 Gabor, welcome to the show. Your latest book is titled, The Myth of Normal. So what is the myth of normal and why is it so pernicious? We use the word normal to imply that something is natural and healthy and unavoidable, which in medicine, which is my training, it has a certain validity because there's a normal range of blood pressure or body temperature or blood acidity inside which we thrive, outside of which we get sick or die. So if I say your blood pressure is normal, I'm saying your blood pressure is in a range that can sustain health, so it's not healthy and natural. But in a social sense, we also assume that the things that we're used to, because they're common and because they are what we do and see every day, we make the assumption that these are also healthy and normal. It's quite normal in a society, for example, to tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying. It's the norm. In fact, it's what many experts advocate. But is it healthy? Is it natural? You ask a mother cat if it's healthier or natural to ignore the baby's cries or you ask a mother chimpanzee, is it healthy or natural to ignore the baby's distress? We see that it isn't. It's very harmful, actually, to human children not to be picked up when they're crying. It interferes with their personality development, their brain development, their sense of themselves, their sense of safety in the world, yet it's normal. And there are many practices beginning with childbirth, childrearing, schooling, how we work, how we relate to our work, how we are expected to be, social norms that we are demanded to comply with, gender rules that we're expected to fulfill that are considered to be very normal, but in fact, which are very unhealthy for human beings. And hence, my title, the myth of normal. The other meaning is this, that we make an assumption that there is the abnormal people, for example, with depression or mental health problems, ADHD or whatever, then there's the rest of us that are normal. And in fact, what I'm saying is that's a myth as well, because I think we're all in the continuum of mental health or mental dysfunction in this society and to try and draw a sharp line between what is normal and what isn't is just a false exercise. So there's several senses in which norm is a myth and it's a pernicious myth. So when we look at it from the cultural perspective, much of what you're talking about discussing is not natural, but we've all adopted it and it's now having a negative impact on our health, our well-being, our emotional state, our relationships, our family ties, and you talk about it being even toxic. So in your view, how has culture become toxic to the human condition? Let me give you a simple example. People that are very nice and self-sacrificing are much honored or liked or appreciated. If you look at people with autoimmune disease, they tend to be people who are very nice and self-sacrificing. They tend to not to get angry. They tend to put their needs, if they even aware of them, much behind the needs of others and so on. Those traits, both statistically and physiologically, why they lead to autoimmune disease, but they consider it to be not only normal, but even admirable. So that's the first point, because the repression of anger actually undermines the immune system. We can talk about that. So when you consider it very nice and everybody really likes you, what a nice guy, maybe, but if you look at neurologists and you ask them to describe their patients with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, in metatrophic lateral sclerosis, they'll tell you, these people are always extraordinary nice. This has been studied and that's what the neurologists say. They don't make the connection between the niceness and the illness. I do, they don't, but they notice it. So this niceness that's considered to be so admirable, I'm thinking undermined health. Now, more broadly speaking, how to recreate this culture? Well, if you want to study zebras, you could say that a zebra is an animal that stands up a few times a day and mostly lies around looking bored. And you'd be accurate if you examined the zebra in a cage. But what if you really want to study the zebra? You wouldn't look at him in a cage. You look at him out on the savannah where he lives. You see a very different creature. Now, human beings evolved over millions of years. All human species, including our own, which has been around for about 150, 200,000 years, all those millions of years and all those hundreds of thousands of years and almost 10,000 years we lived out in the wild in small band hunter-gatherer groups. That's where we evolved. That's the environment to which we adapted, where children were always with their parents, the band traveled together. Kids had many adults looking after them. Parents weren't isolated, didn't leave their kids to go to work the whole day. Kids were always on nurturing adults. That's how we evolved. Now, what we call civilization begins to come along about 12,000 years ago, maybe 15,000 years ago. But until very recently, like if human existence can be summed up in an hour, then civilization maybe happened five minutes ago. As soon as we began to accumulate property and divide into classes and the rich and the poor, the gender dominant shifted to males for the most part, we began to get away from the environment in which we naturally evolved. And this has been exacerbated tremendously by the terrific achievements of modern industrial capitalism. I mean, our scientific, technological, theoretical achievements are, I mean, they're indisputable and they're remarkable. But we also began to lose our connection to our essential selves and to our true nature in the process. So civilization has conferred all kinds of benefits clearly, but it's come at a huge cost. And over the last 40 years or so, those costs have been exacted increasingly in an unequal fashion so that the rising inequality, which itself is a predictor of ill health in the population, as has been demonstrated by multiple studies, the conflict, the racism, the economic insecurity that I mean, the United States, the richest country in the history of the world. The average family is two months away from bankruptcy, two paychecks away from bankruptcy, the insecurity that most people live with. These all stress the body and the mind and they're toxic. So for all our achievements, we've also created a lot of toxicity. And the question is not to go back to hunter-gatherer, nobody wants to do and we can't anyway, but how can we regain what we've lost? So to borrow that zebra analogy from any of us, our job, our addiction, technology has become that cage in which we're suffering. Yeah. And the expectation that we should fit into social norms that may not actually serve our best interests. Now, you mentioned earlier, we talk about this a lot on the show, this nice guy syndrome, this people pleasing and how culturally it's selected for everyone wants to be around someone who's generous, who's kind, who's giving, but unfortunately, when it's at your own expense, not only is it at an expense in your relationships, but it's also to your health, to your physiology. Well, that's the whole point. Niceness and generosity can really emanate from two sources. One source can be just a human compassion and our natural drive to connect with others and to have empathy. That's great. But if it's compulsive and it comes from denying our own needs, then it can become harmful. So what happens is that as I explained in one chapter of the myth of normal human children have the need to connect with their adults in their lives. That's called attachment. Attachment is the sense of belonging for the sake of being taken care of while no mammalian infant can survive without attachment. That's an inbred genetically determined drive to attach our brain circuits are dedicated to it. So that's the need that we have. But we have another need, which is also dictated by evolution, which is to stay connected to our gut feelings, to be authentic, to know what we feel and to be able to act on it. Because out there in all those millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years, out there in the savannah or the tundra or the forest, just how long did we survive if you weren't in touch with our gut feelings? Not very long. So we have these two needs attachment and authenticity, connection to ourselves. What happens in a family where, as is the case so often in this culture, the child gets the message that how they authentically are is not acceptable to the parents, because the parents have been told by some stupid parenting expert that a negative two year old should be punished. So anger is not an acceptable emotion in a child. Well, the child is a decision to make. I can be authentic and be angry, or I can suppress my anger and be acceptable to my parents. Now, or if your parents are very needy, they don't know how to take care of themselves. They're addicted perhaps or stressed. The child automatically takes on a caregiving role in order to be acceptable to the parents by suppressing their own needs. Now that become very nice, very compliant, always giving, always thinking about other people and ignoring themselves. So this tension between attachment and authenticity has huge impacts on health because as I show in this book and other books have written that suppression of self including healthy anger actually suppresses the immune system and causes the immune system to either become less efficient or in fact even turns against the body and now you've got autoimmune disease. And that's because physiologically and scientifically in contrary to medical practice, you can't separate the mind from the body. So what happens emotionally has an impact physiologically. And so these people that emotionally self suppressing are going to also mess with their immune systems, not their fault. That's how they adapt it to their childhoods. And there's another personality trait you highlight in the book around being external focused and placing all of your value on what you produce, what you create, your self worth is tied to this workaholism that many in society are addicted to. That also is detrimental to your health. And for which people are also rewarded. So when I was a young physician and a workaholic, everybody thought I was great. He's always available. He's so generous. He's so patient, you know, he's always there for us. Yeah. At what cost? At the cost of my own mental health and physical health. And at the cost of my own kids who hardly saw me. And yet society rewards these traits. There's two kinds of self esteem. There is what's called contingent self esteem, which means that I feel good about myself because I can do this, that or the other really well. And because people think I'm wonderful. That's called contingent self esteem. Then there is genuine self esteem, which says, I'm not worthwhile because I can do this, that or the other, but I'm worthwhile whether or not I can do this, that or the other. My sense of worth is not dependent on other people's evaluation. Or what I accumulate or achieve or attain. Which doesn't mean that I don't want to achieve or attain. I sure do, but I'm not driven by it. I'm coming from my own sense of self and what I value and what matters to me. And I'm not going to judge myself based on what the world thinks of me. So this society, the whole celebrity culture is all about contingent self esteem and the whole social media culture is about contingent self esteem. How many people like me on Facebook? How many followers do I have? How many people agree with me? It's all based on what other people think of you. It's very addictive, very addictive and very unsatisfying. Well, it traces back to that attachment, right? Our survival depended on being accepted in the group and now we can quantify how accepted in the group we are based on how many people are following us, commenting, liking us, watching this video. Yeah, but on Facebook, do people really present themselves as who they are or they present a face? It's called Facebook for no, it's not called Facebook for no reason. This is a face I'm going to present to the world, you know. So even if people like you, it doesn't satisfy you because I don't know you. They like the image that you've presented. Look, look how many celebrities are there out there with millions of acolytes and fans and admirers who are just internally completely miserable. That's a common story. And then then what they'll do is they'll write a book about the addiction and the mental health crisis and so on, you know, and then it's revealed. I realized just with social media itself, when it first was available, it was certainly a lot of fun. You were putting all these pieces of your personality out there and it seemed like everyone was using it with reckless abandonment. But it also now seems as we've gotten into its teenage years, everyone is starting to see the effects of putting yourself out there with reckless abandonment and at least with either Facebook is dying or people are reeling back. But I've caught myself where the minute I want to post something and I have to think about how three different groups would perceive that post and I'm like, you know what, I'm not doing this and if I have to think about each group and how it will perceive this post, then I shouldn't be posting it. So now I just put up some music that I might be listening to, but I don't put too much else into it just because of how it made me feel. And now we're seeing the results of how we're being perceived due to this. And of course, everyone is getting wrapped up in these facades that they are putting out. And certainly younger teenagers who are trying to find an identity are almost it's almost as if it is forcing them into schizophrenic personalities in order to deal with all of the different posts that they're putting out or trying to live into these characters that they've built for themselves. Well, so there's a lot in what you say. First of all, I pay attention to language quite a bit and use the phrase reckless abandon. Okay. And what does that mean? It means that you don't reckon you don't actually consider what you're doing. Okay. Secondly, abandon who you're abandoning. You're abandoning yourself. Yeah. Okay. One of the things that happen, one of the toxicities of modern civilization is kids have lost contact with their parents because kids were meant to be on their parents evolutionary point of view till they grow up. In the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth for economic reasons. Now, that's a massive abandonment of children. Most children from an early age on spend most of their time around other kids, which means and the brain will attach to whoever you're around. So when you're under the kids all the time, your brain creates the peer relationships as your primary attachment. Which immediately alienates you from your parent. And now you give these kids this technology that even when they go home, they can still be with their peers on Facebook or whatever programs are available because kids need to attach to connect with somebody and because the adult world no longer provides children with those healthy stable attachments from in many cases kids look to each other and the technology simply enables that to happen in a highly addictive and pernicious fashion. Not to mention that the technology itself is designed to make people addicted to itself. It's called neuro marketing. They know how to appeal to the most addiction-grown circuits of your brain. This is not conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy reality. It's been documented. So there's all kinds of reasons why the technology is amazing as it is. And you know, it allows conversations like this one and it used to be called the information highway. It was designed for mature adults to exchange scientific intellectual information. But it's what's really become is an instrument of mass hypnosis, immature people connecting with each other because they've lost their relationship to mature adults. So it's pernicious. And along with that comes the attention that they get from their peers, right? If their parents are absent or the kin work has been offloaded onto strangers, childcare, babysitters, then these children are going to crave that attention from somewhere and social media very quickly provides it. Absolutely. And if you look at how shall I say this? I read one half year ago was some social media celebrity who farts into a bottle and then sells it. What the heck is that? I mean, it's about the humor of a two year old, you know, the people are actually paying money for this. So what do you get famous for? You get famous for farting into a bottle for God's sakes, you know, or their kids on TikTok who, as far as I know, have billions of followers and meet, you know, more money in a month than I might in a 10 lifetimes, you know, I mean, and for what for? For advertising a certain toy, you know, right? So I'm not saying this resentfully. I'm just saying, is that the values we want to inculcate in our kids? Well, I think it's a big part of that. And you discuss in the book, the four A's, right? And that's the acceptance of reality and what is going on so that we can navigate that in the ways that are best for us. Yeah, acceptance doesn't mean tolerance, you know, it doesn't mean that we want to put up with it, feel helpless, resigned in the face of some unpleasant reality where we have to know the reality and accept that this is reality. And so much of the culture is designed to divert our attention from reality. There's the war in Ukraine going on right now and America's supporting it with billions of dollars of weapons. Maybe that is right. Maybe that is not right. There was the Iraq war in which half a million Iraqis were killed and thousands of Americans lost their lives and the repercussions are still reverberating throughout the Middle East. It's just a mess. But you ask the average American to put two intelligent sentences together about the history of Ukraine. Or the history of Afghanistan or the history of Iraq. They couldn't. But they could sure tell you the defensive strategy of the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl or the brilliance of a particular NBA player or or the love affair that some famous Hollywood star just had with another famous Hollywood star. So a lot of the culture is actually designed. I don't have designed that nobody sits there and conspires to do this. But the system itself appreciates itself by drawing our attention away from what's important to what is absolutely non-important. It makes no difference at all. Who won the Super Bowl? Who won? I mean, it's interesting and it's a good game. Mahomas is certainly a fantastic athlete to watch. That's all great. But what difference does it make? You know, as compared to the fact that the Americans on the one hand don't have decent health care and are two patriots away from bankruptcy, which is more important in people's lives. But the culture designs or at least produces these institutions whose function is to draw us away from reality. In those examples you mentioned, it's another point to go along with attachment, right? Like if we look at football and sports, well, that attachment is an identity that we're tying ourselves to that. Oh, I'm I'm from Kansas City. I'm a chief skype. Oh, Mahoms. Or you mentioned also the celebrity and what's going on there. This is somebody that we put attachment towards because they've been there for us. And it may be a one way relationship. They they don't know we exist, but we have so much affection and love for that person. Well, yeah, we have affection and love also for the talent and the gifts that they give us. But we also create a persona that we love and so that if you look at the the gap between the reality of an Elvis Presley as a celebrity and as a human being or the gap between the suffering of a Mellon Monroe and the images, the sexiest woman in the world or the gap between an Aretha Franklin. As this avatar of a feminine power, arias, PCT and in her actual life, she was abused as a child, abused as an adult. And so we create these avatars that have nothing to do with the actual real person and we attach ourselves to it and they become our ideals. And there's an escapism tied to all of this. If culture is toxic, if we're overworked, if we're detached from our loved ones, our family members, our children. Well, then it's easiest in that suffering to escape to the Super Bowl or the celebrity or whatever is the latest entertainment piece that's being pushed by the mainstream media. And in a lot of ways, they're just amplifying what we're psychologically motivated to engage with, the salacious, the over the top nature. Well, absolutely. And look, not to put myself above any of this, like when I'm tired and stressed instead of actually taking care of myself, my tendency may be to go on YouTube and watch the latest sports highlights or the Rolling Stones singing, give me shelter for the 10,000 time. I've been there. That's OK. But it's not OK when it takes my mind over. I'm no longer even conscious that I'm doing it. I'm just flipping from one thing to the next. Then I say, where the hell is this hour gone by? I could have been in bed resting. Could have taken a hot bath, could have meditated, could have. So the blandishments of the culture to escape from ourselves are ever present and very powerful. Again, as I pointed in this book, a lot of that need to escape comes from the emotional pain. Why do we have to escape? Because we're in pain and a lot of that pain is originated in childhood and childhood trauma. And this is a highly traumatizing society that hurts a lot of people. And then it builds entire industries on helping people escape from the pain of the trauma that society imposed on them. It works beautifully. Well, part of that celebrity you touched on earlier is also the dramatization of trauma, the bringing forward of trauma. Trauma now is it's part of the popular zeitgeist. Everyone is using it in their marketing. I went through trauma. I have trauma. So from your perspective, I think it's best to at least help our audience get a deeper understanding since they're inundated with this version of trauma that's that's publicly out there. What is the trauma that you're discussing? How do we define it? And how do we actually start to heal from it instead of escaping from it? Because that is clearly not working. Yeah. So the word trauma is used a lot these days on the one hand, on the other hand is not used nearly enough. It's used in a trivial kind of way as as any kind of an upset. You know, I'm on a picnic on Sunday and it rained. I was traumatized. No, you weren't. You were just disappointed, you know, went to a movie last night and it was traumatic. No, it wasn't. It was just upsetting. So the word is used too trivially and too periscuously. On the one hand, on the other hand, where it matters, it's not used hardly enough at all. Where is it not used in a medical profession? The average physician doesn't get a single lecture on trauma. And yet scientifically, trauma underlies a lot of chronic illness like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, often malignancy, certainly all mental health conditions. As a British psychologist to point it out that the statistical link between childhood misfortune and adult mental health challenges is as well established as the link between smoking and lung cancer. But you go to the average physician with depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, whatever you got. Nobody's going to ask you about childhood trauma. They don't even know how to ask. They don't, they haven't studied the links, let alone if you go there with rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis. Despite all the studies linking childhood trauma, adult stress to all these different conditions. So that's the place where it's not used at all is the medical profession, hardly at all, except in a narrow sense of what they call PTSD. It's not used in the schools. So a lot of the kids that are so called misbehaving, acting out. What they're actually acting out is their trauma. Teachers are not trained to recognize that. For the most part, they're trained to control and punish behaviors, which is further traumatizing the child, despite all the scientific literature. Linking childhood dysfunctions, misbehaviors to traumatic circumstances. Where it's also not used as in the courts. Most of the people in jail have suffered significant trauma. The average lawyer, a judge, prosecutor, correctional officer never gets a single lecture on trauma in their education. So on the one hand, yes, we can use it too loosely. On the other hand, where it matters, we don't use it at all. So what is trauma? Trauma is a wound. That's what it means. Traum literally means a wound, psychological wound that hasn't healed. And those psychological wounds that the Greek meaning, the Greek word for wound is trauma. That's the meaning of the word. And as long as the trauma is unhealed, it's going to affect our behavior, just as unhealed physical wound will affect our behavior. We'd be more defensive, more scared, more limited, more constricted, perhaps more defensively aggressive to keep ourselves from being rewounded again. But the point is that these psychological wounds incurred early in childhood, unless they're understood, seen and healed, they can create a lot of problems in relationships, like most of the problems in couples, in a couple of situations is that one set of traumas is competing with another set of traumas. And the two people are not even present. There's two pasts fighting with each other and people don't even realize that. And so it shows up in how you relate to work. For example, the workaholism, it shows up in my case, it shows up in your relationship as it showed up in my marriage. It shows up how you treat your kids. It shows up often in your politics for that matter. And yet. We're not really talking about it in a deep way. So on the other hand, we trivialize it on the other hand, be actually ignored. Is it safe to say that everyone has trauma that they need to resolve? Well, it's probably safe to say that, although I might be biased, but I have yet to meet too many, you know, no, there are degrees of trauma, there's degrees of wounding, right? It's a continuum. Certainly in my work as a physician or providing therapy to people, I don't meet people who haven't been traumatized because why would they come to me? But I also know that if you look at what people are reading. So a best-selling book for in the New York Times for about two hundred and fifty weeks now has been Bessel Vendor Koch's The Body Keeps to Score, which is a fairly bints. It's very eloquent, but it's also deeply scientific. Not an easy read necessarily, but it's a big bestseller. My book, The Mythical Normal, has been in the New York Times bestsellers for 18 weeks now. Well, another book called What Happened to You by a wonderful neuroscientist, psychiatrist, physician called Bruce Perry, written by Oprah. What happened to you has been another forty, fifty weeks on the New York Times bestsellers since this publication. What does that tell you? It means that people actually interested and they're looking for this information because they need it. That means there's a lot of people out there. And then you have books like Matthew Perry's recent book, Friends, Lovers and whatever it was called. Well, he was an addict based on trauma. Pamela Anderson's recent book. She was a traumatized child. Prince Harry's recent book, Spare. So much childhood trauma and is childhood. So this is a book called I'm Glad My Mother Died, a big bestseller. These are all about trauma. The public wants to know it and to understand it. In fact, in that sense, the public is way ahead of the professionals. So Johnny touched on one of the A's in healing that you discussed in the book, recognizing that we all may have encountered trauma. We have unreconciled, unhealed wounds that are now impacting our behaviors, they're impacting our relationships, they're impacting our propensity for chronic illness. How do we start to recognize and move forward the healing process from all of this trauma we may have sustained? Usually it says you say, AJ, it begins with some kind of suffering, a divorce, your partner cheating on you, an illness, loss of a friendship, addiction, mental health challenges, some kind. So usually there's some suffering that makes us want to say, well, why is this happening? So that's the first question. You know, unfortunately, when most people go to physicians, nobody guides them to the essential source of their suffering. They'll be given a diagnosis maybe, but nobody's going to say, you know, this diagnosis doesn't really explain anything. It describes it, but it doesn't explain it. Take an example, I often use depression. So somebody's mood is low and they have poor sleep and they're socially isolating. So the doctor says, well, your social your mood is low and you're isolating socially because you're depressed. You can say, well, how do you know I'm depressed because you're socially isolating and your mood is low. But why is my mood low and why am I socializing because you're depressed? How do you know that I'm depressed? So these diagnosis, they don't explain anything. They describe them, but that's where most of medicine stops. Is it some description, but not an actual explanation? Even if there's inflammation in your body, such as there is an autoimmune disease, like multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis, why is there inflammation? And now you have to look at that person's life. What inflames, what causes inflammation in the body? Stress and trauma cause inflammation in the body. As the certain chemical agents and so on and so forth. So the diagnosis don't explain very much that describe them. But so people usually begin on this journey by some kind of suffering. And then they have to ask themselves, well, why am I suffering? And then I would ask them, what do you believe about yourself? What do you believe about your life? What stresses might you be generating for yourself without even meaning to or knowing that you are? What extent are you in touch with your needs? What happened to you in childhood? What do you believe about the world? All these questions pertain to your physiology because scientifically, you can't survey the mind from the body and therefore your emotions and your unconscious beliefs have a lot to do with your physiology. So how do people do that? Well, they go see a therapist, they read any number of books, including mine. They go on YouTube and they listen to I mean, in my case, there's dozens of my talks and interviews on YouTube, other people are not the only one. No, I'm saying I'm the best one. I'm just saying I'm one of them. I'm one of the people out there whose work is very available out there. You start looking into it. You start talking to your family. What happened if you're talking to your family? You start asking questions and you don't assume that there's something interesting if they're wrong with you. I just conducted a workshop this weekend called Your Illness Tells a Story. And so Your Illness Tells a Story. And what is the story that my my illness tells? That's the question. It's fascinating because most of Western medicine is around treating the symptoms and not focusing on any of these underlying beliefs that you have that are tied to wounds that lead to behaviors that lead to you choosing the addiction, choosing unhealthy patterns and choosing things that don't necessarily support your your full mental and emotional and physical health. When we look at recognizing, so there's this acceptance, this happened to me. One of the A's is a little counterintuitive and we've talked a little bit on the show about anger, but it's counterintuitive for many in our audience because we're taught from, as you said earlier in an example, from a young age that anger is bad. As a child, we're disciplined for feeling anger. We repress our anger. It doesn't make for civil society if we're angry. We look at the protest going on in Paris and they're not looked upon kindly. So anger is often something that we try to avoid, but you argue it's something that can be healing. Well, yeah. So. There's only one phrase that you say or quote or quibble with when you say you choose addiction and you choose nobody chooses these things. I worked with the. Most densely addicted population in North America here in Vancouver is down to on each side that there's no area in North America like the cities down on each side. People are addicted to heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, crystal meth, alcohol, nicotine, whatever you care to name. Nobody chooses to be an addict. They try to run away from intense pain, rooted in trauma. Nobody wakes up in the morning says, I'm going to choose an healthy lifestyle. I'm going to choose to be an addict. So these aren't choices. They're choices only on the unconscious level. So that I will make that distinction. OK. Now, in terms of anger, nobody chooses to repress anger either. Have you ever met a one day old baby that doesn't know how to get angry? Try feeding it something it doesn't want to eat. You're going to find out what anger is about. OK. Anger is not unhealthy. Our brains are wired for anger. We have a circuitry in our brain for anger. We share that with other mammals. Why? But look, if I were to enter your space right now in your physical space, I mean, we're far away from each other. But if I weren't in your physical space or your emotional space by being insulting to you, what would be a response on your part? Anger. Yeah. Would that be healthy or not? You'd be saying you're in my space. Get out. Or I will not have you talk to me that way. Stop it. Is that good or bad? Well, it's certainly good. You're protecting yourself. And anger is the emotion that allows us to protect ourselves. And I guess the real question is what we allow anger to allow us to do. Well, so here's what here's the point. There's healthy anger such as we have just talked about, which is just a bondary protection. It's not evil to hurt somebody else. It's just all animals do it. They'll they'll generate you know, they'll generate an anger response. You've entered their space, get out. You're in my it's healthy. It's a bondary defense. You can't live without it. When you get the message that your anger is not acceptable to your parents and you repress it. Now you have lost your bondary defense. Now you're the kid who's going to get bullied. The bully can always tell. It's not random who gets bullied. Kids who get randomly bullied are the kids with no bondary protection. The kids who bully are the ones who actually feel very weak inside and they have to make themselves more powerful by dominating somebody else. Something happened to both the bully and the bullied kid to create that dynamic. So healthy anger is just a bondary defense. Then there's unhealthy anger. That's when. We trigger it into a reaction by some unhealed wounds from the past. So. I'm walking towards you in the street and I'm thinking about something and I'm looking at you in a certain way and you get offended. You're disrespecting me. Well, I didn't I wasn't even know that you I didn't know you were there. Never mind. I don't know you. But then you go into a rage or we do this in a relationship like my wife might disappoint me somehow and I go into a rage. That's not healthy anger. That's unhealthy anger. So anger is basically three resolutions. The expression of healthy anger, which is in the moment. It's a bondly defense. Once you express it, it's done its job. It dissipates. It's no longer necessary. Just an emotion that's there to protect you. Or there's the repression of anger, which can by the way, what do we call depression? What's depression? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What do we push down in depression or emotions? Why are we pushed on our emotions because their environment couldn't accept them? So we pushed on our healthy anger, we pushed on everything and become flat. So there's the repression of healthy anger, which can lead to autoimmune disease and depression and so on and so forth. Then there's unhealthy anger, which is rage, a reaction triggered in the present by something that resembles the past and you thinking you're reacting to the present when you're acting to react into the past to this unhealed wound. And that's toxic to you and to the people receiving it. When I had that on anti-anger, that was toxic to my children and very hard on my marriage. So there is that unhealthy anger. By the way, in the aftermath of a rage episode, your risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles for the next two hours because your blood vessels constrict, clotting factors go up and your blood pressure goes up. So there's healthy anger. There's the repression of healthy anger and then there's unhealthy anger. And when people talk about anger, it's usually the last one that they're talking about. So what role does agency play in our healing? Because oftentimes we encounter people around us who are suffering and part of that suffering includes feeling like the victim and feeling like everything is out to get them and this trauma is overwhelming. The belief that everybody's out to get you is not false. But it's a memory. It's a memory, implicit memory of when you're small and helpless and you're being hurt and there was no way there to help you. So you perceive the world as a hostile, dangerous place. But early trauma actually shapes the way we see the world. So if I said you that there was a man who said that the world is a dangerous place, everybody's out to get you. Even your friends that want your house and your wife. And these are your friends. It's a doggy dog world. What would you imagine about the childhood of that person? They were unsafe. They felt unsafe. Yeah. So out of that lack of safety, they created a world view. I've just quoted verbatim a recent president of the United States, because he said these words in his autobiography. So he's not crazy to believe that, but he confuses his own emotional experience with the way the world is, the way the world is. And as long as he believes that that's the way the world is, he's going to behave like that's the way the world is. So he's going to make himself bigger and bigger and more and more grandiose so that nobody can get at him. He's going to have to be aggressive, attack others before they get him. And he's going to be really selfish and inquisitive, because otherwise they're going to take it away from him. So that world view which he obtained in the context of very traumatizing family home, which has been described very intimately and articulately by his niece, whose own father drank himself to death, is going to behave according to those beliefs. What he doesn't know is that those beliefs actually were a natural outcome of his childhood trauma. And rather than healing the trauma, and it can't be very pleasant to be inside that consciousness. I mean, how pleasant it is to be inside a consciousness that says, I'm totally all alone. I'm on my own. I have to be aggressive, selfish. Everybody's against me. I mean, how does it feel like to be inside a head like that? You know, and but he's compelled to act it out. If he was able to say to himself, if you actually listen to his therapist niece, his psychologist niece, who said, look, this is what happened. And the beliefs that you have came out of came out as a natural result of what happened. You could actually be different. You could actually liberate yourself from this worldview. But of course, in this society, he's rewarded for having those beliefs. It's reinforced. And I'm not singing him out, by the way. You see this almost across the political spectrum. Yeah, those beliefs are common. Yeah, it's very common. And so agency means I don't have to believe the story that I downloaded when I was a kid. Right. You can rewrite it. Yeah, I can create my own story based on conscious awareness of what's going on. I don't have to be the victim of my childhood. So trauma awareness is not about the victimhood. It's actually about power. Right. That's where the healing begins. And being able to change that story is something that we work really hard with our clients on. Because as you mentioned, how you view the world will dictate the behaviors that you express in it to navigate it. Everyone, they look for the root cause of certain behaviors and why they act in the way they do and get caught up in some of the loops that they do. It's like, well, there's a belief that is stuck that that forces that that pattern. And there's usually a clasp that holds that loop together and it's going to stem from a belief. And usually it's that I'm not good enough. And there was a whole part in the book in the belief structuring part of how how that belief runs through so many of us. And in fact, it's one of the most commonly held beliefs that we all have due to our growing up. Well, certainly it showed up in my life a lot and it drove a lot of my behaviors and emotional patterns. I wouldn't say it's completely dissipated even now because but that's OK. I'm only 79. So I got time to work on it. I often say this, but I think it's worth saying I said I'm 79 and I'm glad I'm not as young as stupid as I was when I was 78. So there's there's hope for us all folks. But recently I had an event, quite a public event where I was made to look really bad in the eyes of a lot of people and in which I had made some mistakes that contributed to that. I thought I was immune, but I wasn't. I went through a real period of several days, at least not months or weeks, but some days are real respondents and oh my God, what did I do? And I really screwed up and, you know, well, that goes back to a sense of not being good enough. Because I mean, let's face it, even if I made a mistake and partly it wasn't a mistake. Partly it was just misrepresentation. But but even if I made it as a mistake, what's the headline in the New York Times? Human being make mistakes. That doesn't sell any papers. Shocking. Human beings makes a mistake, you know. So we all do. Why should that undermine our self-esteem? Unless there's this wound there that I'm just not worth it. Unless I. I'm successful, you know, or liked and so on. So that one, as you say, is the deepest wound of all. And what's interesting about it, even that belief at some point played a defensive function. Because when you're suffering as a kid, either because your parents don't understand, you see you because they're too stressed, too distracted, really embrace who you are exactly as you are. Or worse, if your parents are hurting you or if they're hurting each other or, you know, there's two beliefs you can adopt. One is that the world is incapable of meeting incapable of meeting my needs. I'm totally alone, defenseless and helpless. Or. This best of is happening because it's my fault. And if I work hard enough, hard enough, if I was good enough, I could fix it. Of those two beliefs, which is more palatable for most children. The second it's the one that there's something wrong with. So even that belief that is so debilitating, that there's something wrong with me. Actually serves a protective function at some point. So you discuss five hours to unpack this limiting belief. It's something that we find in our clients and ourselves to even struggle with. What are the five hours and how do we start to move beyond this limiting belief? That's so common. This is actually an exercise that was originally developed by Dr. Jeffrey Schor. It's a psychiatrist at UCLA working with OCD. And he developed these four steps to work with OCD symptoms. These steps have to be done regularly and with conscious awareness. And the conscious awareness reshapes the brain. That's the essence of what he's talking about. But the good news is that with practice, we can actually undo the effects of trauma. We can develop new brain circuits to regulate the older ones. That's really what this exercise designed to do. So now with his permission, then I applied these four because I didn't say, you know, they worked for OCD for a lot of people he found. But I thought, well, why couldn't they work for addictions, too? And so I at least at least behavior addictions, which have a lot in common with OCD. They're not the same, but there's a lot of commonality. So in my book in the Ramaphonga Goals and Addictions, I reconfigured these four steps to apply to addiction. And then I broadened that. Let's work with all self limiting beliefs. So those are the four hours. I had the fifth one, so I'll give Dr. Schwarz credit for the first four. I'll take credit for the last one. But they become let's say you believe that you're not worth it, but you're not good enough. So the first one is you're reliable, reliable, reliable means not that I'm not good enough, but I have a thought that I'm not good enough. I believe that I'm not good enough. Now, as soon as you relabel it, you're getting distance from it. Because as long as you say, I'm not worthy, you're identifying with the beliefs. Right. As soon as you say, I have a belief that I'm not worth it. No, you've taken the steps away from it. There's a separation between yourself and the belief. There's an eye, then there's this belief. So that's the first step to relabel. And this can be applied to any self-immitting belief. I have to please others. No, I don't have to please others. I have a belief that I have to please others and so on. So that's the first step, relabel. The second one is reattribute, which is to say, attribute this belief to exactly where it belongs. So this is my brain sending me, you know, this belief that I'm not worthy. It's just my brain sending me an old message. A message that I self-developed defensively when I was three years old. It was not that I'm unworthy. This is my brain sending me a message that maybe served a function way back then, but now undermines me. So that's the second step. The third step is refocus. And that means you got this belief that I'm not worthy. Just take five minutes. This is an exercise you're meant to do. It's not just a thought pattern. And then, you know, take a piece of paper once a day or once a week or three times a week and sit down and do this exercise consciously with conscious awareness, not routinely, but conscious and do it in writing so they're not typing on a computer, but write it out by hand. So the third step is refocus. OK, I'm not worthy, but maybe I'll come back to that belief. But for five minutes, I'm going to focus on the people I've loved or the people that have loved me or things that have done well or good thoughts that I've had. Or I'm going to look at a flower. I'm going to look at a beautiful photograph or a picture on and listen to a beautiful piece of music consciously. I'm going to take my mind's focus away from this belief and put it on something that's nourishing. That's called refocus. Simple little exercise. The step four is called V value, which is to actually evaluate this belief for what is really done in your life. So this belief that I'm unworthy. What is this actual value? What is it done? Oh, it kept me a workaholic. It kept me feeling bad about myself. It kept me desperate. It kept me isolated. It kept me ashamed. That's what it's actually done. That's this actual value. It's got a negative. That's called the revalue or reevaluate. The fifth one, which I've added, is called recreate, which is to say up till now, largely I've been driven by these unconscious forces, by these beliefs. I didn't have agency. I didn't deliberately take these on. These are natural responses to my childhood programming. Now I can recreate myself. What are my actual aspirations? What is my heart's desire? What kind of world do I want to live in? What do I want to contribute? Or what do I want to experience? So consciously recreate an image of who you want to be and how you want to show up in the world. So those are the five hours. Thank you for sharing with our audience. I think many of us listening have had those moments, in fact, for me just recently. And in that moment, it can be all consuming and it can lead to behaviors that pull you away from your goals, pull you into inaction or to even more negative behaviors that aren't helpful to your health. That recreation step, the visualization piece, is often I feel the most difficult if we've been in that state and that's been a limiting belief for so long in our life. It's come up over and over again. How for those in our audience who would struggle to think about what they want to be or what that vision is, start to work on the recreation step more impactfully. Look, first of all, if you're training somebody as a weightlifter, how would you get them to bench press 300 pounds? Lift the bar first. You lift the bar first. So just just start simply, you know, I'm going to be a loving person. Period. Or I want to be a person who experiences love. Everybody's got some aspiration. It's not that difficult to identify something. This particular exercise, if somebody takes it on, it's like lifting weights. You got to start somewhere and you got to keep doing it. You're not going to get to 300 pounds. If you don't train for it, this is training. And the whole point is our child to kind of hypnotize us into a certain set of beliefs. Now we have to retrain ourselves. This exercise certainly is not the be all in the end all. It's just one way to approach the self-limiting beliefs. But it's in a training exercise. If you want to take it on, take it on. If you go to the gym three times a week, do this exercise three times a week. It takes 15 minutes, you know, or do it six times a week, whatever. The more you do it, the more you're going to develop new brain circuits that can actually hold that message. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and share your work with us. We love asking every guest one last question. What is your X factor? What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary? My absolute commitment to figuring out the truth of things and not just figuring it out, but also to speaking it once I think I found it. And that's true in my personal life. That's been what's kept our marriage of fifty three years vibrant as they were both really committed to the truth. We didn't just buy it as much as we acted out our stories. Sometimes you'd hurt for ways. We're actually committed to figuring out the truth. And that's true for me in the realm of the human mind, human health, politics and just really committed to truth because I agree with a very great person who once said that you will know the truth and the truth will liberate you. So I think there's freedom in truth. And where can our audience find out more about this book and your other writings? This book is available everywhere. The MetoNormal Trauma, Illness and Healing and Toxic Culture is published in or will be in 30 languages now. Over 30 countries. Bookstores, certainly online. I love it when people patronize the local bookstores, by the way. But those that it's none of it, you can certainly get it online. I have a website, Dr. Gabor Mate, G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T dot com. At my website, you can join my email list if you want to. So it's not difficult to find the other. All right. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing this book with us. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. It's such a pleasure. Thank you guys. It's been a real pleasure to take care.