 Good mental health. I'm your host, Matt Kelly. I'm pleased to once again be joined by my co-host and behavior expert, Dr. Neil Maranello. Neil, as always, it's a pleasure to have you on the show and to share this time with your brilliant expertise. Well, my pleasure. You are a solutions focused life coach in Woodstock, Vermont, and I do refer to you as a behavior expert. I think it's important that before we begin, we just touch a little bit about that. Your experience in human behavior spans over half a century and began when you were one of the youngest to enter Harvard Medical School. Is that correct? Not Harvard Medical School, Harvard College. Harvard College. I was 16 when I went to Harvard, and there was a 13 year old in my class, and I had to deal with the part of me that wanted to either hug him or kill him. Wow. And from that, you've really had experience, whether it be one on one individual coaching sessions, but also clinical experience, both in hospital, working in prisons. Quite a wide experience dealing with human behavior. Well, I think that from the time I was quite young, let's say 15 years old, I became fascinated with the idea of exposing myself to as many different kinds of weird people engaged in weird behaviors, as I could. And it started off at Harvard working for Phillips Brooks House, going to Metropolitan State Hospital, which was the state hospital for Massachusetts at the time, and working in the back wards with people who had been diagnosed schizophrenic. Since then, I've worked with every kind of mental disorder and I would say personality disorder that I could find, and my goal has been to understand how people think. Wonderful. Well, our topic for today is just right up your alley and you know I'm fortunate because I get to pick the topics but we're drawing directly from your tweets on Twitter and our audience has invited to follow Neil directly on Twitter, his handle is at coach Dr Neil at coach Dr Neil on Twitter and our subject for today is there is no part of me that is not a part of you or vice versa as we should say there is no part of you. That is not a part of me and Neil why don't you briefly just take us into the concept and will dig deep as we continue in this discussion. I think I began working with this idea. Many, many years ago and I started to read the science fiction of Theodore Sturgeon, who was a science fiction writer in the 50s, and afterwards and I think, to me his most famous book was called more than human. But his concept was that there would be no wars. If everybody was inside everybody else's head. That everybody's got secrets that they don't want anyone else to know. And if those secrets were all exposed we would all realize we're just, you know, people doing the best we can. The way I translated that into a sermon at our church in the late 90s was to entitle the sermon, no better than Hitler, no worse than Jesus. And I was using Hitler and Jesus as personifications of what the social constructs call them evil and good. The idea that was though that there's no part of Hitler that isn't a part of me, and there's no part of Jesus that isn't a part of me. And what I was saying was, we all have chemicals that operate within us. Emotions that operate within us, thoughts that operate within us. But there are no bad chemicals. Emotions or thoughts, there are only bad deeds. And the things that we do are the things that we need to take responsibility for. So that's the start. There's many other people that have written about this concept. Debbie Ford was one of the best. She wrote a book called The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. And in that book she talks about how she was really furious with a particular woman who she saw as a true bitch. And then she realized that that woman represented the worst part of herself. And as a result of that I actually bought a t-shirt which I use occasionally with my clients. Especially the female ones. And here's the t-shirt. Queen of denial, love it. That's great. It's key to understanding bad behavior. When people do bad things, it's usually because they're trying to deny the fact that there's a part of them that could be like the person that they're criticizing. And it's happened to me many times. In a recent time I was watching a situation in which I was watching a DVD that was about Leonard Cohen. And Leonard Cohen is of course a magnificent songwriter and one of the best poets and Buddhist that many of us would like to emulate. In watching this DVD that was a tribute to Leonard Cohen, there was someone named Anthony Hegerty who was singing a song that Leonard Cohen had written called If It Be Your Will. And Anthony Hegerty was dressed as a transvestite and was, as he was singing the song, acting very feminine. And it infuriated me. And in my business, if you get any intense emotion about anything, I've got to figure out what's going on with me, otherwise I'm not going to be that helpful for other people. So I watched it 10 more times. And about the eighth or ninth time, when I realized I wanted to start throwing things at the TV, I began realizing that whether he was posing as it or whether he was just a very good actor, Anthony was in fact demonstrating to me that he had been exposed to almost the same kind of abuse that I had been exposed to growing up. But he had made the exact opposite decisions. In other words, when I was growing up in the 50s, and I saw, and I felt very emasculated by a very powerful Columbia Law School graduate mother. I would watch a Paul Newman movie or a Steve McQueen movie and model my behavior after them. And I realized that in his extremely feminine behavior, Anthony Hagrid, Anthony Hagerty had gone the exact opposite way that every time he had chosen to be more feminine. I had chosen to be more masculine. In other words, using it in young in terms, he was my shadow. And that's why I was furious with him I refused to recognize that I could just as easily have been him. And this is what I just love about our conversations. It is completely different than what I had interpreted or expected. In essence, our show to be about today and I kind of want to just share what I was thinking that this would sort of be and that is that again the concept being that there is no part of you that is not a part of me. It has to do with what is transmitted to my cornea that then translates to my amygdala that it gets interpreted. And so, for example, if I happen to witness a behavior or, or I have a reaction to someone some person, I have to take responsibility for it because it is my mind that has interpreted this that my eyes my corneas have actually seen. While Neil Maranello is his own individual person. My interaction with you colors my viewpoint of you, and has very little to do with who Dr Neil Maranello actually is. And yet I have to take responsibility for that anger or that fear or whatever emotion comes up, because it, it is my mind that has triggered it. And it is my vision that has seen it then to give this another way if you look just into the background around me. There may be different shapes and different colors. And, and whatnot and for me, I love that because that shapes and colors and designs but somebody else may just view that as a carc off any if you will have of different colors and things and it may be very confusing for them. And whatnot, but again, I look at it and I see abundance of shape, color sizes, and interact with that but somebody else may have a different reaction. And yet I have to take responsibility for my own reaction to what my I see and what my brain translates therefore what my I see I have to take responsibility for and that's why there is no part of you. It's not part of me and that's how I interpreted this, this question and and yet I just love it because it's it's different from how you approach this. The truth is that your example is extremely good because the optical nerves actually reverse images in the brain, and your brain turns it over so it looks so it looks right side up. But the term I use last week when we talked was significant, the meaning that you give to what you see yours and yours alone. And there's a lot of evidence that I witnessed testimony is not very good. Because if you have several people that see exactly the same accident from different angles they will tell almost as many different stories about the accident. As as there are people, because each person interprets it through his own perception. The, the issue here has to do much more with the difference between the meaning that you give to something you see, and whether the effect of that meaning on you results in behavior, which is good, bad, or crazy. The difference being good behavior is behavior which in one way or another helps yourself or other people without unnecessarily hurting others. Bad behavior is behavior in which you are purposely hurting yourself or others to make yourself feel better and knowing it. Crazy behavior is behavior in which you are acting believing something to be true that is not true. Not necessarily even understanding that you're hurting yourself or others by doing that. One other way that you know I came to this, this question was to recognize that, you know, despite all our differences of hair color, gender, size, shape, sexuality, whatever it is. Ultimately, we're much more alike than we are different. So, again, approaching the, the, the topic there is no part of you that is not a part of me coming down to a very basic cellular level. Is it is it is its own truth, if you will. It is true. Yes. But in the, in the business that I'm in, the issue is much more, what are the parts of myself that I don't want to acknowledge or want to recognize are actually things that exist in me. So, many people who behave in, in evil ways, actually are not aware of that they're in their own mind they think they're doing the best they can. But in many cases they are in fact, behaving in ways which are consistent with some distorted perception of reality. I'll give you an example. Yeah, I had many years ago I had read a report that was written by an expert forensic psychiatrist about a particular patient that he had. He was asked to evaluate that person this person had was in jail had committed many rapes and had a pattern of committing rapes that we had resulted in his being put in jail probably for the rest of his life. I met with that person, and after reading the report, and in the report, basically was talking about how this guy had grown up on a farm, and it had sex with cows. A fairly disgusting image. The report that was written by the psychiatrist talked about that, and then immediately went into a diagnosis the diagnosis was anti social personality disorder, which was a totally appropriate diagnosis. What I was asking myself was what's going on inside this guy's head while he's having sex with cows. And is there a way that that distorted thought process that he has can be used to stop him from raping people in the future. And it took quite a while for me talking to him to get his trust and to get him talking to me. In the Netflix series I think called bind hunter, which talks about how important it is to get inside the head of people who commit horrendous crimes. And once you can do that, the possibility of seeing them as human beings, rather than as monsters, which of course their behavior makes them gives you an opportunity to say, Okay, could I do that. What part of me would be capable of doing that. So it's a very, very interesting process understanding how people think that gives them permission to do such horrible things. In my own experience, it comes down to the fact that that if you refuse to recognize that there's a part of you that's capable of doing something bad, that there's a monster inside your own head that you have to get to know make friends with perhaps even accept the odds that you're going to actually act in horrible ways become much less. So in terms of health we're speaking with Dr Neil Maranello our topic here today is, there is no part of you that is not a part of me. And, you know, this sort of brings up to me, the issue of shame. And in the sense that that's sort of what we're, we're kind of talking about here that if it's something about myself that I don't like that that that shame is attached to that. And then as a result, there may be efforts to push that down, which comes out in, in less productive ways. But pushing it down, in fact, is a very good analog, because trying to deny shame is a little like packing a cannon. You refuse to acknowledge that at some point there's a chance that it's going to go boom. The reality is that, in my mind anyway, shame is one of the most ignored issues in the field of mental health. And would you also say that it's probably one of the primary drivers of mental health? Absolutely. I would even say that that shame is an issue which exists in the first year of life. And child experiences that. I remember reading a woman named Karen Horne, who was a person who had a theory of personality, in which she said, every child has two mothers. The mother that changes their diaper when they're hungry and the mother that gives the milk when they're hungry. The child, of course, doesn't know how to do anything but cry. So if the child gets the diaper change when the child's hungry, that's the bad mother. And the child wants to get rid of that mother and just have the one that changes the diaper when the child is wet. The child, however, is totally dependent on the mother and is looking at the mother and sees the face of the mother. And if the child gets the diaper changed when the child is actually hungry, the child sees the expression on mother's face, and that's the bad mother. Of course, the child doesn't know how to do anything but cry. And so you wind up with this situation where the child associates the face of the mother with shame. And of course there is no real shame in it, but there is from the child's point of view, the child isn't getting what he or she wants. One other area that I wanted to kind of extrapolate here on this, you know, having worked with you for a number of years for full disclosure, I've been a client of Dr. Aaron Lowe's going back, you know, to the mid 90s and seeing you off and on since then. One of the things that you have shared with me, which I see pertinent to today's topic is putting yourself in someone else's shoes to, for example, if there's about racism, let's just use that as a as a topic which is very prevalent here today the topic of racism. The way to perhaps understand it is to actually put yourself in the shoes of someone and to actually take their position, and it may be a position that is opposite of your own. And it's only when you're able to do that, that perhaps empathy might be able to be achieved because you come to it from a different point of view, again, being that there is no part of you that is not a part of me. Yeah, absolutely. I think that the issue of racism has come up, you know, quite intensely lately, and the bottom line on it is that it's pretty hard to get inside the head of somebody who puts his foot on someone else's throat and doesn't lift it. At the same time, it's much easier to get inside the head of the person who's being killed by that. But the, the objectivity, the process of saying to yourself, what I'm doing is acceptable is right is something that that the people who are talking and saying things around me. Don't know that I'm doing the right thing. Whatever the reality is of the inner thought process. It has nothing to do with the reality of what's happening now. And I can remember a case that I had very early that taught me an awful lot of a situation where I received a call from a lawyer who said, I know you've had more experience testifying than anybody else, but I'm not calling you about that. I'm calling you because I have a client who murdered a teenage girl, and he doesn't know why he did it. He wants you to tell him why. And, and I said to the lawyer, yeah, right. I'll leave that for a minute. And the lawyer said no he's willing to sign anything at all. You don't have to testify you don't have to say anything. He just wants to know why he did it he can't sleep at night, and he knows he's going to jail and he deserves it. But he doesn't understand why. And that everybody signed a bunch of paper that covered my ass. So I wouldn't have to testify and I was a fascinating job getting inside this guy's had I gave him a bunch of tests I talked to him quite a bit. And it turned out that he was a, he was a big guy, but he had in fact, been born a twin. By the way, I'm changing some of the facts here so that I can protect the most identities are kept confidential. Exactly. Well, to protect the guilty. At any rate, he was a twin, and his twin was a female. And she did very well in school and he did very poorly. And when he was eight years old, his mother had been working in an affair, and, and wound up divorcing his father, and his father had to work three different jobs in order to pay the child support. And prior to his murdering this teenage girl he had wound up getting jilted by his girlfriend, and he started on a bender was drinking and driving around in his pickup truck, and picked up a couple of teenage girls and were totally drunk. And he dropped one of them off at her home and the other one he took to a lover's lane and tried to have sex with her. And she was too drunk and he was unsuccessful in having sex with her, kept going back and drinking more beer, and then choked her to death, and didn't understand why. And after talking to him for quite a while, I was able to make a guess, and the guest turned out to be on the mark. And the guess was that he killed her to prevent a single thought from entering his head. And that thought was that he wished he was female. Wow. And when I said that to him, I had never understood the term blanched before he literally turned white. And he said, My God, that's why I've been having those dreams. This was the 70s, a long time ago. But the dreams he was having was that he had gone to Sweden and had a sex change operation. Wow. But he got it all. And would you say that shame was was present with him in this as well. Let's say it was the major factor. Yeah, hadn't been ashamed of that thought. He might not have killed her. You know, as I think about you and your history and whatnot, you've had a great opportunity to get in the head of some pretty by public standards, despicable individuals. And, and have come to this realization again, there is no part of you that is not a part of me. And so in that, I would assume that you've recognized shame within yourself. And perhaps maybe that was the Anthony Haggerty story. And it's Genesis as well. And wondering if we could just expound on that a little bit more. Well, let's keep it personal. It was very hard for me to get inside your head when you book a loaded gun, put it to your heart and pull the trigger. At the same time, the state of mind that you were in at that point makes perfect sense to me because of the extreme amount of shame that you were experiencing the extreme amount of pain that you were experiencing and the desire to stop it. And that's a scale of one to 10 of suicide attempts. That's a 10. The fact that you're alive is to me, a presentation of an opportunity. And it comes right up against the meaning of life. The shame and the fact that we're all going to die. I think two of the most important forces that are operating for everybody. And the reality is that most people would rather not think about either of those things. So the process of denying that results and you're wearing the t-shirt. But the truth is that that you survived. The question is, why did you survive? And if you want to say it's all a bunch of random existential bold, you can say, okay, but that doesn't lead you anywhere. If you want to say, wait a minute, there's got to be a reason why I survived and let me significant. Let me give a meaning to let me do something with the rest of my life. What you've been doing, which is expressing your artistic capacities in various ways and turning yourself into a person who was talent clearly shows. And yet we can say even that the impetus for that is shame over that event. And to try to make amends for it and to try to capitalize on it in a way that empowers me and allows me to still be fully creative. That feel right. Yeah. What you said just feels right to me. You know, and so I call it the nickel dropping. You know, and that dates me because in the old, the old days we used to have these coke machines. And you'd put a nickel in it and the coke would come out if you if you put it in right. If it didn't you wouldn't hear the nickel drop and so you'd have to push the coin return. And then spin it a little bit and hope that you're getting your coke that way. But what you just said, dropped a nickel for me. And it's unfortunate that it had to take such an extreme action on my part but again that's wrong thinking, and that will be a topic of another of our future conversations. Be considered unfortunate or could be considered fortunate. And all about signification again. Yeah, exactly. The question is why are you alive and why are some people who attempted suicide at a two or three on a scale of 10. Why did they die. And cancer could be it's all a bunch of random crap. Or it could be if you give it meaning, wind up getting a raison d'etre reason for living that works for you. It may or may not work for me or for someone else, but it doesn't have to. And so as we, you know, move forward here and and and we wrap up with with our topic there's no part of you that is not a part of me. Let's try to encapsulate that here. In this regard with myself, how, how do we as a public try to keep that thought in in our forefront, rather than in a back recess, because I would suspect and as you started out with this in the show is that if we were able all to probably in our forefront, you know, there'd probably be less war less violence less crime in our communities and and directed towards ourselves. Yes, I think that it starts with, if you feel strongly about anything. It's worth examining anything that you have a strong feeling about the in the a community they say, if you spot it you got it. But we're talking about the fact that very strong emotions are suggestive that you're, you're hacking a cannon and trying to not think about something that it would help if you thought about. To be clear here I mean the the emotion can be glad, sad, mad, happy, sexually stimulated whatever it is, if it impacts you strongly. It would be wise to unpack it and try to get to a root. Certainly can be in terms of emotions. I'm a reductionist. So, I have four emotions mad sad glad and scared. At one point in my reductionistic experience I reduced it to two emotions, mad scared and sad glad, because they are on a continuum. Extreme of scared is panic, extreme of anger is rage, but they're not miles apart there is a bridge between those two. And because you can laugh until you cry there's a bridge between sad and glad also any extreme feeling that you have, I believe is worth understanding, looking at and saying, is it possible that I'm denying the part of me that feels the opposite. And if so, can I allow that part to exist. The concept here currently is referred to I think is radical acceptance, which is the shrink version of love loving someone is wanting what's best for them even if it's not what's best for you. I think acceptance is accepting that there may be parts of you that you can't stand that are actually monsters, but that you have to accept and even love those parts of yourself, in order to not let them control your behavior, so that you wind up doing bad things. And, again, if you're recognizing it or seeing it in somebody else, more than likely, it's triggering you because you recognize it or, or, or you're failing to recognize it within yourself. And it's only when you are able to recognize it within yourself and come to a point of like you just said radical accept acceptance that you will then be able to accept that in somebody else. Yes, to take it to to the logical extreme. Hitler was not Jewish, but there was a part of him that thought like a Jew. And perhaps if he had accepted that part of him, he wouldn't have killed 6 million Jews. Wow. That's pretty intense. Here's an interesting example. This is a Montblanc pen. I'm a pen freak. And this particular pen. What Hitler did was hire someone to make him the best pen in the world. And he hired a Jewish man to do it. And of course that Jewish man was aware of the fact that Hitler was not a nice guy. He made this pen and the symbol of the pen is right on the top here. It's what supposedly the snowy cap of Montblanc. In fact, if you look at it closely, it's a Jewish star filled in. Yes, it is. Wow. You manage to thumb his nose at Hitler with by following his orders. Same time. We've been speaking with Dr. Neil Maranello, behavior expert and solutions focused life coach life coach out of Woodstock, Vermont. Our topic today has been, there is no part of you that is not a part of me. I want to thank Dr. Neal for his time here today. A reminder that you can follow Dr. Neal directly on Twitter is handle is at coach Dr. Neal. And I can personally attest that he's got true nuggets of gold in there and if you have the opportunity to go through and review what he's written it will definitely be a thought starter. Our topic for next week is another one that I'm quite excited about. It follows on exactly what we've been speaking about today or topic next week will be each of us is in our own reality, and we'll follow up with that next week so on behalf of Dr. Neal Maranello I'm that Kelly, we're both wishing you good mental health.