The Modern World Is Making Men Lonely, Addicted & Lost! - Escape Society's Matrix | Gabor Matè

you have this idea what that what is normal is also healthy and natural and i'm saying that in this culture the norm is neither healthy nor is it natural in fact a norm i think is making us sick gabor mate welcome back to the show nice to be back again thank you dude so good to have you uh as we were talking about before we started roll rolling your book a is incredible but b is very unnerving in the picture that it paints because it feels so accurate it's a big book in terms of what

it's taking on so i want to start at the beginning explain to people when you say the myth of normal what do you mean and then after that we'll get into what a toxic culture is i mean a number two things we have this idea what that what is normal is also healthy and natural and i'm saying that in this culture the norm is neither healthy nor is it natural in fact a norm i think is making us sick number one number two we talk about illnesses and of body and mind as abnormalities i'm saying

that illness in this society given the conditions is a normal response to an abnormal circumstance so that's what i mean by the myth of normal okay so the obviously you go into great detail about this in the book and i remember at one point stopping and taking the note like wait a second basically everything that we think of like you're saying is sort of a normal result of aging or oh this is you know just some people have this kind of response and it is what it is it's just natural um it's all coming back

to trauma and it's all coming back to childhood trauma and um a specific idea that we'll get to in a minute but i want to push a little bit on that idea so what why is what we see in terms of things that we would categorize as mental health issues or overly stressed lives or all of the myriad things that we think of like rheumatoid arthritis one of the examples that you give how is that an adaptive response well the rheumatoid arthritis is not a not adaptive response in itself is the outcome of an adaptive

response so when you talk to people and i've interviewed many or you look at the research literature on who gets rheumatoid arthritis it's people who are super conscientious um they have what's called hypo autonomous self-sufficiency in other words they don't ask for help they looked after the emotional needs of others rather than carrying their own caring for their own they tend to suppress their healthy anger and they really try to fit in and not make waves and these people that's an adaptation this is how they adapted to their childhood they grew up in families where

they were not accepted seen for they were they might have been traumatized the adaptation was to make themselves to suppress their authentic emotions and to try and fit in with other people's expectations and to meet other people's needs that's the adaptation but that adaptation puts tremendous stress on the person and that stress causes the illness so one of those things that the illness is the outcome of an adaptation okay so let's talk about that adaptation so yeah i think a lot about the human mind as having directives there are things that we have been hardwired

to do over millions of years of evolution through even you know sort of the non-human part of our evolutionary tree up through where we are now and so these directives get implanted and it seems like your thesis is largely about the way that as a child we go okay this is what our environment is i don't have a secure attachment style maybe my parents aren't paying attention to me but what is the directive is the directive to get along is the directive to fit in like what is the core directive that causes this to become

pathological the core directive is twofold one is we have to attach we have to be long we have to connect but the other directive is that we have to do so while maintaining our own autonomy our own authenticity auto means the self so that means we have to be in touch with our gut feelings and our emotions and to be true to them and so what we need is relationships in which can be true to ourselves that's the directive as soon as the directive changes by because of this is what we're wired for for example

authenticity being in touch with the gut feeling out there in the wild there's a hunter-gatherer how long do you survive if you're not in touch with your gut feelings so that's an essential thing but what if you grew up in a home where your honest emotions are not accepted by your parents let's say your parents have read jordan peterson's book 12 rules for life where he actually says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves till they come back to normal or that parents should be able to hit their kids in order

to get them to comply now if a child experiences healthy and normal anger of a two-year-old but the message he gets that if you're angry you will not be accepted by us in fact you'll be excluded you'll be given a timeout it won't even be with you until you come back to quote unquote normal then the child will adaptively repress their anger so as to maintain their relationship with their parents so they give up their authenticity for the sake of the attachment that giving of the attachment suppresses not just the emotions but because the emotions

are physiologically connected to immune system in fact they're part and parcel of the same apparatus when you suppress your emotions you're suppressing your immune system as well now you're asking why are we seeing a rise of autoimmune disease in this society which we are and as globalization spreads we're seeing more auto immune disease around the world is because people are more and more having to suppress themselves to fit in with the false expectations of a society so that's the link all right i'm gonna see if i can hold all this my head because this is

one of the the most interesting core elements of the book is this collision between authenticity and attachment yes used a incredible analogy that really hit me hard and that's you said the lung is not the response to an expectation of oxygen the lung is the expectation of oxygen like it it is the manifestation of that yeah if there's no if there was no oxygen we'd have no lungs our lungs evolved as an expectation for oxygen which makes total sense to me yeah and if the and i'm paraphrasing here but i think i'm pretty close that

the human is the expectation of attachment absolutely so that we we exist only in relation to having that attachment well how long would a baby survive without attachment it wouldn't yeah so the infant is an expectation but not just for physicals physical attachment but also for emotional attachment of a nurturing and unconditional kind we're an expectation for that we're that's how we evolved as a species the the baby gorilla is an expectation to be loved nurtured held and fed and protected by the mother gorilla now have you ever seen the mother gorilla who ignores their

babies cries can you even imagine one have you seen a mother cry a cat that ignores the the little infant kittens meow infant is an expectation for unconditional acceptance we tell parents to ignore their babies crying we tell parents to separate from their kids if the kids behave in a way that they don't like we tell parents to deny children's natural need to play out there in nature so human beings are expect we evolved as you say as hominins over the last couple of million years and as a species the human you know the homo

sapiens we evolved as expectations for certain conditions the lesser society meets those conditions the more toxic it becomes to the developmental needs and therefore healthy growth of the human being okay so let's walk through that so yeah what do you do because you talk about needing to set boundaries and you're you mentioned look i'm a parent and at the end of the day i do have to set boundaries so how do we set a boundary without and i'll quote i think it was plato or aristotle that said this the only impossible job is raising children

one of the reasons that i did not have kids is because i my sister and i were raised in the house the same house by the same parents and we reacted very differently to that well first of all you're not brought up in the same home by the same parents that's interesting why why do you say that because uh the the parent that the child experiences is the parent the way they show up for that particular child your parents did not show up the same way for a female child as for a male child even

if they tried to they couldn't have because they're programmed culturally not to secondly you were different ages you came along at different stages of their parent relationship to one another or their cell phone or their relationship to themselves did not have the same parents you did not grow up in the same house number one number two you might have different sensibilities that is for sure one of you may be temporarily more or less sensitive than the other so that means even if your parents could have been the same which they couldn't have been but even

if they could have been the same to both of you you would have experienced them differently okay so knowing that level of complexity yeah how how do you do this well like it it seems so my mother disciplined me both physically so i was spanked and well this is sort of interrupted no please discipline you is one way to put it hits you is another way to put it yeah you know so uh which that word doesn't ring weird to me but i know given your area of expertise that it does for you and that's

what i'm trying to figure out so how do we set a boundary with without the child feeling that there are conditions around the love because reading that in your book the and again i don't have kids so nobody needs to panic but um unconditional love to me at an intellectual level anyway doesn't seem to break just because you're told to sit on the stairs or be isolated well you see the the love that the child experiences see i don't doubt that your mother loved you but the love that the child experiences is not what the

parent feels it's what the child gets from the parent now if you're told that if you're angry you need to be on your own what message are you getting you're getting the message that only under certain emotions are you only when certain emotions are present are you acceptable to the parent the child the child will not experience that as love but that um so i will say this this is purely anecdotal and it's just me and i don't want to get lost in that yeah but um i remember i even as a kid i would

say that my mom i sometimes get very angry at my mom but i never doubt that she loves me no i i i i nor should you doubt that she loved you because she loved you but that doesn't mean that your experience the love is unconditional you wouldn't have any idea you had nothing to compare it to that's the only love you'd ever known so how do you set a boundary without breaking the sentence so that's the question of who's setting the boundary you see let's say a parent with uh no no but here's what

i mean with children who are naturally lovingly connected to their parents how you set a boundary is you say don't do that with a parent that the child is not totally unconditionally connected you have to use more and more force so when you talk about setting boundaries yes you can't let a kid i live in vancouver british columbia it's not alaska but we get pretty cold there it gets pretty cold in the wintertime a one-year-old doesn't get a choice about do i get to go outside naked into the winter in vancouver no choice it's not

a democracy no you don't go outside naked but i do that a child who's wanted to attach to the parent warmly will naturally follow the parent's advice you see um your mother hit you aboriginal people uh hunter-gatherer people don't hit their kids when when the caucasians or the europeans the christians arrived in north america they were appalled at the parenting practices of the natives because they didn't hit their kids and yet those kids were far more confident and capable than the caucasian kids so that you can set boundaries through just love through relationship through example

it doesn't have to involve force and certainly does not have to include physical force is there so that is one of the things that that doesn't ring true to me no i haven't studied it so who knows so maybe this is just because i've grown up in the system where it's sort of broken already from the jump but is there anywhere where that experiment is being run today where we could see that because kids seem impulsive and their brains aren't developed and they just seem like little messes that need things like like for instance a

kid that throws a tantrum because you won't let them go outside into the snow so so why can't they throw a tantrum that's they're expressing their anger no yeah let's say but but but what were you saying before because i want to go back to it just before we talked about the tantrum oh yeah kids are impulsive um here's the thing children want to belong to the parent they want to connect to their parent there's a natural range of attachment behaviors that the kid will go through under healthy circumstances one of them first of all

is they want to be physically near you they want to be held by you in fact aboriginal people carry their kids everywhere they go that's what they do gorillas carry their kids everywhere they go spontaneously number one number two the child wants to emulate you they want to be like you that's a natural attachment drive so if you show up as a loving nurturing parental figure the parent the kid will naturally want to emulate you and copy you number three the child will want to be good for you without any coercion whatsoever and uh again

i'm telling you uh hunter-gatherer groups have been studied extensively extensively for how they parent and those even books are being written now about trying to learn the lessons that they teach about how to parent why because we've lost our parenting instincts you're talking like an adult without parenting instincts and that's not a criticism i'm just saying that when you're tweeted like the way you tweeted some ways i was tweeted i talk in the book about it look let me just jump back a little bit it's this is in the book i'm two weeks old i'm

still in the hospital with my mother and she she writes her diary my poor little son my heart breaks for you because you've been crying for the last hour and a half to be fed but i don't feed you because i promised the doctor that i only feed you on schedule now what's happening to me this woman loves me my mother desperately loved me i know that in so many ways but she's not listening to her own parenting instincts her heart is breaking but she's letting me cry by myself because she promised some stupid doctor

that should only feed me on schedule what message i'm getting am i getting the message that i'm being loved or is it too recalled i'm getting the message that my needs don't matter and they don't care about how i feel which message am i getting yes she totally loved me but she wasn't listening to your own parenting instincts and that is traumatic for the child and it's confusing because she loves me yes she doesn't even feed me when i'm hungry well that's really confusing and it's traumatizing and we're telling this to parents all the time

in this society as a physician i used to tell parents to behave that way i regret that but i did so what i'm talking about is a culture that has lost contact with the parenting instinct or take the example of do you remember dr spock is that yeah so dr spock was the world's painting expert for decades and he talked about how you deal with kids you put them to sleep you put them to bed and you walk out quietly and you close the door and you don't go back in because you don't give in

to the tyranny of the infant he said the tyranny of the infant the infant has an attachment drive that says i need to be held by mommy or daddy the child is crying to express that attachment need because physically that's how they can attach it's phys they can't emotionally connect as a as a month old they can connect if you hold them if they see you if they hear you what message are you giving to the kid when you don't pick them up when they're crying that their feelings don't matter that they don't matter that's

the message you're giving you may love them but you're still giving them a very negative message and so that you may know on some level that your parent loves you because they feed you they hug you that whatever but at the same time these people that love you are deeply hurting you that's traumatic aboriginal peoples don't do that kind of stuff in under normal circumstances they just don't do it do they have a right of passage moment where so let me do it again sorry the spanking business yep there's been studies recently published in the

american journal during the american medical association's pediatrics publication the kids were spent experience as much trauma as kids were more severely abused that's what the findings are in the long term certain interrupt but not at all this topic is a incredibly meaningful for anybody considering having kids raising kids yeah um and certainly even for me somebody that doesn't have kids nor plan to have kids it's it is the the thesis of your book is so big and so powerful that it what it does though is it okay so i've grown up in a culture this

your hypothesis i've grown up in a culture that is fundamentally sick yeah is stopping um parent many many things the book is way bigger than uh just parenting we just happen to be on that right now but um so it's created sort of parents that are detached from their parental instincts that's right and so they're constantly making these mistakes but it feels normal right so i grew up in it to the the fish is the last one to recognize what water is yeah and so i can't even see that there could be another way of

doing this right but because of that when i look at this i think once you're in the cycle how do you break out of it because a you can't be an infant forever even you know gorillas at some point like th the child is distance from the parents needs to be either they break away themselves or they get pushed away or their parents may die also very possible yeah and in the cultures that i have unintentionally encountered rights of passage rituals because i'm interested in rights of passage there's this moment but i don't so the

one i'll talk to specifically because i remember it so vividly is in um the long walk to freedom nelson mandela's book he talks about how i think it was your 14th birthday you're with the woman and your mother yeah and then you are ceremoniously removed from her physically like they come and grab you and take you away at what age uh i think it was 14. okay and they take you away and then there is this they cover you in mud and then you are actually i think before you get covered in mud i'm getting

the order wrong here but anyway they sit you down buck naked in front of the whole tribe with a very sharp rock they cut your foreskin off and they make you yell a warrior prayer yeah and then they cover you in mud and then another young woman comes in after some time washes the mud off your body i mean it's this whole thing and before reading your work i was like that's so rad like this rite of passage that's dope you're taking the child away from the mother is that is that a necessary moment or

is that all part of this like just sort of crazy detachment from what we should be doing so i think it's a mix of both um let's just step back a little bit um nature has a natural agenda for every human being like when you plant an acorn what's nature's agenda for that acorn grow into a tree go out to be an oak tree so nature is the same agenda for human beings to grow to be independent self-mastered collective connected beings that's nature's agenda this is how we evolved that means if you meet the right

developmental conditions that kid will grow up to be an independent person not because you push them away but because that's nature's agenda because the parents are gonna die at some point or another so at some point or another that infant has to be an independent adult that's nature's agenda we don't have to make that happen that happens spontaneously so long as the conditions are right now if you plant that acorn into dry ground with no irrigation and no sunlight ain't gonna be any oak tree not because the acorn doesn't have that capacity but because the

conditions weren't right same with human beings so i'm saying what is up my friend tom bill you here and i have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10 if your answer is anything less than a 10 i've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving

huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact i will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right i've just released a class from impact theory university called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself

to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work i will see you inside this workshop from impact theory university until then my friends be legendary peace out if the conditions are right that independence will happen anyway now it's true societies have developed rituals of passage so there's a jewish bar mitzvah ceremony which happens at age 13. you know um there's a vision quest that that that indigenous people will lead you know but those ritual

rites of passages or those passages of rich rites of passage rituals are conducted by adults to welcome the child into the adult community in their our general original environments which is small band hunter or groups there wasn't circumcision in fact i quote an expert on aboriginal indigenous or hunter-gatherer groups dr donna cion arves of notre dame university who says that circumcision wasn't a part of that kind of practice so that circumcision came along later with with with more settled tribes and agriculture and so on so once you get away from the hunter-gatherer milieu we're getting

more and more or less and less natural so what mandela is describing then is a combination of a healthy rite of passage if we're recognizing your adulthood now we're honoring you welcoming you to the community of adults but there was also an element of barbarism in it where you're deliberately hurting a child for which there's no reason whatsoever whether it's a male child or it's a female child and we know to what degree female children in some areas of the world are hurt by the rituals of circumcision the male children are hurt as well not

to the same degree as the females but those are already post hunter-gatherer additions so yes rite of passage beautiful why is it necessary to hurt somebody it's not hiding in there and i'm so curious i'm so glad that i get to ask you directly hiding in there is a sounds like to me a vision of humanity that is just loving and wonderful and that our natural state is um we would grow into the oak tree that doesn't that isn't my same base assumption but you very much have an expertise that i lack so does your

world view require that belief about humans to be not purely good but certainly default good no nobody's default good we've always said problems as human beings because we're flawed beings you know but it's a question again of um what develops under what conditions you know and uh the more our needs are met the more like for example in this society the belief very much is that were competitive aggressive even hostile selfish creatures that's not how most of that's not how humanity developed we could never have developed if that's the way we were we could only

have developed if they were nurturing and communal communal support and connection and so if you look at all kinds of cultures that are so-called um primitive so-called primitive giving and receiving and connection are values and people gain wealth by giving not by gathering and taking from others so wealth is defined as a set of social connections rather than a set of physical possessions in canada in the northwest pacific northwest they used to have the pot latch and the potlatch were do you know what apartheid says yeah yeah so it's an event where people gather and

they give gifts which is how they gather wealth of connections that's a very different sense of wealth than gathering everything onto myself by taking it away from everybody else one of the first thing that the colonialists did is they forbade their rituals and the spiritual ways of the indigenous people including the potlatch because it threatened the qualist acquisitive ethic so we went against thousands of years of tradition in order to force people into a cultural mindset that suited the purpose of colonialism that's what happened okay so going back to the idea of um it doesn't

require humans to be perfect we're an imperfect creature so if we are imperfect and do you agree with uh i think it was um soulja nitsan who said that the evil runs through or the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man which rings true to me does that ring true to you i would say that the potential for both runs through every person hitler was a human being as i say this in the book jesus was a human being at least let's agree that in his earthly manifestation whether you're a

christian he was a human being even jesus was tempted wasn't he you know he's in the desert is tempted by power and ego and acquisition the buddha in the buddha story he's tempted by lust and by greed and by aggression and egotism so yes the potential for for for that kind of egotistical self-regard which turns out to be evil that is ultimate expression is is that that strain is in us so is the strain for compassion like the buddha infinite love like jesus humility like moses that's all within us as well the question is which

conditions promote which in his development the buddhist talks about seeds of which seeds in our minds are planted and which get watered and which don't so yes i agree that the potentials are there and in an embryo everything is there but the question is what gets nourished and what gets suppressed and i'm saying that in this society it's the worst of us that gets nourished and the best of us that gets suppressed all right so let's define those what uh i would assume that loving attachment unconditionally loving attachment certainly towards your children that's part of

the best of us yeah what are some other attributes of the best and then we'll move on to some of the worst so let's talk about children and now let's talk about people in general so children's needs are unconditional loving acceptance from everyone or just their parents for their parents or well ideally from the community but certainly they're nurturing caregivers whoever they are and their meant to me wasn't just a parent by the way we're never meant to be parented in nuclear families okay it's pure that's a modern thing so unconditional living acceptance rest from

having to work to make the relationship work say that again rest from having to work to make the relationship work in other words the child should not have to be mold themselves into anything to make the relationship work with their parents they shouldn't have to work they shouldn't have to be good nice pretty to make the relationship work they shouldn't have to take care of the parents emotional needs to make the relationship work like people that have to work to make their to meet their parents emotional needs end up in deep trouble as adults very

often physically ill you go into tremendous detail in the book about that so children should be able to allow to feel all their emotions and i mentioned play before those are the needs of the child as human beings more generally we need a sense of connection a sense of meaning a sense of belonging a sense of transcendence so that there's something we're part of something greater than just our legal egoic concerns these are all the needs of human beings to the extent that they're met we thrive to the extent that they're not met we shrivel

and there's lots of shriveled people in positions of great power in this society no doubt okay so what are what are the as we're creating this soil that we're going to nurture things in yeah how do things start to go awry and how do we begin to prep the soil for something better well we've covered that to some degree so things will begin to go awry when we lose contact with our pending instincts and we'll and we is it just that like is this would you um speaking from experience very broad but if you were

going to really like bring it down is this largely an echo of a parenting system that has become dysfunctional it's it's a society that's become humanly dysfunctional that transmits its expectations through the parents and that actually begins before birth because already the the more stressed and troubled the parents are that has a physiological impact on the child's brain development so i'm just talking pure science here so mothers who are stressed and depressed their infants in the womb were already getting those messages hormonally and through nerve conduction and so on so that you can actually monitor

the heart rates of mothers who are stressed and those heart rates will be different than the heart rates of infants whose mothers are not stressed in the book you talk about the uh the crazy ice storm ends up showing up in the epigenetic markers of kids if you don't mind walk us through that it's pretty crazy well it's only that um in the laboratory they have shown that the more you stress um parent animals the more troubled and stressed the kids will be so in quebec there was an ice storm some years ago and the

parents underwent great the mothers underwent great stress and you know it was really cold there was no heating a lot of stuff wasn't working um those mothers who experienced that stress their children were shown to have more troubles later on behaviorally and learning wise and and in other ways as well so again the stresses of the parent translate into the physiology of the child there's a there's a study that i quoted in the book about they looked at um marriages that were stressed and you could there's two ways you could tell how stressed the marriage

was one is you could ask the parents and they could they would talk about it the other way is you could marry you could measure the urinary stress hormone levels of their children wow and the parental conflict was reflected in elevated stress hormone levels in the urine of the children the elevated stress hormone levels in the urine means that the immune system itself is under assault and that has an implication for health later on we know for example that the more stressed parents are the greater the risk of asthma for their children and that the

degree of stress on the parents is correlated with the amount of medication the kid will need for their asthma amongst other studies lots of such studies so in other words there's a correlation between the emotional environment that we grew up in and our physiology yeah i mean that's really the core thrust of the book is hey all these things that you think are maybe just old age or um bad diet they're actually related to trauma or even disease in fact one of the ones you talk about that was the most eye opening was als yeah

which you know i would think of as a genetic disease bummer horrible roll of the dice but walk people through the the um there is a predictable personality trait of people with als that i was like well so um first of all there's nothing genetic about als nobody's ever shown i mean there might be some rare examples of als genetically into this but those would be a tiny infinitely small minority so genes don't have much to do with most chronic illnesses there are some illnesses that are genetic there's one that runs in my family my

mother and my aunt had it muscular dystrophy gradually they became weaker and weaker already when i was a child my mother couldn't lift her arm up and in the end she was not immobile at all and so if you get that gene you're going to get the disease but those diseases are very very rare about one in ten thousand most chronic illnesses have very little or no genetic basis to it so for example there's a breast cancer gene but out of 100 women with breast cancer only seven will have the gene and out of 100

women with the gene not all of them will get the cancer so in many cases even if these genes are implicated it's in it's the interaction of genes and environment now in als it's you know the the als personality which i noticed in palliative care when i was a palliative care physician also in the literature are people that repress their healthy anger are emotionally very rigid and they don't ask for help from anybody um and usually that's based on childhood trauma and logarithmic was like that the ultimate you define trauma in you you go to

very careful links in the book to make sure that people understand trauma isn't always getting hit with a bat or uh being sexually abused like there's a range that can be wildly impactful well let's take uh lou gehrig after whom the name the disease is named in north america his father was an alcoholic and lou gehrig was one of these very nice guys that took care of his mother emotionally he had to that's what happens in the home of an alcoholic very often the child becomes the caregiver now he was such a nice guy that

you know he the the the record that he set for uh consecutive games played that stood for so many many many decades why did he set that record because even if he was sick he would play because he's too dutiful to his teammates to take himself out of a game is that a healthy thing or not it's not healthy on the other hand when there was a young rookie on the on the yankees who got sick and he couldn't play and the manager was very upset with this kid gerry says what are you talking about

he's sick he can't play took the rookie to his own home where he lived with his mother his mother put the kid to bed the rookie nursed him and luger slept on the couch so that kind of self-sacrificing self-negating emotionally repressed really nice person is the person which is typical of the als personality and there's been a whole lot of studies on that that show that you know these are the people that get als it's just that the doctors don't make the link between that personality pattern and the ls that's just basically swallowing your anger

swelling your healthy anger directly yeah sorry swallowing your healthy anger is directly causative to als i think it's a major contributor you never see it you never see it and you never see the healthy anger in anybody with als and you always see this hyper conscientious hyper autonomous self-sufficiency that no i don't need any help now and when you talk to neurologists which has been done in studies they always describe their patients as extraordinary nice als patients extraordinarily nice why they're so nice because they repress their healthy aggression it's just that the neurologists don't make

the link between that and the disease i'm saying that that plays a major role because that repression of emotions again the emotions are not separable from our physiology the nervous system and the immune system and hormonal apparatus and the god and the heart they're all one system when something happens in one area something happens in the other area as well look the analogy in the book is this think of a person with a big beach ball trying to push a beach ball under the water that takes a lot of effort now have you ever been

angry of course okay now when you're angry it's not just an emotional state in your head it's a whole body is now how much energy would it take to suppress that energy to suppress that anger can you imagine so that you don't even feel it but not feeling your anger was an adaptation to your childhood where the anger wasn't permitted so that emotional physiological effort of repressing anger takes a toll on the nervous system and an immune system it's a major role in disease i'm saying yeah it pays a major contribution yeah this is where

the book really starts to get into some fascinating territory as you go through all these different diseases and you start talking about okay repressing anger uh you go into the god is it the natural killer t cells end up uh being suppressed because you're putting so much energy away from your immune system your immune system can't keep up and so there's all kinds of things like cancer that are afflicted there was one thing you said like back in the 1800s or early 1900s there was a doctor that was like oh whenever you see somebody with

heart disease they have this type of personality and you even talk about in the book the type c you said it's not a personality type but that there are traits yeah that people with type c have that end up being sort of pro disease personality traits yeah what are some of those traits well before i answer that let me go back to something let's talk about healthy anger for a minute if you could okay um then i'll illustrate these traits okay what is healthy anger why are we given healthy anger so there's a there's a

system in our brain for anger not just for us mammals what is it there for is there to protect our boundaries somebody to invade your space physically or in the case of human beings emotionally you should say no stay out that's the rule of healthy anger now you're frust if you are repressed that healthy anger what would happen to you to me in life people would be just trespassing all over me all the time because i had no boundaries so healthy anger is a boundary defense is that clear okay healthy anger is a boundary defense

it just says it seems like one of its uses i'll be honest i don't know that i'd say it's it's only use but i don't know healthy anger that's its only use that's his major use just boundary protection that's just measure that's why it came along animals have it you're in my how space you extending that to loved ones so now if you encroach upon a loved one well if your loved one intrudes your space emotionally no i mean if somebody else is intruding on my loved ones oh yeah dad too yeah yeah oh yeah

yeah you or your loved ones anything you cherish absolutely for sure so that's healthy anger so the role of anger is to set a boundary between what's nourishing uh you know to to let in a lot of healthy anger is to keep up what's dangerous and unwelcome right what's the role of the emotional system in general is to let in what's healthy and nurturing and to keep what was dangerous and unwelcome is that fair enough seems good what's the rule of the immune system same exactly it's the same the role of the immune system is

to keep what was dangerous and toxic along with nourishing and healthy the immune system and then and the emotional system are not separate systems they're part and parcel of the same apparatus they're unified when you suppress the emotions you're also suppressing the immune system when you say when you when you tom bill you here announcing my new espanol episodes on youtube and podcast we are committed to spreading the impact theory message of empowerment at scale to as many people in our growing global community as possible so we've taken some of our best i.t episodes with

some amazing guests and dubbed them into spanish language tell your friends and family start watching tom bilyeu n be legendary when you don't know how to defend your emotional boundaries that also weakens your immune boundaries physiologically it's that simple or if you repress the anger that anger doesn't go away it doesn't evaporate into the heavens it turns against you in the form of depression or self-loathing and so on in the same way the immune system turns against you and now you have autoimmune disease and so the traits that were identified with chronic illness most chronic

illness like cancers or immune disease are emotional self-suppression inability to experience healthy anger desire to please others to fit in to be acceptable to be nice to be ignoring of your own needs these are the traits that are over and over and again identified in the literature whether with multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or with cancer now these are not the real per these are not the real person these are adaptive traits in response to the childhood environment but they take a heavy toll or take another so-called illness and by the way the case i'm

making is that what we call illness is actually response to life so take a take depression this so-called biological disease of the brain what does it mean to depress something try to push it down to push it down what gets pushed and what's got pushed on in depression well i can tell you i've been depressed what gets pushed on depression is your natural emotions everything is flat and nothing matters nothing has any meaning and that starts with people pushing them down that's that's the word that's what the world means it means to push it down

it starts in childhood with people people having to push down their emotions why do they have to push their emotions to fit in with other people's expectations so and i don't know the literature on this at all so there often times then the depression will just sort of creep in slowly i always assumed it was tied to something being stuck in um a bad relationship uh death in the family loss of a job that there would be some sort of triggering event well the okay fair enough if you're in a bad relationship the healthy response

is not depression but to deal with the challenges in their retirement in their relationship either by work they're now out or by leaving their relationship depression is not necessary outcome the response to the death of a close one of a close one is not depression it's grief grief is the healthy response we have a system in our brain for grief by the way so grief becomes depression when you're not allowing yourself to grieve but you don't know how to grieve properly yeah and you don't know a lot of grief properly because your emotions were suppressed

as a child and so yeah we have uh these healthy systems but they get their activity gets deformed through our natural expectations okay so to stay with depression for a minute so you're pushing all this stuff down it starts in early childhood you're trying to fit in you want unconditional love you're not getting it so you have this directive for attachment and so you begin to oh i see what i can do if i if i don't yell scream if i'm not expressing frustration if i'm the caretaker or whatever that situation demands then i'll as

well so now i've learned this adaptive response to suppress my emotions and over time it begins to numb me i would assume i have not been depressed so but uh so you're beginning to be numbed but now something it gets starts to be very extreme and you what i have heard depression explained as is just like the skies are permanently gray you will never see joy again and so what what is breaking in that that like the beach ball analogy i like right i'm pushing something under the water but if i stop pushing it will

pop back up and so if that thing or my emotions is when you're treating depression let's say non-pharmacologically is it the release of the pressure on those emotions to let them finally come up yeah so the so the the difference between the pushing the beach ball down is that i'm doing it consciously and deliberately but the repression of emotions that a child um engages in is not conscious is not deliberate it's an automatic response it's unconscious therefore the child can't just that go like that and then as you say it numbs and then becomes overall

a depression now the by the way i'm not against pharmacological treatment i've taken antidepressants they have helped me so i'm not here to advocate against them i could talk about their misuse but in principle sometimes they're helpful and occasionally they're life-saving and much of the time they're over prescribed for way too long and we're not dealing with the real issues because the pharmacology deals with the symptom but it doesn't deal with the underlying problem so yes the healing of depression and i talk you know the last the the final part the longest part of the

book really is unhealing is you have to reconnect to yourself so you can feel your emotions that's the treatment of depression talk to me about reconnecting how do you reconnect what is that process well first of all you recognize that you're disconnected and you notice how that disconnect shows up you know in so many areas of your life uh in your on the job or in the uh in your personal relationships for example or in your relationship to yourself so you have to become aware and this is where i talk about disease whether it's physical

or so-called mental um as teacher not that i recommend the illness as a way of learning to anybody it's that's not my fault but if it happens but if it happens it can actually teach you and you can ask yourself what i've been pushing down and what are the stories why do i push it down oh i pushed on my emotions because i've learned i have the belief that if i'm angry i'm a bad person well is that really true is a person experiences anger really a bad person um i learned that if i push

down my needs then people will love me do i really really do i really want to be loved at the expense of disconnecting from myself as a child i had no choice because i had to be loved or connected with otherwise i wouldn't have survived is it still like that so basically it's a graduate isn't it though sorry isn't it like isn't in fact this is my overarching question and somebody that has helped so many people through therapy you probably have the answer or an insight but as we become adults yeah you don't have like

other than your parents should you be lucky enough that they're still alive but man out in the outside world peop people do want you to act a certain way and if you don't they're not going to be around you like i'll just be honest if somebody's throwing a tantrum as an adult i don't have time for that but an adult doesn't do a tantrum are you sure yeah like i have seen adults throw what i don't have an adult version you've seen you have children in that old body just throw tantrums interesting okay go on

you know so the the adult who throws a tantrum he's a traumatized child who has not developed self-regulation i'm not talking about repression of self but regulation so for example help me differentiate so for example i throw up at the airline counter and uh they've um overbooked the airplane okay my healthy response is disappointment and some degree of anger i'd say this is not right that you did this i want you to redress it you do something about it please throwing a tantrum yelling at the poor clerk behind the counter who had nothing to do

with creating the problem who's just trying to do her job and trying to help me as best she can is that that's not a mature adult that's a child whose midfielder cortex or self-regulation has gone offline and his emotional circuits have taken over believe me i've been an adult child very often in my life as my wife could tell me tell you so that's not an adult okay so then the process there goes back to connect to yourself figure out why you're repressing this yeah let go of those things that are keeping it down find

a way to be able to regulate yourself so that they're sort of contextually sensical so that we're not in unhealthy anger territory um okay interesting so trauma is um is an imprint that makes you react to the present like you're still a child essentially i mean that's a very narrow definition of trauma that's one of his essential aspects and that the important thing that you said earlier is it's automatic it's automatic it's unveiled it's automatic and it's um and actually when you look at the brain scans of deeply traumatized people the prefrontal cortex is totally

asleep and the emotional circuits you know they're the the the primitive emotional responses are active this is why so many of so much of the jail population are traumatized people that's why end up in jail but instead of dealing with their trauma and helping them develop which they could under the right circumstances become adult people self-regulated the jails just make it worse by the way by the way they torment people and the way they traumatize people even further so when i talk about a trauma for society informed society what if we actually understood trauma what

if you just actually understood it you have huge implications for medical school for medical uh health delivery what if when you went to the doctor with your depression you weren't just told you got this biological disease of the brain here's a pill but they actually said what happened to you as a child one of the people i quote in the book is the great pediatrician psychiatrist no scientist bruce perry who just wrote a book with oprah the title of which is called what happened to you now what's wrong with you what happened to you what

if we asked that question you know so that would change medical treatment completely what if inju in the in the in the prison system or in the legal system we didn't just say what did you do but what happened to you that made you do it now that wouldn't mean that we allow or encourage antisocial behavior but it would mean that we would actually want to rehabilitate people and to help them become who they could be you know that's a very different legal concept what if in education it was kids developmental needs that were put

paramount rather than their performance it's interesting how would you do that functionally what would school look like well i talk about it a bit like schools in finland there's much more play there's much more freedom and they have much better results than we do so that be in other words to be honored what are the right results to look at a child who is curious who wants to learn who's engaged who is um respectful of others um who is confident um that would be the right results then you don't have to worry about stuff acknowledged

on their throats why because they want to learn they want to learn so you don't have to punish them you don't have to reward them you just present them with the opportunities to learn and they will that's a natural human attribute we kill that in this society and how much of that like and again i i am so aware that i come at the interpretation of your solutions as somebody sort of in the thick of the broken thing yeah um i used to teach adults so very different than teaching you know 12 year olds or

whatever but there is a certain amount of like hey i need everybody to stop talking and pay attention right so yeah how do you how do you create the the system where we want a totally different outcome so we're not going to be judging just based on your math we're going to be looking at inquisitiveness we're going to be looking at how much that you want to learn but you're dealing with large groups people in all different kinds of positions like how do we because the their the punch line of your book is like basically

hey we're going to have to overhaul a lot of this yeah i mean you go very specifically into the ways in which the culture is toxic you have to read the book to get into it um but it is like in a nutshell is basically we're sort of like this is a ground-up restart like there is a fundamental flaw we've already talked about the sort of basic basic first building block of how you actually in fact we haven't because in the book you talk about like even before you get pregnant the things that can create

trauma in uh fetus and it's carried on and look i i will tell you dear audience that uh he talks about the science and there really is from what i've seen quite a bit of science that can show i think it was up to five generations you could see an epigenetic marker of trauma and even the father who's carrying that across the sperm into the fertilized egg it has an impact on how the dna is wrapped and expressed it's insane and that it goes for five generations that's madness and you begin to realize how easy

it is to perpetuate this sort of wheel of trauma so knowing that there's probably two things we should talk about because right now if mothers are paying attention they're freaking out about all the mistakes that they made that have now traumatized their children uh and so you go into blame in the book i think that's important to touch on and then yeah go into the importance of not blaming exactly exactly so i want you to speak to the role of blame here yeah um and then how do we begin to heal stroke build a society

that isn't sick well the good news is that i wrote this book with my eldest son i mean and believe me i've had a lot of guilt as a parent i felt a lot of guilt for the way that i stressed and and passed on my own trauma to my children which i did not because i wanted to i love them i i've always said i would have thrown myself into a fire for them but there was a problem they never needed me to throw myself into a fire they just needed me to be at

home self-regulated knowing how to take care of myself and being knowing how to attune with their needs now that is a traumatized survivor of the genocide in europe and there's a workaholic doctor and as an anxious husband in a conflictual marriage i wasn't able to do and that really did hurt my kids i say that at this point not with guilt just to say that's what happened i know i did my best that just happened to me my best but anyway what i'm saying is is that um i wrote this book with my son and

even the writing was a process of working out our issues so the first thing though is that these issues can always be worked out that the the patterns can be reversed we don't get stay stuck in them so that's the good news as far as blame is concerned um as you say trauma is passed on multi-generationally you know the bible says that the sins of the fathers will be visited unto the third and fourth generations they're not talking about the sins of the fathers they're talking about the traumas of the parents will be passed on

to the future generation it's true but if that's true um if i passed on my trial to my kid my trauma to my kids did i cause my own trauma as a child why would anybody be blamed the end of who you end up blaming adam and eve you know you end up blaming some eight living in a tree who was my ancestor at some point i mean blame doesn't make any sense it's also cruel and and and totally unhelpful so there's no blame in fact it's it's it's not about blaming it's about understanding but

once we understand now we can start to do things differently that's the whole point it's not about blaming so we have to break the cycle self-awareness get in touch with ourselves now let's zoom out a little bit so we know what to do on an individual basis we have to stop the repression let the emotions come up mature into the adult that has the ability to self-regulate that could be there for the next generation to raise a child in a healthier way at a societal level how do we begin to think about this and what

are some highlights of like the the things that you're like yo this is really broken and causing a lot of problems is it the health care system is it the education system like where do you think sort of the the real big ones are well the healthcare system and educational system in any given society the dominant institutions will reflect the interests of the dominant groups in any society so who are the dominant groups in this society here's what we know i know i'm talking to somebody who's made a lot of money okay so don't take

this personally but but the dominant groups in this society are getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and the rest of society is getting more and more uncertain and insecure that's an untenable situation because when you look at what stresses people are loss of control uncertainty conflict and lack of information which are precisely the conditions that most people are increasingly living with there's less security there's less sense of a positive future there's more sense of loss of control there's more sense that on my little voice i don't matter even doing covid when a lot of people

lost a lot of money and under terrific economic stress the top stratum of billionaires gained immensely well that's a stressful situation for a lot of people that stress translates into physiological illness that's just how it works that's the first point uncertainty loss of control conflict lack of information that's a given condition of globalized capitalism because you never know when somebody a zillion miles away is going to make a decision that's going to change your life completely over which you have no control whatsoever that's a designation or that's a recipe for stress okay number one number

two um you look at well there's a chapter on socio sociopathy or strategy now you look at corporations major corporations who make decisions to deliberately concoct products that'll get people hooked and addicted i'm talking about the food companies this has been documented that they actually plan scientifically which combination of soft sugar and fat are going to get people addicted which are going to excite the addictive circuits in the brain no doubt thereby killing millions of people the tobacco companies don't have to talk about them at all above what they've done the companies that have for

decades hired phony scientists to deny climate change thereby creating conditions of ill health and the engineering life itself and these are respectable well-to-do um pillars of society and philanthropists on massive scale um the pharmaceutical companies the pharmaceutical companies who sell opiates knowing now i'm not against opius by the way as a palliative care doctor i love the opiates not for myself but for the patients i was looking after thank god but to sell those products and telling doctors that they're not addictive when you when you know that they are tens and hundreds of thousands of

people are dying of opioid overdoses but that's sociopathy by any definition and these are the people at the top still an echo of childhood trauma or do you think there's something else at play well it's a combination i think the people who do it they're really disconnected from themselves they really are disconnected from themselves and they're acting out their traumas in some ways but it's also the nature of this system these are the people that this system raises to high levels of power and rewards then there's the political system now i'm not talking about political

policy here for a moment but in the book in the in the chapter on trauma and politics we looked at two opposing candidates hillary clinton and donald trump now trump is a as one of the world's trauma experts bessel van der kolk said to me is a poster boy for for trauma the grandiosity the denial of reality the genuine inability to tell reality from lies um the aggressiveness trump said once that um that the world is a horrible place it's dog even your friends want your wife they want your money they want your house and

this is your friends now he wasn't making it up that sense of the world being a horrible place reflected his childhood under alternate tyrant of a father who demeaned his kids horribly and the mother who didn't protect them and one of his brothers drank himself to death now as we know his niece wrote a book who knows the family really well and the trump and the trauma that trump endured and how it manifests in his adult life now i'm not criticizing the guy i'm not blaming him i'm not even talking about specific policies i'm talking

about his personality now that's trump okay who was he running against so let me tell you the story i you probably read it but let me tell it to you and give me your opinion a four-year-old girl runs into the house to his mother she's upset because neighborhood courts are building neighborhood children are bullying her and the mother says there's no room for cards in this house now you get out there and deal with it what's the message to that child at four years old yeah at four years old how would that be read that

you're on your own kid yeah you would suck it up and don't be vulnerable in this house that story was told at hillary clinton's nomination celebration at the democratic convention in 2016 and it was told as an example of wonderful parenting that same election campaign when hillary developed pneumonia what did she do with it remember nothing right she didn't tell anybody she collapsed in the street she sucked it up and she put up of course with the philandering of her husband all those years blaming herself for not meeting his needs typical trauma response what i'm

saying is that the american public had the choice of being too traumatized people they chose the more traumatized one the more traumatized you know yeah that's that's the one thing that's the one they chose there are all kinds of reasons for that again i'm not talking about policy foreign or domestic i'm talking about personalities here these are the people that we elevate to public uh high public level and they carry their traumas with them inevitably those traumas show up in their politics okay so society healing making things better i know that you consider yourself hopeful

as do i i am worried uh we were talking about this before we started recording there is uh my audience is going to get tired of hearing me say this but there is a chinese uh curse proverb you live in interesting times correct yeah and uh i would say right about now it's very interesting very interesting times so how do we and i think you've even said that it you know there's going to be a period of of deep unpleasantness but that long term you're optimistic and walk me through one is why are you optimistic

i am too but i'm just curious what drives your optimism and then how do we make sure we end up on the optimistic side well look first of all to speak personally um the imprint on me of um being an infant under conditions of genocide and war and then the conditions of a mother who was really stressed and terrorized um and grief struck because her parents were killed in auschwitz and then who gives me up to a total stranger when i'm a year old to save my life i remember that story yeah was that this

is a bad world that i'm on my own that um nothing's ever gonna work out for me and so even when i was successful as a physician and even as a writer and so on my innate belief was i'm basically screwed now i don't feel that way anymore so i remember when that changed like i'm trying to figure out when that changed so what was the work that you were doing because we have the the thumbnail sketch we understand we have to stop repressing our emotions let them get reattached to ourselves but like if it

were that easy then everybody be cured at the end of this podcast which of course they won't be it's not that easy now so in the work that you were doing on yourself were there a string of breakthroughs there were stranger breakthroughs it wasn't like one big epiphany it was the gradual work over time do you remember any of the the key moments a lot of it happened in my relationship i'm married to somebody who in my first chapter i say that you know my problem is that my wife understands me you know and she

does all too well but she loved me anyway so and and wanted to be in that relationship i had to grow up because at a certain point she wasn't willing to live with the child anymore so we grew together i would say that was the basic ground of my development but getting therapy learning to know my own patterns and where they came from and learning to get some agency over them was very important for me what i observed as a physician as a clinician as a healer was huge fonts of information for me in learning

because you start to understand the patterns of human behavior yeah i started to understand human beings um sometimes i took antidepressants that helped temporarily by lifting the cloud lifting the clouds i could fear more clearly in fact you know again i'm not an advocate for the massive and i think horrendously overdone use of medications but i can tell you that the first time i took antidepressant after a few days i said you mean people can feel like this normally so when that cloud is lifted i could see a bit more clearly now a lot more

clearly actually um coming to terms with my adhd and understanding the patterns not as it inherited disease but as an adaptive response really helped as well um oh interesting so wait i'm not surprised so everything comes back to trauma so how is adhd an adaptive response to a situation so picture me okay as i was at the first year of my life um my father's in forced labor my mother doesn't know if he's dead or alive her parents are killed in oceans when i'm five months of age she has to wear the yellow badge as

a jew under the nazis that painting of that is going to be in the book she's terrorized she doesn't know if she's going to survive if i'm going to survive how am i feeling i can only imagine give me a few words um afraid yeah lost there's a pediatrician that saw me and said he has never seen such fear in everybody's eyes than in my own eyes lost right all that hopeless stressed okay very how do i cope with that you push it down i dissociate i tune out what is it add all about tuning

out really never thought of it like well they did the major trait of edd is tuning out a kind of absent-mindedness and unwilled tuning out as an infant what else could i do could i escape could i change the situation i tune out when am i tuning out when my brain is developing the two [ __ ] gets programmed into my brain why are we seeing more and more kids with adhd these days because parents are so stressed and sensitive kids pick up on that stress they don't know what to do with it they tune

out as they're as small children when their brains are developing it's not a genetic disease it's an adaptive response the problem with adaptive responses is they help you at the time but later on they become problems in other words adaptive at one point maladaptive at another point again the problem is that they're not conscious adaptations i mean look if you it was if it was raining in california what is always good in los angeles but let's go back to canada okay it's um i'm up in the north of canada it's freezing you know 50 below

whatever that even means you know how do i adapt i put on warm clothing that helps me survive but what if i still wore that warm clothing in the wintertime when it's really hot that same adaptation would not kill me the problem with these childhood adaptations now with the cold clothing i could take it off oh it's not cold anymore i can take off the warm clothing these childhood psychological adaptations they're not conscious they're not will they're not deliberate they're automatic they're under the level of awareness therefore i can't just drop them in fact i

even associate my survival with them so i'm very reluctant to give them up so something has to happen to wake me up oh this isn't working anymore this is where a diagnosis like adhd or depression comes in this is where illness comes in it can be a wake-up call again i don't recommend it or a relation or a bad divorce all of a sudden you realize i married somebody who didn't understand me why did i stay with them so long because my parents never understood me so i expect not to be understood but it doesn't

work for me anymore so next time i marry i'm going to marry somebody who is a bit more mature and you know i'm more mature now so what i'm saying is that these adaptations they show up as problems later on in life and then we can learn from them in the case of my marriage we learn together i'm curious in in a marriage so parents should offer their kids unconditional love should a spouse offer their other half unconditional love yes but it shows up differently so unconditional love doesn't mean that i have to put up

with it it doesn't mean that you know in in the case of uh in the case of my wife when i'm throwing a tantrum the healthy response on her part is to say if you're going to be like that i don't want to be in the same room with you but if you keep doing it i don't even want to be in the same house with you so what if she just changes between childhood and adulthood because in childhood don't do that the dependency the dependency that that the child depends on the parent for very

life itself and for healthy development my wife is not responsible for my healthy development she's not my mother anymore as a matter of fact the reason women get so much to autoimmune disease is they suppress themselves to take care of the stresses of their men very often yeah you tell a story i think it's in the book i've heard so many interviews as well sometimes they get confused what was in the book uh of a woman who's diagnosed with breast cancer and her husband whose first wife had also died of breast cancer her first thought

was oh my god i hope i don't get so sick that i can't take care of it yeah it's in the book her immediate she's the one that diagnosed with breast cancer she's going to have to chemotherapy or radiation or surgery or whatever and her first thought is how will i look after my husband's emotional needs well that's culturally ingrained in women that's why do you think it's just cultural or is it also an echo of the need to be nurturing to the child it's true that the nurturing instinct in women is much more developed

than in men partly because they have more of the hormone oxytocin which is a nurturing hormone but partly because it's their cultural role now if you take men who look after children they become really good mothers so it's a question of what role are people put in anyway yeah so you know i forgot what we're talking about right before that last saying you were explaining the difference between um the dependencies of a child oh yeah my wife is not responsible to help me grow into a healthy adult that's not her job her job is to

be responsible for the healthy growth of our children if she suppresses her needs and puts all her energy in taking care of the women have this decision to make in our society my wife did really in a sense am i going to look after the little babies and we're going to look after the big baby and the energy they put into looking after the big baby is taken away from the little babies and children suffer as a result so my wife is not responsible for my maturation and my healthy growth she ex she has the

right to expect that i'm going to show up as an adult okay when you're supposed to offer unconditional love and you're not getting what you need from your significant other how do you have people play that out is it is there a point at which they say look i just i can't offer you unconditional love i need to separate from this or you can say i love you i really want the best for you but i can't be with this i can't be with it it's toxic for me it's bad for our children at some

point that's the result in that way do are you saying that we should have unconditional love for everybody even though that means we'll maintain boundaries we'll have different kinds of relationships it depends what mean by unconditional love and again it depends on the age of the person and the the needs of that person so um having love for a person doesn't mean that you're to put up with everything that they do but how you like even with children as we said earlier we have to draw our boundaries but the question is how do we draw

our boundaries and in what spirit and with what intention that's interesting that's so complicated and makes me despair because it's so hard but i think you're right the spirit in which you make the intention so for instance my wife and i yeah i would never have said that i love her unconditionally just because that doesn't feel true in that i have specifically given her conditions and said um if you were unfaithful to me that would be the end of the marriage um that'll be the end of my marriage too for sure so but the spirit

in which i make that is not meant to be a threat or anything like that it's just clarity what you're actually saying is honey my relationship with you is so important that i can't bear to share that with somebody else on that intimate basis because my capacity to be intimate with you would really suffer if i had to wonder whether you're choosing somebody else instead of me that's a perfectly normal healthy statement to make to an adult partner it's an expression of love actually help me understand that how is that an expression of love because

you really want her you're helping them be successful you don't want that you really want that person in your life you're saying i really want you in my life fully and there's no room for that in that you can have all kinds of friends and i hope you're independent and you have a life that's not all bonded with my own and i want you to have your own activities and find your own meaning and have your own friends and have your own activities but in terms of intimate relationships i can't handle sharing that with somebody

else that's an expression of love there's so much depth and nuance to the human mind to the human experience do you at all worry that we as a society will not be that here's my thesis we didn't intentionally get it right a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago yeah it was just that was the nature of what we had access to that's right and to sort of co-opt chris rock's statement you're only as faithful as your options which i totally disagree with but uh but culturally like when you take it on mass it

does feel like a lot of the sort of sickness things are us solving like these minor annoyances that end up snowballing into becoming deep problems like at first it's just like hey we want to be able to control the food supply so we don't starve to death amazing then it's like well we can already do that now i want to make sure that the food that i'm storing tastes good and it's like whoa well if i can do that then i want to be able to sell it and if i want to sell it i

want to sell more of it now that i want to sell more of it i want to make sure that it tastes really good and gets into that addictive quality that you're talking about and look not everybody does it obviously from a food perspective that was the whole reason that my partners and i got into food in the first place was we wanted to make junk food good for you and so using things like that i'd explain that how do you mean junk food good for you so it's good for you it's not junk food

well so to your point this depends on how we define junk food so i'll define the way that we looked at it is things that you grew up as like craving wanting whether it was chips so we made protein chips now the great thing about protein chips is they naturally kill your hunger so you're only going to eat so many of them and then they stop being fun so doing things like that but anyway i don't want to get lost in that but so i worry that that this isn't a bell that can't be unrung

well look but let's go back to what we were talking about intention your intention wasn't purely to make a profit your intention was also to serve people while making a profit that's a very different intention than my own then my only purpose is to make a lot of money at no matter what cost no matter how many people get sick how many people develop diabetes become obese become addicted to the stuff that's terrible for them that's the actual intention of many of the major corporations now that wasn't your intention so i'm talking about intention but

how do we scale that that's my punchline how do we scale it what do you mean by that so i really i i have i could have retired and never worked again but i really want to help people like get to i wouldn't use your language the word i always use is is a growth mindset i want people to have a growth mindset okay but i think secretly we sort of have a very similar aim which is we want people to thrive we just happen to be each attacking a different party so that's the intention

the intention is that people should thrive now how do we scale that how do we get heavy you know what i'm not a business person what do you mean by scale how do you get sorry i don't mean it from another on a massive level yeah yeah so if we have a sick society which i'm with you or a sick culture i'm with you how do we how do we get a culture like i mean we're recording this as there is a war going on on the borders of europe so yeah uh it does make

me feel like there's just a nature to humans and it repeats i think we're gonna have to challenge who's in control for one thing at some point we're gonna have to challenge that on some level this is not a book about we talked to do we do touch upon politics and the trauma that's manifested in politics but i hope the answer isn't politics i hope the answer is but but this book is not a political manifesto i agreed you know um but i think people have to start thinking about what i'm talking about on a

large scale rather than just how do i make my life better how do we make society better in other words how can we think with the mutual need as our intention and our commonality is intention rather than just my personal uh aggrandizement i think that shift is going to have to happen for survival number one in terms of what you say about wars and so on well in any war if you examine them closely including this one they're always conflicting interests and power interests and so on i don't think i want to get into the

politics of this war and what i think about it but it's not just an expression of human nature it's an expression of political systems clashing with each other for very selfish reasons that's what i see happening and i see that in just about every war you know so is it in our nature to be aggressive and cruel certainly our potential to be that way but you know here's what i see yesterday i was talking to a a a u.s veteran a navy seal who who came back as many do with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and

uh through a psychedelic experience actually he turned it around he was losing his marriage he was there he was throwing coffee pots through the window he was terrifying his children his wife no longer recognized him and then he had this experience and he rediscovered his true nature which was loving and and and nurturing and so on and now he's that way towards the world he would never go back and do the things again that he did then you know so even doing kovid you say human nature well in the book i make this point the

alfie khon who's a educator educator and a writer he says when somebody behaves selfishly we say well that's just human nature how about when somebody behaves generously we never say oh that's just human nature but it is and and so at least in the early days of kovit the more stressed we got and the more overwhelmed we got by the crisis the more the divisions and the rancor showed up in so many on both sides but what did we see in the beginning we saw a lot of people cooperating collaborating being kind to each other

um being communal celebrating the healthcare workers you know supporting one another that that's in our potential as well so why should we settle for the worst version of ourselves and i say that's us it isn't actually most people want peace they don't want war people usually have to be manipulated into war which they are very often you know so what's their nature that's why i'm optimistic i think it's in us i love it i have to get you on an airplane so i have to let you go the book was amazing man where can people

connect with you where can they get the book well um the book will be published is published on september 13th and it's going to be available everywhere um i hope people will favor their local bookstores uh pick up the book but you know it's obviously every it's going to be available online as well um in terms of i have a website drgabermate.com and pretty much everything i'm up to i'm also all over youtube not that i'm all over youtube but people have published amazing presence your interview with me last year lots of hits and lots

of other interviews are available on youtube so i'm easy to find these days yes you are yeah boys and girls uh i fear that trauma may be the hidden influence on the world and there are few people that elucidate it more clearly and what to do more clearly than this man i hope you will read the book and i hope that you will engage with him online you will be richly rewarded as i know many of you i'm sure and according to the good doctor all of us have experienced trauma in some way or another

and to be blind to it will be to your own detriment so check it out you definitely will not regret it and speaking of things you won't regret if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace there's an animal part of our nature which is we completely take appearances for reality that's sort of the source of our problems and our misery to be honest with you in life so the front that people present the way they look the way they talk to us