Doctor Gabor Mate: I Regret My Interview With Prince Harry! The Shocking Link Between Kindness & Illness!

70% of the adult population is at least on one medication, quarter of women or an antidepressants, the rate of childhood is going on. Worldwide, there's this epidemic of distress. What can we do about that? So the first step would be to... Dr. Gabor Matei, legendary thinker, celebrated speaker and best-selling author. Had we saw it after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development and distress,

People, these are the people that tend to develop diseases. When people don't know how to say no, the body will say no for them. That niceness is a repression of healthy anger, and that repression of healthy anger has huge implications for your health. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you. People who are emotionally repressed are more likely to get cancer. And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma. We interrupt this film to tell you we are getting reports that the people's princess is dead.

Harry was a traumatized child. How he's told about his mother's death is that it was an accident your mother didn't make it. His father touches Harry on her knee and says, but it'll be okay and leaves the room. This 12 year old, nobody held him. And children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them, but just by not having their needs met.

by not being seen, not being heard, not being held. Those are wounding for a child. I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to do at the end to you. It really got to me. I lost myself. What happened?

There's a question we often ask each other in flippant conversations, which we usually kind of brush away because it's the convenient thing to do. That question is the question I wanted to start by asking you, which is, how are you?

So that question is, for me, brings up two dimensions. I'm going to call my at this present moment, which is how am I at this moment, which is all there is. I'm well. I feel rather peaceful inside. I'm very happy to be here with you.

If you asked me, two days ago, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said I was feeling somewhat anxious and kind of troubled, you know? So as a, in the moment answer, I'm well, and I also know how to keep well as long as I...

Stick with what I know and when I forget what I know then I can be very not well and So the last year since we've met has been in many ways a tough year for me also one of deep learning so if the question is how have I been I'd say I've been up and down and I've had real challenges that I've had to learn from how am I right now? I'm really well. Thank you

Two days ago, if I'd asked you that question, your answer would have been anxious and troubled. Yeah. Why? I gave a talk on Monday night to 2,100 people. And I just didn't think I did my best here in London. And I thought, oh boy, I could have done better. I let people down. I allowed my self-judgments and solved those to really dominate my thinking.

You know, as much as I think I'm immune to that kind of self doubt, evidently I'm not. So that's what happened. When you say, um, you let it cloud your thinking, what are the, what were the symptoms of that? So you gave a talk two days ago to 2100 people. Yeah. And you didn't feel you did your best. You went home that night. What was going on in your head? What are the symptoms of that feeling?

Constant cyclical self-criticism of I could have been more present, I could have been more grounded, more attuned with the audience perhaps, but you know, just all these self-criticisms, which then are accompanied by certain feelings in the body, like kind of a roiling in my belly and so on. And that's what I went through.

And what was the remedy for that? Because we can overlay it. Earlier this year, also feeling in the state of this convabulation, just a few months ago, I did something radical. I did a two-week total sabbatical from the internet. No cell phone, no emails, no checking on.

Amazon, how my books are doing you, all the self-referential ego enhancement stuff. And it just really made a difference. By the end of two weeks, I was a different person. And so I'm keeping it up. And one of the things you'll learn is you start noticing these body states that you're in and the mental hoops that you jump through, but you don't identify with them.

So what's the worst case scenario? I didn't do the best possible job. Okay. What's the headline in the newspaper? Human being fails to do his best on a particular occasion. What's the big deal? You know, so it's a matter of observing this all, all the stuff and not identifying with it, not letting it take you over as it tends to.

I was reading something that said, when we vocalize or share our stress, it moves it from the emotional center of our brain to the much more rational center of our brain, where we can kind of step outside of the video game and hold the controller per se. Exactly.

Yeah, it's the mid frontal cortex of our brain that has insight and social connection and awareness, which so often goes offline. As soon as some emotion takes over some anxiety or anger or resentment takes over, the mid frontal cortex tends to go offline.

and the more trauma you experience as a child, the more likely that is to happen so that your insightful capacities, the executive functions get taken over by some deeper emotional dynamics. And so one of the benefits to me of meditation is it restores that executive function so that I'm not taken over or

too long taken over by emotional dynamics that just sweep me away. For two weeks this year you said you went offline. Yeah. Why?

Sometimes people say to me, I've written this book that I know that you have on your desk when the body says no one. And my contention is my people don't know how to say no. The body will say it in the form of illness. And I can say, hundreds of times, people have said to me, your book has saved my life. And my response has always been, be best you read it myself. Because the fact is, I'm quite capable of giving advice and dispensing wisdom that I don't follow myself.

And that was the case. So I became quite stressed, and my relationship with my wife, Ray, became very fraught. And she said, enough, enough of this gap between who we are there in public and how you are in private. So that was a big incentive for me, because we're coming up to a 54th anniversary, and on the whole I'd rather stay married than not. Everything else being considered.

But also for myself, I don't need that guy anymore who can speak the truth. A lot of people consider it to be a truth so articulately, but not follow it myself. So I just don't be that person. And that takes practice. And that's why I take the break from the internet. And what was interesting is

I had my cell phone on airplane mode so nobody could get through to me. A couple times a day, I still pick up the cell phone and I say, what are you doing? There's nothing on it because it's an internet, but the compulsion to try and get some from the outside to fill some gap within. I just kept noticing it. By the end of two weeks, it wasn't so strong anymore.

Um, so I did it because I needed to through the sicko mental health. And up and down year for you, you said? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is that, is that the, the down you were talking about?

Well, I remember a conversation, my conversation with you, and I think I remember you telling me that you had this goal of becoming a millionaire. When I was younger, younger. When I was younger. And then it's when you achieve that goal that you realize that

that ain't all there is, that you still left very much with your internal demons. And that's a very common lesson. I mean, there's two ways to wake up. One is failure, where you keep asking yourself, you know, but success is even more because

you think that once you get something, then you'll be happy. So I thought, okay, well, geez, to this book, the myth of normal, bestseller internationally and published in 35 languages, I should be happy. No, the more I'm going to involve with it, the more I toured it, the more engaged with the outside, the more miserable I became inside.

So the very success of the book and it all just swept me away and I lost myself You know, so that was one thing and I did this very long exhausting tour. I wasn't taking care of myself and then that was the my interview with Prince Harry and all the Froufer around it before it and after it and I'll allow that allow that to take me over as well. Really? Yeah, yeah

Yeah, I mean, I can see what happened, but at the time I was too caught up in it to notice. So what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what I know, if I don't pay attention, rigorous attention to what's going on inside, and if I keep looking to the outside to give me meaning and give me validation, then I can lose myself. And that's what happened.

You're interview with Prince Harry. How did that cause you to lose yourself?

Well, in two ways, one is I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to doing it the way they set it up. Because the way it was set up is in order to watch it, people have to buy a copy of Harry's book. And I thought this is not fair. Four million people have already bought the book. Why can't I watch this into you? Do they have to buy another copy? In other words, I believed that there should be a free public service.

I'm a part of two people who can have a very interesting conversation. But out of sheer opportunism, I agreed to it. So I didn't follow my gut feeling. So I lost myself, even in agreeing to the format. And afterwards, Harry and I both wanted it released to the public for free, but the lawyers said you can't do that. Because this was advertised as a one time only event, and there could be a class action suit. So the result was that I agreed to something that I didn't really like.

Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him. I didn't like the idea of putting this behind the paywall. So I lost myself just in agreeing to it. Number one. Number two, then there was the incredible social media and British media reaction to it. That was for the most part so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted. But I barely even know how to talk about it.

I thought, by this age, I would know better. But you know what? It really got to me. It really got to me. I mean, I can give you examples, but eventually what happened was that I was really in a negative state of mind. And if you read the book, the foxed them all, the horse, the boy and the horse,

I bought it last week. It's upstairs in my bag. Wonderful. So great. It's a great little book, a great big book, although very few words in it, most of just these wonderful drawings. Charlie MacKenzie, he's really channeling wisdom in that book. And the horse is the most grounded of the four characters, of the four friends. And he's asked, what's the most courageous things you've ever said? And the horse says, help.

So it's so difficult to ask for help. But I did, you know, in the middle of all this fufra and my upset, and I called a friend of mine, a psychiatrist. And I said, I'm just in a bad state. And he said, what's going on for you? And I said, well, this is all this bad press and all the social media distortion of who I am and my motives. He said, what is it about that? Yeah, it bothers you so much. And I said, not being seen.

of being seen as one of the needs of the child. But he said to me, okay, look, Gabor, when you're an infant, you're not being seen for who you are, so you're being almost cost you your life, which you did. As soon as he said that, I said, yeah.

This isn't about the present. This is an old unresolved, not yet fully resolved wound, age 79. I'm still upset at not being seen. I don't care if people agree with me, or if you shoot my ideas, but I want them to see me and what I'm actually saying. Not some distorted version created by their own minds. And many said that, that not being seen really threatened your life. I said, yeah, that's what's going on. And then I could relax.

So what? What somebody else says, I don't live in the British press. I don't live in somebody else's mind. Here I am. Let them think and say what they say. But it took somebody to wake me up to that. So that's what happened.

You said you could share examples of how it got to you. Oh, yeah. Well, oh boy, they called me a stern, overbearing merchant of pain, you know.

At some point in the interview, you know, when Harry was, and the other thing was, see, Harry was a traumatized child. And when you read his book, you can see why.

And people couldn't understand how this is possible. How could somebody so privileged at the very apex of society and gilded palaces be traumatized? Totally misunderstanding of trauma. It's true. People have as much tougher in many ways. But as an infant, as a sensitive infant, to be born into a loveless marriage where the father's having an affair even before he's born. But the mother's are troubled, very sensitive, very creative, warmhearted.

very unbalanced young woman. So Harry describes in his book

spare that he's 12 years old when his mother is killed. How he's told about his mother's death is that his father, then Prince Charles, comes into his room early in the morning and says, something terrible happened. There was an accident. Your mother didn't make it. Then there's a few moments of awkward silence. And finally, Charles touches Harry on the knee and says, but it'll be okay and leaves the room. And this is how this 12 year old was told.

Nobody held him. Charles himself was only doing what happened to him when Queen Elizabeth went on an international four or five-month royal tour leaving the five-year-old kid behind when she returned to England. She greeted him by shaking his hand.

What I said to Harry was that even animals hold and touch their kids, their infants, mammals, that's what they do. Because mother rats, when the baby is born, they lick their babies.

And the way the mother rat licks the baby, this has been shown in laboratory, influences the brain development of the child. And those babies that get the right kind of licking, it's called grooming, they have better brains as adults.

premature infants used to be put in incubators and nobody used to touch them. Then it was found out that if by just by stroking their backs 10 minutes a day, that promotes healthy brain development. And the great British American anthropologist Ashley Montague wrote a book called Skin, The Human Significance of Touch. So I was saying that touch is important. You're not being held and not being touched was a deprivation.

And I said, mammals, monkeys. You know what happens when a BB elephant is born? This is fascinating. The mother, I read this in the book called Evolve Nast, for which I wrote the preface by a wonderful psychologist called Darcya Narvaz. When an infant element, an elephant is born, and the mother goes into labor. All the other mother elephants stand around in a circle. When the infant plops on the ground, they all stroke them with their trunks.

So touch and being held is so important for mammals. And I was saying, I almost do that. This journalist, who I don't know what she was listening to said, I said the wrong family to his like, I said, no, I wish they'd had. So I mean, the distortion is just laughable. If it wasn't, if I hadn't taken it so personally, for the reasons I already explained.

So personally, which led you to call a psychiatrist, a man like you with the knowledge you have that writes books about the mind and stress and the body and all these things, you must have been in a pretty dark place.

I was in a dark place and I wasn't, but look, I don't know whom you like to rest and what Charlie Mackiecy says in that book is that the most courageous thing you can do is ask for help. It's true, you know. I don't know if you remember the Beatles song, Help. I need somebody and John Lennon sings when I was younger, so much younger than today. I didn't need anybody's help in any way.

But those days ago, and I'm much less self-assured, he's actually saying that when he was younger, he believed he didn't need help. But the reason he believed he didn't need help, that he has to make it on his own, because he was so traumatized as a child. His father left him when he was born.

His mother left. He was brought up by an ant. And Lenin goes up feeling abandoned. That I can do this on my own. I don't need anybody. And later on he realizes, I need help. But actually we are born needing help. We are born needing to be understood, to be attuned with, to be seen, to have our emotions received and validated. That's one of the essential needs of children.

as I make the point in the myth of normal. And children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them, but just by not having their needs met. By not being seen, not being heard, not being held, those are wounding for a child, which is what the meaning of the word trauma means. So you don't need terrible things to happen.

It's so difficult for people to understand that. They think for trauma. You need horrific events. Well, horrific events can be very traumatic, but you can wound people, sensitive people. The sensitive child or any child can be hurt just because the parents are too stressed and unavailable emotionally to really see them for who they are.

I've struggled with that in my life, especially being a CEO, I think. I've struggled to ask for help when I need it, because you kind of see yourself as the helper. And also, I've struggled with the idea. Maybe I don't know where I got this story from that. People like me, maybe because I'm a man, maybe because I'm

the head of businesses, we have to figure it out on our own. And the cost of repressing how I feel has become more and more evident over time.

Just like, I think, when I was younger, I never experienced anxiety before. And then as I had more difficult moments in business where I tried to solve the problem in my mind, well, the first times at like 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, that I experienced like fully fledged what I'd call anxiety, where I just couldn't get a thought out of my head and I felt it in my body, my breath was short, this constant state of like angst.

And yeah, I just thought I could deal with it myself. I thought I could think my way through it. Was that the hardest moment in terms of your own psychology and your adult life in recent times? Let me answer that question a moment, but let me ask you a question that occurs to me. If I may. Please. It's like with beautiful women. They sometimes have a very hard time because they can never know

that somebody want me for who I really am or they're just attracted to my physical features. So for somebody who at a young age becomes quite wealthy and successful,

How do you know when somebody is approaching you? Are they approaching you because they want something from you? Or because they really care about you? I mean, that must be a problem for you, I imagine. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. You never really know and understand what your relationships are. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It must be confusing sometimes.

It is. And you, I typically fall back onto the relationships I had before. Yeah. Yeah. Because I can trust those ones. Yeah. So I have the same, my best friends, people I spend my time with on my birthday, there's five, you know, five people there. Yeah. All the five people that were there 10 years ago.

Yeah, unless I think we get reconnected to our gut feelings, then our gut feelings will tell us what is within, what isn't. But the problem for many of us is that we get disconnected from our gut feelings very early in life. Like in this room of 2100 at the proxy on Monday night, I think I asked this question, I always do it. Have you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something and not paying attention to it, ignoring it and being sorry afterwards?

Almost everywhere puts your hand up. That's a sign of childhood wounding because we're born connected to our gut feelings. No baby is disconnected from the gut feelings. Something happens to make us disconnect. What is a gut feeling?

from a physiological perspective, because gut feeling is used as a word to describe an intuition. Well, the real gut feeling is really happening in the gut. In the Western way of looking at it, we tend to look up on the intellect and the intellectual brain is the only brain that we have. But actually, our brain is a form of complicated structure. And our heart has a nervous system, which is connected to the brain up here.

And there's a kind of knowing in the heart. Sometimes people say, I knew in my heart, and they did. If they're connected, gut feelings are what all animals possess. It warns them of danger or when it's safe and when it isn't safe. No, in the brain. The gut is connected to the brain. The gut sends more connection to the brain than the brain sends to the gut. And the gut has more of the neurotransmitter serotonin in it than the brain does.

so that the gut things are here to tell us about what is safe and what isn't. And when the brain in the gut and the brain in the heart and the brain up here in the head are connected, then we're grounded and present and very alert and very aware of what's going on. But when childhood trauma interferes with those connections, which it does,

then we start to just work from up here and we can figure things just from up here. But actually, when you think about human beings, where did we evolve? We evolved from millions of years out of nature. How long does any creature in nature survive if they don't pay attention to their gut feelings? So to go back to your question about me, I used to believe, I really used to believe into my 40s that everybody else could be stressed, but I couldn't be.

And it's like you and your anxiety. I think the reason I didn't feel the stress is because I had coping mechanisms, like working hard and getting people's attention or using my smarts.

uh, having status and all this kind of stuff, you know, then that broke down. I realized I could be stressed like everybody else, but literally I had to, I had this belief. I mean, it's almost unbelievable to me now that I used to believe that I couldn't, everybody else could be stressed, but I couldn't be. So what I thought. Yeah. Your wife, when you went through that dark moment, if I was her, what would I have observed?

Well, first of all, and I talk about this in the myth of normal. And really, my wife came on stage at the Troxie on Monday night and talked about this, I asked her to. Women have 80% of autoimmune disease in this society.

Disease where the immune system attacks the body happens to women much more than to men. Things like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, inflammatory diseases of the gut, and so on. Why?

Those diseases tend to happen to people not just according to my own observation, although it's very much my own observation when I was working in family practice and palliative care. Before I did addiction medicine, I noticed that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental. As a subject of my book when the body says no. And then again, in the methanormal, people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own.

identified with duty role and responsibility, so they're working the world rather than their own true selves. They tended to suppress healthy anger, so they tend to be very, very nice and peacemakers. And they tended to believe that they're responsible for other people feel, and that there was never disappoint anybody to fatal beliefs.

So these are the people that according to my observation, but according to a whole lot of research as well that I didn't even know about, but have since found elegant research. These are the people that tend to develop autoimmune disease. Now in this society, which gender is more acculturated, programmed to suppress their healthy anger, to be the peacemakers, to be the caregivers, women. This is a function of

a reality that a lot of people deny, but it's a patriarchal society, which we can talk about, but it's not a conspiracy, it's just how it works. So me and my marriage expect my wife to absorb my stresses, and if I'm unhappy, guess who I blame, and who do I take it out on? So she would experience somebody who can be hostile for no reason, and blaming, and she has to walk around nightshells.

No. Thank God. She's not the type to do that for too long. At some point she'll call my bluff. And then either wake up or she says, thank you very much, but enough for this. And so she would experience somebody who was irritable and unreasonably blaming and not taking care of their own needs and then expecting her to take care of them for me.

We both had to grow up and she was programmed that way as a child. Her parents had a lot of problems and she became the peacemaker in a caregiver emotionally. And then she cares that role into her marriage with me. And here's what the bad news is for people. We always marry somebody at the same level of emotional development or trauma resolution as we are.

So when we met, we were too traumatized people, not even realizing it. And then we played out our traumas, and I played it out in a typical male way, which is to be aggressive and demanding and resentful if she wasn't around to mother me.

And that's what she would have seen. And this dynamic can still arise, except when it does, she puts a stop to it right away. And I have the grace and the wisdom right now to understand, yeah, I'm doing it again. In fact, I haven't done it since then, because I just don't want to be that guy. You know, but that's what she would have seen. And what was going on inside your head? Were you anxious? Were you depressed?

I was anxious and then I want her soothing, I want her, how should I say this? There's an interesting sexual dynamic between men and women that men very often expect, unconsciously expect, their women to mother them, to give them a mothering that they didn't fully receive as kids.

And the women take on that role because they are acculturated in this society to do that. But then what happens sexually? No healthy guy wants to sleep with his mother and no healthy woman wants to sleep with her son so that the the the ardor and the you know the the the passion kind of drains out because of this unconscious dynamic of women mothering men and men demanding that they do. So then I become frustrated and

then who do I blame for that? I blame her rather than looking at how did I have created this situation? So all that stuff played out in our marriage and we've had to learn a lot from what didn't work.

In my relationship, when I was most anxious, it's also when my relationship nearly ended with my partner because, like you said, I inadvertently took it out on her because I felt that she should understand how I'm feeling and basically adapt to me.

Exactly. And she didn't. And so there was conflict because I felt like she was misunderstanding me. Yeah. And wasn't like acting in the right way to meet the needs that I had. Like she couldn't understand, you know, and so that I think I wore her down. And then there was kind of like, as you say, that ultimatum moment where she's basically saying, listen, shall I just go?

And what you probably didn't do, and what I didn't do for a long time, is just to go to her and say, you know what, I'm feeling anxious. That's what happened after. And I'm feeling unsettled. And I realize that I have resentful feelings towards you.

Instead of owning it, we act it out. Why don't they understand us? So what we're actually demanding is that we can be children emotionally, and they be the mothers who, without any effort on our part, will understand and see us. And this is a strong dynamic.

in men-female relationships, and what tends to happen is that men then, women at some point, if they're healthy enough, if they're not strong enough to assert themselves, you know what happens? They get sick.

I know this is a mouthful, but a lot of women's cancers and autoimmune disease are precisely because of this self repression. And I could talk about that at great length, the physiology of it. But either the body will somehow say no for them. That's why women are much more likely to be an antidepressants, because they're taking a medication for both of them.

And so either the woman gets ill somehow or she asserts herself and says, I'm not doing this anymore. At which point the guy will go seeking a younger mother who is not yet mature enough to assert herself. And this happens all the time in relationships.

The cost of self-repression, the cost of sort of emotional repression, I think everybody is guilty at some point in their life of repressing their emotions. I think men do it a lot as well. I mean, if you look at the sociality in the UK, men tend to act it out on themselves like that, yeah.

What is the cost of self-oppression that you talked about, the physiological mechanism of what's going on when we repress our emotions and how we feel? It's been well studied, not just by me, but others and documented that repression of healthy anger disturbs the immune system. Now, why should that be the case? Now, healthy anger is simply when somebody is intruding on your space,

And they won't exist. You say, you're in my space. Get out. That's healthy anger. It's in the moment. When it's done its job, it's finished with. It's different from chronic rage, which is a whole other thing. Now, in other words, anger is a boundary defense.

That's all it is. Animals do it. Ah! Get out of my space. You know? No. The emotional system in general has the job of the human emotional system.

In general, has the role of allowing in what is nurturing and loving and healthy and welcome and to keep out what isn't. That's the job of the emotional system. Let me ask you a trick question. What's the job of the immune system?

Okay, I'll answer is to keep out what is unhealthy and unwelcome and toxic and to let in what is nurturing and healthy. So the immune system is like it's been called a floating brain. It is a memory. It is reactive capacity.

And it allows in new treatments and vitamins and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and unhealthy, invading organisms and so on. In other words, the immune system and the emotional system have exactly the same role.

That's the first point. The second point is they're not separate systems. Physiologically speaking, emotional system, the nervous system, hormonal apparatus in the immune system are all one system. And there's a whole new science, when I see a new 60, 70, 80 years old called psychoneuroimmunology that studies the unity.

So it's not even that all these things are connected. They're one. So therefore, when you're suppressing one aspect of it, you're also suppressing the other. So people that repress healthy anger, they have diminished immune activity. And this has been demonstrated.

So the repression of emotions has a physiological function. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you or to fail you when it comes to malignancy. The immune system, like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day because nature makes mistakes. That's not a problem. The immune system recognizes them as

Cancer cells don't have, on their surfaces, markers that our normal cells do. So the immune system says, this is a foreigner, it's an enemy, I'm gonna destroy it. But when you repress your emotions, you can also undermine your immune system, and now your immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it, and allows it to proliferate. There was a British surgeon in the 1960s who operated on, am I talking too much?

No, you're not. There's no such thing on this podcast. Because I just get so passionate about this stuff. And the reason I get so passionate about it is because it's so important in healing. And we as physicians could do so much more for people if we understood these scientific facts, what we don't as a profession. Anyway, there's a British thoracic surgeon called David Kisson in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice.

that people are emotionally repressed or more likely to get lung cancer. Now, it's true that most people who get lung cancers are smokers, but out of 100 smokers, only about 10 or 15 get lung cancer.

Which doesn't mean that smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer. It is. But he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking. And the more repressed they were, the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer.

This is this guy noticed this in the 1960s. So emotional repression has huge implications physiologically and emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma. Why? The child is born with some fundamental needs.

One of them, as I've articulated earlier, is for attachment. For closeness, proximity, unconditional loving acceptance by caring adults. Not just a human child. All mammalian children have that need. Without that they don't survive. So that's called attachment. Seeking of closeness and proximity for the purpose of being taken care of or to take care of the other. And our brains are wired for attachment.

We have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships. And that's so important all through our lives, but especially when we're infants and young children. Now, while we have another need, we've already talked about it. I just haven't named it. The other need is for authenticity. We used to be ourselves connected to our bodies and our gut feelings. Because again, without access to our gut feelings, we don't survive out there in nature where we evolved and where we lived until

15,000 years ago, and so that authenticity is very important to be connected to yourself so that you know when you're safer, when you're not, you know what you want and what you don't want. You know how to say no, when you don't want something, you know how to say yes, when you do. That's authenticity, all told of self, being ourselves. And to go back to Harry, his

Challenge all his life was that he wasn't allowed to be authentic. He had to pay a certain role and fit into a certain set of expectations of how to be and who to be. And he could never figure out who am I really, you know, in that context. But that's so general. So many of us face that challenge of who are we really, who are we authentically, as opposed to what's expected of us. Now, so we have these two needs. Attachment, on the one hand, authenticity in the other.

Ideally, the two are not in conflict. Ideally, you can be in a relationship or I can be in a relationship where we can be ourselves and be accepted and connected with. And that's ideal, all our lives. But what happens to a young child where if they're authentic, they're not accepted?

So for example, certain psychologists recommend that angry children should be punished for their anger. Rather than their anger being understood as to what it's all about and the child being taught different ways to express it, they just to be punished for it and by different ways.

By the way, if you're a parent of a two-year-old, and if you don't frustrate your child, you're probably not doing a good job, because your two-year-old may want to cookie before dinner. And you say, no, cookie before dinner. In a minute, they're throwing a tantrum. Because what do even adults do when they're frustrated? They throw tantrums. Children, that's just what they do. They have no self-regulation yet. So the two-year-old gets upset.

No, you punish them. You give them a message. You're not acceptable to me when you're angry, when you're angry. You have to be a certain way for me to accept you. Well, you mustn't be sad. Cheer up. What's wrong with you? So when children are given this message of conditionality that you're acceptable to me only if you behave in ways that I approve of,

Otherwise, the attachment relationship is threatened, then the child is faced with this choice, which is not a choice at all. Do I stay attached to my parents? If my father is an alcoholic, and the only way I can find acceptance is by repressing my emotions and not show my sadness and my fear. Then do I show my sadness and my fear or my anger?

Or do I threaten the relationship? Well, there's no choice at all. The child will choose the attachment.

and therefore they give up connection to themselves, which is the essence of trauma, that disconnection from ourselves, not in my own words, in the words of other trauma theorists who I agree with, the worst aspect of trauma is the disconnection from ourselves. And we do that for the sake of maintaining the attachments, which means, for the rest of our lives, we'll be afraid to be ourselves.

Is this what they call people pleases? People, exactly. So, um, Cheryl Crow, the American singer, musician, um, developed breast cancer. And she said that since my breast cancer, I've been a different person until then I was always trying to please others.

And now, and it used to be voices in my head that are always telling me that I was wrong. I don't listen to them anymore, you know, so that people, pleasers are the ones who gave up not by conscious choice, but as a matter of survival, their authenticity in order to stay liked and accepted and attached to it. But then they carried that on in the rest of their lives. And they're at risk. I always worry for the very nice people.

I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.

I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, whatever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. You always worry for the very nice people. Yeah, you talk a

a lot about that when the body says no. Why is being nice a potential risk to one's health? Well, there's two places to be very nice from. One is just genuine human compassion and concern for others, but you're still grounded in yourself. That's great. But a lot of people are very nice because they are afraid not to be.

because they weren't liked who they were, they weren't loved who they were. Being nice was the way of getting the love and the attention they needed. Let me tell you a story. In 1870, there was a French neurologist called Jean-Martin Charco, who was the first one to describe multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammation of the nervous system. Very debilitating.

And Charco said, in 1870, without any scientific research, but just from his own observation, that this was a stress-driven disease. Now, since then, there's been a lot of research to show how stress and trauma potentiate multiple sclerosis. It's not even controversial. Not that any neurologist knows that. They don't get taught to stuff in medical school. But the research is there, and I present it in my books. In any case,

When I was writing, when the body says no, a group of a self-help group of multiple sclerosis patients formed me and said, would you come and talk to us? Because I would understand you're working on stress and illness. And I said, yeah, sure, I'll come and talk to you. And there's about 25 people in the group. This is in Vancouver, Canada.

And I gave them very tentatively, apologetically. I said, look, I don't know this for sure, but the sense I get from my work in founding practice and collective care is that the people that develop your condition and other conditions tend to be people to be pleasers. They tend to have difficulties saying no, they tend to be very nice people.

And I said, you know, I'm sorry if I offended you. I don't mean to. I'm just giving you something very tentative. I haven't done a research yet. I'm just giving you my observations. They said, you just described us. And they all said that. And there's a woman who says in the group who says, I don't even know how to say no.

I said, terrific. Give me $100 right now. She says, well, I don't have $100 with me right now. I said, it's not a problem. I said, outside this building, there's an ATM machine. After the meeting, we can go out. You can get $100 and give it to me.

She says, I'm not comfortable doing that. I said, listen, I'm just trying to get you to say no to a ridiculous demand by a perfect stranger to whom you own nothing whatsoever. She said, I can't say the word.

Because in childhood, by the way, when you have kids, you're going to find out what the word no means. Because age one and a half, all kids start saying no. They say that long before they say yes. Why? Because that no is the boundary defense of, I'll figure out who I am. I'm not going to exceed to your demands. I need to figure out what I want. Put your shoes on, no. The parents think this is something wrong. There's nothing wrong. It's nature, individuating the child.

When families punish that, the child will repress the know, and the body will say in the form of multiple sclerosis. For example, niceness, ALS, amatrophic lateral sclerosis, or known in Britain as motor neuron disease.

Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with it at age 21. He was told he'd be dead within two years. He lived another 55 years. Doctors don't know everything. But there's been studies on ALS patients. They're extraordinarily nice.

So from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, a major referral clinic, two neurologists published a paper at an international ALS or motor neuron, Congress. Why are ALS patients so nice?

And what they described was that when people came to their office for diagnosis, before they met the physician, they underwent EDX, electro diagnostic testing of their nerves. And the technicians who performed the tests would write on the side of the test, this person can't have ALS, she's not nice enough. Or if this person has ALS, they're too nice. And their physicians, the neurologist specialists said, despite the shortness of their contact with their patients,

And the obviously unscientific nature of their observations invariably, they turned out to be right. And then I called Dr. Wilburn, who did this study, and I said, what did the other neurologists say? When you presented this, they said, oh, I said, yeah, we all noticed this. We just can't explain it. Since then, there's been a study where they've asked neurologists about their patients, and the answer is, all our A-list patients are so lonely and nice.

Now, what the neurologists don't do is they don't make the connection. That niceness is a repression of healthy anger, and that repression of healthy anger plays a role in the onset of that disease. So it's not an accidental connection. So why do I ever want very nice people? Because they're putting themselves at risk. Again, niceness can come from genuine concern for others, but that's not

accompanied by an ignoring of yourself. You also care for yourself. Then you can be as nice as you want. But you also know how to say no. And you also know how to set boundaries. You don't know how to be angry if you need to be. But the niceness that comes from self repression, that's the one that hurts. There's clearly going to be a lot of very nice people hearing that, that know they're nice, that know their people pleases, that know they've experienced in their lives the consequences of

putting everyone else before themselves. It's funny as you were talking, I was thinking about the person that I know who I think is nicest. And that individual is sick all the time. And I just connected that dot in my head. But I remember making a joke to her about, oh, you're sick or whatever, you're sick a lot. And then also thinking, oh my God, she is probably the nicest.

Nice is an interesting word because that can be misconstrued as like, hey, you know, saying nice things to someone else. But it's really a deeper level from what I've observed in that person, putting everyone else before them or chronically serving other people's needs before their own.

Well, so my contention is, as I said earlier, when people do not say no, the body will say no for them in the form of illness. And for a lot of people with serious illness, the illness is the wake-up call. And they actually learn. And when they do, that can make a difference to the course of their illness sometimes. Not always, but I've seen examples of remarkable healing when people learn to say no and stop being people pleasers.

And I just only wish that physicians understood this. So when somebody comes to them with chronic eczema and all these other chronic conditions, they will not just provide the physical treatment, but they will also talk to the person about how much stress they're taking on. It's very stressful to take on everybody else's issues and ignoring your own. It's very stressful. That stress is a physiological impact on the body.

How does someone who is a people pleaser, how do they turn that ship around? Because they'll hear that, but because their niceness or their people pleasing is so deep within them and it started so early, they're not going to change. Most of them won't change.

Well, they may change if they get sick, you know, and if they learn something from it. I've had a lot of people tell me that. But it happens very early, but it's everybody's second nature, not their first nature. It's a very interesting phrase, second nature. It means that it's a first nature. Now no baby is born as a people, please.

No baby lies there. No one day old baby lies there thinking, gosh, I'm hungry and wet and lonely. But gosh, mom and dad have been worked so hard, I better not bother them. Babies will express their needs very volubly and very articulately and very loudly. That's how we're born. We're meant to be born that way. So that this suppression of that is our second nature.

And that first nature never goes away. We can always retrieve it. But you have to become conscious of it. So when the body says, no, I lay out certain principles of healing. In the myth of normal, I will actually teach this exercise. Ask yourself this question. Where in your life are you not saying no? Where no wants to be said, but you're not saying it.

Let me give you an example. Let's say I come to London and I'm with friends and I call you up, even here I am, dear enough coffee. But you've been up all night helping a sick friend or otherwise you're just too stressed to want to meet me right now.

Your desire is to say no. But what if you suppress that no? And you say yes, for the fear of displeasing me or disappointing me or losing my friendship. If I say no, God or won't like me anymore. What's going to be impact on you if you keep behaving that way? Physically, what's going to be impact?

I'm going to be, I'm going to be more tired, more exhausted, probably going to be more stressed. All that. Yeah. You can be disconnected from. Yeah, exactly. So it's not a, this, so this person, they need to, I teach this exercise in the book about, where am I not saying no? And what is my belief behind saying, not saying no?

I don't want to upset Gabbo if he's coming back. Exactly. And I depend on Gabbo's liking. Yes. Which means, as a child, you depend on your parents' liking and you have to suppress your nose to be like, thirdly, where did I learn this belief that if I say, no, I'm not likable or I'm guilt to, I'm not worthwhile. And the fourth question is, who would I be without that belief?

You know, and so if your friend does this exercise regularly, believe me, she can turn it around, but it takes some practice. Who would I be without that belief? Yeah. When I put myself in her shoes or I put myself in a people pleaser shoes, I wouldn't, I'm a people pleaser in certain environments, but I wouldn't say I'm generally. Yeah. I can imagine someone would respond to that and say, well, I'd lose all my friends. She'd find out who her friends really were.

because the real friends would celebrate it. They'd say, oh, finally, we're so glad to see you being yourself. The friends that were just using her or relying on her to be their supporter unconditionally will turn away. And I say this to people. This contest between attachment and authenticity can be a painful one, but you can decide which kind of pain you want. As a child, you have no choice.

As an adult, it's true. If you're authentic, you might lose some attachment to relationships. That's going to be painful. But which pain would you rather have? The pain of being authentic and losing some friendships that were no friendships at all? Or the pain of losing yourself and all these implications and all these impacts on the body?

It would be difficult for her and through some relationships that she has now that would fade away. But my God, she would also attract Muslim or genuine and authentic relationships. And her true friends would really celebrate her. But let me tell you something that just occurred to me, forget it. There was a book written by an Australian nurse about 12 years ago. And this nurse, like I used to work in palliative care with dying people, she works in hospice with dying people.

And these are people who tend to die of malignancy and chronic illness well before that time. I showed a book called The Top Five Regrets of Dying People. For anyone. And you know what the top regret was that I wasn't being myself.

That wasn't true to myself. I wasn't being authentic. That's a top regret of dying people. And the third one was that I didn't express my feelings for fear of disturbing or displeasing others. So authenticity is not just a new age concept. It's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings. Oh, one more thing. So yesterday I was in Westminster Abbey.

And I was looking at all these beautifully and articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists, to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and despoiled native people all over the world. They're the heroes of the British Empire.

And I think one of the reasons there's such a strong pushback against the idea of trauma in this society is if you recognize trauma, which exists not only on the personal individual level, but very much on the collective level.

the ruling elites in this country would have to come to terms with the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of foreign peoples, which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry, is that he pointed that out. Let's face it, the royalty, the wealth that I was born into.

was achieved that the despoilation and oppression of people around the world. So trauma is not just a personal issue. It's very much a social and collective and historical issue. What's the cure? You know, because if we're many of us are byproducts of generational trauma and we're seeking different ways to ease our pain through the means of addiction, whether it's pornography or heroin or alcohol,

We can't all afford expensive therapists, but we exhibit those self-destructive behavior patterns, maybe every single day, maybe with social media addictions or whatever. What do we do?

Unfortunately, the healthcare systems on the world have very poor appreciation of the emotional contribution to people's physical or mental ill health. And most physicians and most psychiatrists are not trained in it. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap between science and research and one and medical practice and the other. It's maddening sometimes to contemplate it.

So, the first step would be to educate the caregivers. Just educate doctors about the actual science of the mind-body connection and the impacts of trauma. Educate them. So, when you go to a physician with, say, chronic fatigue or inflammation of your joints,

They don't just give you the necessary medication, which I'm not against, but they also ask you what's going on. So that's the first thing. The second thing is let's prevent the problem. So let's support young families to be really there for their kids so that families don't have to struggle economically and their parents are so stressed.

As I may have mentioned, I've forgotten now, when parents are emotionally stressed, economically stressed, according to a number of studies, the kids' stress form or levels are abnormal. And that is a harbinger of future disease.

And so let's look after young families. Let's make people feel secure. Uncertainty, lack of control, lack of information. These are some of the drivers of physiological stress. So let's create a society where there's a more sense of mutual acceptance and communality and social support.

You know, let teachers be educated that the kids who are so-called misbehaving are kids who are actually troubled, troubled because of stuff at home, and that the solution is not to exclude them or to punish them, but to actually give them emotional support in the classroom and in the schools. Let the schools be the human brain

According to Harvard's study, it develops from before birth. It's an ongoing process that begins before birth and condenses into adulthood. The necessary condition for human brain development is safe, supportive, emotional relationship with adults.

Let everybody who deals with children, from social workers to teachers to daycare workers to kindergarten, supervisors to parents understand the emotional needs of kids and provide that safety. Let the justice system so called about which there's very little just. In Canada, 50% of the women in jail are indigenous. They make up 6% of the population.

50% of the geopolitical patient. You call that justice. You take the most traumatized people who then act out their traumas and then you punish them for it. So let the medical system, let the educational system, let the legal system understand child development and trauma. Now, in terms of the adult to answer your question more specifically, so there's a social answer, but then there's the individual answer.

Yeah, a lot of people can't afford good therapy. It's true. It's expensive. And then even if there's a lot of people who are get therapy, but not getting appropriate therapy. Well, if you can't afford therapy, go to the library, read some books.

My own, but not just my own. I could rattle off five of the books you should read. Read Dick Schwartz's book on internal family systems called No Bad Parts. Read Bessel van der Coe's book on trauma, called The Body Keeps Score. Read Peter Levine's book, Waking the Tiger on trauma. Read Oprah Winfrey's and Bruce Perry book, What Happened To You? Read Bruce Perry's book called The Boy Was Raised as a Dog.

I'm interviewing Peter Levine. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. Oh, good. Wonderful. I'm glad to hear that. He's one of my mentors and friends. And we often work together. So this is, and, and, and all of these books will have some advice about how to help yourself, including my books. Then there's a lot of stuff on the internet. So this, the interview that you and I had a year ago, I checked this morning. It has been seen by two and a half million people.

I'm sure it's helped a lot of people. There's a lot that you can get, just freely. Nobody's going to get in charge on the YouTube. Lots of my talks are available. Lots of talks about the really good people are available. Do that. They're self-help groups of all kinds.

Is there a risk here? This is what the one side of the narrative sometimes argue that you can kind of over trauma ties your life in terms of over labeling everything that you do as a trauma. So, you know, and I mean, that always happens, right? When people become aware of something, they become over aware and they start over labeling and saying, that's a trauma response. That's a trauma response. That's a trauma response. And they kind of live with a feeling that they are inherently broken.

Yeah, but my point is that nobody's broken. Actually, I talked about our first nature. That's always there. When people recover, it's an interesting word recovery. What does it mean to recover? When you recover something, what are you doing? Going back to... You're finding it. Oh yeah, I'm true, yeah. It's the definition of the word, isn't it?

What do people find when they recover? They find their true selves. That's what they'll tell you. That true self never went away. Nobody's damaged goods. Nobody's broken. To talk about trauma is not to disempower people, but to empower them. If I learn that my response to the British media and the hairy

issue was actually nothing to do with the present moment. It's actually some old programming. Okay, now I can drop it. Are you glad it happened?

I'm glad that everything happened because everything is learning. Nothing. This life is wasted if you use it properly. So what I'm saying is that to be aware of trauma is not to lose power but to gain it because it's not an excuse. I can't keep going to my wife and saying, I'm being resentful of you and punishing you because my mother didn't take good care of me when I was a baby because she was too stressed.

I mean, that's lack of responsibility. But for me to understand that my demands on my wife to take care of me like a mother would have a baby, actually is my trauma response, then I can drop it. Because I'm not a baby anymore. I don't need, I'm not that helpless. I'm not that resourceless. I'm not that ungrounded.

When you recognize trauma, it's not in order to use it as an excuse, but to actually to overcome it. That's the whole point. When we talked about the suppression of our emotions and anger, you use the word healthy anger. Yeah. When you, you know, because there's a, there's a risk isn't there when you're saying that anger can be a positive thing that people will then assume that berating someone behind a counter or a waitress in a restaurant because they got one item when you order wrong is standing up for your boundaries.

I've done it. No, it's not. So healthy anger is in the moment. And it's just a boundary defense. It's not outrage. It's you and my space get out. That's its purpose. That's its only purpose. Or to protect something like you want to see anger.

Try and tell a mother bear not to be close to their cubs. You'll find out what healthy mother anger is all about. That's just healthy. The kind of rage you're talking about, have you ever had that kind of rage?

Definitely on a spectrum. So the reason I struggle with the answer is because I've got a friend that's fully shown me what the extreme side of that is, where we used to call it the red mist with him, where he would literally lose control. Which is incidentally what Harry used to call his anger. Oh really? Yeah. So my friend, my friend, one of my best friends in the world, he talks about this all the time, is he had, you could trigger him by saying something, usually by,

saying he was wrong about something or something like that. And then he would just lose it. So I remember the first, the last time it happened was when the pandemic rolled in, I was staying with him.

in his apartment because the lockdown and I was living in America at the time. And we were discussing the virus. And I said to him, I think people that are older and that have certain health situations are more at risk. And he said to me, no, people that are younger are more at risk. And I said, and I showed an NHS website, which said, no, it's people that rolled her at more risk. And he just went into this red mist where he was totally triggered and lost control of his emotions.

Okay, so if you observed them then, what you would have noticed is, you remember what I said about healthy anger? It's in the present moment. Once it's done its job, it's gone. Your friend, the anger he gets, the anger he gets. So the rage just keeps building on itself. Now we talk about a fit of anger.

It's a good word. You know, whereas we talk about fits, is epileptic fits. In epileptic fits, certain electrical misfiring in the brain then recruits other brain circuits and it gets more and more and more until the whole body is shaking and the person may even lose consciousness.

Soiled themselves and so on. That's an epileptic fit. A fit of anger is the same. That fit of rage is the same. So that the more surreal gets, the more brain circuits it recruits, or rather than expending itself, doing its job and then being gone, it actually gets worse and worse and worse. That's unhealthy anger and triggering is a good word. Because look at what the word triggering means. Now if you look at a weapon, how big a part of the weapon is the trigger?

for the trigger to set off anything. There has to be ammunition there. There has to be explosive material there.

So your friend is carrying a lot of explosive material. I can tell you, your friend never felt understood or validated as a child. And he's still carrying the rage of that. So you trigger him, and then, by disagreeing with him, and all the pain of invalidation, all the rage of not being understood, nuggets triggered, and recruits more and more his brain circuits. Now I can tell you something.

Healthy anger is essential for our physical integrity that rage in the absolute in the aftermath of a rage episode Your risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles for next to the next two hours or going to studies because what happens your blood pressure goes up Your blood vessels narrow and the clotting factors and your blood increase so of course you have more risk so the repression of anger and

can lead to chronic illness, but so can rage, lead to heart attacks and strokes and so on. So, anger is a delicate thing.

Should I say something about my friend that we found out? Because he then went to a childhood psychologist. Oh, good. And that's why I said that was the last time. So you can imagine that was three years ago, the pandemic, two, three years ago. He went to a childhood psychologist and what they uncovered through their work was that as a kid, he was not only a foot shorter than all the other kids, but he was both dyslexic and struggled a lot intellectually. So the people around him and on his report card,

basically called him stupid as a child. And then he actually found a, I think he found a text message at some point between his mum and his nan, where they were diminishing his chances of success. And he grew up with this deep sense of like, I am not intelligent, a deep, deep sense of it. And it's come out in all of these ways as an adult. And that you're right. That's what was going on in that moment. I was challenged. I was taking him back probably.

Well, and you know what, again, to come back to here, that's what happened to him. They called him stupid and thick hole and naughty. And he was none of those things. He just had trouble of concentrating and paying attention because of all the stress.

Yeah, yeah. And so in his book, he describes that he'd been told he'd had post-traumatic stress. I didn't diagnose him with all the stuff. It's in his book. I said, you know what? But I think, given how you were distracted as a kid, you're trouble paying attention. They call you stupid.

This is ADD. And I wasn't saying he's got a disease. I was saying, actually, that was a normal response that you had to an abnormal situation where you were under a lot of stress and they made you wrong for it. They called you naughty. They called you stupid. They called you sickle. You're not any of that.

Now, the whole bunch of British psychiatrists got their knickers tied in the knot because they made that diagnosis, you know? My God, people, I was saying to the guy, you don't have a disease, you have a normal response to have no circumstances. You were not stupid ever. But children undergo this character assassination like you fended. And imagine the rage inside him. So when you disagree with him, you're triggering all that.

It's just, that's just how it works. Now, interestingly enough, people call me stupid. That's not a trigger for me. Yeah, it's not for me. Because I know I'm not. You know, I always grew up with a sense of my own intelligence, not to overstate it, but I never had any doubt about it. But certain things you can do, like not see me and that'll trigger me. And for context for anybody that doesn't know why you not being seen triggers you,

Well look, I was born, you know, I may have mentioned this last year, so I was born two months before the Nazis occupied Budapest. Then they started exterminating all the Hungarian Jews. So literally, my life was under threat, because they didn't see me as a human being. They saw me as a vermin.

Now, not that I knew that directly, but my mother can imagine what it was like for her to have a two-month-old and living under the risk of death all the time for a whole year. And then, as I mentioned before, she gave me to a stranger to save my life. And I didn't see her for five weeks. But that's not being seen. And my father's not there to see me because he isn't forced labor.

So literally not being seen, threaten my life. So no wonder when people, when that happens now, that for me is the trigger. Now, of course, the answer is, is to see myself. If I fully see myself, it doesn't matter whether you see me or not. So if you see me,

If you're not seeing me, if you're distorting who I am in your mind and in your words bothers me, it's only because I'm still cunning on you and other people to see me because I don't want to see myself. If I'm fully confident in myself, I'll say, gee, it's too bad. Stephen doesn't see me. Well, maybe we talk about it or maybe he'll never understand it, but I don't live in his mind.

How do I fully see myself? It's hard to do, right? It's hard to do because

When you were seen, it's not hard to do. Because you children see themselves with their parents' eyes. But when you're not seen, then you have to learn it. One of the things is to go back to meditation. That's not the only way. First of all, notice all the ways that you're not seeing yourself. Like two days ago, whenever I had this anxiety about how I made it, I didn't get my best talk on Monday evening.

You know what, I did my best. Me and I had been perfect, but I prepared for it. I put myself out there for two hours, and I spoke a lot of truth.

might have been the best, but so what? But but but at that moment, I wasn't seeing myself. You know, I can still lose it. So meditation, which is the form of meditation that at least I am learning is about just noticing and seeing what's going on inside with our judgment. So being aware. So let's practice. And you also suggest removing the things from your life that will stop you from seeing yourself, like social media,

Well, because that can be a move. I can't remove social media from my life, but what I can remove is my attachment to it.

For example, I don't have to look at the comments on all my talks on YouTube. Who says what? Who likes it? Who doesn't like it? I'm not on Facebook. I have a professional Facebook page, but I don't administer it. But people go on Facebook and who says, who likes me? Who doesn't like me?

you know, they can win themselves off. That's what we may not be able to stay off social media to write my books. Thank God for the internet. But I don't have to be attached to it. So it's, it's, it's, it's using it, but not letting it use you, which is very hard.

The social media and all of these things, these stimuli, I feel like they've, I'm concerned that many of us are living in a state of chronic stress, mild background stress. And I say that a lot because the amount of times that I catch myself, I spoke to James Nester who talks a lot about breathing in breath. And the amount of times that I now catch myself, very shallow in breath after just looking at my phone or thinking about something,

Let's get some oxygen back into me. In bed at 1am as I'm trying to sleep, catch my breath being shallow. During this podcast, when I start thinking about something, my breath gets really shallow. Looking at my phone, my breath gets really shallow. I feel like I'm living in this state of constant, subtle background stress.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned breath because it's one of the, to go back to the question of what people can do for themselves, they can learn to breathe. And Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher. He says that,

I mean, not to dismiss the other, but that's more important than anything else. And interestingly enough, the Buddha, when he was teaching his monks, in fact, one of the Buddha's assistants, Ananda, asked him, or holy one, do you still meditate? And he said, yes, and what kind of meditation do you practice?

and Buddhist is observing the breath. So in Buddhist meditation, I'm not here to advocate for any particular pathway, and I'm not a practitioner of any religion, but this is a very wise man. He taught awareness of breath as the most important portal into reality.

What do you think the antidote is for the way we've designed our lives to be constant in this sort of stressful stimulation? Because we're clearly, I was just wondering if human beings are supposed to endure this much constant stimulus and stress in their lives, and with chronic inflammation and all these kinds of things in our killing people at alarming rates, the diseases that are caused by inflammation, what can we do about our stress? And is it okay? Maybe it's okay?

Well, it's the norm. So you can say it's normal. Is it OK? Well, the question is to be answered by looking at what the impacts are. And what are the impacts? You know, the impacts are very serious. You can see it on the individual level in terms of mental health conditions, as I said earlier, or burgeoning internationally, autoimmune conditions are. But if you look at it also on the social level,

There's more conflict, there's more division, there's more intolerance in our culture than it has been for quite a while. These are the impacts of the stressful culture that we live in. So, is it okay? Yeah, if you want this, it's okay. But if you don't, it's not okay. It depends what you want.

relationships, romantic relationships. I've thought a lot about the role that our trauma plays in our ability to form relationships. Obviously, society has changed quite profoundly in the last couple of decades, different sort of gender transformations have caused

certain mismatches and difficulties with people connecting. The world has gone very digital now, so dating apps run a lot of dating. I think 50% of people originally meet online. That's their first point of contact. Dating is very, very hard for people, and there's a lot of people that are kind of giving up on it. Attachment, dating, trauma,

I've come to learn that we are mirrors. I think I found love in my life when not when I discovered anything externally, but when I did a lot of work to figure out the barriers that were standing in my way of connection.

Well, you just answered your own question. We can't form proper relationships until we have the capacity to be alone and be comfortable with ourselves. And the more comfortable you can be alone, which is different from being lonely, by the way.

The more capacity to be allowed to be with yourself and to grind yourself in your own truth, the more likely you are able to form meaningful and positive relationships. Rather than asking a lot of people who run into relationships to solve their problems,

then there's the initial in love phase where everything is just ideal and then reality hits and then all of a sudden that person who you're so infatuated with becomes your enemy and you hate them so much. I've experienced such hatred for my life over the years and when I've been disappointed or dissatisfied

You know, because I was looking to her to fill me with, and nobody can fill you from the outside. So once you no longer need it, once you no longer are dependent on it, then you can enter into a healthy relationship. Or to put it more positively, a relationship can be a real ground for mutual growth. So you can enter into a relationship,

You're not going to be perfect. You're never going to be perfect. Carry a certain degree of trauma, a certain degree of dysfunction, certain things that trigger you, as we said earlier. But if both people are committed to the truth, which my wife Ray and I have been, that's one thing you can say about ourselves.

for all the stuff that we've been through. Ultimately, the truth mattered more than who's right and who's wrong. So if you're committed to the truth and working it out and if the fundamental love is there, then you can grow together. And so for me, the relationship has been the most important growth going ground of my life, not the therapy that I've had or the reading that I've done. Not that I'm dismissing any of that, but the actual relationship has been my

most important schooling and how to become authentic.

There's no real chance of a good relationship if one or more parties in that relationship aren't committed to truth and they're committed to being right or to victory or... It happens all the time. As I said earlier, people always meet at the same level of emotional development or trauma resolution so that water finding its own level. But when one person starts growing and the other doesn't, it becomes impossible.

Either the person that does the growing gives it up and goes back to their previous selves, which is almost impossible, or the other person is challenged to start growing themselves, or they're going to split. That's just what's going to happen. And again, to go back to the association, be men and women, this is what tends to happen. And I've seen it.

In my own marriage, I've seen it as a physician, as an observer of human beings. The couple are kind of getting along, but then the children come along. Now the mother's caring energy has to go towards the children, where it needs to go.

The father may feel now a bit of their nose is a bit out of joint, because now they're not getting the attention. Another woman is a decision to make. Do I look after the three-day old baby or the three-month-old baby? Would I look after the 35-year-old baby? And to the extent that the mother chooses to look after the 35-year-old baby, she's depriving the three-month-old.

A lot of boom and then make a choice that I need to look after my kids and I can't put all this caring energy, mothering caring energy into my husband anymore. And then relationships get into trouble because the guys can't stand it. I've seen this over and over and over. I'm not saying it's universal, but it's very common. Sex.

In your practice, I imagine you've come across this quite often where there's a sexless relationship and that's causing issues. What is typically the true cause of that, that disconnect with intimacy with sex in the bedroom? Because a lot of people are struggling with that.

Well, first of all, I think today we jump into sexuality way too early. In other words, we talk about intimacy. But intimacy really means the innermost. And we tend to have physical intimacy before we have emotional intimacy.

so that people jump into bed rather quickly. I'm not being prairie, I'm not being prudish here. I'm not prescribing that you should only have sex when you get married or anything like that. But when we enter into sexuality early, without the emotional intimacy and emotional authenticity, then the sex becomes divorced from our real needs. And especially for women who tend to

I can't speak of everybody, but in general, women tend want to have more intimacy emotionally. That becomes very hard. And if the emotional intimacy doesn't follow, sex becomes rather mechanical. Because mechanical.

Yeah. So that's one big reason. The other reason we already talked about this sort of parenting dynamic between the genders. I know we're only talking about the two major genders now. There's all kinds of gender variation these days. But these dynamics exist in all kinds of contexts. So that when one partner is doing all the emotional caring or most of the emotional caring, this is parent-child relationship that really deadens the sexual drive.

You know Marissa Pier? Marissa Pier. She's a psychologist. She actually said to me the other day, never call your partner, mommy or daddy, for this very reason. Yeah, well, oh good. That's a good way to put it. I think it's because we put sexuality in this society, of course, it just glorifies sexuality.

You know, and if you look at some of the most famous sex symbols, who were they? abused women in like a Marilyn Monroe deeply traumatized job and abused as an adult by President Kennedy and just about everybody and she was the the woman everyone was asleep with You know so that this really distorted sexuality here and for women especially

safety is so important for sexuality. We talk about frigid women, but when do people freeze? It's a fear response. There's nobody's true nature. It's just a response and usually something happened to them or something is happening now so that

then unmelting can happen in a condition of safety. And then the emotion intimacy is there, which creates the safety for the sexual opening. And that's the dynamic in my marriage as well. My wife says, she says, truth is sexy.

Such a good point. Is there anything in your practice that you're increasingly being confronted with in the last couple of years that you weren't seeing as much as when you first started?

What I see out there is increasing distress in this society and people are more confused and young people are just so challenged. In the United States, the rate of childhood suicide is going up. Suicide. More and more kids are being medicated for all kinds of conditions.

in the U.S. 70% of the adult population is at least on one medication. Quarter of women at least in the U.S. are on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications. Those numbers are growing up in Britain as well from all the statistics that I see. So I see these going manifestations of distress, what I call a toxic culture. I see that all the time.

Look, I mean, the fact that this book, The Mythical Normal, is being published in North Macedonia, in Thailand, in Vietnam, and in Northern Europe, and in Eastern Europe, and it's just worldwide. There's this epidemic of distress. That's what I'm seeing. And I'm saying people, either we can look upon this as some unexplainable misfortune and bad luck, or we can actually look for the actual causes of it in the way with that relate to each other

in a way that we raise our children, in a way that we approach ourselves. And I'm saying that solutions are possible. But yeah, the world is getting more and more difficult for a lot of people. I do see that. And I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon. You're not optimistic.

So, noam Chomsky once said that when he was asked if he's optimistic or pessimistic, he says, he says, strategically I'm an optimist and tactically I'm a pessimist, which means that in the long term I do believe in people. I mean, and I am the same way. I do believe in the human beings. I do believe in the human capacity to grow, to transform, to come to a deeper grounded sanity in themselves, both on the individual and the social level.

I do believe in that. If I didn't believe that, I would just stay at home and read books and listen to music. I do believe in that. I'm optimistic in that sense. But at the same time, I think in the short term, it's getting darker and darker. And you can see that so many manifestations of that. So yeah, I am optimistic. I believe in humanity and human beings. And I think we have a hard road to travel before we get to our

better sense of self. And I have to close this conversation by seeking some solutions. You use the word solutions there and you talked about this better sense of self on it. We've talked about this from a social level, what governments can do to change education systems and on an individual level on a family level. What can what can I do?

Well, first of all, you need to define what your actual goals are. Okay, so let me try. I want to do work that serves others. I want to do work that I find fulfilling and that keeps me challenged. Which incidentally serves your health because it's been shown that people that live a life of purpose and meaning they're physiologically healthier.

I want to be healthy because I want to do all of these things for longer. I want to have relationships that are full and true and raw and honest. And I want to

I think that's it. That's the work in personal. And then I want to raise a family that is beautiful and pure and free of as much trauma as I can possibly make them be. And I want to be close to my children in a way that I wasn't close to my parents.

Yeah. Well, then the question you're going to ask yourself is what factors in your life support those goals and what don't? What activities are you engaged in that will support those aims? What will undermine them and seek to diminish or eliminate the ones that are undermining your goals and strengthen the ones that are supporting it? You know, that's what it is. And, you know,

And your intentions, by the way, are not only superficially the ones you articulate. If I want to know your real intentions, I have to look at how you live your life, not what you say about it. So when I was a young parent, if you had asked me, what is your goal? What's your intention? I would have said this, the happiness of my children. And I would have said that totally sincerely.

If you have looked at how I live my life as a work colleague doctor, not available to my kids, always are out there looking for being important and serving others and being at the center of people's lives because I was so essential to them. My actual intention was self-importance. My stated intention, the happiness of my children, as much as I would have meant it sincerely,

did not jibe with how I was living my life. So what you need to ask yourself is when anybody who asks themselves is, look at your intentions, both the conscious ones and also the ones that show up when you look at how you actually live your life and bring the two into alignment. So look at again, what serves your intentions and what undermines it. And look at that seriously. That would be my answer.

It's so difficult to distinguish between the two sometimes because, I mean, on the surface, the system you gave there are actually looking at how I'm allocating my time and is my time being allocated towards things that would further what I'm seeing my intentions are. It's a very useful exercise to run. But, you know, as I said, those things that I said, as my stated goals,

I do find a disconnect, I think. I think those things have been handed to us. When you ask them when they're goals, they will say things that will make the person asking the question, think well of them. Because there's one goal that you didn't state. Which is, I stayed away from the selfish goals. No. What's the one I didn't say? Inner peace. Hmm.

Because without inner peace, you're not going to be able to serve any of those goals properly. Or if you were, you'd do it at some risk to yourself. And so how would that be for you as a goal, inner peace? And then if running around serving others in the name of this so-called higher goal undermines your inner peace,

then you're not on the right track. And you know what I'm talking to, I'm talking to myself. Talking to me as well. Yeah, inner peace is not a selfish goal. It's from a position of safety, sorry, a position of inner peace that we can speak compassionately and truthfully to others, that we can serve our other goals. But you know, Eckhart told, he talks about our inner purpose and our external purpose.

And you stated a bunch of external purposes. And that's why there's this, I believe, if I'm a part of the diagnosis, but or the analysis. But but that's why that disconnect that you mentioned. Because the goals that you stated were largely external. And what are the internal goals? In a piece. Very good. Yeah. Now you have to put that into the mix. And once once you do, I don't believe that nobody handed that to you.

I think this is the issue with the work of Holics is we think that the path to inner peace is just by aiming at the external goals. I think maybe at some level that's what I believe. Work Holics think they can work their way or validate external validate or trophy their way or number one book their way to inner peace.

Because temporarily, when your book shows up as number one on the bestseller list or shows up at all, you feel something in your piece. But it's addictive. And there's a wonderful physician and researcher, Vince Feliti, who studied childhood trauma quite a bit and showing its relationship to adult negative outcomes. And he said, it's hard to get enough of something that almost works.

And so, yeah, you can get that temporary inner peace, but look at the long-term consequences of the word callism. It's not inner peace. I can tell you that. I can tell you have too long experience. It doesn't matter even how successful you are out there. We started the conversation with this. It's never going to give you inner peace. Inner peace doesn't come from the outside. That's not a goal anybody ever handed to you. That's something that you have to come to yourself.

You know this, how are you acting in line with what you know? Are you doing it well? You know what? I'm not going to give myself 100% by any means. I mean, just look at this week, but I'm doing so much better than I ever did. And I'm so much more comfortable about it than so much more comfortable about the future as well. You know, I am.

What is the one thing that we didn't discuss that maybe is the most important thing for my audience that are listening right now? That

Not that we should impose suffering on any children or anybody in order to teach them anything. Life will bring its own suffering. But when suffering comes along, there's two things we can do with it. We can try and just get rid of it, not to feel it, to numb ourselves, or we can actually learn from it. So suffering and pain can be big teachers if you know how to relate to them.

So when illness comes along, when a crisis comes along in your life, you might notice that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of two character letters, meaning danger and opportunity. So when there's a crisis, there's danger, but there's also opportunity to learn and to grow. And there's such a thing as growing older. In other words, not just getting older,

But actually growing older and actually still keep growing as you get older. And that growing older actually has to do with becoming more and more authentic to yourself. So sometimes I do that successfully. Sometimes I don't. But that's really the journey. And I'd recommend that journey to everybody. You can actually grow older. In other words, you don't have to shrink. You can actually grow.

When you said the word growth there, it reminded me of something you said in a topic we haven't actually talked about, which I did want to speak to you about, which is vulnerability. Yeah. I remember you making this interesting connection. I saw it somewhere online between vulnerability and growth. Yeah. And vulnerability is a risk for a lot of people. It's always felt like a risk for me.

So vulnerability comes from the Latin word vulnerability to wound. To wound. Yeah, that's vulnerability to wound. And so as human beings, or as any living creature, we're all profoundly vulnerable. From the moment that we're conceived to the moment we die, we can be wounded. We can be wounded physically, we can be wounded emotionally. That's just a given. When children are

safe and seen and understood. They can accept their vulnerability because they have the confidence that they can deal with it. But when children are traumatized or not understood and not seen,

And they're alone, emotionally. The vulnerability becomes too painful to bear. So be shut down or sense of vulnerability, you know, not to feel the pain. But when you look at life, nothing goes without vulnerability. So a tree doesn't go where it's hard and thick, does it? It goes where it's tender and soft and these shoots that are very viable. They can be eaten by animals or insects.

A crustacean animal, like a crab, cannot grow inside a hard shell. What does it have to do when it needs to grow? It molds and becomes this soft creature. That's very vulnerable. But without that vulnerability, there's no growth.

Without emotional vulnerability, there's also no growth. And so much of our culture is designed to deny vulnerability and to shut it down or to somehow distract ourselves from it. And the cost is that we stay mature and that we lose ourselves. That's what the cost is.

I also think vulnerability is, and I've just learned this from doing this podcast, that vulnerability is a great connector. Yeah. When I, much of the reason why I have good conversations on this podcast, I think is because I'm willing to be open myself.

Yeah, which allows your clients, your guests, the safety to open up themselves. And in your personal life with your friends, I mean, you can talk about the scandal of Newcastle beating Manchester City in some game recently by one to nothing. I don't say to talk about it, if that's interesting to you, but which is more meaningful to you, that or when you actually share.

What's our struggle? What's going on for you? I mean, it's no contest, but so much of this culture is designed to distract ourselves from our vulnerability. Okay, but we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. Yeah. Question that's been left for you. It's quite a long one. Today is your last day on Earth. Yeah.

You're allowed to make two phone calls. One phone call to the person you love the most and the second phone call to the entire world. What you say on both of those phone calls. What John Lennon sang all those years ago, all you need is love.

And the phone call to the person you love the most? To the person I love the most, I don't have to say anything at all. Why? Because she knows. But if you were calling her on that last day, I'd say thank you. What for? For everything. And you know what? I may even say that to the world.

I might even say thank you for all the struggles and the travails and troubles and tribulations of childhood and adulthood and parenting and career and all this. Thank you. You've given me so much. That's what I would say. If I wasn't giving advice, all you need is love, which is advice. Don't forget that. I'd say, I'd just say thank you.

as somebody who did his best to make a difference. And who made a difference? Which I know I have, by the way. So not that everybody agrees with me, but I also know I've made a difference. What difference do you think you've made? How to say this without finding an egotistical,

But I get so many messages from around the world. I mean, literally from around the world. But reading my books have transformed people's relationship to themselves and made them understand themselves. I think I mentioned maybe in a different interview that the best review I ever had of the myth of normal was that some young guy said to me, thank you, I read that book and I remembered myself.

So my work for those who are open to it really helps to connect them to themselves and to see themselves clearly. And that's a gift.

in a world where it's increasingly hard to see who you really are. Yeah, and it's hard for people to see themselves. And so people don't see themselves as broken or as your tree will be damaged, but actually they can begin to see their capacity for wholeness, which incidentally is the root of the word health, its wholeness. And so that's the difference I'm making is that people can see themselves

not as broken and damaged, but as actually fundamentally whole with some stuff to work through. That's it. We can learn so much from children, can't we? So much of your work brings us back to the first nature, as you described it, of children. Yeah. Well, a lot of parents will tell you, and you'll find out, is that the greatest teachers are your children, if you're willing to learn.

Gab, well, thank you. Thank you so much. It's a difficult question to ask someone else about the impact they've made on the world. But even what you said, I think, is a huge understatement because the people that I know close to me like my partner, who, like my partner, who just, I mean, her life, I think, has been

changed personally but also professionally much of the reason she does the work she does she's the reason why she's not here to meet you because she would have liked she would have gotten the next flight to fly here is because she's doing a retreat in the south of France with a big group of women and much of the work she does there is built on the work that you've

written about in your books and taught online. So not only have you impacted people personally, but you've impacted the next generation of teachers and therapists, which is going to be a generational, it's like a dominoes effect, it was counteracting the generational trauma is the generational healing.

that has come about because of people like you who are wizards in our culture and that are willing in the face of often great adversaries who take a different stance to persist with truth.

But thank you. And one of the things that most and heartened me is that when I go about London or any city in the world, just about these days, it's all kinds of young people coming up to me, thanking me. It's not people. I mean, people of all ages, but I'm just so enthused by how young generations, like people on quarter of my age, are coming up to me to thank me. Well, that shows me that it's making a difference.

100%. If she could have been here, she was so annoyed. She realised she'd booked her a treat on the same day that you were coming to London, because you didn't get to meet you last time, because she was in Bali. Oh, wow. Some other time. She'll be watching this, trust me. She's probably watching live right now. But thank you so much, Gabor, again, for your generosity and your wisdom. It's changed my life, and it continues to change many other people that are listening to this, but all around the world. So thank you. Thanks so much.