic early upbringing. And they are just massive. And I wonder, you know, some people on the surface go, or even looking actually. You're that way because you're learning to defend yourself and to build yourself a steam. But the gesture is not the right gesture. Like, oh, you're just doing that because, as if you're being dismissive instead of saying, good for you. You're doing that because you felt so helpless and you want to build up your body.

1:33:39Interesting. My association is that I testified on behalf of many people were abused by Catholic priests. And almost to a person they had become weightlifters and bodybuilders. Really? Clearly for the reason that you also mentioned, they were just trying to bulk up to a feel a sense of agency and power. And it didn't work well enough for them. So that alone wasn't enough. I think you also needed to make a connection with their helplessness. Psychedelic therapy. Yeah. What's your view on psychedelic therapy? It does my own personal background. Of course, I'm a child of the 60s. So I knew about LSD.

1:34:24And I think LSD, for me, at that time, I became a good medical student and came with a culture. Stop taking drugs. But my memory of taking LSD was very positive. And at that time, I got to see that I'm a very small part of a very large universe. And that whatever constructs I make in my mind, I just very small constructs of a much larger reality. And over time, I've had quite a few of my friends have become very good scientists. And they say the same thing about her early LSD experiences of really truly having opened up their minds to many possibilities. But then the culture changed. And they became illegal, criminalized.

1:35:15And people stopped doing that. And then Rick Doblin and Michael Mitthofer started to open up the world of psychedelics. And they asked me about it 50 years ago or something. And I said, I think it's a great idea because when you are traumatized, you live in a very constricted world. Basically, the trauma dominates your perceptions and regularly sort of interfere with your exploring larger realities. And as a theory, having a psychedelic experience and mind -opening experience, would be very helpful. But I discouraged them from doing it because I thought it was too... You'll never get by the regulatory practices.

1:35:57And then they raised enough money and asked me if I wanted to run the Boston side of a very large study, which was eager to do, very compared, very good psychotherapy by people who I largely had trained, with psychotherapy plus MDMA. And the results were stunning. You described it as stunning. That people... I saw that therapy would be very helpful in many of which got cards. And it turned out that therapy didn't make that much of a difference. A little bit. But the MDMA vastly changed the situation. And I wrote up the paper, but it actually started by how little that paper gets quoted. I mainly focused on the so -called secondary data of the study, which was how time and change your experience of yourself.

1:36:51And what we saw is that people became much more aware of themselves. People had compassion for themselves. So people all that went into their traumatic experience and had this sense of time of, oh my god, this happened to me. That was so awful. It happened to me personally, also actually, on psychedelics of things coming up that you were unaware of. We were so vivid, deep down inside. And I think, oh, this poor kid. Look what he went through. He was so little. He was so small. He couldn't defend himself. And so you get this very deep sense of self -compassion instead of the usual response of self -hatred and self -blame.

1:37:36And then the next thing that we saw happen all the time is, and I was such a beautiful kid. And I had this alcoholic violin father, and I'll talk about myself, but good. And my poor dad, he never got to really enjoy this beautiful kid that he had. And they have compassion for their perpetrators. Like, since it's a timely compassion opening drug, which we have been looking for him in so many areas in life. You call psychedelics a true revolution. Yeah, it is. And you say it's a particularly revolution because we don't know how it works. And I was looking at some stats. We don't know how anything works.

1:38:15We just have a bunch of hypotheses. I was looking at some stats that say, MDMA therapy assisted, which is an important point. That's what we did. Yeah, assisted with a therapist there, or someone who's a practitioner there, a phase three chemical trial reported that 67 % of participants who received MDMA assisted therapy no longer met the PTSD criteria compared to 30 % in the placebo group, which is a pretty drastic change. That is the main paper that on which I'm also an author, they get quoted. But I think it's more important not better than the PTSD that's so well, but people's relationship to themselves changed.

1:39:03And my other paper describes that actually, but it doesn't get quoted as much. People can be focused on the PTSD. The real issue is, do you love yourself? Is your heart open? Are you open to new experiences? You know, not do we have this little list of symptoms in the PTSD scale, but are human being who embraces themselves as human being? It's a really interesting studies around treatment resistant depression as well. One with psilocybin, which is what people know as magic mushrooms, a treatment resistant depression study in 2021 showed that a single dose of psilocybin led to a significant reduction in depression with effects lasting up to six weeks for many participants.

1:39:4930 % of participants were in remission after three weeks. And a study by John Hopkins University, University showed that 71 % of participants experienced more than 50 % reduction in symptoms after two psilocybin sessions with 54 % achieving remission four weeks after the treatment. And the last study that I'll share is a follow up study found that nearly 60 % of participants maintained reductions in depression symptoms one year after treatment. But these compounds aren't even legal in America and the UK yet. That's right. What can I mean is? Can I mean is. And we do a fair amount of can I mean, it's just a therapy these days.

1:40:27And I'm intrigued that kind of means seems to have similar effects to psilocybin and MDMA, even though they're completely different chemical substances. Have you ever done a psychedelic drug? Yeah, of course. As part of my being PR of this MDMA study, I had to do MDMA. But for example, I thought MDMA was ecstasy and gave frequent plays of pleasure. As part of my job, I had to take MDMA myself and I was ready for my magical experience. I'd never done it before. And instead, I had always poo poo the issue of I carry a stroma. No, it didn't really hurt me all that much to see all the stroma that I wrote.

1:41:09And while I was having my MDMA experiences, all the traumatized people's pain that I had experienced over time came back. I lied there for eight hours in agony, going, oh my God, oh my God. And I got in touch with that hearing all these trauma stories did have had the profound effect on me. And so I was really changed by that of the MA experience. I became a much sadder but somewhat biser man. You became a sadder man. Absolutely. I really felt all the pain. Much more deeply. I was able to sort of boil it off onto that point and the wall came down and it was quite painful. But what helped me is that my guide, Michael Mitthoffer, when I told him how I felt like a failure having that sort of pain for his pain.

1:41:59He said, yeah, I know I used to be an emergency room physician and one of my psychedelic experiences, all the patients who died in my hands came to visit me.

1:42:13So that was helpful for me because it made me feel like I had a connection with another human being. And the context is terribly important. And that's really about much of the issue is our boat right now. I think we may very well lose that and that is that clearly you need to do psychedelics in very safe conditions with a lot of support. And that the set and setting of psychedelics which sounds Hopkins study also took very good care of all the studies you mentioned. And the context is terribly important. And while you in these experiences the environment needs to be completely supportive and safe and be there for you.

1:42:59And what our world profit is looking for is to give people psychedelics, give them one pill and go off by yourself. And then deal with the majority of the people in our study said to us, the study was over. I couldn't have done this if you guys hadn't been here with me. Did that experience with psychedelics, the MDMA experience you had changed you? Yeah, I think it did. It made me a much more humble person and much more compassionate to people in general. Yeah, just one dose. Well, I've had some other experiences. Also, I've had a number of other really painful experiences in psychedelics. And it made me much more.

1:43:39So you know, people say, oh, you, how should I go? I became much more aware to what degree my quest for almost any trauma had to do with me than. And I learned most of the after age 70. Really? Yeah. Earlier on I asked if people could heal from that trauma. Yeah. Have you healed from yours? No, healing is a complex word. I would say, yes, I'm doing well. I do many people I've worked with. I know that's what I think the real power of my book is that it's a very hopeful book. Every chapter tells stories about people who are better and as much science as I've been able to do, I've proven how helpful EMDR can be.

1:44:26I've proven how well you're a feedback. That's really has been my mission is to not only be an advocate, but really say, let's do the science and see how it works for home. What is the of all the things that you tried in your life to help you with your own personal trauma? What are the things that have personally helped you the most? There's another thing that's really helped me and that got me into theater is the issue of psyched trauma. Psyched trauma? Yeah, the chapter in the book and I've never done the science behind it, but I still love doing it. And that is when you act out things in three dimensional spaces, it becomes a completely different phenomenon.

1:45:11If I tell you, let's put your family in this room. Yeah. Let's say, where are you to somebody to play the role of your dad? Where would you put your dad? You know where you put your dad. I'd put my dad in this room right now. I put him there. My dad. Yeah. Not there. But there. Yeah. So that's what the hell is happening here. You know precisely what you want him. And if somebody would play that role for you, the feeling of superchimp would come up maybe even in your imagination to some degree right now, if you imagine your dad there, let's first come to your mind. Well, I put my dad at the head of the table that we're at because he was always at the head of the table in my household.

1:45:58He was always the one one we're at a table. He was in charge of us eating. So reaction would get us you see him here. Um, It's complicated because it's complicated because one of the reactions is like, one of the reactions I had is when he sits there, he's in charge. Yeah. But now it's an adult. I have this other feeling which is like, no, I'm in charge now. Because I'm at the head of the table. I'm at a wild house. So it's just this authority thing. I was like, yeah, that would come up. It doesn't come up abstractly, but concretely when he's sitting there, it comes up and you may say, actually, that I'm the boss now.

1:46:40Yeah. Or I hate it. You're being the boss or something. So it comes up. My freedom. And what this talking is that for everybody when they put that virtual person in the room, the feelings towards that person become very vivid. And the other lives quite different from what the story that people tell, actually, that brings up the three dimensional. And often those people have had harsh and neglectful fathers. And then what I say at some point after you do things with him, I may even say you want to hate your dad. Possibly, I might actually do that. Actually, have you hit your dad, put a pillow in front of him and ask people about the feeling, oh my God, if I could have done that, would it be so great or how guilty I feel.

1:47:29So you do something virtually which you could never do in your words. And then I would say we can like to pick somebody in this room to play the role of the dad if you always wanted. And then you choose somebody and I encourage you to see how you would like that person to hold you. And when you have that, you usually have a very deep emotional release and say, oh my God, if my dad would have helped me like that when I was three years older, five years older, eight years older, needed it, my life would have been completely different. And so you make a virtual new reality with that is physical and visceral with other people and that memory of what it feels like can be very profound.

1:48:22And you're doing this since we're a group of people. And it's about four times a year with a group of people. It's my favorite kind of activity because I'm always just so astounded by what comes out of it. Now, so much role playing your past and role playing, but you really because you're working three dimensional space, it feels much more real. And so, but, but therapists usually they have this hope that if I'm respectful and caring towards you, I'll give you a imperative emotional experience that will give you the feeling of what it would have liked. It's been like if you had gotten that in the past.

1:49:04And what my old teacher, but it said, it's a mismatch. I, as an 18 year old guy, cannot give you as a 30 something year old guy, the feeling of what it would be like if your mom would have loved you at age three. Because it be kind of do that. But in the theoretical enterprises in three dimensional space, very physical, you do get an imprint of, oh, that is what it felt like. That's what I was missing. So you, it's a very powerful way of creating a virtual reality. So the subject matter of ADHD has become very popular in culture in 2022, approximately 11 % of children age three to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD up from 9 % roughly in 2016.

1:49:53And in the UK between 2000 and 2018 ADHD diagnosis and adults rose 20 fold what with a 20 fold increase in medication prescriptions among men aged 18 to 29. And that's from the NHR and in Australia over the past decade, ADHD medication has surged nearly 300 % with more than a 450 % increase in adults, a significant rise among women. What is going on here? See, I really see see that some are differently from the way you guys talked about it before. And that is all these things are on the on the continuum. You don't have PTSD or you have don't have ADHD or you don't have ADHD. These are all binary issues.

1:50:39So this capacity to focus to pay attention to be flexible in your attention is is an emotional issue. The mental issue is that so people some people have better and more than others. Some people can also still at all and other people can sit still on the certain conditions other people. So it's not like you have ADHD or not you may have some issues staying focused or staying still or paying attention and that may be very many underlying issues, maybe that your mom took some toxins while you were she is back with you. It's possible that it is in your genes just about every traumatized kids I've ever seen math criteria for ADHD because trauma really messes up your capacity to focus and concentrate.

1:51:28So this is not an entity. It is a fictitious entity. It's not like cancer of the gallbladder. It's not having astrocytoma in your brain. And these mental phenomena are networks of complicated ways of organizing your mind and our diagnosis system just sucks. When I spoke to Gabel Matte, he, you know, Gabel Matte? Yeah, yeah, he was describing what ADHD was to me and he said he reviews it as a response to early childhood stress and trauma rather than purely genetic or neurological. Well, but I wouldn't say that. I'd say it could be genetic. It could be toxic. It could be trauma. It is the surface behavior of not being able to focus and concentrate.

1:52:16Like my son certainly had a criteria of ADHD. I sound other than that he disappointed me was not a particularly traumatized kid. No, he really had real issues organically based. But he grew also at some point. So these things are not stable. These are configurations that you can grow with over time. And they're not multi a they're multifactorial. The surface phenomena. Because I was I was diagnosed with ADHD, but the way other people that have ADHD have just like drastically different symptoms to me like drastically different. Like we're not the same people at all. When I come close to the same ballpark, like for example, I'm really going to focusing on something for quite a long time.

1:53:04If I'm interested, whereas I often hear people with certain types of ADHD be very unfocused on things. And so I have struggled with understanding what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD when there can be so many types. Yeah, that's right. So it almost makes me feel that the label, the singular label, which we share, although there's all these subtypes, isn't necessarily helping me to understand myself in any way. Yeah, like I would really like everybody who who is serious about stuff knows that our diagnosis system totally sucks. Really? Yeah. But just is it total artifact of us sitting in a room 40 years ago, making up the list of diagnosis.

1:53:47There's no scientific validity to this. Actually PTSD is one of the more scientifically reliable diagnosis of all the diagnosis. They're just very primitive ways of categorizing human mind. And we know so much more and we should move beyond that and everybody knows something about science knows that we should be on the but we are not why I think we're not doing it because our focus is not on helping people. Our focus is on one successful financially or financial organizations. You know, I teach neurofeedback and the chapter of neurofeedback down this serious research and neurofeedback. And we do neurofeedback trainings.

1:54:28And so the head of an insurance company took training with me in neurofeedback. And he pulled me aside. It's the best of course, you know, that as a head of insurance company, I'm not interested in getting people better. I'm interested in having as many subscribers to my parents as I can. You know, if we really went back to being real doctors, we said, how do I get you better? What is wrong with you? And we know so much about neuroscience these days about how the brain organize the information that it's time to actually update ourselves to 2024 and start taking your birth networks in the brain.

1:55:03And what part of the brain is connected with but and mental functioning at different ages and what kids understand that eight three birds and different age five. And think in terms of how well you should be able to filter out a bell of information. How well you should be able to be still and quiet and how well are you able to take on the task and complete it? How do I not raise a traumatized kid? That's all because I'm going to have kids probably quite soon, hopefully. And I don't want to raise. And be sure to listen to people in your environment don't raise them by yourself. I think raising a kid by yourself.

1:55:44You'll give the full brunt of your own pathology. So it's very important for a kid to be raised by a number of people. So the kid gets to see all my dad is a little bit reactive, but my neighbor across the street is much calmer. And so the kid gets to seem multiple perspectives as all of us idealize African villages, if people having many different parents who look after you. It takes a village and say kids need to be we depart a larger environment where they can see their parents as safe people, but also flawed people. And the more nuclear you get, the harder it gets to keep your pathology out of your kids.

1:56:22So that's life actually. So community is everything also in terms of raising a child. Is there anything that you think is healing towards trauma, childhood trauma, or forms of trauma that we haven't talked about? Well, the critical issue is that trauma is about being helpless and not nobody coming to your rescue. And so it's very important to have the experience that if you really cannot do something you're scared, that somebody comes to your help at this point. And you get an imprint that even when I feel really bad, somebody will come and be there for me. And that is what many people miss. I mean, you have a drunk appearance.

1:57:09We see this all the time in our practice. People have a violent parent, usually the father, but not always. And then mom or dad, my case, mom or dad or my mom, turns a blind eye and doesn't say, I'll take care of you even though the other parent is hurting you. And the betrayal of a parent to let the other parent do terrible things to them and not really say, no, you cannot do this to my kid. It's a huge thing for many people. It's interesting. And just having bystanders who do not come to your help, very big deal. And the way to recover from that is to contract it with adult information. Yeah, it's.

1:58:02Have you never experienced it where people come to your help? And I think being part of a sports team, being part of a theatre group, being part of a musical group. People really feel, now to your turn, come in and you know, I think the issue of ethnicity and synchronicity is really at the core of our internals and safety among you. That's all we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is. What do you believe is the question that the audience have just heard this conversation or screaming down the camera?

1:58:41The question is, where do I get the help I need? I think that's really the big thing because it is so hard. It is such an exploration. Almost everybody who I know, who have found a way of getting better, has been an explorer. And quite an accidental explorer. And then I found this Kavadi teacher. And then I found this yoga teacher. And then I found this psychodramatist. But it's very largely accidental. I think the mainstream is not on the whiteboard. So you have to discover what worked for you. And that's a very tough one because you feel stupid and ignorance. And if something is not helping you, it is very hard for yourself for yourself.

1:59:37It is not helping me because this person is not helping me. But blaming yourself, there must be something wrong with me that is not helpful for you. And making that distinction is a very tough one. I know it from my experience. I've been at treatments for a long period of time, despite all my qualifications, where it took me a long time to go like, I'm wasting my time and my money. And if you don't have my education and background, it's even harder to say I'm wasting my time and my money. It was interesting as you were speaking. I was reflecting on the things that it's thinking a lot about this idea of community.

2:00:13And you're talking about how being in sports teams helps. And I was thinking about in my adult life in some of my most difficult times, when things were difficult and I went and played football or some kind of sports with a group of people. I just felt radically better. And I think actually I put it down to, oh, well, because I did some exercise. But I actually think there's something deeper. Oh no, it's at the connection. Passing at the ball, somebody catching it, I made a difference. Playing music. My little piece of music that I made, made the better place. Being in a theater group, being a cook, you know, as many of the mentions, a language you can do to it.

2:00:53And many of us, especially I think, adult men don't have these kind of things. I mean, we go to watch Manchester United and play something like that. We do football ground, but maybe we need to follow lives with more of these things. Yeah, we do. I think, and we should say it to ourselves because I need to do more of that also. What we kind of just assume that society is designed in such a way where it'll give us what we need. Yeah, yeah. But in fact, if you think about the loneliness stats and the way things, even like the pub is less pubs on the high street, shoving down across the UK and less community centers, the church is.

2:01:24A good example is I grew up singing all the time. And people around me, they made me sing in schools. And now we then we go to iPods. I wouldn't be lucky with iPods. And then before it's alone, you stop singing and you start listening to your iPod. And so technology has been unbelievable blessing. And what occurs it has been for us. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Thank you so much for the work you can do. As I said, you before we start recording, you have so many extremely passionate followers, advocates, fans, because your work has made them completely rethink and understand their lived experience.

2:02:05And also given them a much more optimistic, hopeful cure or treatment for their lived experience. One of which is my partner who when she she's been telling me for three years to get you on the show and was so extremely excited. I think it's the happiest I've made her in the last three years when I said that you didn't read to come on. But that maybe is such a personal and sort of local sign of evidence of the impact you have on people. It is tremendous. So thank you on behalf of all of those people for the work that you do. And please do keep on doing it because it's opening all of our eyes. And you too.

2:02:36Thank you. I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the diavis here at the very end of it, you'll know. I asked the guest to leave a question in the diavis .io. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diavis .io into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had their question. And on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.

2:03:18The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards .com. They sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.

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