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are we here hello okay sorry about that chat let's get started chat okay super excited today welcome to another healthy gamer GG stream my name is Dr alok canoja just a reminder that although I am a doctor nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice everything is for educational and entertainment purposes only if you all have a medical question or concern please go see licensed professional hello everybody okay I'm super hyped actually this is fun um so today we've got a couple of cool things to talk about um so

first of all on Friday we're going to have Dr Mark Horowitz and we're going to do an interview with him it's going to be great it's going to be lit Dr Horowitz is an expert on depression and we have frequently talked about Dr horowitz's research in our various HG things so we're going to be if y'all are interested in learning more about depression definitely check out the stream with Dr Horowitz this Friday um I think he's uh so we'll be talking about depression medication serotonin hypothesis is my guess so we are also we have a

special So today we're going to be doing a stream about trauma so I don't know if you all caught our Deep dive into trauma it is one of my most favorite lectures that I have given a lot of people have said it is really really good so y'all can check that out and today we're gonna go kind of one step further so in our Deep dive to trauma we covered a lot of basics of how to understand trauma there's about like I think the video is like 36 minutes okay so today what we're going to

do is we're going to talk about various manifestations of trauma and particular things so it's like we're going to look at uh posts and people asking questions and we're going to understand some additional principles about trauma so that's super cool but the other cool thing that we're trying for the first time in four years I am going to be teaching a live Workshop so this is not something that we have done yet at healthygamer um but we are doing it for the first time and so we're going to be doing a workshop on trauma and

the main thing is that this is going to be a kind of solution oriented workshop on how to overcome various impacts of trauma so what I've done is taken about 15 years of work on trauma both from a spiritual perspective and about now wow I think it's actually 12 years of medical work and distilled that into very concrete ways to fix problems that are related to trauma so there are a couple of important things to understand when you go to a psychotherapist for trauma they're good at helping you deal with the pathology of it but

one of the key things that I've sort of found as a psychiatrist and also as a coach is that trauma affects a lot of dimensions in our life that are not fixed by medical treatment right so it's like we can treat PTSD but trauma will have manifestations in our physiology so how can you rewire some of your physiology it has manifestations in terms of our emotions so how can we sort of understand from a neuroscience perspective what happens to our emotions and how we can get reconnected with our emotions that in turn leads to things

like motivation and behavior and there are some aspects of trauma that we don't really deal with in therapy so for example as people go through trauma they start to lose the dimension of the future now I know that sounds weird but basically when you grow up in a traumatic environment what you want in planning for the future is useless because someone else has a lot of control over your life so there's no point in making plans because you may have a parent who even if you were supposed to go to a slumber party if your

parent is abusive and doesn't you know care about what you want there's no point in wanting things in the future and what that does over time is atrophies your ability to plan and execute tasks so we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about how to sort of Reform your identity after trauma and then we're going to talk about how to develop a narrative and make meaning from your experience so some of these things if we look at evidence-based treatment protocols those are fantastic right so we have things like EMDR and stuff like

that those are to treat specific things like PTSD but what we're going to be covering in the workshop is basically it's an eight-hour Workshop over two days a Saturday and a Sunday and it's at the end of this month by the way and it's basically like when I work with patients and we we're kind of post PTSD treatment I go through sort of like a protocol a trauma protocol to help them rebuild their lives repair their relationships discover who they are find motivation rewire their physiology so it's all this other stuff that we've sort of

distilled down into a live eight hour Workshop um if you all are interested I think let me see if there's a command or something I don't know if the command is going to work on YouTube um but y'all can type exclamation point trauma that may work at some point and so spots are limited so there are a couple of other things that are unique about this the first is that it is a live Workshop that I'm personally teaching so there'll be time for Q a and audience interaction and stuff like that the workshop is also

not like entertainment focused so a lot of our streams and YouTube videos and stuff like that have to be crafted not for like if I do a six hour or eight hour thing about you know how to overcome these various impacts caused by trauma that's like people aren't going to stick around for that right so this is going to be very very Solutions focused it's going to be very very practical and it's basically a distillation of all of the things that I help people that I work with do and this isn't necessarily people who have

diagnosed these of PTSD this is also people like Executives who struggle with forming relationships because they grew up in households where their parents were like very very like conditionally loving so we'll love you and we want you to be the best and we need you to go to Harvard and we need you to become a CEO and we need all these things you need to be number one you need to be number one you need to be number one sixty percent of people in the world have adverse childhood experiences that can be almost classified as

traumatic and those have lingering effects even if they don't rise to the level of diagnosis and so we're trying to help people how to understand the physiology understand the emotions get reconnected with yourself um once you can get reconnected with yourself you can start to cultivate motivation and plan for the future you can repair a sense of identity because a lot of people after they're like you know after they've been shaped by someone so I also see this in like Asian kids but other kids too where I was taught that everything that I wanted is

worthless and I need to conform to some kind of standard and then these kids may be successful but then their their life feels empty and they're like burnt out because they don't actually care about what they're doing so how do you reconnect with yourself and there's also going to be an element of spirituality involved where we talk a little bit about narrative and Karma so one thing that we know is that scientifically healing from trauma involves forming some kind of narrative over it so why did this happen to me how can I sort of instead

of just thinking about this life that has fallen apart how can I start to look forward and plan for life and so it's kind of a stepwise approach it's an eight-hour workshop and it's live so definitely check it out um we're giving this a shot you know a lot of people have questions are we going to do it more than one stuff like that and the answer is it all depends okay so if you guys are interested definitely check out the trauma Workshop we're giving it you know it's going to be live with Dr K

over the course of eight hours and if you all are interested in various problems that like I'll kind of run through them so if you're kind of physiologically hyperactive so what that means is you experience a lot of anxiety a lot of stress you can't calm down you're always retreating to like numbing things because otherwise you're anxious so you spend time like gaming and maybe using drugs and stuff like that spending time on social media we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about reconnecting with your emotions so this is a big thing

to understand when people go through traumatic experiences they dissociate and in the worst cases this dissociation is a clinical dissociation where you lose track of where you are but in the much more common and milder and non-diagnosable level it comes it manifests emotional numbness so we know for example that trauma causes decreased activity in the corpus callosum so you have your left hemisphere which is analytical and logical you have your right hemisphere which is emotional and when we get traumatized we disconnect the two and when we disconnect the two when they're emotionally triggering experiences we're

very numb with them so we can be like called the analytical the problem is when we do that we lose access to the Flow State we lose access to emotional motivation and so as we numb ourselves we actually become a motivational so how do you sort of reverse that process we're going to dive into all those kinds of things okay there are 200 spots in the workshop okay um yeah so if you all are interested and and you know I think that like basically what I've tried to do is distill the most Salient points when

I work with individuals and kind of package it for y'all and it is eight hours because there's a lot of stuff involved so definitely check it out um okay should we dive in chat okay let's Dive In trauma Workshop has no plans of being on YouTube at the moment so we have like our Deep dive into trauma and stuff like that but this is really a workshop so it's like more Interactive um and is also like Solutions focused so generally speaking eight hour marathons do not do well on YouTube okay all right let's dive in

great question being more emotionally aware has has made me sadder what's the deal with that I'm just going to keep this short and simple and exactly what the title suggests being more aware and reflective of my emotions trauma mental state Etc made me realize I'm a lot sadder than when I had no clue what was going on in the first place because I'm thinking about it more and fixating on the hows and the whys my mental circuitry adapts to hold on to that fixation is if that'll fix it but it will keep doing that until

I'm tired and exhausted and way sadder than when I was blissfully ignorant I'm sure many have realized this themselves and I'm also sure that realistically our minds very slowly adapt to it enough to end up better than before we were emotionally aware as long as we power through the chaos but I'm just curious about what Reddit thinks Etc okay so this is a case of someone who is more emotionally aware as they become more emotionally aware they become sadder and they feel worse and how do we manage that so this person says for example that

um made me realize I'm a lot sadder than when I had no clue what was going on in the first place I'm thinking about it more I'm fixating on it and it'll keep going until I'm tired and exhausted and way sadder than when I was blissfully ignorant okay so let's understand something so a lot of times we are blissfully ignorant and then we do some kind of emotional work some kind of introspection and we become sadder and then we think like okay this is a part of the healing process but this is kind of a

scam because I become sadder and now my mind is fixating on the sadness and the problem is not fixing itself it's like you progress into a bad zone of sadness and then you kind of stall there and then you're like now what actually this is worse because even though I've uncovered the sadness it's not fixing itself and my mind is looping so what's going on here and how do we understand this the first thing to understand is that if you are not aware of your sadness that does mean that you are not sad and that

does not mean that the sadness is not affecting you generally speaking when we numb ourselves to our emotions those emotions are still active we just lack awareness of them right so if we look at the body and the mind the body has all kinds of things that are active all the time that we're just not aware of for example my body can be uh you know digesting food but I may not be aware that I'm digesting food all the time I may not I'm constantly producing urine but my body only lets me know hey we're

producing urine when our bladder is pretty full so even emotions are active all the time whether we're aware of them or not especially in the case when we have numbed our emotions so when we numb our emotions we do not process them when we do not process them they end up getting stored in some way in our brain and that stored emotion will still act so for example one of the ways that numbed emotion interferes with us is that it requires some amount of Ram or processing power to actively suppress emotions so when you're someone

who numbs yourself out to your emotions the amount of anesthetic that you need to numb yourself grows over time right so as you get sadder and sadder and sadders you get stuck and stuck and stuck in life your brain needs more power to like run the propaganda in your head so that you don't feel sad and then eventually all your brain is doing is like suppressing the sadness and this is when we feel tired all the time we feel burnt out we feel like I don't feel like doing anything I have no motivation and why

is that I get curious about stuff I get excited about stuff I have goals but I have no energy that's because your brain is using all the energy to numb the emotion literally what happens is you have active emotions in the amygdala and in the limbic system but your frontal lobe is expending all of its energy to suppress those emotions in the most taxing part of our brain is actually the frontal lobes our frontal lobe is what willpower comes from it's where planning comes from it's when task execution comes from so when we drain our

frontal lobes we can't motivate ourselves to do anything so even though you don't feel sad the sadness is absolutely affecting you the second thing is that the sadness affects you in other ways right so when I feel sad and I don't realize it when I don't feel the sadness I will get engage in behaviors that I do not understand to alleviate the sadness like I will start binge eating or I will reach out to people who are kind of toxic and abusive because I feel so lonely that I need some kind of connection but since

I'm numb to the loneliness since I'm numb to the sadness I'm not aware of what I'm doing and then you wake up one day and you're like why do I keep on doing the same same stupid stuff over and over and over again I know it is bad for me but I can't stop if you are in that situation that is a case of suppressed emotions controlling you from behind this the scenes suppress of oceans are like puppets they're like the puppet master and you become the puppet where the suppressed emotions are active and you're

not aware of it and they cause you to do all kinds of things lower your energy level and make you chase weird things that you know are bad for you so the first thing that I'd like to say is even if you have discovered your sadness that's actually a step in the right direction for sure because when you're ignorant you may be Blissful but you're not in control right so this is the other thing to understand is that we tend to think oh ignorance is bliss yeah ignorance is bliss but ignorance sucks for outcomes right

if you if you're ignorant of things you can't fix any problems and you can't control your destiny you may be happy but you're going to be stuck and so you have to really decide am I willing to pay the price of bliss in order to gain control in my life and this is the core problem that happens with human beings all the time so even though you may feel Blissful in some way and it's not Bliss it's numb so the other problem with ignorance is bliss and emotional suppression is that you're not actually blissful what's

going on is you're numb to the negativity but that numbness also makes it hard for you to engage in joy and happiness in life okay because some part of you is aware that you're sad so you're not going to be Blissful you're going to numb everything down including the Bliss and the joy and then life just kind of becomes like a a dopaminergic Pursuit because you're not really like content or fulfilled so now let's talk about okay so now that you become emotionally aware now your mind is fixated on this sadness it's kind of like

it's spinning it over you're not really fixing it what do you do about that so yeah to a certain degree the mind will naturally heal it as long as you're aware of it but there are a couple of pitfalls we have to watch out about one thing is that when you engage with your sadness one thing you've got to be careful about is that if you're not careful you'll repeat the same stuff in your head and that is not actually like healing anything so when we perseverate on an emotion the emotion does not go away

so perseveration means just focusing on the emotion without processing it in any way and so like repeating the same stuff in your head over and over and over again does it does not fix the problem so I've had patients for example that will have some kind of breakup like in high school and they'll fixate on that breakup and how this is the one that got away and now like their lives would be so different and they just think about that Loop over and over and over again 10 years go by 20 years go by and

they never move Beyond it they stay stuck in that place so instead what we need to really do is emotionally process so emotional processing is tricky for a couple of reasons the first is that what our mind naturally feels like doing with the sadness is not necessarily processing there's a certain like addictiveness to being sad where our mind like really likes to feel that sadness and that hurt this is sometimes the reason that we stock exes on social media right like we see them and we see them being happy we see our friends being happy

and we're like oh it hurts so much but I can't stop it it sort of like brings out that emotion and really makes it feel valid in some ways but really emotional processing has a couple of different parts the first is to think about things in a new way so generally speaking when we look at trauma and we look at persistent sadness unless we start changing the way that we see our situation we'll stay stuck in that way so even if you can kind of acknowledge okay I'm sad because I missed out on these three

opportunities there's any you say to yourself like okay this also means that I'm screwed because I've missed out on these opportunities I'll never be able to catch up as long as you cognitively frame things that way then you'll never actually improve or maybe you'll improve very slowly what's a lot more helpful is we if we start to cognitively reflame how can I start looking at this in a slightly different way so for example let's say I didn't date anyone in high school or college and now I've graduated from college I've never had a boyfriend or

girlfriend and now I feel like okay I missed the boat so you can look at that and you can say I've missed the boat therefore I'm screwed or you can say well at least I've acknowledged that this is a problem and even if I'm behind I have to acknowledge that this is a problem in order to catch up both of those are reasonable conclusions I've got to make up for lost time or I'm screwed because I missed an opportunity both of those are actually valid conclusions but unless we start thinking in a new way we're

not actually going to process the emotion or come out of that slump there are a couple of other things that are very good for processing emotions there are certain forms of meditation we have a whole video about processing emotions that you all can check out the other thing that you can do is see someone like a therapist or a coach and work through this stuff right so I have another human being help you cognitively reframe that's very helpful as well and then the last thing in terms of like emotional processing and especially sadness let me

think about this so we've talked about meditation we talked about cognitive reframes yeah then there's the other thing that you can do to sort of process sadness is physical in nature so we know that there is a connection between the body and the mind and we know for example that there are mind-body practices like yoga and Tai Chi which when they're done lead to improvements in mood and will help people kind of come out of that slump so there are actually some physical things and we understand this really well in trauma so for example there's

a treatment called EMDR which is eye movement desensitization I forget what the r is maybe recovery I don't know rewiring who knows so in EMDR what we do is there's normally a traumatic memory and normally what happens is that traumatic memory triggers a physiologic response so what we do in EMDR is we talk about our trauma but we are mentally focused on you doing a particular type of eye movement and the interesting thing is that when you're focused on the eye movement talking about the trauma engaging with the trigger does not cause the triggering response

so if we sort of think about a trigger there is a trigger and the whole reason we call it a trigger is because there is an automatic response so when we do EMDR we're drawing we're building a wall between the trigger and the physiologic response and so if you sort of think about it that's the whole point right so the problem with triggers is that they trigger us we can't handle the exposure and then we start to physiologically spiral so when we do something like EMDR we're preventing that physiologic response which is actually the thing

that cripples us it's not the trigger that's the problem if I've been bitten by a dog the goal is not to ignore dogs for the rest of my life and tell everyone around me hey I get triggered by dogs please remove your dogs from the house hey I'm going to a concert I need to tell everyone to leave their dogs at home because I get triggered by it we end up getting controlled by our triggers instead what we want is we want to control ourselves we want to regain control from the trigger and the way

that we do that is through desensitization and deconditioning and things like EMDR are very good at that because since I'm mentally occupied my cognitive Ram is filled with this activity I don't have any cognitive space left to respond to the trigger in the way that I I used to and then what happens is the more that I expose myself to the trigger it's basically like exposure therapy the more I expose myself to the trigger without the physiologic response suddenly the trigger is no longer a trigger so even if we talk about these triggers for sadness

and getting caught into this spiral of sadness this is why what we really want to do is decondition that response so how can I engage with the material of sadness without feeling physiologically sad so this is where there's something really cool that you can do this is why I love hiking for introspection so if you want to understand the mechanism through which hiking and especially trekking so we're talking about like going out by yourself for a couple of days you want to be safe but what happens is that as you start to think those sad

thoughts you're also physiologically active so it's not like you you have pent up anxiety or pent up sadness and as you sort of are physiologically active it'll rewire you from a physiologic standpoint and then once you get rewired from a physiologic standpoint then those triggers will no longer trigger the same degree of sadness or anxiety so I absolutely think that if y'all have are no longer emotionally numb that's a step in the right direction and even though you can feel like this is worse because you get fixated on the thoughts the thoughts repeat themselves they

don't make any progress the good news is that there are several things that you can do to get out of that hump and the problem is if you look at society today everyone is telling you oh you should talk about your emotions you should like we should validate feelings and we should support each other right and so we all talk about like you do journaling to uncover what you feel but we tell you how to like uncover the problem but we don't tell you how to fix it then what do you do Journal more well

like it doesn't seem to be working the same Venom seems to be coming out over and over and over again every time I journal and that's because we don't really know as a society how to process emotions we don't teach these skills so try this stuff and see if it helps right so uncover the sadness which you absolutely need to because it's screwing you up anyway and then use these techniques to kind of come out of it whether it's working with a therapist or a coach whether it is doing something that sort of removes the

trigger from the physiologic response all that stuff is is good stuff questions yeah so when cat is saying walking through nature is magically helpful Things fall into perspective so the reason that so here's why nature is good for the brain so normally when we're not in nature and we feel negative emotions those negative emotions release hormones so for example when I'm feeling anxious Panic sad that'll activate things like cortisol and adrenaline and this is what a lot of people don't understand cortisol and adrenaline go to your brain and take things out of perspective that is

literally what adrenaline does it tries to remove all of the perspective because it wants you to make a instant survival decision this is not a complex nuanced topic with lots of different perspectives this is Do or Die and when we're at home in these four walls and we have that physiologic response it shapes our thoughts so the anxiety keeps us from having perspective right and this is why we go to therapists to help us with our anxiety the therapist does the work for you of helping you regain that perspective now the cool thing is when

we're in nature nature helps us regain perspective by countering the effects of cortisol and adrenaline and the way that nature counter these effects is fascinating number one there are literally plant compounds called aerosols so these are chemical compounds which they release into the air which when they stimulate our olfactory receptors induce relaxation so they will literally lower your anxiety from a chemical perspective okay second thing is normally when we get super anxious we're filled up with that energy and the energy doesn't go anywhere so it goes into our mind and then our mind runs a

mile a minute and we're kind of running things in here and eventually we get exhausted and we kind of mentally check out when we get that sympathetic response when we get that anxiety adrenaline cortisol and we're hiking that energy gets used up and so what ends up happening is instead of the energy bouncing around in my mind my mind calms down my emotions calm down my physiology calms down right because I have all kinds of physiologic signals when I'm hiking when I'm hiking I'm sending signals to my respiratory system we need long deep breaths stop

this hyperventilation crap that anxiety causes so we counter the physiologic effects of anxiety counter those those hormonal actions even induce plant aerosols to to chemically calm us down and then the brain is able to get perspective beautiful now you can see things clearly and it's because the anxiety itself is interfering with your ability to see things clearly so it's beautiful hike very good for you how are the plant aerosols different from the canned aerosol very different completely different canned aerosols are usually I think made in Labs they're different chemical compounds right so a smell is

not the same thing as something that's effective so you get all kinds of compounds that may not have smell but they still will activate your neurons in some way and will trigger responses okay there's a good question about do you have any tips on how to cry haven't been able to cry for 15 years oh that's a good question um let's talk about okay if you haven't cried in 15 years let's talk about how to learn how to cry so the first thing that you can do to to help yourself cry is to have a

conversation with someone who will help you cry so frequently the reason that it's hard to cry is because when we get close to crying we will Retreat from it and here are the different ways that we Retreat the first thing that we do to retreat from crying is we intellectualize we start to rationalize we start to become resigned so we'll say things like it is what it is and once you say it is what it is what can I do about it you move away from the emotion right you move into a space of resignation

and acceptance and you're kind of like then there's no emotion to it it kind of disarms the whole thing so if you have a conversation with someone who's really good at validating let them validate you and try to avoid all of your intellectual answers so if you pay attention to your conversations with people what you'll find is that you shut down the lines of conversation that make you feel emotional you'll rationalize them away you'll change the subject or it'll get curious about things all kinds of stuff will happen so the first thing that you've got

to do is start stop running away from the emotions that will lead to sadness the second thing that you can do is watch something or listen to sad music get some kind of exposure to something that's very sad and while you're watching it or listening to the music or whatever pay attention to yourself and how you are reacting because chances are that you will find something within yourself that is suppressing the natural empathic sad response so when we listen to sad music and we watch it like you know a sad movie at the end like

everyone's crying and that's that's what the movie creators like that's what the film people like know how to do they can make you cry but we block it ourselves so pay attention to that and then what I would say is once you notice that block I would let yourself kind of breathe and relax into it so just breathe and relax like into that sadness just let it come out it helps if you're by yourself here right so you can talk try talking to someone but the other thing you can do is like you can cry

in privacy and that's the other thing to remember is that a lot of the reason that we don't cry is because we're ashamed to cry and the last thing that I would sort of tell you is if you're having trouble crying think about when you learned not to cry okay so take a moment to think about you know the last time you cried and what were the lessons that you learned about crying what did you learn about what crying does to you or doesn't do to you how people respond to you when you're crying and

then I want you to because it's going to be bad right so it's going to be like someone made fun of you or someone chances are it'll be something like that and then what I want you to do is think about how sad it is that the younger version of you was surrounded by people who would not let them cry that this poor kid was so sad and all they wanted to do was cry and they're hurting and the world shamed them for it the world punished them for it and like wow that's like really

sad that you had to go through that right that it's bad enough that you're hurting but when people punish you for hurting that's even sadder because how are this is the exact time when you should have gotten help people should have supported you and they punished you instead and so just dwell on that for a little bit and see if you can feel that sadness and let it come it's a process right so Build It Up over time and then hopefully with a little bit of luck you'll be able to cry again yeah so someone's

saying what if I feel no empathy for the past me very good so if you have trouble feeling empathy for your former self and if you struggle with self-compassion the number one reason that it's hard to have compassion for yourself is because you're pissed at yourself right so when you screw up when you make a mistake you can do two things you can be have compassion like oh like you know people make mistakes and you were learning and you were young you could say that kind of stuff but that's not what you say to yourself

you get angry at yourself stupid dumbass other people figure that out why couldn't you if you just fixed this a long time ago we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if you had gotten over yourself and your anxiety and you'd asked that person out then you would have dated someone in high school then you would have dated someone in college you would have been fine we wouldn't be in this problem right now because here's the reason why it's hard to have self-compassion because you have problems in your life today and who is

to blame you were to blame it's all your fault and if it's your fault if you're the one who did this to you why the hell would you have compassion you're pissed at yourself so the number one block for self-compassion is being angry with yourself because you're the one to blame self-blame and self-compassion come at opposite ends of the spectrum then you may say okay well like how do I develop self-compassion then first start by noticing how you treat yourself like be like wow because it's automatic right we don't even realize we don't conceptualize it

as I am abusive towards myself that's not the way we see it I deserve it it's not abusive I deserve it be like wow holy crap I am really hard on myself this is very different from other people get to mistakes I don't let myself get mistakes we're not saying you need to have compassion and hug yourself just notice what you do and the second thing is then ask yourself is this the relationship that I want with me is this really what I want do I want to blame myself and you may find that the

answer is yes yes screw this guy he deserves it right and then the the issue is okay it's not an issue of whether they deserve it or not now you have to ask yourself can I cut this guy a break anyway or this girl a break like it's not about what they deserve can I be kind to this person even though they don't deserve it because kindness is not about what you deserve right that's transactional that's even that's not kindness kindness is going beyond what people deserve and so this is the way that we think

about ourselves and think through these questions and look at your relationship with yourself and then you'll understand why self-compassion is hard for you because you don't deserve it big surprise y'all get that it's so hard to feel worthy and feel deserving of good so this is my point if you are toxic towards yourself you don't have to deserve to be good you don't have to deserve feeling good you just have to have kindness for yourself right and that's the whole point is that you don't deserve goodness I mean you do but in in this mindset

it doesn't work like that instead what you really want to do is take a look at yourself and say like wow even though I don't deserve this self-compassion I'm going to go the extra mile and be kind to myself even though I screwed up that's what real compassion is compassion isn't giving people what they deserve it's giving people beyond what they deserve right so you can debate with yourself about and that's the problem is you never win right I do deserve it and if I tell you no like you deserve to love yourself man you

deserve to like everyone deserves a second chance and you're like screw you I don't deserve a second chance everybody else does but I don't so like I can argue with you all day but it's not going to get anywhere you don't you don't feel like you deserve it so me telling you that is not gonna work so instead go one level above it and ask yourself okay what kind of relationship do I want to be someone who holds myself accountable and Dooms me to a life sentence of self-hatred because I made mistakes eight years ago

or four years ago or two years ago do I do I want to give myself a life sentence it's not about whether I deserve it's like do I want to cut this person some slack do I want to relegate them to a life sentence of self-hatred lack of compassion and just to be broken or do I want something better for my life and then the crazy thing is you are the one who can give it no one else can give it you have to give it to yourself you're just so caught up on what you

deserve that you're not willing to do yourself a favor it's crazy okay how do you worry how do you prevent compassion turning into oh poor me I have it so hard I worry about that a lot what a great question so let's understand that too is self-hatred so how to so if I'm compassionate to myself I'm gonna be like oh my God Cry Me a River I had it so hard [Music] and you're like screw that I'm not going to be that loser I'm not going to be one of those people who like blames their

circumstances like that's not what I want to be I'm going to be stronger I'm going to be better I'm not going to turn into some pity seeking POS sum like trauma hoarding like Spotlight taking no I don't want to be that so there's a lot of self-judgment right that prevents you from acknowledging that you've had it hard in some way and the reason that we think that I will go if I if I open the floodgates a tiny bit I'll go all the way right so right now I don't give myself any self-compassion if I

give myself an ounce of self-compassion I'm terrified that I'm going to become pathetic and like oh like woe is me and why is that it's because there's so much like water that's damned up right there's so much like emotional energy there that you think that if you let a little bit out it'll it'll flood through your mind and it'll like wipe everything away but that's not how it is that's just how it feels because you keep it damned up all the time you may feel pathetic about yourself for a little while but eventually the emotional

energy will dissipate there'll be a flood but a flood doesn't stay flooded forever and the same is true when we Dam things up in our mind and so a lot of times we're afraid of opening the floodgates to sadness or anger or whatever because we think there's a lot of it stored up there and why do we think there's a lot of it stored up because it takes a lot of energy to keep stored up but the only reason that there's so much there is because we never let it out right you got to drain

it and there'll be some emotions that come out and that's the whole point but the nature of the human mind is to equilibriate from emotional from motions so Joy will go away sadness will go away it'll always go away that's what it does okay great questions is this are we doing okay chat y'all enjoying this okay yeah so everyone's okay a lot of great questions let's just talk about so how do I know if I'm sabotaging myself due to trauma I'm just bad what about emotional numbness how do we deal with that I've had a

lifelong health issues it doesn't feel like trauma but I know it sometimes affects me how do you stop dissociating it's been months okay so this is why we're doing that trauma Workshop right so definitely check out we're doing a trauma workshop at the end of the month where we're going to go into a lot of these practicals and so if you all are interested in more practical Solutions definitely check that out but there are also some of these answers are to be found elsewhere we're doing a I don't know if you all saw the the

person who's asking about self-sabotaging y'all should definitely watch our interview with xqc we're thinking about doing a standalone video on the subject but xqc describes it beautifully like where self-sabotage comes from and basically like the way he describes it is yeah you all should watch it but he kind of talks about how you know he's like trying really hard to not drop this plate because he doesn't want to break the plate but even though he tries really really hard to not drop it right he's really anxious don't drop the plate don't drop the plate don't

drop the plate and then he ends up screwing up anyway and he drops the plate because maybe he's got ADHD and it breaks anyway so his mind then learns like okay even if we try not to drop the plate we're going to be super stressed out about not dropping the plate and we're going to screw up anyway so instead what I can do is sabotage right away I can just break break the plate because it's going to break either way I just have two choices I can break the plate and I can be anxious and

stressed before I break the plate or I can break the plate right now and then I don't I relieve myself of the stress right it's done got it seems kind of hard to believe that a person making millions of dollars per month has relatable issues though yeah it does seem hard to believe I completely agree but here's the thing no amount of money makes you not human right this is the crazy thing is that your brain and your body like most of us have two eyes one nose one mouth you know our brain works the

same whether you're rich oh actually that's not technically true brain actually does work differently if you're rich or poor right so the lack of security leads to higher stress and all kinds of other things like accelerates cardiovascular disease so it's not exactly the same but it's wild that we're all human and I know it's hard to imagine that you can relate to people but I think one thing that we've we've shown I think is that you know all human beings are to a certain degree relatable okay before we go too far down the the rabbit

hole of xqc um let me think about okay so I see a lot of questions about how to process emotions so let's do this one okay [Music] what's the best way to release trauma and or repressed emotions I Harbor repressed emotions of Shame anger embarrassment how should I go about releasing them potentially recalling the event probably deep in subconscious what type of meditation should I do any suggestions would help these emotions traumas are actually causing physical ailments when some of these emotions arise it begins to exacerbate one of my ailments if someone can help me

find the root cause of these how do I go about dismantling them and permanently moving on Is A Healer is a healthier individual so let's understand something about trauma and emotions and physicality give me a second hold on a second chat no okay give me a moment um okay so let's understand how to release repressed emotions okay so let's first understand how emotions enter our brain and our body so we have an event okay okay so we have an event oh we have an event okay and that event gets interpreted by our sensory organs and

then that triggers an emotional response and that triggers a physiologic response okay now if we kind of are aware of all of this stuff and process all of this stuff over time the emotional response decreases the physiologic response decreases and we're fine but there's a problem when we're dealing with trauma which is that when we're dealing with trauma we have numbness so in order to protect ourselves so what happens in trauma is that this right here is so overwhelming and this is so overwhelming that we can't deal with it like we can't deal with it

physically physiologically mentally so what trauma does instead is we become numb so we do is we block this and we block this so now it's no longer overwhelming okay now this creates a problem though because now that we're blocking stuff if we block it this doesn't actually get processed and the emotions start to build up the more that we block it the more that our emotions start to build up okay and then we also see that there is a stress response that also starts to build up and is actually dormant I mean it it's suppressed

but it's not dormant actually or dormant is the wrong word it's active but we're not aware of it so this is why people who have PTSD for example have different kinds of like physiologic parameters so one example is their heart rate variability is low so heart rate variability is the fluctuation in our heart rate so let's say our heart rate normally has a high number and a low number and for most people maybe this is the midline but most people throughout their day their heart rate will go up and down when you have trauma what

happens is your heart rate variability is lower so people's heart rate just stays like this and why is this it's because when we get traumatized there's a physiologic response that makes us elevates our heart rate across the Baseline so we're on a constant high alert and if you're on a constant high alert then the variability in your heart rate is going to be very low right because normally I go through life and I'm not on constant high alert so sometimes I'm on high alert up here and then sometimes I'm chilling but when I'm on a

constant high alert after trauma I'm always sitting up here above the Baseline all the time okay so numbness prevents emotional processing so this is what we kind of know about how to process emotions and how to get rid of this stuff what we need to do is something called counter conditioning okay so normally what happens is there's an event and then the event becomes the trigger right if I've been traumatized by I don't know hot beverages every time I see the hot beverage I will trigger a physiologic response so what we need to do is

condition our physiology to be different and so what we're going to do instead is this is where techniques like EMDR come in right so then what I'm going to do is I'm going to expose myself to the trigger but right here I'm going to add a physiology rewiring intervention so while I'm exposing myself to the trigger I will do something else that prevents this physiological response so EMDR is one example of this this is eye movement desensitization hiking is another example of this okay and then there's also some other interesting things like tapping so EFT

so we're going to talk about EFT for a second so EFT is something that I thought was pseudoscience bluntly ten years ago I was like this is BS so emotional Freedom technique is something that people will use it's called tapping and they sort of believe that trauma is stored in the body and there's some evidence of this so for example if you look at like epigenetic changes of trauma survivors we know their physiologic things now there's enough research to suggest that EFT probably helps people in some way and let's take a quick look at the

mechanisms so um let me show you all a good example so so EFT protocol breaks the cycle of sympathetic nervous hyperarousal more rapidly they claim than other forms of desensitization so for example they'll look at uh progressive muscle relaxer relaxation versus stimulation at certain acupressure points and what they find is like just inducing muscle relaxation is not as effective is like focusing on certain acupressure points and essentially provide providing acupressure to those points and something about the way that it activates the body is like different so um so there are there's evidence that certain parts

of our brain are deactivated by accupoint generating signals so the main thing here is that we know that there's some kind of like weird stuff going on with our body in our mind and the cool thing about tapping and I think this is what people with acupressure sort of figured out is that there's some way to focally activate some parts or deactivate some parts of the brain by focusing on the body in some ways and that sounds ludicrous like the biological mechanism to this doesn't make any sense but we also know for example that accupoint

stimulation is used in EFT releases serotonin in the amygdala as well as the prefrontal cortex so that's kind of interesting right they have studies that show that this focally releases serotonin and if we're thinking about how do we calm down our physiology and anxiety or panic disorder we actually take medications that boost the serotonin in the brain um and then we also know that accupoint stimulation releases things like opioids serotonin Gaba shutting off the fight flight freeze response right so this is what's also interesting we get neurotransmitter release like Gaba and what Gaba does is

physiologically shuts off that response so when we're talking about okay I get triggered by something how do I process that trauma and the big issue is that we think about trauma processing as purely a mental thing I have to go talk about my problems but I think part of the reason that trauma is so damn hard to treat is because we have assumed that it is mental in origin it is because as psychotherapists we are not trained in physiology I'm a medical doctor so a psychiatrist is but the majority of psychotherapists are not right it's

not a knock on their training it's just true they don't study the body and so then what happens is when we try to think about emotionally processing trauma we think about I have to talk about my feelings or I have to journal but especially if you're a dude there's some evidence that vocalizing your emotions is not the primary way in which men process their emotions they do it using their body and so one of the things if you're interested in like processing your trauma and kind of getting this stuff out there it turns out that

physicality is a big part of it there's also studies that show that hyperbaric oxygen Chambers plus Psychotherapy for trauma helps people reprocess their emotions faster than just Psychotherapy for trauma so I would recommend something like triphasic breathing right this is a technique that is really about taking the deepest breath possible and when you do these kinds of techniques bronium and things like that or you do yoga postures or do something like tapping or go for a walk all of these things will affect your physiology and as they affect your physiology they will actually help you

process your emotions because emotions are not purely mental they are also physiological and so what we want to end up doing is do this counter conditioning where we have a trigger and then we trigger some kind of emotional response but there's a physiology somewhere in there and if we shut off the physiology we'll fix that emotional response once we fix the emotional response in the physiologic response then we can reframe interpret and change the narrative around our trauma and that's really when it gets healed the problem is that our mind gets so out of whack

by our triggers that we can't even leverage our mind to fix the problem so focus on the physiology okay we've also got videos on how to process emotions you all can check out things like Dr K's guide if you're interested in triphasic breathing and we're going to go into detail exactly stuff like this but in more detail in our trauma Workshop okay questions how much do you think trauma is self-inflicted so trauma so how much do I think trauma is self-inflicted trauma is not usually self-inflicted usually the nature of trauma is that someone else does

it to you the tragedy of trauma is that what other people do to you is what you learn to do to yourself so while the trauma itself is not self-inflicted the problem is that once someone does it to you this is what you learn about yourself and this is what you do to yourself so the propagation of trauma is self-inflicted the inability to heal from trauma is partially self-inflicted the consequences of trauma are oftentimes self-inflicted and this may sound like it's damning right because I'm saying oh it's your fault but let's like look at it

scientifically people who are abused growing up are more likely to wind up in abusive relationships this is a statistical fact and why is this it's because when I get abused I think of myself as worthless and then if I ever start dating someone who thinks of me as having value it confuses me I don't know how to function with people who actually treat me with compassion it makes me feel uncomfortable a good example of this is if you have low self-esteem and someone compliments you one of two things is going to happen either your ego

is Gonna Love it or you're going to feel deeply deeply uncomfortable if it's like an authentic expression of like you're a decent human being you're going to feel deeply uncomfortable and you're going to run away from it good feelings are scary and so the way that we stay stuck after our trauma is self-inflicted because we figure out okay this is what I'm worth and then anything anyone who tells me otherwise is confusing or trying to trick me and everyone who treats me like crap ah yes they treat me like crap I treat me like crap

this fits it feels right even though it hurts so what we really self-inflict is the propagation of the pattern of trauma it's not the trauma itself it's the way that we stay stuck in the cycle and this also is not to blame y'all but we have to understand that okay like either we have power over it or we don't have power over it if we assume that I have no power over the cycle then I'm screwed because I'm not I don't get blamed but I also I'm fine it's you know I don't get blamed but

I can't fix it so you have to choose and this is what's hard this is why people stay stuck because if you want to fix your problems then you have to accept responsibility for them you have to accept that you had a hand in this especially when it comes to trauma and that's the only way that we can Empower you to change your future good question yeah so Matthew white Bay is saying I'm not at fault and I'm responsible to fix it absolutely so mental illness isn't your fault but it is your responsibility okay this

is a good question why does it feel good to think about Suicidal Thoughts what a great question so you know as a disclaimer I think if y'all are having suicidal thoughts you should absolutely go get help for them okay so go see a professional if y'all are really worried about hurting yourself really call Emergency Services or go to the nearest hospital talk to a medical professional I really do believe that but what we don't understand is that Suicidal Thoughts can be very comforting right we think about them as bad things and from a medical standpoint

it's a bad thing but let's understand that Suicidal Thoughts are not a bug they're a feature like our brains have evolved to have Suicidal Thoughts we even have some cultures in which suicide is like ritual suicide is a part of the culture right so in in Japan you have things like sapuku right where you're like committing suicide to regain your family honor and then even in Indian culture you had this practice called Sati which is when oh when usually a husband dies and is burned on a funeral pyre one or more of their wives will

commit suicide along with them so that they can travel with them to the next life right so we're not going to talk about the misogyny and stuff like that I'm just saying that suicide is a cultural phenomenon okay so the question is why so this is where what's appealing about suicide the first is that it's an out right so oftentimes why do people think about suicide they think about suicide because they're suffering and so why is it comforting it's because hey I can quit this cycle of suffering whenever I want that's really what it is

right that's a huge part of it is like hey I have some amount of control so I had a patient once who kept a noose in their house and I we got to the point where they were able to give it up but when they told me this most people will think that thankfully mental health professionals are pretty good good mental health professionals in my opinion Would Not freak out right so we want to address safety for sure but I want to talk to him about why do you keep it there what does it do

for you let's understand why you're so attached to keeping this nuisance and he's like well I know I've always got a Lifeline of sorts right that's what it really is because suicide for some people is not an end to life it's an end to suffering it's an Escape from all the things that are painful that's why it's comforting now I think the reason that you should get help and the reason that I don't think you should take that escape is first of all my personal beliefs are that karmically you just passed the buck right so

committing suicide in this life doesn't fix things even from a Buddhist perspective if you don't believe in karma and reincarnation with the Buddhist kind of believe is that the harm from your suicide will simply distribute the suffering out to other people and maybe even increase it across the whole so on a net positive from a human perspective it is not a good thing which I agree with both of those perspectives and the real reason that I think that it shouldn't be an escape is because I believe you can fix your problems in this life and

I have done it I've helped a ton of people do it right I think this is the real tragedy is that you want the Escape why do you need to escape why do you need a Lifeboat because the ship is going down and there's nothing you can do the good news is that if you are suicidal there is a overwhelming statistical chance that the ship is actually not sinking or even if it's sinking it can be patched up you don't even need a dry dock you can just fix it and this is what we know

from like scientific treatment right that like even if you think that things are hopeless getting some help can drastically change the way that your Ship Sails so it's very comforting to have suicidal thoughts for sure that's why people have them and at the same time just because it's comforting doesn't mean that the premise of your situation that okay Escape is the only option or Escape is attractive I'm with you it's attractive but there are two ways to escape your situation you can fix it or you can peace out and that's where people feel like oh

fixing it feels impossible I'm with you it feels impossible that's why you need some help that's why you should go get to see a professional that's the real thing is seeing a professional allows you to make the impossible possible that's the real value what if you just don't like living even the happy moments are not sad ones yeah so that really sounds consistent with something that a therapist can help you with so if you're not able to enjoy the happy moments in life that's a problem but that's usually me that's usually something that is more

along the lines of pathologic right so if we have people who like are anhedonic which is a feature of depression major depressive disorder is the inability to derive pleasure from things that you normally find pleasurable so the good news is like that's treatable and then you can like start enjoying life again but it's very common um okay so many good questions uh thoughts on Sadler's view on trauma that it doesn't exist and we make the past the line with goals I mean there may be some truth to that I'm not particularly I think I've read

some stuff by Sadler but I think there's good physiologic evidence that trauma is real like very good physiologic evidence right we have all these studies that show changes to our autonomic nervous system and stuff like that so I think it's absolutely real so someone's asking what a professional is not an option I know this sounds kind of like that's tough right so the first thing is that the real sad thing is that we can say you know professional treatment is helpful but a lot of people it's not an option so I I and that that

doesn't change for other things right so if I have like cancer the right answer is like you should go see a doctor and then people like well what if I don't have access to a doctor and so then I would say the problem that you need to solve is is how do you get access that can be a problem that is solvable absolutely right and it just depends on where you are and what your circumstances are okay let's move on man so many good questions are you all having fun is this working for you all

we've got about 30 minutes left um okay okay all right can emotional trauma cause a higher sex drive in order to cope so for some this might be an obvious question but I'm curious I was diagnosed with cptsd recently due to years of emotional and verbal abuse and other events that messed up my mental stability however I've never dealt with sexual trauma at least not that I remember and I did notice over the years my sex drive just gets higher when I'm extremely stressed or triggered I crave intimacy and sexual release I almost feel like

a little too much it kind of freaks me out I've heard of people develop this due to sexual trauma but I haven't got gone through that anyone else so any form of trauma can result in hypersexuality or hyposexuality so it's a very common misnomer that if I was sexually abused in some way that will mess with me in a sexual way but if I wasn't sexually abused it's weird right so like no so actually hypersexuality and hyposexuality both of those can come from any form of trauma so let's understand the hypersexuality first so when we

get traumatized we start the process of numbness emotional numbness and dissociation okay when we start to numb and dissociate dissociate from ourselves our ability to manage our emotions becomes weaker because we're using the numbness card right so instead of cleaning up a mess we're just covering it up so I'm just shutting the door on it so I don't learn how to process emotions and then what happens is when I get stressed or triggered these result in a rise of emotions and life eventually numbness doesn't work because they pot the emotions pile up and pile up

and pile up and eventually they become overwhelming so at some point if you've been traumatized some amount of motion will break through the numbness and now you're in trouble because the way that you manage emotions is by numbing them you haven't learned how to deal with them in other ways so now you need some other way to take those emotions away this is why people with a history of trauma are more likely to have addictions right because that's one way to do it and the other really cool thing is that you can have sex right

so what does sex do sex leads to a rush of oxytocin which makes you feel good leads to dopaminergic release which makes you feel good sex also shuts off the negative emotional circuitry of the brain so that feels good so sex becomes an emotional regulation technique there's another interesting thing about sex which is that compared to other drugs it engages another physiologic mechanism that helps us calm down if we've been in have a history of trauma so anytime our hype a sympathetic nervous system our stress system gets activated like let's say I'm feeling super stressed

there is a really interesting way to shut down that stress system which is actually extreme physical activity so anytime I do extreme physical activity as my heart rate shoots up my body starts to prepare itself to cool down right so if you kind of think about like if I like Sprint for 60 seconds my body is like okay we're Full Speed Ahead but as soon as we're done full speeding ahead we need to sit down and breathe right so you run for 60 seconds and you get on your knees and you're like so your body

automatically triggers a relaxing response when you hyper activate your stress system from physical exercise so when you get mentally stressed we get a hyperactivity of our stress system but there's no automatic turning on of our relaxation system which physical exercise does so when we have sex it's a hyperactive physical experience which then triggers a calming response right and let's like think about the calming response post not clarity now I can think clearly you're chilling you're relaxing it helps people fall asleep sex also releases endogenous endorphins which kind of chill you out so sex does a

couple things it physiologically shuts off the triggering response shuts off the stress and regulates her emotions there's a third reason why people get addicted to sex it's because when we get traumatized oftentimes we feel lonely the reason we feel lonely is because we do not have a well-developed sense of self so people who are traumatized feel like chameleons they don't really know what they want they hang out with people and they get excited by what their friends are getting excited about and then oftentimes what happens is when I'm by myself the emotions come roaring back

and I need some kind of distraction so let me go hang out with someone else depending on what kind of trauma you've gone through if it's like even emotional abuse right you can have a messed up attachment Style so you crave the affection and attention of others if someone else loves you then you feel loved because if you've been traumatized you don't know how to love yourself and going through life without love feels awful and so what's way that one way that I can make people love me and what's one way that I can feel

loved I can have sex with them right because then I oxytocin gets released I bond with this person I feel loved they're accepting me they came over they're now here with me they value me there's something I can offer them to make this person love me this is the third reason why people get addicted to sex or it can be hypersexual so there's an emotional eye a regulation standpoint there's a physiologic standpoint there's an identity attachment and relationship standpoint now let's talk about hyposexuality because trauma can cause hyposexuality as well so one way that trauma

causes hyposexuality is that it does lead to numbness and if we sort of think about sexuality sexuality is oftentimes emotional right and it's not just love we're talking about like you know like let's go there's emotion there I'm not even sure what it conveys but there's some emotion there like flirtation you know mystery a sense of Conquest a challenge love there's all kinds of emotions that enter into the sexual relationship and if we've been numbed by trauma we don't have access to those right so then it could like even if we have sex like sex

can feel good but all of that playfulness is hard to access the flirtation is hard to access you know all that stuff can be hard the second thing is that especially in some cases of of trauma so definitely true of sexual abuse could but can also be true of physical abuse or even emotional abuse is that we our body can learn that in the case of sexual abuse that sex is painful and dangerous it doesn't actually feel good it is it hurts us right so you'll have some cases of people who will have like you

know the fear like it's hard to be sexually aroused when you're being like hunted by aliens on a foreign planet right like the the sympathetic nervous response of fear and survival is like very different and shuts down all sexual drive so when intimacy vulnerability or sexuality and can be all three it can be something as simple as vulnerability because when you're sexual with someone there's some amount of vulnerability right and if you learn because someone was emotionally or physically abusive that you should never be vulnerable now anytime You're vulnerable you trigger a fear response which

shuts down your sexual drive and in some cases I've also seen things like vaginismus or other kinds of like you know vaginal spasm where like literally it becomes physiologically difficult to have intercourse because a patient of mine their body learned that like sex hurts me so that can result in hyposexuality as well so it's some amount of numbness that leads to a lack of the emotions that lead to sexuality it can be a physiologic response just from trauma from things like sexual abuse and it can even be something a little bit more abstract like I

don't like to be vulnerable and then sexuality comes with some degree of vulnerability and especially if you're one of these people that for you sexuality requires an emotional connection then you're like doubly screwed so trauma can absolutely lead to hypersexuality and hyposexuality and there are a lot of mechanisms at Play questions okay you've helped me a lot with connecting with people I kind of lost that totally before I found you thanks for helping my life man you're very welcome how do you build a sense of self after trauma okay so we're going to cover this

in detail in the workshop okay um but I'll do my best to answer so if you've been traumatized and you don't have a good sense of self let's talk about how you can actually rebuild that sense of self so the first thing is that part of the reason that we don't have a good sense of self is that oh no so let's start with understanding the problem a little bit when we do not develop a good sense of self we're kind of like empty on the inside and we kind of become chameleons and then what

happens is we start internalizing the senses of self that other people give us so if someone treats me well and loves me then I feel good about myself but if someone doesn't respond to my texts then I feel like a waste of a human being so the way that I feel about myself is shaped by the actions of others so history of trauma can lead to something like borderline personality disorder can also lead to things like narcissism or sociopathy where in the case of narcissism it's like I want everyone to love me and then I'll

feel good about myself but if anyone points out my insecurities I'm going to get really angry at them I'm going to teach them a lesson and all of these things share one problem which is a lack of a cohesive sense of self so where does the sense of self come from how do you know who you are sense of self comes from an integration of experiences and the development of a narrative these two things so the first thing is when I think about who I am how do I discover who I am so I'll give

you all an example for a little while I was in a military school and I had gone to put my life together and I was afraid of heights and so like I was terrified but like by the end of my time there I could climb you know a 30-foot rope and like ring a bell at the top and so even though there's a lot of negative emotions that go into that so my sense of self is I'm afraid of heights this is really scary I can't do it followed by progress followed by a sense of

Triumph where there's still the physiologic fear of heights so if we think about that's an identity forming experience for me an identity forming experiences require emotion number one thing so if you think about when did you discover who you are and if you watch like an anime when does someone discover who they are it's when they're emotionally tested so emotions and identity are come hand in hand and if you kind of think about what determines your identity it's not the drab experiences yeah I took out the trash yesterday that makes me feel like who I

am no it's the emotions that those are the experiences you remember and those are the experiences that form you being bullied on the playground I'm a loser emotional energy even taking out the trash patients who've been depressed for 60 days haven't taken out the trash in two months taking out the trash is a formative experience for my identity I put my life together because that what's the difference taking out the trash in two cases is the same the only difference is the emotional engagement so when we get traumatized we become numb our brain suppresses our

emotions we start to dissociate when we dissociate we lose the capacity to form identity literally right you dissociate you separate from yourself so you have to stop dissociating start recognizing your emotions start feeling your emotions because that's what's going to give you the character of the self the second thing that forms our identity is narrative so when we put when we tell a story about ourselves so we we kind of say I was a loser and now I'm a good person I used to be overweight and now I'm in shape I used to eat like

crap and now I'm healthy there's a sense of narrative there's the story of your life and oftentimes if we think about what are the what are the pieces what are the chapters of the story of your life they're the emotional ones right I woke up for the 422nd day and played Diablo again and then I woke up on the 423rd day and I played Diablo again that's not The Narrative of your life The Narrative of your life is I wasted two years of my life playing Diablo it emotionally hurts so you have to have narrative

where did you come from where are you going and we know from tons of research on trauma that healing from trauma involves making narrative from it so there are even people who will say I don't regret being sexually abused and as you talk to them about what happened well I was sexually abused and it really ruined a part of my life but then I went through therapy I got healed and now I support other sexual abuse survivors I'm a peer counselor this is an example of someone forming narrative from their life and they look at

their past and they say this sucked but now it has made me who I am and this is also the concept of uh there's something really let me see if I can find it okay so I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of kinsugi so this is super cool so the Japanese have a really good way of kind of talking about this so oh sorry so if you want to understand narrative look at something called kinsugi which is the art of repairing broken pottery and there's sort of this idea that something

is something that gets repaired is actually more beautiful than something that was never broken in the first place and they turn it into a whole art form of like you know putting things together and there's even like scientific uh studies or or papers about this concept and really thinking about that is how to how to help people with trauma that when you put the pieces of yourself back together that's when you will discover Who You Are so I know it sounds kind of weird but the answer is really first of all that you being broken

is part of your identity but it's only one piece of who you are right it's like a broken it's like a piece of pottery a cup that's shattered into three pieces and one part of your identity is being broken and that'll lead to a crappy life if that's the only piece of pottery that you have but you can build that into a complete sense of self once you combine the other pieces and that's really what's missing in narrative right what's really missing in your identity is is that you are just broken you don't have the

other things involved you don't have that you're a survivor you don't have that you're resilient you don't have that this is part of your journey and you've made yourself whole again and so that identity really comes from narrative so one last example I'll share with you all is I talk about karma karma a lot with my patients if they're interested in it right so I'll say to them look I have this background I studied for seven years to become a monk I found this perspective is useful for some of my patients would you like to

explore it with me and then I'll ask them you know I'll share with them that this is a concept that comes from Hindu and Buddhist religions I'm not trying to be religious here but I think it's a useful concept and one interesting thing about the aspect of karma is that this is all part of your life and that these things happen to you for a reason it's not that you deserved it or didn't deserve it it's that it happened and how can we make sense of it how can we understand this so I'll give you

all just an example from my own life so I graduated from college with a 2.5 GPA and there is no scenario in which I thought a 2.5 GPA is better than a 4.0 but then I ended up going to med school trained at Harvard for a Psychiatry was faculty there and then suddenly something weird happened because I was surrounded by kids who had 4.0 when I started streaming on Twitch and when I started like doing media interviews and stuff like that what people were interested in was I'm the kid with a 2.5 who wound up

at Harvard if I had been a 4.0 no one would have cared just like everybody else and believe me that's that's who I was surrounded by I was surrounded by people who were like really really solid in a lot of ways in some ways I felt like I didn't belong but I did and so even then you sort of think to yourself well is there any scenario yeah I mean so like you can't have a Redemption Arc without being broken and Redemption Arc is really what makes you who you are and so instead of focusing

on how broken you are and how you got this way start to really think about okay what's one way that I can add another piece back what's one thing that I can work on as you start adding those pieces back as you start becoming emotionally aware and acknowledging your emotional experiences your identity will start to heal great question error IQ not found good name 2.5 is low you are correct it's not above average FYI at least not in the US I think the average GPA like in college is like a 3.0 or 3.1 or 3.2

is my guess yeah so um yeah can you talk about the relationship between Weed addiction and porn addiction and the possible feedback loop yeah so weed addiction and porn addiction are a match made in hell because one addiction solves the problems created by the other addiction so for example if I'm addicted to pornography over time the enjoyment from pornography goes away because what we know about pornography addiction is that it's like more about emotional regulation than it actually is about sexual pleasure it's a switch that you can flip in your brain to make yourself kind

of just feel better right and make the negative emotions go away and then when you're addicted to porn for a while it stops becoming fun until you get high and then colors are more Vivid orgasms are more intense and so marijuana addiction solves the problems of porn addiction now the interesting thing is that it goes both ways so when I start using pot a lot I start to have difficulty with motivation my life like starts to kind of blur together when I'm not high the way that I'm screwing up my life or other kinds of

emotions and stuff start showing up and then like it causes me problems and so when I'm feeling bad about my life because maybe I'm a pothead I can use porn to make those feelings go away so the two really go hand in hand in a lot of ways right marijuana can also increase like sexual desire and stuff like that so they really just they're a match made in hell to be honest yeah so someone's saying I'm sad when I'm not high and then like porn takes the sadness away right so as you watch pornography it

suppresses your emotional circuitry as you orgasm which sometimes happens when people are addicted to pornography that's not a meme by the way I mean like literally sometimes people who are addicted to pornography will watch pornography without masturbating or achieving orgasm you know but when you do that you get a little bit of dopamine and you get some relaxation and you're kind of chilling and it feels good and the sadness kind of goes away okay cool let me see if we've got time for one more um okay so just to remind you all we are we

do have a new thing that we're doing I am running my first Workshop for y'all and I'm doing it at the end of the month and it's all about trauma so we're going to be covering more detail and really more of like what to do to fix some of these problems so how can you get reconnected with your emotions how can you develop a sense of identity how can you develop a narrative what are exercises you can do how can you rewire a physiology we're going to be covering all that stuff in more detail and

really being more like Solutions focused so the workshop is about eight hours four hours on Saturday four hours on Sunday taught live with time for things like q a and stuff like that and what I've tried to do is distill basically what I offer people that I'm working with who are struggling with this so how do you put together your life after trauma it's not a substitute for clinical treatment like PTSD treatment or anything like that it's actually all the other stuff so when I when I'm doing PTSD treatment when I'm done with a patient

then we start to really think about okay how is how is trauma affecting your relationships how is it affecting your physiology how can we start to work on those kinds of things so it's kind of like a brain dump of all of the problems that all right what I think are the six most important problems caused by trauma and how to fix them which is emo dissociation and emotional numbness physiologic rewiring sense of identity uh problems with motivation and inability to see the future so this is another really big one where when we're when we

get traumatized oftentimes there's no point in planning for the future because the nature of trauma is that we lack control over our life if you lack control over your life there's no point in thinking about the future and then once you leave the traumatic situation let's say you leave the house the problem is that your brain doesn't know how to think about the future now because it never learned because it didn't need to because the future didn't matter it's just about survival today so how can we train our brain to start thinking about the future

and start moving towards goals that's another big part then covering identity narrative and even some degree of spirituality heal my life organize me sir we are working on it we have another thing that we're also working on which by the way hopefully the the trauma Workshop will fund so the other challenge that we Face by the way and thank you to everyone who's donating and stuff is that in order to build stuff like sometimes building stuff is expensive and uh you know we've done everything that we can with the stuff that you all have offered

but we're actually really hoping to generate some capital from this Workshop so that we can actually build things that are more accessible so I was asking people recently you know we have some ideas around an app that's kind of around skills building and structure and the majority of people were like I want to use it but I don't want to pay for it or I can't afford it which means that the money has to come from somewhere else so we're working on that too um exclamation point trauma should work yeah and the the workshop is

going to be live okay and we can't raid people on YouTube right okay so the I'm gonna host it live from 12 to 4 pm CT on September 30th and October 1st okay so definitely check it out and thank you to all of the um thank you for all the financial support y'all we really appreciate it um okay all right let's see uh how do I I don't know how to I don't know how to raid someone on YouTube is there some way to do it tired of restless oh my God YouTube is showing me

an ad okay I don't know how to raid this is terrible is there raid functionality live redirect okay let me see if I can figure out how to do that um um okay there's nothing more more ads I don't know how to okay I can't figure out how to do this all right um okay the person has to pre-approve okay so then like who where do you all want to go hmm we can just go organically who's streaming right now that you all want to see let's go to YouTube live spam Lincoln comments okay why

I haven't enough people seeing yeah so definitely check it out we're doing a workshop we're trying this right so I've been streaming for four years we always do this like on YouTube and stuff but I think that to really get into more of the solutions and like how to fix some of this stuff we need I need like more y'all's time and then we also need to make sure that people we can like regulate the questions that are asked in the sense of so that people can you know worked on a particular topic that people

ask about that particular topic which I love that you guys ask all kinds of random questions it's fun it's it's part of what makes it fun okay why don't y'all raid Destiny just go hang out with Destiny for a little while um and take care y'all have a good day it's great to see you all on Friday we're streaming with Dr Mark Horowitz who's an expert on depression serotonin pharmacology so