The 7 SURPRISING Ways To Heal Trauma WITHOUT MEDICATION | Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk

I wanted to start with a quote from your iconic book the body keeps score

trauma

robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself oh that is a true statement what did you mean by that where you are

trauma

tized is not the external? event, but your reaction to that external event is that you can't cope with it and then you are vulnerable to reacting to other things as if they were catastrophes, so you may suddenly find yourself very scared, very angry or very excited. you panic or you can shut down and then you really have no control over these intense emotional reactions that happen after a trauma, yeah, so in a lot of

ways

people who are traumatized feel like their lives are out of control, that life, I guess , it's happening to them instead of them. they are in control of their lives, yes, they keep reacting to things and things are disorganized and then a lot of times they start blaming the people around them for causing them so much anger or panic or something like that, but after a while people are starting to realize. oh, it's really my reactions that make life so difficult and then how I can control these reactions becomes a major problem and many times people learn to close themselves off and learn not to react, but with that they become very distant from themselves themselves. and the people around them I think what you said there was really moving for me: we often think that it's the people around us that make us feel a certain way without that deep understanding that we are actually generating those emotions that such Maybe I don't know why we are generating them, but ultimately it comes from within us, doesn't it?

Yes, the whole story was like that because you know that negotiating your paths into the world is complex. People will say things that may or may not be nice. I respect you as much as you would like, but the bottom line is how I react to adverse problems and I can't change everyone else. In fact, I have to learn to manage my own arousal and my own reactivity. Yes, what is the difference between trauma? and stress, the big difference is that when stress is over, it's over, so when you take an exam you're working hard and you might not be able to sleep, but once you take the exam you can go for a walk and do whatever. you want to do and the stress disappears and stress is not bad for people because we are really programmed to deal with very adverse circumstances, people can deal with a lot of stress, but the critical thing is when the stress ends and you have done everything what it takes to cope, then your body resets, you calm down and stop being hyper focused or whatever, but they give you a trauma test, those reactions don't stop, so the trauma is almost like a severe stress response that never ends. and that begins to change our nervous system and how we see the world, how we react to the world, is that one way of saying it, no, it's not, it's not as cognitive as seeing the world, really how we react to the world, a reactivity. . uh it changes and we may get too intensely excited about minor problems so actually Trump we're talking from a neuroneuroscience point of view we have some networks in the brain that help us select what's important what's important is called the saliency network. and after you are traumatized, the salience network makes you react to minor problems as if they were a catastrophe.

Yeah, how common is trauma would you say? Oh, extremely common and of course there are all kinds of radiation, but things like being abused by your own parents. Being brutalized in your personal relationships by someone is extremely common and it's really ironic that when we first defined PTSD we said that this is an extraordinary event outside the usual range of human experience and we were completely wrong about that, but because when we start looking at it we discover that at least one in four women and every five or six men experience sexual abuse before reaching adulthood;

For example, large numbers of women are raped and large numbers of people are involved in domestic violence. situations, so it actually turned out to be a lot more common than we ever thought it would be. I mean, those statistics are really alarming when you put them like that. I imagine, Dr. Vandercoat, that some people who were listening or watching right now are thinking. Wow, many people will think well. I know many women and many men and have never heard of this happening to them, which potentially speaks to secrecy. It is a shame that many people have suffered this and continue to suffer because of the traumatic traces, but they are not talking about it, well, that is in the mark that, after trying, whether after you get out or after that you get vaped, you don't go around telling people about it, there's al

ways

this. issue of I must be to blame for what happens or if you are in a domestic violence situation you don't tell people oh my boyfriend or my girlfriend just hit me because that reflects badly on you and then the shame and secrecy are very big part of trauma situations is very

surprising

when there is public trauma.

My example in the culture I live in is 9/11. I had a technical Trade Center when there is excessive trauma, people tend to be very generous in terms of helping people, but these private dramas of abuse, etc., are hidden and people try to move on with their lives, but They keep reacting as if it were still happening. Yes, now when I think about trauma and traumatic events, I think about the fact that different people are exposed to the same thing. trauma will react in different ways, some people will end up very traumatized, yes, while others will not, so what are the factors that determine whether someone will have that chronic imprint of trauma or whether they will be able to overcome it? deal with it, you know, deal with that stress response and get back to baseline.

Do we know what those factors are? There is certainly a temperament problem. Anyone who has more than one child knows that we all come into the world with reactivity and different responses, so that is one factor, but the other important factor is the social environment and who is there for you when something bad happens in general if you happen because of a terrible experience and you have a partner, a spouse, a parent, a boss. Who says: Oh my God, how can I help you? I will be there for you, but in your social environment it helps you protect yourself and feel safe again, that makes a big difference, so the beginning, for example, after natural disasters or after an accident, already in a war situation , the first thing you do is reconnect people with the people they love and care for, because that is really what for human beings is the main source of comfort, and as long as you have people around you who recognize the reality of what happens. because of what you went through and that they are with you in a very deep way, you will probably be fine, yes, and that, of course, is what happens in war situations when people are at war, like what is happening in Ukraine right now , is that people feel very close to each other and that's kind of a natural biological thing, almost that when we're under extreme stress we really become very dependent on each other and we form very close bonds and that's how people survive. , but if the people who are your closest people deserve You determine that you lose that sense of connection and protection and then, a lot of times, that's when people reach the limit.

Yeah, it's interesting, it's always preparing for this conversation and I was reading in your work the importance of human connection in making us, I guess, in general, more resilient. but in many ways isolating ourselves from the probability that a traumatic event leaves a chronic mark on our interior yes, it's insulin is a bit of an extreme word here it's okay, it helps, it makes a significant contribution yes, but on the other hand no, it's totally true one word, but in general, when your child, for example, and you need to go through an operation or terrible things happen to you and your parents are there for you and they recognize it, then that child is probably going to be fine, yes, yes, really, very interesting, yes.

I think one of my goals in having this conversation with you is to try to raise awareness of trauma in my audience, and as you've already mentioned, it's much more common than we might think. I certainly feel like the word is much more common now. it's commonly known to be talked about potentially in environments that you might not consider traumatic, like maybe we can talk about that, but I think this affects everyone on some level, whether it's individually or judging by the statistics you shared, there will definitely be someone in our lives, who we interact with, who has been traumatized, so I think it's imperative that we all have a deeper, more compassionate understanding of what that is and therefore what we can do to help people absolutely, uh , and it's true that people are starting to do it.

The concept becomes too inflated and people focus too much on the trauma as well somehow at the same time. Wait a minute it's a very real problem. Let me give you an example. I live on a couch in the mountains of Western Massachusetts and they gave a big public talk and after the school principles in this area invited me to meet with them and they said can you set up a retreat clinic as a child? And I asked him how many of the children in our county see domestic violence and witness drug overdoses. beaten at home and the principles of the school said that about half of our children and my answer then was that they should not have a clinic for children with termites, they should have a school system that helps the traumatized because that is at least approximately the half of your population to really learn to regulate our bodies and for and for you you need to have a trauma informed school and not read it as an individual problem because it is very much a social problem so once you understand trauma, change the workplace, change the schools, change the hospitals and really start to pay more attention to the issue of individual safety and agency in helping people function.

Yes, now with the same trauma. I think most of the public would intuitively understand if someone has been to war. Let's say we would say it is a traumatic experience. Yes, but what? about something I think almost anyone who has been in a relationship will experience something like this at some point when their partner tells them something that may well be superficially quite trivial but for some reason the other party reacts disproportionately, maybe they're reminding you. when a parent criticized them when they were five and when their partner says something, it's not about what the partner said, it's about the feeling it evokes very similar to what you just mentioned happened when you were a child.

Can we say that this is also a trauma? No, I would say it's an experience, but I'm glad that the boundaries are from this example because you know that about a third of all couples engage in violent interactions, so a lot of people carry a lot of trauma and in the relationships comes to light and, uh, but once you're intimate with another person, you live with that triggering behavior and some things can be extremely upsetting to your partner, who can get very angry or shut down in response to things that you have no idea. , but he was very horrible about it and at that point, once you become sensitive, you can say, "Oh, my partner is still being nasty and mean and horrible, my partner gets upset about something that has very little to do with you and me." ".

I can really take a step back and say honey, let's go for a walk before we address this or let's play tennis together or let's sit on this for a moment or let's talk to someone else about what's going on here so you understand. of the situation, uh, could you tone down the heat of what's going on, but relationships all the time, of course, yes, in fact, in my experience, I at least see this play out in the close personal relationships of the people all the time, of course, it could be about what is happening in your relationship, but in my experience, very rarely is it about what happened at that moment, it is what makes the other person feel, which is why I think that your work is so important both for people who have experienced trauma and for people who want to help their loved ones who have been traumatized, yes, yes, and indeed, intimidating problems arise, most people are capable to organize quite well under neutral conditions, for example, I have no idea if you become violent in your personal relationships or not, and you don't know about me because we don't have the kind of relationship in which we will get triggers about these very central issues, for which is not until you actually negotiate very complex issues about what happens in close relationships that these issues come to light. uh uh so everything is contained within relationships and I continue to urge my colleagues who do outcomes studies to always not only ask people not only themselves but also how they react, but also as their spouses or their partners.loved ones because they can often tell more about people's emotions. reactions yes, yes, so if we think about trauma, we say that it is very common, it is more common than many of us believe as a doctor.

I'm incredibly fascinated by stroke, frustrated that trauma isn't talked about much to medical students because I think. about, particularly, in general practice, you know the kind of chronic conditions that often come to primary care doctors, you know, anxiety, depression, addictions, migraines, fibromyalgia, everything you know, a lot of problems , autoimmune problems, actually, that scientific research seems to suggest that trauma may well play a role in a significant number of these conditions and, in fact, you know, this is a temperamental problem that most people who experience people in medicine want to address. We have clear answers and clear paradigms and we go to medical school, we learn about all these diseases and their illnesses and not starting to talk about the social context would make it even more complicated, so you don't learn about that and, in fact, right now.

I was meeting up with some old friends from my medical school days and we often did terrible things to patients and didn't really understand how terrified they were of, say, white doctors and how they would neglect them by neglecting their care. physically because they were too terrified. about doctors to mention it, so, yeah, I'm very glad that some people in some medical schools and medical settings are starting to pay attention to it because the title of my book, The Body Keeps Score, is not just a nice title, it actually affects your immune system, it affects your stress responses and people who have a long term history often have multiple medical problems that you have to do with your body, they get stuck in fear, struggle and escape, so fibromyalgia is a very good For example, fibrology is quite related to trauma, but it is so diffuse that I am friends with very old men who used to go to the National Institute of Rheumatology in the United States and they say to me: Do you study fibromyalgia?

He says no, how does a crazy disease work? Yeah, and here's the guy who is the best rheumatologist in America, who just dismisses this very complex, very debilitating disease because the people who have it are too complex to treat, difficult and resistant, yes, and so they get nice diseases and clean, yes. Hey, listen, me. I want to pause on this point because I think it's very important, first of all, I think that medicine, for all its benefits, for all the conditions that we manage to help with, there are many conditions that we don't do much about.

Good job and I think we can sometimes be quite condescending as a profession to certain patients who suffer from certain conditions like fibromyalgia because they don't fit into a neat box that we can make. Oh, this is the problem, this is the pill we'll get. better and that's why I think doctors often feel quite frustrated and helpless. I don't think they necessarily want to be derogatory. I think they thought they were going to learn what they needed to treat these patients and then they're faced with people who keep coming back and they don't know what to do, so I think that's a point I absolutely wanted to make.

You also mentioned something I think we should explore a bit. You said fibromyalgia is a condition, huh, that's me. I don't know if you said it's often or always related to trauma. Now I think we need to clarify what we mean because there will be people listening with fibromyalgia. This may be the first time you're hearing it, so can we expand on it? That's explained a little bit so they can understand what you mean by that, yes, but you study a fragment and you do a trauma history on people. You usually find a history of severe trauma, usually within the attachment system, you often don't feel safe and what happens, I think.

It's very similar to what happens to all of us to some extent, when we become afraid, we become tense and we begin to physically become defensive and cling to ourselves, and that tension and trying to control things caused us to eventually break down. They'll express it as fibromyalgia, but you become a very anxious and actually upset person and, uh, the difficulty for medicine is that there's no clear answer, it's not like, oh, let me give you a pill and you'll feel better, you really need to go through a whole process, uh, that could very well involve the body. oriented therapy maybe massage maybe really work with body reactions which of course in medicine we never do, that really needs a lot more intervention than we are capable of or our systems allow us to intervene.

I know quite a few people who have resources in the United States with fibromyalgia who find the right people to work with who know the body's reactions, but they are very difficult to find. Yes, I agree that I have seen many patients with conditions like fibromyalgia and found that what can be effective is when you take this multi-pronged approach, do many different things, it's not just one thing, different patients will need different things, different things will appeal to you, but at least from my experience, Dr. Vandika, I can appreciate that you have a lot of experience in this area, I have found that you just have to experiment and try different things, but I would also say that I would share it with you if I think of many of my patients that I have seen in the past with fibromyalgia when you dig deep enough, yes, it is not unusual to find some history of trauma there as well.

I would definitely agree with that, look and then say the right thing here, you have to be patient to try a few times but probably NHS and our insurance system doesn't give us time to really explore these things because I think all doctors are really under pressure to relieve, get rid of your patients and move on, so these patients are very time consuming and require a team approach and our support may not be prepared for that, yes, and then the following happens, we get frustrated and then we start to be mean and nasty to people who are suffering just for the sake of aggravating their condition, so I think where it starts for us as caregivers is whether to get particularly angry at a particular person or get frustrated by a particular person to really flag that and say oh, this person is really driving me crazy, let's see what's going on with the patient, that the patient makes me feel so helpless, so the natural song is to become somewhat abusive with people like that, yes, because they make us feel bad, they take our time and they don't follow the rules, so when you have people like that, it's very important for us to have the ability to take a step back. with our colleagues and really reassess what's going on here, yeah, so I think our own reactions are a very important factor in determining whether we're dealing with a traumatized person and I think as clinicians we have an incredible ability to help recreate trauma.

For our patients, they hear that all the time. For people who go to Medical Systems, I know people who have breast cancer and heart disease and they tell me about the exquisitely good care they received in our systems and how great the nurses were and how great the doctors were and then you deal with people with trauma histories who have dealt with these unknown issues and they always tell us how terrible the system treats them and I'm like, yeah, that's what happens, yeah, that's very, very profound because what we're saying is that We, the medical system,

heal

thcare professionals, as you just said, by re-traumatizing patients who are already traumatized, we may not realize that we are doing it, but due to lack of understanding, the lack of knowledge, the lack of time, patients who were already struggling, many times they feel lost, they don't know where to go, they look for books or new information just to see what I can do.

I don't want to stay like this. this forever and it's not just the conditions that you mentioned, even a lot of people with autoimmune diseases, you know, I've found that they also respond very well to this kind of multi-pronged approach. I really want to get to a central philosophy of his work that I at least take from him is that the body keeps score, that's the title of his book, but this idea that the body keeps a record of what has happened and that one One of the goals of therapy is to help people feel safe in their bodies, yes I think a lot of people may not understand what that means, what do you mean when you say we need to feel safe in our bodies?

Well, you know, I think Darwin wrote a beautiful book back in 1872 in which he talks about trauma, actually he calls it getting stuck in fight or flight or stuck in avoidance and defensive reactions, which is not a bad thing. definition, and talks about how these experiences are expressed in the course of the vagus nerve that Darwin uses. pneumogastric nerve back then and you experience your emotions like God, gut-wrenching, gut-wrenching physical sensations and I think we're all familiar with that, something painful has happened, we feel it in our chest and we feel it in our bodies and that's why our bodies respond. to these things and when you get traumatized, that feeling of visceral revenge and anguish really stays with you and you become an intolerable person with yourself, it sounds familiar to you because, you know, I do it firmly every time I travel and I go to a place where I don't I know the language.

I always ask in your language if they have a word for gutwench and every language has a word for it. Yes, it is a universal response that you experience deep disappointment and betrayal. fear in your body, yes, I think people have experienced that if anyone has ever gone through heartbreak before them, which we all have, yes, almost everyone has at some level, you feel it, yes, in your hearts, like you could literally feel the pain. discomfort there, so I think when we start thinking about it it's like, oh yeah, that's in our body like something happened here in our mind, we've perceived it in a certain way and then our body expresses a symptom of that, like that So I think this is a really good point to talk about some of these practical things that people can start doing to help themselves.

I mean, frankly, the things you're talking about are useful for anyone, but can we start with yoga? I know yoga is something that's talked about as a really fantastic way for a lot of people to start feeling that security within their bodies. How did you find yoga and why do you think it is so effective for so many people? Well, you know these things are usually a matter of accidents where you meet someone. who does yoga and who says come and do yoga classes with me and then you do that and then you feel like your body feels calmer and your mind is more focused, then you see all this, so I actually went to Nationals with mental

heal

th and I have the money to study yoga as a way to calm the body, uh, but now people say that yoga is the treatment of choice.

I don't know, maybe other people can have better Qigong, Tai Chi or some other musical practice, but for me. Going to yoga was really a way to explore the extent to which people can change their relationship with their bodily sensations and yoga turned out to be very good for that, but it's certainly not the only way that studios still love to do someday is. see how tango dancing works. For time, in theory, that would make a lot of sense, since it's a very good time to do it, actually, and what I see all the time is that people who are in my life who are traumatized go and start exploring different things that help them uh and uh some people find it, let's say acupuncture is very helpful, other people say it doesn't do its thing for me, so we don't know exactly what's right for who, but it's very important for us to have. an open opinion.

Think about uh and you need to have an open mind for yourself too to really see what can help me feel alive in the body that you live in to make sure that you're taking action after watching this video. I have created a free breathing guide. that will help you reduce stress, calm your mind and increase your energy in this guide. I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately, even just a minute a day will start to make a big difference in receiving your free guides all you have. What you need to do is click the link in the description box below.

So, you mentioned a few things here, let's say yoga and Qigong, for example. You're saying that many people who are traumatized don't feel safe in their bodies they don't experience everything that happens inside their bodies they shut down in certain ways and you say that one method that can work for some people is through something like yoga or Qigong or martial arts, for example, what is happening? you are starting to connect with yourselfbody you are starting to connect with your breath and how you say it what you think may be happening there that is helpful what happens there is that you are stuck in stress response syndrome and for example, when you start breathing slower and deeper and you change your breathing, you change your heart rate variability, which is a way of measuring how the heart and the central nervous system relate to each other and then you get a sense of relief and openness once.

You are able to do things that calm that system and so initially by having someone work with your breathing you say, I don't want to do that and then if you learn to breathe much slower and much deeper you get a feeling. . oh, I feel calm, I feel clear and what you actually do at this point is you open up some pathways in the brain between the parts of your frontal lobe and your insula, apart from your brain that is connected to your bodily sensations, and you open new ways. of self-experience, basically, yeah, it's so fascinating.

I know this when I was reading the section on treatment in your book. After you wrote about what trauma is, he said that when you start dealing with trauma, there was a part that these four of us talked about. Things that need to happen, one, you need to find a way to focus on the ordinary, two, you need to be able to stay calm in response to things, events and people that take you back to the Past, then the third thing, I think, was to be present. You had to find a way to be present in your life and with the people in your life and then the fourth thing was that you shouldn't keep secrets from yourself.

The reason I mention that, thank you, is that I had forgotten that there are four approaches. Yes, it was, it was, it was really. It's beautiful the way you wrote it in your book and I think what you just said about yoga speaks to the first one, which is number one: you have to find a way to calm yourself and concentrate, yes, for traumatized people. If you're stuck you won't get into certain parts of your body that don't want to do certain poses or positions because they don't feel good, it sounds like what you're saying is that when people can find some kind of practice that helps them feel safe in Your body, whether it's yoga or anything else, will start to help you experience what calm feels like because I guess a lot of these people don't really even know what it feels like to be calm. for just 10 or 15 minutes, I think what people mainly learn is how to cut off their feelings.

I said that many people learn not to feel and of course psychiatry is very good at that too because things like Prozac make you feel less, yes. Then you feel less overwhelmed by your feelings, but by mitigating your feelings you also lose your capacity for pleasure and enjoyment. Yes, a very common adaptation to trauma is to simply shut down and become that tense person who somehow manages to cope. your day, but to recover you need to open these paths of self-experience and you need someone to very gently help you reconnect with yourself. I think you published a study, did you know that, on yoga and PTSD, from Recollections? three of them, yes, yes, what do they show?

They showed us that if you do yoga for eight or twelve weeks, your PTSD scores go down. We did some newer imaging and we see some new links in the brain connecting, especially those involving areas. That brain has to do with self-experience, self-sensory experience and what the study showed is that when people do yoga they are more open to being with other people, less afraid of being with other people and less afraid of themselves, especially , Yeah. wow, very, very powerful, it's interesting, but I mean actually people say, "Oh, yoga is the answer." No, yoga was a paradigm that helped us understand how it is useful to interact with the body in a particular way, but it is not the last word. story, yes, I love it, I mean, it's speaking to my heart, you're really touching.

I think one of the big problems I see today in terms of how we treat people with chronic health problems, whether it's trauma or anything else. It's like what that narrow reductionist study shows oh great oh it works and it's great great that means that that is the treatment for each patient and it's like if you see real people with real problems you realize that in reality there is no single solution for everyone like for someone it might be brilliant, but for someone else it might not be the right thing for them, but I feel like I say that a few times on the podcast.

I think science is important, it's very important, but I think we make inferences. and we draw conclusions that we then believe are applicable to everyone, whereas, as you say, that just showed us that this paradigm here, therapies like yoga, that help us experience our bodies more, have the potential to help, but You know, in my travels I come across a There are a lot of people who claim that they do amazing things doing, let's say, equine therapy working with horses and I say interesting, that's why I collect these people and on my website, the term website of the Research Foundation, we had these people talking about their systems sometimes and then I need the evidence so the next step is always for me to say it, so we're going to help you do a study where we can actually see who's effective for who's not.

It is effective. I think the evidence is of terrible importance, but we have seen. our field we often close the barn door prematurely yes, we find it if the project works sometimes for some people they say oh, the cheap project is a treatment of choice no, sometimes the project works for particular people, let's see who it is for exactly the person for whom it doesn't It doesn't work, yeah, I love it, I think that's a really nice way to put it. Move on to other therapy or I know that when I heard you talk before you talked about theater and movement, you put those two things together and I first.

It all seems interesting to me that you put theater and movement together when I've certainly heard you talk about it, but can you explain a little bit more about what's so powerful about theater and movement and how it can help people with trauma? Yes. I would like to separate this a little bit, so the question of movement is terribly important and that is not really part of how we think in psychology, psychiatry or even in medicine, but basically we express our vitality through the body, the movements that we make. and when you work. with children, for example, they explore their movement and their relationship to how their body affects the growth around them and how the world also affects their body and many hypothesis studies over the last 150 years show that the term is often related to physical immobility when attacked by someone it is very important to activate your fight and flight system and fight and hit back, but at the heart of many traumas is that people cannot do something to change the situation and therefore, They enter a state where agency no longer matters, and some very good studies in neuroscience are also the doors, but if you do any of that, as long as you can move in response to a really challenging situation and do something, you'll be fine. directed from the center. but doing something dramatic is often the inability to do something and a lot of times there are people, as you probably already know as a doctor, who tend to become very passive and tend to ask us for pills and things like that to make their physical condition go away, but it becomes very difficult for them to do things and activate their bodies, so movements and doing something that makes their body feel alive and capable is a very important part of being alive.

Yeah, I've heard you talk before about hurricanes that have happened, you know? big natural disasters and you were talking about the fact that yes, a lot of people are affected, you know there hasn't been a big natural disaster, but the fact that people are coming together, they're helping others, they're moving, you he said that in many ways that helps them process the trauma can you talk about that a little bit please yes exactly exactly exactly what we are? you know we are an extremely resilient species you know we are everywhere we are almost as good as cockroaches as humans we are very stressful it's fair and we can adapt as long as we do things with other people and we make things happen and we are building ourselves very homophobic, we are people who do things and as long as you can do something.

You get the feeling that yeah, that hurricane sucked and I really miss home and it's really terrible, but my friends came and helped me build a house and wasn't it great to be able to put a roof over my head again? helping people get supplies, etc., so doing something to overcome your helplessness is tremendously important actually, and of course medicine tends to be very passive. People go to the doctor and have to follow their doctor's orders. I don't really like the word compliance because people really need to own what they do and experience what they do.

Yes, a few years ago I wrote a book about stress and when I talk about stress to companies, people or groups of people, one of the things I often say is that you have to understand that the response to stress on one level is to prepare your body to move correctly. You know the predator, the lion, the tiger, whatever it is, you're getting ready to move, but if it is. If you're sitting on your stomach and it's your email inbox that's stressing you out because of your workload and the fact that you're on Zooms for 10 hours straight, your body is gearing up and ready to move, but because you're not you're moving and you're almost stuck and you're not processing the stress energy that has built up.

Yeah, do you think that's right? Well, I think that's accurate. I think it's a very, very important topic in our current culture. Yes, we are becoming more and more virtual. living a virtual reality isolating you and I really enjoy talking to you, but if you sat together in the same room, we would actually have a relationship afterwards, yeah, we don't really form this kind of bond ordinarily with other people when interacting. way we do it and I think it's a big challenge for us to really analyze the impact of that and I think it's going to have a big negative impact on us as human beings to sit on our butts and experience virtual reality and the virtual, Yes, with people, it is a very important issue.

I don't think we know much about it because it's a relatively decent phenomenon, but it's something that deserves a lot of attention. Yeah, it's really interesting because I think about your trauma writing about movements like yoga, for example, that can help us feel safe in our bodies and then we're just talking about the stress response and actually without movement. We cannot discharge that energy, it is very difficult and I will be thinking about This for a few months now it is very difficult not to draw the conclusion that for many years movement and exercise, whatever you want to call it, have been talked about through the lens of health physical and I think now we're more and more aware that Yes, movement is also very important for our mental health, but I actually think it goes beyond what I feel like if we don't move our bodies in a wide variety of ways different, we could not express it and take advantage of it.

Our full potential as a human being, right, is very important to who we are. I think so, I miss you, that's something, uh, we get that sense of pleasure from being involved with our body, pleasure is a very somatic response and I think people don't. I don't talk much about pleasure, but I think pleasure is a very important part of life. You need to have the feeling of meeting a friend, like you did this weekend, and you have discussions about things, you move in together and then you have a feeling of wow, life is worth living because I really made that connection with that person.

I have distanced myself from that person and I am very concerned about the virtual world we are moving into here, on that note, let's talk. theater yeah, I'm okay because we've mentioned you know yoga and then movements in terms of really practical things that people can learn from this conversation. Oh, I wonder if this will work for me. I wonder if this will be helpful to anyone in my The theater of life and Shakespeare I've heard you talk about are fascinating, so tell us what's going on there. What do you know? How can this be useful?

Well, you know, let's start and the development of the person actually doesn't just end. I spent some moments with grandchildren and they are always playing different roles and now I'm going to be an astronaut and they're going to try it and now I'm going to be a hunter and I'm going to try it and that's how human beings learn uh what it feels like in your body to have different roles but it struck me with traumatized people is at some point that identity becomes an identity of defeat I used to be a warrior but now I can't move anymore I used to be a sexy woman but now I'm frozen in my body, uh, or I'm a sexy man, and that's why Thomas fixes people in a particular role in life that has to do with helplessness and, uh, when I look at my children and thenWe have this wonderful theater in the area where I live called Shakespeare in Court where they teach juvenile delinquents, there were stories of terrible traumas for six people who play Shakespeare roles and get to feel oh, this is what it feels like to be a king, this is what it feels like to feel powerful this, but it feels like being a killer and then you get to a visceral level, you experience the very different multimodality of ourselves and we really get to feel oh, I can be powerful and that's what feels, but you can't be powerful until you actually hold it in your body and then playing Macbeth gives you a feeling of that's what it feels like to be a boring, unpleasant person and then you can play these different roles and the theater helps you really viscerally experience others. ways of moving in the world and you then your habitual and ordinary responses, is that where you live?

Juvenile offenders when they appear before the judge are often given the choice between time in jail or time in the detention and learning center. Shakespeare, that's what really happens when you act in a play, he makes you learn how to fight with swords and that's a very, very complex thing, learning all that kind of stuff, but when you do that you feel like, wow, I can hold my own. . I really could. Be a powerful person, so you need to have a visceral experience of power and control that has been taken away from you by your trauma.

Are we seeing that these children are improving? I mean, can you tell us any stories of what happened to these kids? because I think it sounds, I can believe that rationally it is, you know, I think we all know, maybe we don't think about it, but if you stand up with your chest inflated exactly, you feel completely different, you feel powerful and strong, and if you roll your shoulders and squeeze your ribs, yeah, you feel a little insecure and you know, I think we can get it, so it makes a lot of sense to me that, like you said, a lot of people who are traumatized get stuck, I guess they get stuck. . certain body positions also true, yes, absolutely yes, defense, collapse body positions, uh and and the way you hold your body and you express it very well because the social research shows exactly what you say is that when you put yourself in a position of let's say there is a body position that denotes joy in all cultures of the world you raise your hands, you open your mouth, you open your ribcage and when you freeze people in a body position of joy and you say to them now I want you to be angry, They say I can't be angry while I'm like this because to be angry and there are steps like that, yes, and that's how it is.

It's really important to honor that knowledge by helping people experience different states of being by the way you hold your body, so what happens? I love the idea that all over the world, people you know are young people who have made a commitment. Those who have been traumatized are offered this or other modalities as a way to rehabilitate themselves by experiencing different feelings and sensations like how did it get to the point where the judge is now saying this, I mean, if trials were held, if there was mounting evidence. space what happened to make that a reality because that sounds really quite profound these things always start with individuals who are charismatic convincing other people to work with them on something yeah so this always starts before there is evidence and I see this everywhere in the world, everywhere I've gone, I see amazing shows made by charismatics and individuals, but then when the charismatic individual dies, they get old, they do something else, the shows die, yeah, etcetera, but I'm very in favor and try to promote it.

It's when you have this good method, then we do the research and we do it based on evidence, but for example, I have never been able to get money to do a tango study. I have never gotten the money to see what Choral singing does. for people, but I have a friend in Russia, we study choral singing, yes, and we show a change in how the brain changes, but as long as you are frozen in that diet, that disorder, singing, theater, yoga and all kinds of other things can It doesn't occur to you that it's effective, let's say, oh, there's dizziness, so I'm very much in favor of people studying a bunch of different things and seeing how effective it is, yeah, it's something like that like what you're saying before about You might hear someone say that Equine Therapy is working for this group of patients, so everything is going well, that's interesting, so you start with an open mind, believe in people and say that they are okay, that's interesting, let's study now, let's go and I think that's what the The scientific method should be really good because we listen to humans and real people who are experiencing things and a series of things that poop is not that interesting, Why don't we try to get some real scientific validity behind that?

I can expand it. I think it's a really beautiful approach that would help a lot more people. It's a question of paradigm, and that's why right now, if you're a psychiatrist or other medical professional and you start talking about theater, your colleagues will tell you. it went to the bottom it's amazing how many people how many times my colleague said oh he used to be pretty good but now he's studying yoga so it's gotten so deep uh oh he used to be good but now he's studying EMDR. crazy, masturbate, your familiar, oh, he has the gun off on the d-pad.

I've been accused of going off the d-pad so many times in my academic career, which is why most people are academics who want to be respectable and get money for their research. and if you go down this path, you're not very likely to get much financial support on an individual level, how did you deal with that kind of criticism? Because many of the things you're talking about are certainly things that are not conventionally taught. to Western doctors, but what was it like for you as a respected academic clinician when you started getting this pushback? Well, I used to be a respected academic clinician but I studied drugs.

I first started on Prozac and Zoloft and at that time my star was high, but once you started doing other things, uh, but you know it's a logical character thing. I'm just a curious guy who likes to explore new things, so respectability wasn't the most important thing in my life, hence the characters, Destiny and so on. I am a person who likes to explore many different things. I'm a person who speaks several different languages ​​and so I can think in different paradigms and that made it possible for me to look at different options uh and that's just the character thing Yes, yes, you mentioned EMDR EMDR, of course, is another therapy that I I heard you talk and that it can be useful for certain people with trauma.

What is the MDR? Can you explain a little about your experience with it? Do you know when? Did you find out? What can it be useful for? How do people do it? They do it themselves with a therapist. Maybe talk to EMDR a little bit. Please look. EMDR is actually a very strange treatment where you call and ask people to call things. that really bothers them, but not talking about it, just saying: remember what you saw, remember what we just felt in your body, remember what he was thinking back then, so become aware of that and then ask people, stay there and ask people. move your fingers in front of people's eyes from side to side and say just follow my fingers now if there was a crazy treatment, that's a crazy treatment, so my first reaction and everyone else's is that it's strange, no you listen to those things and then part of my own patience, where it works, it starts to come back and say I did an EMDR and I see deep transference information and some of my colleagues are doing it and they showed me their video tapes and I say that's a change dramatic and that's how I see my patients, I see my colleagues' videos.

I mean this clearly changes the brain in very profound ways, and being sort of a neuroscientist, an oriented person, I was fascinated by studying what eye movements do to the brain. It took us 15 years to achieve it. enough money together to start doing that study, but it started by doing a simple study comparing EMDR to Prozac and it turned out that these eye movements caused a very significant change in most people, so that was the first time I studied a method that it didn't fit the Western paradigm and the Western paradigm is you talk or take a drug and now you did something else and after EMDR I learned that things that don't fit our cultural paradigm can work and some other people say tapping on the points of acupressure can be helpful and they say what is the evidence that there is no evidence for that and maybe study it and it turns out that, in fact, tapping on these parts of Chinese acupuncture seems to have an effect on people's physiological arousal and So, but EMDR was particularly important here for me because it was my first foray into something that didn't fit the paradigm and our results were extraordinary, we had a sixty percent cure rate with EMDR in a trauma sample that now no one has ever received. . 60 cure let all the symptoms go away and I think because it's so strange that it doesn't fit our paradigms, a lot of people still tend to poop even though the evidence of how well it works is very clear, but it is, so e and the Dr. helps you neutralize the memory.

Your part of being traumatized is that certain memories, certain events scare you and haunt you, but EMDR specifically does, there are particular triggers to being passive, as you calm down and no longer get scared by the memory of Thomas in particular, uh, and then people have a message and then they say, oh, let's use it for chronically abused children and orphanages. I said no, that's probably not the right treatment for them, so it's important to also know who it works for. and who it doesn't work for and what we showed in our research is that people with long histories of childhood abuse it didn't work as well at least in the way that we did, yeah, you know, in your book that I think it was first published in 2014, yes, it was first published in 2014, yes, 2014, right, and I have the page in front of me, although we still don't know exactly how EMDR works.

Same goes for Prozac, sorry I'm interrupting, if you're enjoying this content, there are many more like it on my channel, so take a moment to hit subscribe, hit the notification bell, and now get back to the conversation and it's a paragraph very powerful that at the end of chapter 15 um while that was eight nine years ago when you wrote that so certainly when it was published you probably read it 10 11 years ago that section um now we know how EMDR works compared to when you actually wrote that book? Yes, my colleague Serene Herzarian and Ruslanias and I did a study where we put people in the scanner and we saw that it activates certain circuits in the brain and circuits in the brain that activate particularly a Sicilian network, the part of your brain It is what determines whether something is relevant or not, but if you see the people who are in the scanner, their brain organizes the experience in a different way, creating new circuits of experience, yes, and it is not about understanding. or Insight, you just modified the brain circuits in a way that helps you not be overwhelmed by it, you don't get any boosts, but it becomes a memory, yeah, so a traumatic experience is not a memory because the moment you get there there, relive it and that is the nature of traumatic things and if you have been raped you get very angry thinking or talking about your Vape, but it is not a memory of something that belongs to the Past, it is a moment in which you are recreating the physiological state . of that past event and what EMDR and to some extent yoga, neurofeedback and our psychedelics seem to help us do is go there and reorganize our perception of it and become aware at a very deep level of what happened to me . so it's not happening right now and also some circuits in the brain change that allow you to put it in the past to say yes, it happens, it's horrible, but I don't feel it today, yes, yes, very clear, very clear, thank you, is it? could you?

They say EMDR should always be done with a therapist and the follow up to that is that there are a lot of music tracks called EMDR available now on streaming platforms that I know people like to listen to. I don't know if you have any experience with this. music, what it could do for people is something quite different from what you're talking about in terms of seeing an EMDR therapist to guide you through that process. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that please, it's interesting. I can't talk about that because I haven't studied that and I see that I'm so aware that time is about shame and being disconnected for other people that I actually love the work of bonding with someone and yes, helping me deal with that in the context. of a relationship with someone who you are no longer ashamed of what happened to you, so I'm not really a fan of mechanical devices because a big part of trauma recovery is reestablishing your capacity connected to thepeople around you and um, but That's my particular bias in a way, yeah, I would probably also have that slight bias in general and I want to get to the psychedelics and the neurofeedback that you just mentioned, but to close that loop a little bit of yoga which we started with. talking about when we talk about the kinds of things that people can do to heal from trauma.

I guess you would encourage people to do yoga as part of a group instead of just doing it on YouTube, right, yeah absolutely, I'm really impressed. I'm not a natural yoga person, but if I'm a group of other people who are much more flexible than me and do a much better job now, I kind of absorb their flexibility and enjoy doing it with other people. I think it s true. For many things, they are psychedelic therapies. Nowadays we sometimes do psychedelics in groups and I really like it because you experience this. I have a particular experience and you have a different experience and then you can really see that I am part of humanity. and I'm holding something that we all hold in different ways and I think that the feeling of emotional isolation or the word that I used a lot in the previous book, not in this one it's the feeling of being abandoned by God, is a very important part of trauma.

So I think doing it in groups of other people, as a humanity dimension to the whole thing, yeah, and just before we get to neurofeedback, right at that point, talking about the Western medical system and how it's set up, it's very individualistic. , you already know. We tell an isolated patient that this is what's wrong with them and this is what they should do and I mentioned this a little bit in my last book, that maybe we have all the wrong settings for certain people because there is a movement in the UK It's called social prescribing, that's growing enormously, where people heal in communities, they go to, say, cooking or reading classes, or you know, there's something called park run in the UK, where people go every Saturday for the morning in every town and city, you know, maybe 50, 100, 300 people get together and complete 5km together, some walk, some run, but it's a very community-oriented environment, people heal in communities , not in isolation, which I think really speaks to what you're talking about.

We're all watching the British baking show around the world of people cooking together making food together and it's interesting this point so when Tom was reinvented or rediscovered I'd like to say Boston versus test mode Vienna wants what's the music and we had a A group of people in Boston like the new Herman burger, you know. And Turkey, other people who were very involved in the city, where they talked to each other and our initial treatment was always group treatments because we didn't know what it was like to be raped. or being a Marine in Iraq or Afghanistan, but they did know. and that's why we founded a group with people who had really been there, it reduced people's shame and also gave them a lot of recognition.

It's actually quite horrifying to me how group treatment has become a kind of tertiary treatment, of course, in the addiction community. group treatment and self-paced programs are still central and the sense of community of people who have had similar experiences is tremendously important and in fact I'm pushing people to come back and do a lot for group treatment where, Let's say, you've been sexually abused and you deal with it by cutting yourself, it's embarrassing to cut yourself, but when you're a group of other people, you say no, but I get really angry, I cut myself or I pull a lit cigarette out of my arm, hey, you don't. see, other people don't get it, you should never do that, you're going to like it, oh yeah, I get by, it's the same way and I feel really embarrassed about it too, but what does it do for you?

It actually helps you when I do that. Yes, then you have the potential to meet people who understand what you go through much more than someone who has gone to medical school. Yes, no, 100 and everyone can help each other, of course, probably in a much more powerful way than a doctor or health professional who has never experienced that, neurofeedback, what is it? I know you believe it is or have shown it to be a potentially powerful therapy for people experiencing trauma. Can you explain what exactly it is? Does it help us rewire our brain? Who is useful for all kinds of things like this?

So neurofeedback is a method by which you can put electrodes on people's skulls and our technology is good enough right now that even though the skull is quite diseased, you can collect this electrical debris. of the brain. that are in Nissan's skull and by placing several electrodes on people's heads, you can project the electrical activity of the brain on a computer screen and you can see which part of the brain is talking to which part of the brain and what is most active and what's more inactive and we have pretty good ideas about what kind of electrical activity helps with optimal functioning and a lot of times when we do this, what's called quantitative EEGs in termites, my reaction is, oh my gosh, how can you have a life for yourself because your brain is really messed up.

I don't tell people this, but you see a very serious disconnect between different parts of the brain that people think can compensate and sometimes compensate, but by having a discussion map you can say, "Okay, now we can." play computer games with your own brain waves where every time you bring it creates some kind of brain connections that are good for you, uh, little color changes or some music changes so that you play feedback in people's brains, that's well and if you don't create the right brain shapes and certain shapes that make you angry or hyperaroused you don't get feedback so you can subtly give people some sensory feedback through sounds and images yeah do more of that so you can train the brain. to make different connections is not trauma treatment, it is brain organization treatment.

I'm surprised this isn't done more widely and more frequently because it makes a lot of sense, from a scientific standpoint, is that you can actually visualize these things and you can really push the brain to organize itself in a different way and what makes me What has surprised me is that there is a guy in London, John Kruzelier, who has done some good research, some people in Belgium, some people in Germany. and Ruth Lanius and we are among the few people who have really studied these brain-computer interface methods and I think it is enormously powerful and we have done studies with children who are completely crazy and they can't go to school, they can't learn and we can calming their brains so they can focus and not lose control, so this can be for many of us with depression, anxiety, chronic stress, children who feel out of control, it's just a way to harmonize with your brain a little bit , TRUE?

Well, and you know, my dream is that every school in America has a newer feedback system and a neurological capacity so that when kids come to school and they're out of control and terrified and angry because they have all these experiences that they just had. At home you can help these children calm their brains so they can really learn and get along with other children. Yes, I wish all medical clinics had neurofeedback. It is a very simple and pleasant way to help you smooth out the functioning of your brain. If I like you. I'm a fan of people healing with others in real life.

You know, I understand there's a lot of great technology available to help, but I think we shouldn't rely too much on that web hustle. We are experiencing things in the real world, but I think there are some apps now that help with things like coherent breathing and you can know that they can help you harmonize various parts of your body and your brain through different methods, so I think the technology is going to revolutionize this, have you experienced that you have also come across applications like that? Oh absolutely, I know those apps and I actually have them on my phone.

I'm also impressed because I don't use them even though I know how useful they could be and sometimes I get a little lost or whatever and I know it, but what impresses me is that if a federal of my Cosby, will you come to this class or you will go? go for a walk, so that's rewarding enough for me and I'll actually do it, but the apps themselves most people just don't love their absence to say leave me just like I said, it's an interpersonal process, it's still very rewarding, yes, so do it. in a group of people saying where were you last night when we did this uh uh, that's what we assumed, yeah, you know what's really interesting, Dr.

Savannah Cook, if this isn't trauma related at all, but it does a few months? I talked to a guy named Elliot Kipcogee on this podcast. The Kenyan marathon runner, the only person to have run under two hours in a marathon, is considered the fastest marathon runner of all time and you know it was a lovely conversation with him about all kinds. of things and one thing, he said well, a lot of things, but one thing in particular really caught my attention: he never trains alone, he never goes running alone, whereas in the west we often run alone and you know we do it to de-stress or relax us, he's like, no, no, we always run together and he's like, if you know, if you're not going to show up or if your motivation isn't there for a few days, one of your friends will be on the phone and he'll be like, Hi, Elliot. , where?

What's going on? Everything is alright? And I was really struck by the role that culture plays here. I thought, wow, this incredible athlete, the fastest marathon runner on the planet, he never goes out alone, he's always in a group, yeah, and I think that's who we are, you know, uh, I was just lucky enough to go to the Serengeti plains. I could see all these animals, yes, they are all living groups, you know, mammals live in groups, humans live in groups, yes, that's like us. We define ourselves as our identities, our rewards system, and you know there may be people who just love their little apps but don't know a lot of them, they're absolutely wonderful, yes, but I guess you wouldn't know them because "They're at home in their apps." , so you wouldn't potentially interact with them, but I think it's a very important point.

We should briefly touch on psychedelics. You mentioned psychedelic group therapy and of course psychedelics are getting a lot of media." Are trendy. They are still illegal, of course, in many countries. I have to say: What is your position right now on the use of certain psychedelics as treatment or as part of treatment for people suffering from trauma or otherwise? mental health issues, you know where, what the evidence says at the moment and who do you think it might be useful for and who should be careful, would you say? Fortunately, this is not just a matter of opinion.

My lab actually does psychedelic studies. and I'm really very happy to be part of this Burgundy thing and we are part of the studies and one of my articles will come out specifically about how circular all the basic research can be and so I have a license to give MDMA to people and part of a larger study that is almost finished, so I have good data and the only psychedelic substance that is legal in the United States right now is ketamine and I am involved in training people in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Ah, so I know ketamine pretty well.

I know MDMA quite well. I don't know psilocybin well from research or personal experience, but we all talk to each other and I see the beautiful work that has been done, it started at Johns Hopkins and let me give you You are an example. A friend of mine who is a very important person in the trauma field and the person we love deeply developed severe cancer eight years ago and was angry as could be, but he had the diagnosis and joined psilocybin. I went to Hopkins and I visited him and he said he started crying. He said it's an amazing experience.

My friend doesn't have a mystical bone in his body. And he said that I was destroyed in the universe and that I had these visions when I was little. villages with smoke coming out of these chimneys and all my ancestors were there and they waved at me and said hello, yeah, could you join us? Oh, we're all here and we all die and it's part of life and my friend had this mystique. experience and he accepted his death, except he's still alive eight years after we all thought he was going to die, which really intrigues me a lot.

We should really study whether psychedelics changed the immune system to actually change some of the things in the body. This is an interesting experience. problem, but if it happened to my friend Frank it was a very important inspiration for me to see how psychedelics can be useful and one of the reasons why I was intrigued is, of course, that I am from the 60s generation. I had a good experience with LSD when I was young andthen everything became normal and I have done it for a long time, but I do remember that taking LSD back then is how it opens your mind and makes you aware of the reality that I have constructed. to me it is just a very small part of the general reality that surrounds us and you become really aware that your reality is your own personal Construction and by having this academic experience you see that the universe is much bigger than the universe you have. you actually live and that's what we see when people do psychedelic therapy: their mind opens up to new possibilities of being more curious to explore new things.

I have several friends who are very famous scientists and I have asked all of them. They all have to do with my age. I said did you take ours in college. I also said yes, of course I did. I said how do you think it affected your career and everyone says you know. I think I became a good scientist because psychedelics made me realize that the reality we have defined for ourselves is just a small piece of butter and it is making a person more curious and open-minded, yes, and that's very much PC in our secondary treatments and people often go into their Obama and it's not easy at all, it can actually be very painful and people can lie there and cry and say oh my God, oh my God , but that opens them up to see themselves and visit themselves and what our research shows will come to light sooner. too long is that secretaries lead to a dramatic increase in self-pity that other people actually feel for themselves and have a feeling of compassion for themselves.

It also makes people much more aware of who they are. It also makes people more aware of what others are like. people are much better able to negotiate interpersonal conflicts and interpersonal relationships because they actually become exposed through a broader reality than they are normally locked into, so for a person who has suffered trauma when they go through a psychedelic experience, let's say in their laboratory or in your studies, you know, it opens their mind, they see what the story that they have built is just a story, there are many other stories that they could build around Dimensions, plus, when visiting your trauma, I guess you are always stagnant because your body maintains a square and the moment you get back there you feel that agitation, you feel that Terror and you want to get away from it as fast as you can and there is something about suicide as well as ketamine and MDMA because we have seen it in all three great people to go to these dark places and not get engulfed by them, to not get kidnapped by them and immerse themselves in a dramatic state, but also to get some different dimensions and understand things in a different way, yes, yes , and so.

The self-compassion piece that you mentioned, of course, is very, very important to any healing, if you come out of that feeling, more compassion for yourself, less shame, less guilt and of course that will help you in everything you do. Are there any disadvantages that you know of? These things are becoming more and more common and people are talking about them and you know more and more people are trying psychedelics and of course there's a lot of good research showing how helpful it can be, can it be harmful for some people? I'm so glad you mentioned this.

I tell my colleagues that we are in the honeymoon phase and that is why I have a team of people who were between 20 and 30 years younger than me. And they say that we are part of the Revolution and I tell them, you are part of the second revolution because I was one. At one point I had Timothy Leary's old office at Harvard. Wow, there was an end to that last Revolution and death. The revolution collapsed partly because of politics, but also partly because people became too careless and it really got out of control and I am very afraid that these things will get out of control again.

They are very, very powerful substances, because of the way we do our work. The study is extraordinarily careful. We get to know people very well. They have two therapists who are with them all the time. Setting and environment are everything. We have relationships with the people we deal with and they feel safe with us, so right now. our study we just opened the second study, the first one had 891 people, the last one had 103 people and again we don't have significant side effects, but we don't have significant side effects because we pay a lot of attention to certain environments and what you see.

Since there is money at the end of our hills, you can go to the academy infusion clinic, where you go to a small cubicle to receive the infusion and there is no one there with you and you can bring a panic battle button if you get too angry , that horrifies me, yes, because Blowing your mind is potentially a very dangerous thing and very painful and horrible things can manifest and you really need to create a very careful container for it. Yes, it's okay, thank you. I'm worried it will explode again. Yes Yes. I'd love to. To um just think about what trauma can teach us as members of society because you said something very profound once victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage and pain in a world that longs forget, you know when you quoted me.

I always say I wish I had written that it's that good and then in terms that I've written like yeah, I mean, those are your words and I think they're very profound because look, let's be very clear: traumatic experience is horrible. They are causing all kinds of problems for people. Hopefully the conversation we've had and the work they're doing will help people, first of all, become aware of it and then start making changes, perhaps some of the modalities that we've already talked about. but I wonder what we as a society can learn from traumatic trauma, you know, traumatized people, you know, is there an advantage?

Is there anything you know for a partnership? I have a very sensitive way of saying this, but I'm just saying that every little adversity in life tends to have a silver lining at some point, whether we're ready to see it or not, and I'm wondering with all your experience, is there any silver linings and what we as a society can learn from looking at people who suffer from trauma. I think the big message is that people generally do the best they can, yes, and that's very important, and one of the things that's very rewarding about the work that I do.

I see a lot of people who have gone through experiences that I can't imagine being able to survive and you see what people have done to survive and they may have done weird things like become addicted to heroin to survive but that affects how they survive and I think which is a trauma. What it really teaches us is that people do the best they can to survive and that being punitive and nasty to people who do things you don't like is probably not the best way to help them and that you really need to do it.

It's so important that people get traumatized if you yell at them, if you examine them, if you seclude them, and they become aware of the potential harm we can do to each other, but also how being heard and being in connection with people is terribly important for all. of us at every stage of our lives and that, uh, that, to honor the reality of people. I also think that many of us are familiar with certain works of art or songs or some quite beautiful pieces of music that come from trauma, so yes, that individual has had extreme pain and suffering, but what came out of that has brought him so much joy to so many people. uh I don't know, again, I'm very cautious about saying that because I don't want to sound at all like Someone who is undermining how painful those experiences are.

I'm just trying to maybe leave a slightly uplifting tone at the end of this conversation. Yes, you know there is no scientific statement, but I think most of the truly innovative things in our world. They are discovered by traumatized people because they live in a world that is unbearable and so they have no choice but to fight against new ways of dealing with things that are different from where they live because if they were told to keep doing the same thing, they would die. a great example is Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist who ever lived, and the UV biography, this guy had the worst childhood possible, so he hid in mathematics and physics and that was his safe place that he allowed us to create things, JK Rowling. author of uh Harry Potter uh, she was a very traumatized person that I wrote.

Don't give details. I never met her, but she was a very messy person trying to test until she started putting it together into these Harry Potter stories that actually come from the visions of a time tester and she gave this amazing gift to everyone. people's world to be able to imagine new possibilities and you see this over and over again and part of the joy of my job is when I really get to know people I can see how they have found their particular ways of surviving. Not everyone becomes like Isaac Newton or JK Rowling. You know, it's still an exceptional talent, but termites have new ways of surviving. by pointing things out to us, we can learn from them Dr.

Monica, you are doing a great service to the world. All your work. The book, literally, is a phenomenal read. I can see why he continues to sell equipment year after year and continues to spread by word of mouth. it's absolutely amazing thank you for taking the time thank you just that you know yourself also I'm really impressed with the depth of the questions you asked me I really liked it a lot yeah oh thank you I appreciate it very, very finely um for anyone who's listening on this moment or you are looking, you feel trapped in your life, you feel that the way you are now is the way you have to stay the way you have to stay and you don't feel any hope, or possibilities for the future, what would you do?

Tell them you would talk to them, you might be available, have you tried yoga, have you ever seen a choir and in the family? I always take very careful stories about when these things work for you, what you were doing but didn't feel that way, what the relationships are. Were you in and I tried to help people not only remember the horrors of the past but also remember that boy from a long time ago who was able to do this and who managed to somehow and to revisit yourself as a Survivor to see what was born?

Him, what hasn't worked, what gave you a glimmer of hope and then look around, we'd sing in a choir, we're doing martial arts work, we'd go to a yoga studio to really see what it's like. in your culture that might help your body feel at home or safe or a sense of pleasure and commitment that is around the code that comes in the program. Thank you very much, it's a pleasure if you enjoyed that conversation. I think you're really going to do it. to enjoy this, all about the trauma of addiction and why many of us feel lost, addiction is the most human thing, there are all addictions, attempts to get relief from pain, relief from emotional pain or something like that, so This whole society is so expert at selling us things. filling those holes temporarily this is the whole ethic of this culture