Your Childhood Trauma Is Causing Your Autoimmune Disease | Erica Komisar | Dr. Josh Axe

26:21And so the idol of America is economic progression. Of course it is. It's money. It's just money. Our idol is money. Yeah, and in some cultures, it's sex. And for some, it's media. I mean, so it can be different. And just as bad, but that is the, you know, that's the God. I mean, do we want to live in a society that idolizes money and materialism and economic achievement and success? That is the country we live in. Instead of idolizing, and we don't want to idolize, but instead of valuing relationships above all. You know, Aristotle's deathbed question. Who's going to be sitting beside you on your deathbed?

26:59Is it going to be your boss and your colleagues at work? No. If you're lucky, it'll be the people that you have taken care of and loved and attended to and spend time with and made to feel important. Those are the people that are going to be sitting by your bedside. But only if you give, right? So if you don't give enough when your children are young. You know, and I love the song Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapman. But it was a song from, I think, the 60s. And it rang in my head when I was a little girl. It was a song about a father who was too busy to spend time with his son when he was working.

27:37Father was working all the time, working, working. And the son just said, Daddy, but I need you. I need you. Father said, I'm too busy, son. I'm too busy, son. And when the son grew up and the father was old and the father said, son, I would love to come and have lunch. The son said, nope, dad, I'm too busy for you. So what you model for your children, I mean, I don't want to scare people, but what you model for your children now, how attentive you are to your children, how interested you are in your children when they're little and throughout childhood is pretty much how interested they're going to be in you when you grow old.

28:12That's so good. So don't expect anything more than you give. You know, one of the things we talked about earlier is, I think it's important. One of the topics I think that's so important in psychology is identity, right? And one of the things that you'll see in movies today and see people talk about is, like, I'm gonna go and find myself, right? And I'm gonna do this, and most times it's, I'm gonna find myself independently. Like, I'm gonna go off here and here and here and here and here and find myself. And when I think about what identity really is, you know, Jordan Peterson, he's somebody I followed quite a bit.

28:48One of the things that he talks about is, you don't find your identity in yourself. You tend to find your identity, you do in your uniqueness. So there's a part of it there, but you find your identity in your attachment to others in your community. And what role do you play there as part of a community? And I think it's so interesting because I think a lot of times, and for me, I think that's where I get a lot of my value and self-worth is knowing, okay, this is how God created me. This is where I'm unique. This is where I can add value as part of this family and then as part of a larger community.

29:21And that gives me a great sense of self-worth and value. But I don't think a lot of people understand or even know how to find their identity. The other thing I want to say is, you know, I think identity is so important in terms of your faith. Like my identity of knowing that I'm a child of God, knowing that I'm built for eternity, like what I do here is going to have eternal ramifications and rewards and all kinds of things like that also impacts my identity. So have you done much work on, I guess, identity in terms of how does somebody go out and actually build a solid identity? Well, identity formation starts from the moment that you're born in terms of it's basically the development of a self, right?

30:00So we all have to develop a sense of self. And it starts really from the moment we're born and it has everything to do with the relationships that we have. Meaning our mother and father, particularly our primary attachment figure, but both our mother and father. one of the main jobs of being a parent is to help your child to develop a sense of self and what that means is being there enough knowing them enough to know what their strengths are and what their weaknesses and vulnerabilities are and helping to foster their strengths and their interests and helping them to accept their limitations there's a lot of narcissism today which again, I don't think of narcissism as something that makes people bad people.

30:47Narcissism is basically a sign of a wounded person. So we call them narcissistic defenses. They are defenses to protect a very vulnerable person. And so we have a lot of very vulnerable parents who project onto their children who they want them to be rather than knowing, organically knowing their children and knowing who those children are, what their strengths are and what their vulnerabilities are. So that is one of parents' main role. And so if you're, again, I'm gonna repeat myself, I know like a broken record, but if you are not present enough in your child's life, you don't know them. You really can't know them if you only spend an hour and a half a day with them.

31:35There was a Pew Research study that said that American parents spend on average 90 minutes a day with their children. That is not enough time to know your child. And again, empathy is not something we're born with. It comes from the right part of the brain, the social-emotional part of the brain, what we call the prefrontal cortex. And that's not fully developed till 25. It's only conditioned by your interactions with your child, particularly in two critical periods of brain development, from zero to three and nine to 25 for adolescents. And if you don't model that behavior, if you don't model empathy, it doesn't matter what you tell your children.

32:14It doesn't matter if you teach your children the rules of religion or the Bible, unless you model it for them. It's how you behave and how you treat your wife, how you treat your friends, how you treat strangers. that's what models empathy for them. So it doesn't matter what we say, it's really what we model for our children. And we can tell our children, by the way, that you love them. I love you. You're the most important thing in the world to me, but you don't spend time with them. You don't pay attention to them when they're in the room. You're not really that interested in playing with them or interacting with them or even listening to them about their day.

32:57You find it boring. So how can you say you love someone if you can't even be with that person. There was a guru named Ram Dass years ago. I'm old, so this was like the 60s or 70s. And he came back and wrote a book called Journey to Awakening. And he said, there are three pillars of life. There's the doing, the having, and the being that most people just do, do, do to have, have, have and forget about the being. And the being is the most important pillar of life. And so if you can't be with your children because it makes your skin crawl or it makes you feel bored, you know, I always say boredom is a sign of depression.

33:38And so when you say, I'm so bored, I'm bored, I'm bored being with my children. Okay, if you're not in the child business like I am, I'm not bored with babies. I love babies, but I'm in a particular field. But I don't expect people instinctually to be interested in children if that's not their thing, other people's children. but when it's your own child, it's anti-instinctual to say you're bored with your own children. You might have boring moments, but you're not pervasively bored being with your children. Yeah, yeah. I think it's so good. You know, one of the things I found in this, I think this is true generally with almost anything in life, that I was trying to tell my daughter this the other day.

34:16She was like, I don't like this food. And I'm like, you know what, honey? I didn't like tomatoes either or olives or peas or a number of things. But the more you eat them, the more you'll like them. And I think there's an element too of the more you do something, the more you start to like it. And so I think that one of the things if a parent does feel that way, I think there's two things. I think the more you do it, the more you can kind of get into that. I also think it's understanding the importance. I mean, you mentioned that Jewish phrase earlier. There's a pastor who says something similar.

34:45He says the most important thing you'll ever be, basically it's a parent, right? I mean, the single most important job to your point. I think if you truly understand the depths of that, that these are eternal souls, eternal beings, and God put them in your care. And what that means in terms of the responsibility is just huge. You know, the way that I try and think about being a dad right now is there's really two things I'm most concerned with with my daughters. And it is I'm responsible for two things. One, helping them grow in their character. That's going to help them be the best they can be.

35:20and then helping them grow in their unique gifts and skills God's given them, that thing that makes them unique, right? So like my five-year-old now, I think she's going to be a pretty good swimmer. It's like we're doing everything we can to help her be a good swimmer. And then, of course, the character qualities. But I think that if you kind of think about it like that, like, hey, my goal is to take this person and help them to grow to the highest level possible, maybe that's helpful for some people. Now, again, that could also be unhealthy probably for some parents because if it's not what the kids actually are good at and it's what they wanted them to be or they had something and they never fulfilled their own dreams, then that's probably a problem.

35:57So I would say parents, when it comes to health and safety, have to lead the way. So you're a health person. So I would say when it comes to how you feed your children or whether you vaccinate them or don't vaccinate them or you lead the way with health and safety, that you make sure that they don't run out in traffic or you're the leader. But when it comes to their interests and how intensely they want to engage their interests, I always say to parents, they're the leaders and you're the follower. Don't try to be the leader in something that is uniquely theirs. Because what you'll do is you'll take something good and make it bad.

36:38And so swimming is a good example or piano or anything. Yes, you want to encourage your children, if they love to do that, to do it and cheer them on and admire them. We want to admire our children. And not admire our children for their accomplishments, but admire our children for trying. So our admiration is really important in terms of them developing a healthy ego, right? Healthy sense of self. But you have to be careful. There's a fine line between encouraging and admiring them for them and encouraging and admiring them for you. And so you just have to make sure you always have to check yourself as a parent.

37:19So we're always checking ourselves to make sure that we haven't crossed the line and that we're following our children and what they want. So, you know, and when your child comes to you and says, you know, swimming is so hard and I'm so tired and, you know, I think I want to quit, daddy. And if you say to them, well, you know, honey, do you still love it? Do you still like it when you do it? Yeah, but it's so hard. You know, we can talk to them about resilience and how it's important to stick with things. But in the end, if they still, after we've given them that talk and we've encouraged them, they want to stop.

37:56Again, we have to follow their lead. Hey, so if you've ever thought something is wrong with me, but I just can't prove it, then this is for you. Now, you might be eating clean, even what you feel like is perfect, working out, taking all of the right supplements, but you're still exhausted, still foggy, gaining weight, and you're not sleeping. And every time you ask for help, you hear the same thing. But your labs are normal. Here's what that actually means. standard blood work only shows what's in your blood, not whether your cells can actually access it or not. You can give your body all the right inputs, but if your cells are in danger mode, chronically stressed or inflamed, they can't absorb or use those nutrients properly.

38:42If you're finally ready to heal, go to mybloodwork.com. You'll get an at-home cellular blood work panel shipped straight to your home and reviewed on a private call with one of my senior health advisors at the Health Institute. And this will help you finally connect the dots between your symptoms at the cellular level. We'll also determine if you're a good candidate for one of our cellular healing protocols so you can finally experience lasting healing. Once again, go to mybloodwork.com to check it out. We should be attached to parents and to people, but people can create unhealthy attachments.

39:21This is something I heard you talk about. And I think people find this so fascinating. I had a patient recently I was working with and she had a really hard breakup with, I guess a hard breakup with a boyfriend. Right. And she, I mean, you know, four months later, six months later, still absolutely just a wreck about it because she felt like this was the person for her. And now he's kind of moved on and, you know, and, and, um, and dating someone else. And so, but it was very, and the thing is, She was a Christian, somebody who's very spiritual, looks to God for a lot of things. But if you had somebody like that come in your, you're working like someone with that in practice, what would you say about that attachment?

40:02I know one of the things you've even trained on, I think there's multiple attachment styles that people can have. Well, there's a healthy, there's only one secure attachment style. So that's the good news is that you don't have to remember too many of them because there's really only one that's what we call secure, healthy attachment style. And what does it mean? It means that, one, you look for reciprocity in connections, meaning you trust others, but you look for them to love and trust you in response. So we look for reciprocity. So in the case of this patient that you're describing, it sounds like maybe something got lost in translation with the reciprocity piece, right?

40:40To say you are madly, deeply in love with someone who has rejected you or doesn't want to be with you. Remember, we want to teach our children that real love is when you love someone and they love you back. You want someone and they want you back. But also, healthy attachment means that you feel comfortable in the presence of someone you love. And you feel comfortable depending upon people that you love. You're not scared of dependency. But when they aren't there, you can hold it and feel full and not empty when they're gone because you're able to lean into a secure sense of safety from early in your life.

41:30So meaning when the person is there, you can lean on them. And when the person isn't there, it's sort of like having a backup generator for your house. You can lean on yourself. That's healthy, secure attachment. Then there's different kinds of attachment disorders, which are basically defenses that children develop in response to these traumatic attachment situations. So they can either become avoidant, they can become anxious, or they can become disorganized. So an avoidant attachment is someone who says, right, my mommy isn't coming, my daddy's not coming, and I need them, so I'm just not going to need anybody and not trust anybody.

42:09And that's most closely associated with depression and inability to form connections later on. Anxious or ambivalent attachment is when a child says, oh, my God, my mommy's here, but she's going to leave me again. I'm going to cling to her like life itself, and I'm not going to let her go. and that's most correlated with anxiety later on. And then disorganized attachment is the hardest to treat and is connected to things like personality disorders. It's basically when a child doesn't have a strategy. I suppose you could say the other two are like strategies. So a child who doesn't have either their primary attachment figures are absent in those early years, or even if they're physically present, they're emotionally absent in some way, depressed distracted resentful whatever so those children who have disorganized attachment don't can't find a strategy so you can think they're trying to click into a strategy but can't find one so first they'll avoid then they'll cling for dear life then they'll slap their mother because they're angry and then they'll cycle through again they never quite find a strategy so they end up in this disorganized kind of attachment and that's correlated with things like borderline personality disorder, which we're seeing a lot of in young people.

43:25So yeah, there's really only one secure attachment style. Yeah. Let me ask you about this. So you had mentioned, so there's an element of somebody having attachment, especially to parents, right? Over time though, as we grow up, those attachments are going to obviously lessen to a degree in a way, right? Because they're less present or let's say your parents pass. How do you still have a healthy, do you attach to other things? Do you just solely start relying on yourself? Do you have to have God there for that support? Talk to me a little bit more about the healthy attachment style and how that would work.

44:02So in the first three years, you build a scaffolding in a child. They aren't able to internalize that sense of security until about three years of age, which is why we call three years of age a critical period of brain development. So by three years of age, 85 % of a child's right brain is developed. And in those years, the environment is critical to developing that sense of security. It can only be taken in and internalized and held on to. Think about pouring a glass of milk for your child. You can't pour it all once you pour a little by little over that three-year period. By three years, the glass is full, and now they've internalized a full glass of milk.

44:44And so, if you're not as present, then they only internalize half a glass of milk. And what happens then is they don't have that internal experience of comfort and soothing and safety to turn back to. So, you say God is that for a lot of people. And interestingly, a lot of people use God and parents interchangeably. And what I mean by that is, for many people who didn't have healthy relationships with their parents, reaching out for a parental figure in God is a very positive thing because that's why religion exists. That's why Christianity is used in 12-step programs, if we're talking about health, because there is a whole, there's an empty glass where there should be a full one inside those people who have addictions.

45:38They're reaching for to fill up that empty space inside of them with gambling and drugs and pornography and food and alcohol. And those are all things that are an attempt to fill up a space that was never filled with love. And so if you get enough love, and I don't mean pay lip service, but real attention. I always say to parents, if you want your children to feel good about themselves, then if you want them to feel as if they are valuable and interesting people, then you have to be interested in them more than you're interested in anything else. Can I share something that was such a powerful thing for my faith is, I think at certain times growing up, I heard two things which Jesus teaches and the Bible talks about quite frequently is, love God, love your neighbor, right?

46:34but I had this sort of thing that happened to me where when I was able to love God in the greatest way in other people, when I was finally able to reflect and understand how much God loved me. And it really wasn't until then because before I was kind of trying without seeing results or it was kind of like this trying to get myself motivated to go out and do things, love people. But when I had this reflection of, wow, like God loves me so much that he would sacrifice his own son. God loves me so much, he's constantly thinking about me. Like King David said, he knows me to the very, you know, numbered to the very hairs on my head.

47:08It's like meditating on that, letting that sort of penetrate me and become who I was or understand that, that was such a thing. And then like now even looking back, thinking about like my parents, like I had a day, I was so blessed. Like my mom was like, took care of us so much. Like she, you know, drove the bus at school. She worked at my school, did gym teacher so we could go to a Christian school. I had a dad who never missed a single game, ever. And even thinking about that, it gives me such a sense of just love and fullness, and it makes me want to love them so much in return. And so I think for a lot of people, but a lot of people didn't have that experience like I had and had parents that were that selfless and that interested in everything we did.

47:52And so how do people, what is some practical advice? How do people get to that place? So that kind of unconditional love that you're describing that hopefully you get from your parents, but unfortunately not everybody does, people find in religion, they find in a connection to God, and they find in the kind of therapy that I do. So it's not all therapy because I think there's different kinds of therapy. I think people don't know that much about the different kinds of therapy that are out there. By the way, can I just say, there is so much bad therapy. Like today, we've heard this thing about rumination.

48:29For a lot of times, people I know have gone to counselors and like, what did you do? And basically, I'm not saying this very medically or delicately, but they wallowed in their suffering and they never learned how to maybe leave it or how to move forward from it. I don't really love the word rumination. It's a psychiatric word. I think of it as a grief response that, you know, you can get stuck. do you know Kubler-Ross in Death and Dying? You can get stuck at any stage of grief. And so people who are quote unquote ruminating, I suppose, are stuck between disbelief and sadness in terms of sometimes anger, but they get stuck sort of like you used to scratch an LP and it would skip back and skip back.

49:14You know, the records, we don't really have records much anymore. Well, I had CDs, but they would do the same thing. Yeah, they would do the same thing. So actually people are using records again, but the concept is if you are not moving along in a grief process and you get stuck, you keep going back and back and back because you can't move forward in that grief process. So I'm a psychoanalyst. So what we call psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy is the best therapy because for that kind of response. I mean, there's CBT, which I think CBT is helpful for certain things, but it's more symptom oriented.

49:51and from my perspective if you're only addressing symptoms and you're not addressing the origins of symptoms then you're just always putting out fires as Stephen Covey said you're always just putting out right right so the idea is you want to go to a therapist who really first of all who is an emotionally reparative experience for you I mean it's not a term we like to use in my field But it's the truth. The truth is that therapy is a relationship with a kind of parental figure where there's a transference of some kind to a kind of parental figure that we call it like an as-if parental figure where you have a different experience of somebody actually listening to you and being interested in you and being able to mirror your feelings and reflect them and be attentive to you emotionally.

50:44in a way, and to be calm and not to be volatile emotionally, you know. And so that is an emotionally reparative experience, not a quick one, but it is. So that kind of therapy helps. And then I also think religion helps. I've never heard, like, first off, this just makes sense. Like when I'm thinking about the Bible right now, there's the shortest verse in the Bible, and it's Jesus wept. And there's an element there of like, so if you're going to be a good therapist, there's an element of, you used the word empathy earlier. You actually need to feel the pain, get in there in the deep end with the patient and actually help them work through.

51:25And it's not, you're standing over here, they're standing over here. You're in with them, helping them go through it. I think that when my mom had cancer, that was very much, I learned so much because oftentimes when I have patients, they're like, and you get a serious diagnosis, it's like deer in the headlights. There's so much information. There's a lot of fear what to do. And I really kind of went down there. We went in the deep end and we walked through every moment of the part of the day for months and all that together. And I realized, I'm like, wow, that is how healing is supposed to happen.

51:55It's like you are in community, locked arms with someone else getting you through. But most people today, they're lonely. They're in a corner. They're trying to do it themselves. So, yeah, it's interesting because we say that repression is a great defense if it lasted a lifetime. So repression is basically shoving down one's emotions and one's trauma for years and years without dealing with it, right? Shoving down conflict, shoving down pain. And unfortunately, it doesn't generally stay down, sometimes, rarely. it comes out in various ways. It'll come out in mental illness. It'll come out in health issues.

52:40And so, yeah, it's unfortunately, we have to deal with our pain, whether it's emotional pain or physical pain. We can't just push it down because it doesn't stay down. And it is really important, particularly when you're dealing with physical illness, And it's really a hard thing to talk to a lot of allopathic doctors about because they're trained just to see the body as a physical thing, not as a whole unit, not as a whole thing with one's psyche and one's emotions. Although they're starting to more and more. But how many doctors, when you get a cancer treatment, talk to you about trauma? And are you seeing a therapist?

53:23And not too many of them. Less than 1%. It would be very low. Yeah, and even, you know, psychiatrists also, I have to say, they want to, they're symptom relievers and there is use for that. There's use for that at moments. If someone is in a very severe state, suicidal state or, you know, bipolar state or schizophrenic, there's use for medication. But really what we're doing right now is we are silencing people's pain instead of helping them to get to the bottom of their pain and really resolving their conflicts and resolving their pain at its origin. right? Otherwise, you're just kind of cutting the grass, and the grass grows back.

54:02Yeah. You were referencing this as people, in order for people to heal and move on and become their best, you talked about working with a counselor like yourself that's getting in the deep end with them and helping them go through that process. And then you were also about to get into there something connected to God and faith in that process as well. Yeah. I mean, again, it's what heals you when you're in pain, when you're in emotional pain, are relationships. That's what heals you. And so not drugs, but people and relationships. And you also have a relationship with God. God is, you know, I remember my husband went to Hebrew school when he was a little boy and his mother said, what's the one thing you learned from Hebrew school?

54:50And he said, God is invisible. and I said I hope you learn more than that but the concept that there is this invisible being that is also a relationship we have a relationship with God we have a relationship with our parents we have a relationship with our spouses and our children we have a relationship with our therapists and so relationships are healing and you know and it's not I don't think that we really talk about that very much and I also think that we don't help people to understand that if the relationships that cause the greatest pain that lingers with you throughout your life are the early relationships, then you have to dedicate many years to being in therapy.

55:34Because if you think about it, it may have taken many years for that trauma to form, and it's going to take many years to unravel it. And so people go into therapy and they say, right, three sessions, Am I done? Is this it? And I'm like, wait a second, how long did it take you to get here into my chair? And they say, well, I'm 40. So I guess, well, I say, you're not going to be here 40 years, but give it a little time because it is the relationship with me that's healing. It's not some pithy thing that I'm going to say to you. I wish that I was a magician. I have a friend who's a mentalist, and I'm not a mentalist.

56:08I'm a psychoanalyst who helps people with their pain, but it is in the connection. It's in the relationship with the therapist, and it's in the relationship with God. That's what's healing. It's the relationship, not some magic bullet that comes out of, not some interpretation or some pill. It's the relationship. And so therefore, the consistency and the care and that relationship over many months and many years is what heals people. So you just came out with a new book. And you've written some great books and done some great interviews. Like I said, I've seen a couple of your interviews online.

56:44I was just so, so impressed. And I was so impressed because the way you think is very much root cause oriented. And this is the way I like to practice medicine. I like to do something called the five whys. And, you know, basically it's Socratic. you know, and it's method. It's saying, okay, you've got diabetes. Why? Your blood sugar is high. Why? Insulin sensitivity. Why? Oh, you're eating too many carbohydrates or no cortisol is high. And that's what's driving it. And then, so going to the very, very root so we know exactly what to fix in order to how to heal. And you do that with people in their emotional states and their past traumas and all those things.

57:21And there are a lot of things that I think about that cause a lot of trauma for people when I'm looking at patients. You know, some of the top ones I just want to mention. One is just emotional trauma as a child, right? The parent wasn't there. They grew up without a parent or there was some sort of verbally abusive or physical. I mean, there's a number of things there. So that's one big thing. Another one is losing a loved one. Like I'm walking through this right now still. Last week was the two-year anniversary of my father-in-law passing. He was 60 years old, had a heart. So this is my wife's dad and my mother-in-law and he was 60 and I was going to the gym with him every day.

57:55I mean, really healthy, fit guy and my best friend in a way, in terms of a male figure, someone I respected poured into me. And so, you know, that was, that's the hardest thing I've ever probably gone through is just, and they were like living with us. Like we were like, they were, you know, our closest family members. And then another thing that I see that really impacts people is divorce. And divorce is so common, even in, you know, Christian households. And while I don't, you know, One, I'm very much on the line of just thinking about the way— Supporting marriage. Yeah, supporting marriage and thinking about what Jesus said is 77 times 7.

58:36Like, let's cherish and protect at all costs. But if someone has been through a divorce or is going through a divorce, that's something that can be really traumatic on people. What is the right way to go through that type of trauma of losing someone or even more specifically a divorce in order to protect themselves, but also their kids and their other family members as they're going through that? I wanted to ask you this question because you've written an entire book on it. Well, let's talk about why marriage is so important in raising children because that's the first step in that question is, is marriage really important in raising children?

59:13And the answer is, of course it is. Marriage, having a mother and a father is really important to raise healthy children if they love one another. if they care for one another if they're affectionate with one another if they respect and admire and trust one another um it's the best environment to raise children in i'll just say that so everybody understands that i support marriage as the best way to raise children now some people can't raise children in that situation because someone passes away or they're you know uh they have a divorce and so there are situations where people are stuck in terrible circumstances where they're not in these loving and healthy and supportive relationships while they're raising children and so i'm big into prevention so that was the first part of your question the reason i write books is because as a therapist i got tired of just dealing with with the fires that came to me when I knew there were so many things that people could do to prevent the fires.

1:00:26So you talk about prevention, right? That's what living longer is about prevention, preventing illness. I talk about preventing mental illness. And so with children that come out of a divorce situation, and there are going to be divorces because there just are. 50 % of people in America divorce. And so that means, Christian or not, there are going to be divorces where parents do not get along, where they are in constant conflict. And what the research shows is that raising children with a person who you hate and who hates you—first of all, the word hate doesn't mean what we think it means. The opposite of love is not hate, right?

1:01:15The opposite of love is really not caring. Indeed, hate is unrequited love. So when people don't make it in a marriage, it's usually because there's such great disappointment in what they thought would be an amazing connection for life. And so hate ends up being unrequited love, right? Rather than indifference, which is really the opposite of love. When you raise children in a hateful environment, it's very bad for children. When you raise children in a conflict-filled environment that is unresolvable conflict and chronic conflict, we know now from the research that that is not the kind of marriage that is healthy to raise children in.

1:01:58So there are times when we say it might be better for children to be in two harmonious, peaceful, calm environments with two parents who can work together and care for each other without living together and co -parent. So I wrote this book, The Parents. Can I say one thing? One, I would challenge that a little bit from this standpoint, is that if you have two people that are resentful and hateful, or one of the two, that means that they're going to have two separate homes that are both harmonious. I would challenge that that is almost never going to happen, or very rare. I'm not going to say that.

1:02:43That's why I wrote the book. Okay, okay. To give people a map. The book, it's not a perfect map, but it's a map on how you can, we know it's going to happen. We don't promote divorce, but we know it's going to happen. So if it does happen, how do you deal with it in the best way possible? If it does happen, how do you mitigate the negative impact on children? How do you secure their mental health for the future? How do you make sure that they still have faith in relationships, that they can still trust in love? Because many children come out of divorce not trusting in loving relationships and not having faith in the permanency of connection with another person.

1:03:27Yeah. Okay. So this book is a roadmap for those who are going through divorce or who are thinking about going through divorce. It may scare you away from divorce to read my book. You may go back and say, I want to give marital counseling another try. But if you are going to do it, then you have to do it in what I call a child-centered, child-healthy manner. Because if you don't, then your children are the ones who are suffering. And what I will say is that when we're in pain as adults, we share our pain with everyone around us. We can't help it. It's like when you stub your toe on the corner of your bed, you know, and you scream at your wife and you say, why did you put that bed in the middle of the room, right, when she didn't, right?

1:04:11And so we're not our best selves when we're in pain often. And so this is a book to help you. It re-centers parents to try to be their best selves for their children. Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. Well, Erica, thanks so much for coming on today. I want to encourage everybody to check out Erica's books. They're in bookstores nationwide. You can go to Amazon.com and look up Erica Komisar. I'm going to show you her book here now, The Parent's Guide to Divorce. There's other books. What are your other two books? Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, and Chicken Little, The Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.

1:04:49Very creative titles, but very effective. You know, that sounds like a psychoanalyst wrote the book. But Erica Comisar, you can find it again, bookstores nationwide, amazon.com as well. I want to encourage you to check out her books. And hey, we'd love to hear your comments. You know, on this show, I really am focused on bringing people on that I have an interest in learning from and Iron Sharpens are growing from having on the show. And so I love to be able to have people, Erica, like you on the show, where I can learn about being a great parent, learning about how to heal wounds. Myself, you know, nobody had a, I had great parents, but nobody had a perfect childhood and doing everything I can to overcome depression, anxiety, you know, high cortisol, living in a state of anxiousness.

1:05:38And so I think these are really important things. And the show here is really focused on helping you heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and taking your health and your life to the next level. So I want to say thanks so much for watching and listening to the podcast here. By the way, the number one thing you can do to support the show is subscribe. By the way, sometimes we have episodes that can be shadow banned because we talk about a lot of controversial things, everything from cancer to RFK Jr. to a number of things, and even some controversial things that we cover on the show today. So subscribing, if you're subscribed, you'll always get notified that we had a show here.

1:06:16and also sharing. There are so many people that don't know the truth about how to create a really emotionally healthy environment for themselves and for their others. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you on the next episode.