Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx5J5nwDBTo
I've proven how helpful EMDR can be for pgsc and depression why and how well trauma is a be living and whatever you're feeling is real as opposed to feeling like a memory but in our research you discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth as you recall a traumatic experience your brain is able to say this is what happened to me in the past and 78% of the people we studied who had adult in time were completely cured can you do it on me good what do you you see vessel Vander kulk has been described as maybe the most most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century and for over 40 years his clinical research has revolutionized how we understand trauma and its impact on our brain and body your Early Childhood experiences create who you are and how many of the people that you treated in your practice have childhood trauma about 90% And it's very difficult to change are they changeable yes that is the great news but the problem is the focus is not on helping people the focuses on funding successful Financial organizations and even though was the first person who started yoga for pdsd which was very effective and then there's psych development and neuro feedback Weir our results were stunning people are so conformists we already know the ansers let not explore anything new but let's do the science and see how itse works if for home and what about psychedelic therapy It's very effective have you ever done a psychedelic truck yeah of course what did you learn that my quest for Al understanding trauma had to do with my own childhood trauma all the pain your suffering earlier on I asked if people could heal from their trauma have you healed from yours this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so
much Dr Bessel vanderock you've been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century by the financial times what is the mission you've spent your life pursuing I have been interested in how people survive extreme situations how people can uh overcome the history of people doing terrible things to each other and how we can create a better world in that regard actually so so the the mission has been rather social but the investigation has be very much based on what we learning about brain science what we learning about psychological functioning etc etc and this word trauma seems to be Central to your work and when I looked before this conversation at the rise in the use of this word online and people searching this word it's pretty staggering what I found there's this graph that shows a huge jump and people using the word trauma what is your view on the subject matter of trauma specifically how we've misunderstood what it is well there has been Evolution which is quite striking and when I when I first started to study trauma I was on the research floor at Harvard um and my colleagues said why are you studying trauma Bessel when you croak nobody ever talk about trauma again like it is a completely alien subject um and now everybody talks everything is a trauma and so from being non-existent has become a total explanatory mode as so we have gone as we always do from one extreme to the other and my primary interest these days is not so much into trauma trauma started it but somewhere along the line I got to realize that trauma is to a large degree a breakdown of connection between human beings and synchronicity between other human beings and these days I'm much more focused on how we can help people establish a relationship to themselves and to the people around them when people are suffering from some kind of psychological disorder whether it's depression anxiety um PTSD what is it that you disagree with with with the traditional view of how to treat them people are being taught methods that they say can cure people in eight sessions which they count and so
there still is there's what people learn in school these days although no good CL I know actually practices that is to help people thinking out to straighten out people's thinking and to make them not think these crazy thoughts like and um that really is no evidence that can do that is that cognitive behavioral therapy yeah yeah yeah cognitive restructuring s of thing or you get people better by blasting them with trauma and then before long they get desensitized with trauma and they see both of these methods are just they don't get it that completely doesn't get the issue at hand actually why I cannot talk into being a reasonable person people are not reasonable people and Trauma is as unreasonable as she can be that's really at the core if you understand trauma is that your brain and perceptual system gets rewired so you see things almost entirely through the life the past experience rather than current experience okay so if I've if I'm traumatized talking about my trauma doesn't necessarily fix my trauma trauma is a speechless experience so we did the first neuroimaging study about people reliving their trauma and we saw that the entire cognitive part of the brain disappears that when you're in your trauma you're just one ball of emotion and there's no thinking so you're you're confused you're befuddled it is uh as Shakespeare says you you suffer from speechless Terror you become dumbfounded so the whole traumatic experience is just beyond belief and so you stay in a state of confusion and agitation and then finding language for yourself in this point is terribly important to help you to begin to organize your relationship to yourself it's not enough but it's but language and the finding your in experience is terribly important the word tumor as you say has been thrown around a lot um and it's become a bit of a cultural joke to some people when you say you know something happens to you you go oh I feel triggered um I'm traumatized Etc what actually does count as trauma trauma really is an overwhelming experience of oh my god when something happens and you're completely helpless and there's nothing in you that knows how to deal with it people talk a lot about small tea trauma and Big T
trauma fan of that okay so explain why not uh well this you need to be more accurate the but but the small t t is is very real trauma when your environment about you doesn't acknowledge Your Existence most people for example after natural disasters do very well because people get together after natural disas I've seen it we have a cabin in Northern fromal we have had terrible floods the neighbors get together they help each other and you get a sense of cohesion actually and a sense of meaning we're doing this together the small T traumas have to do with um not acknowledging that what's going on with you saying to kids stop crying I'll give you something to cry about no you don't matter no actually your dad is a drunk because you are such a difficult kid that your father was doing okay until you came into this family and you must were too much for him and you caus him to be the person that to is so it's I think that's people may small te trauma it's relational trauma which is a very big deal for most of the people I get to see in my practice most people come in not because of big te traumas it is because nobody saw me nobody heard me um I was relevant um we always had to take care of my mom or my dad uh but there was no room for us so if you get fired from your job and it's a traumatic event yeah um for you because you you get I don't know you get you lose your friends you lose the job your parents are embarrassed about you can that become trauma something like that yes you could depending on how you define and for some people it does and for some people it doesn't you know um depends again on the context uh for some people you get fired you go like well I didn't like those [ __ ] anyway or um I I asked this because I'm I'm wondering if there's a lot of people listening now that I'm trying to understand if they small experience which other people think is Trivial actually could have resulted in some kind of deeper trauma response absolutely at the end the issue is the perception your perception your perception the issue is not the event itself you and I may have the same events happening and for me it reminds me about my brother torturing me or it reminds me about my mom being sick and
not paying attention to you or whatever and for me it becomes a very big deal and for you it goes like yeah you know but I have so many talents why not try something else and can you give me an overview of the work you've done in your life that have fed into all of the knowledge and information that you have just for anyone that might not know who you are yeah what is that sort of body of work I had a very good psychiatric training um in one of the Harvard hospitals and then I was I been the last state mental hospital in Boston which is also interesting um I it was this Sanctuary for very disturbed people and so that instiution gets closed I go work at the Veterans Administration hospital um I met these guys who were people who I looked up to they were good athletes competent people helicopter Pilots all my age and these guys had broken apart and they had fallen apart they go oh and they reminded me of some of my relatives who I grew up with who also had been concentration surv and Japanese Camp survivors and then I learned much else after that but that really opened up my eyes to that that people can be broken by life experiences and that really intrigued me tremendously this is Central to your story is this early experience you said earlier that you you were born in 1943 1943 very important when you're born has a huge inflict on who you become so my earliest imprint is of my father at some point was detained by the Germans he was not in cration Camp but he was supposed to go off there my mom is by herself raising small kids in hiding right next to the place where the Nazis are launching their Rockets to go to London so half of the Rockets fell into our backyard and you I have no conscious imprint of that but uh I grew up like a kid going up in Ukraine today um and uh a lot of kids my age died I was a very sickly child there was a low of hunger and misery half my generation died of starvation and so I grew up with Incredible preconscious imprint of what gets in Ukraine and Gaza are going through right now um and that must have left a trace in my curiosity and my being including a trace of having a body that was very sickly you were born in 1943 in see occupied Netherlands Netherlands okay and you the middle children of five that's right y you were very sick as a
child yeah what were your parents like in terms of love affection all those kinds of things my mother was more or less broken by the pandemic of 1919 in which her father developed parkinsonism and became one of those all of sax type people so my mother was a very frozen person um which had a very impact on me my father was very conscientious loving you described your mother as being a frozen person yeah and it had an impact on you yeah having a frozen mother has an impact on you what was that impact the impact is that if you have a mother who is not available to love you and care for you that that becomes part of your perception of the world and that means that uh there's a lot of work to be done about learning about affection and intimacy and uh closeness and vulnerability and all those sort things yeah yeah your mother would faint whenever Bessel would ask her what her life was like when she was a little girl no no I asked her only once um I was already a junior professor at Harvard had two kids and my parents came to visit me and here's an example of but parents I had I left at age 18 for the us because I wanted so distance between me and my parents 10 15 years later quite a few I wrote to my parents said it's customary for parents to come and visit their children sometimes we should be interested in coming to visit me that never crossed our mind and so they came and we actually had a very blessing time very civilized and so in the last day my parents were visiting us I said to my parents you know you probably don't really know what I do for a living but a lot of my work has to do with incest and I wonder where does that come from and I turned towards my mom and I said you know I wonder if something happened to you that I picked up that you were were you ever sexually abused and my mom fainted fell off her chair and my father said look what you did to your mother and my dead wife and her my father carried my mother into a rebell so I don't know if my mother was sexually abused she just fainted when I asked the question yeah but that's how it goes H you barely get a straight answer to any of these things you said that child abuse and neglect is the single most
preventable cause of mental illness the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes heart disease cancer stroke and suicide that's true and in your book you say that ating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half alcoholism by 2/3 and suicide drug use and domestic violence by three quarters yeah that doesn't come from me there a data from this very big CDC study uh done by Vincent fer and so these a DAT on 25 25,000 people yeah yeah people have got increasingly interested in their Early Childhood experiences as a lens to understand who they are as adults yeah is that overblown or is it important to understand it's not overblown to be curious about how you became who you became and what the internal ingredients of your cake are I think that's very good for people to be aware of how they be how they have come become the creatures who they are I think being curious about yourself is very necessary uh also to be curious in order to be curious of other people when you said about your mother and the incest thing yeah you'd realized as an adult much of your work focused on incest and then you turned to your mother and asked her if there was an experience she had had and She fainted do you believe that there's a part of you that knew no but I don't know if my mother was incested I know that my mother was very uptight about sex and I wonder what happened to her and her fainting INB means that I triggered something but I don't know what I triggered I would not jump to conclusions that my mother was in victim something happened to her but I don't know what it is okay but the indicator was that she was always uptight about sex it wasn't that unbelievably UPS about sex terrified about sex Y how many of the people that you treated in your practice have you could you trace their adult dysfunction back to An Early Childhood experience pretty much 90% let's say yeah 90% but you know that's that's me how I mean people with Autism or people with
OCD don't come to see me MH that's so I I have a very narrow filter in the way of who comes to see me and what's the Crux of what happened to them as a child if you had to simplify it the Crux is uh not being acknowledged and honored and for who they were as kids that's the big thing is you uh they were unseen and people did Terrible Things to them and nobody seemed to bother to protect them when you say Terrible Things Terrible Things is being beaten up being sexually molested having their bones broken what if it was just words also words one of my patients mother said for all the time oh you will never have friends if people really get to know you they will all reject you because it's Dr ter PR that's pretty that's pretty good who said that well mother of Wonder people3 but it would not be an unusual thing to say people do terrible things to kids intentionally and unintentionally um automatically automatically yeah is that hurt people hurting people yeah no you see it in supermarkets and parking L and stuff like that yeah what' you see you see people abusing their kids seeing terrible things their kids I guess it's difficult for parents because they sometimes think well I've got to raise a child that's not dysfunctional so I've going to have to punish them and I've G to have to discipline them as a way to make sure that they grow up to be healthy and well-rounded yeah that's an interesting cultural issue that um that is sort of how my parents and grandparents generation saw their kids and then people who grew up in northern Europe completely changed their attitude now you go to jail if you hit your kids in in Sweden for example I think me in Holland also not in the US so people have really changed their mind but in the US when they talk about the the downside of of physical punishment of their kids often times particularly black people will say I want to raise my children knowing about right and wrong and the Bible says I need to punish my children and that's what I'm doing and you should not subvert the teachings of my children church and they don't argue with that
because um at least not straight on I grew up in a household where I was punished physically in pretty significant ways ways that I probably could share because it's just quite you know significant quite horrendous and they are horrendous stories actually yeah I was born in Africa so I've got a African mother and an English father um it's funny because I look back on it and I go and this is just me rationalizing and hindsight I go I'm happy that I had a home where there was discipline because if I didn't have that home then I wouldn't maybe have left the city we're one of the few families that actually left the city the small fairly small town relatively small town to some of the towns I live in now and went and did a lot of things with my life and I was I didn't get caught up in drugs like some of my friends I I wasn't dysfunctional and my mother couldn't read or write as well so I feel somewhat thankful but I'm doing I'm like rationalizing in hindsight because it somewhat ended up okay in certain measures of my life in other areas of my life there's dysfunction you know and your perception may change really my perception about my life and who I became has has quite changed quite a bit over time as as layers come open but what you talk about that things were predictable is very important my parents also were predictable which is enormously helpful for at least you to anticipate to know what you are supposed to do etc etc chaos is a terrible thing I think that point is really interesting because although there was I was physically punished a lot yeah um it was predictable yeah so I knew that if I I understood why I was being punished so I kicked I was playing football in the house and broke ornaments yeah or something like that it was never unpredictable right but something comes to my mind as you're talking is that same visit that my parents finally came I had a three-year-old daughter at the time we staying at the house and put my parents on the first floor right next to the main bathroom and then my three-year-old daughter went to that bathroom that was next to my parents bedroom and my mother came out and yelled at me said how dare she use our
bathroom you should punish her and I almost did I had an immediate impulse arm I should punish my my three-year-old doing and I started to walk to her and go oh my God I'm about I feel like crying oh my God I feel I'm about to reenact what my parents did to me and I made a physician no Mom she is allowed to use his bathroom and I said the limit on my mom which is one a transformative experience for me to actually realize that I'm about to repeat what was done to me which people do routinely and I was about to beat my daughter and I said that's the end of the story yeah it still causes you a lot of emotion it's actually I'm surprised how much emotion comes up talking about it yeah yeah why do you think it it's so so much emotion comes up when you talk about that good question um it's interesting question um because it allowed me to have a life you know much of life is automatic but you can make a choice to do things differently you start owning yourself and that's the moment I started to own I'm responsible for my kids I'm going to do follow what I think is right it's really a moment of Liberation but also a moment of Separation like I will not be like you it's tremendously hard to do that because it's going against your right and I think that's a big thing for all of us to because we want to Bel long we want to be member of a tribe and if you do things differently you lose your tribe and you become a lonely Trav so this is incredibly complex because uh people want to be part of a tribe we cannot do without a tribe and so the act of actually leaving your tribe is a is a very very major pilgrimage make yeah there's parts of me that manifest sometimes and I understand that this is the behavior that I would leared yeah and I I think there's part of me that's worried actually because I learn I grew up in a home where phys you know physical discipline was the response to most kind of forms of unwanted behavior that I'm worried that if I become a dad that'll be my natural probably will be yeah I don't want it to be you don't have to follow it yeah your kid will
drive you crazy because kids do yeah and at that point I think having kids is one of the great learning experience in life you know we all none of us knows but what we're doing and then the kids teach us how to to be very important teachers for how do you deal with this because it's very challenging yeah what did you learn from y children oh I learned a lot from my kids uh for one thing so my my first born was a is a was uh just easy and loving and luminous and pretty and girly uh and she now is gender ambiguous and just divorced her husband to be with the woman so that was completely transformed in her case and to see go through that Journey with her like wow wow wow wow and my son was a neuro atypical child very out of control much of the time um many physical reactions very bright but reactive staying in bed only playing computer games and he has grown up to be one of the most loving thoughtful adult parents you can hope to meet so both my kids have become become very different people who I thought they were but they have a very good relationship with both of them even though I really don't quite understand either of them when we see dysfunctional behavior in children I think one of the natural reactions is to give them some kind of medication or to attach some label to them and say that they're broken in this way how do you feel about that well that is what saved my son because I am a psychiatrist and I know about how these labels are little crutches that never quite capture what somebody is suffering from and people started want to do my put my son on medications because but I was a psychopharmacologist I really studi drugs and what I can and cannot do and it was very clear that they were not helping him and I didn't have to submit to Authority as most parents would do and say oh my doctor says this and this and this I say I'm a doctor I know about brains and I know about kids and I don't know what the hell is going with my kids but he doesn't have bipolar disorder and he is not respond going to respond to
lithium and so my both my kids were major Inspirations for really exploring what was good for them and I'm particularly grateful for my son who was such a really very scary kid in many ways that my wife whom I'm now divorced from um she was really great also in terms of exploring what might be helpful and so what I really got to also be aware of is the issue of privilege that I made enough money um that we could spend a lot of time trying to find things that would help my son if we had lived in the housing project I some would have been a terrible Misfit but because we had were able to give him so much support and Care by exploration uh that he actually found a way of rearranging his his his mental state him I mean just on that point there's a startat I read that children from low-income families are four times more likely as the privately insured to receive antis psychotic medicines that's right that's that's that's true 400% more likely to receive antis psychotic medications if you that's very big issue it's not really my of expertise uh but you know giving drugs to kids is potentially very dangerous because you interfere with natural processes of grain growth brain growth yeah so if you give people medication that changes certain chemicals in their brain at the development of phase it may actually change the way that that brain gets formed and may not allow as happened to my son who was able to compens for many things and his brain was able to learn how to react differently if you suppress all that your brain may not learn these new adaptations you think we should be looking at Social conditions before we look at Social conditions physical conditions movement touch uh synchrony music um has so so in our world we got stuck in Western people are allowed to do things they can do one thing is they can what they call take a swig if you feel bad you take them alcohol and that makes you feel better so that's part of our respected tradition is taking a chemical to change the way you feel and anybody who says you should take that chemical nobody ever say you're crazy and the other thing that Western
people are very good is ying so it let talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk and understand things and then I like to tell people's story that the first time we happen to Beijing in 1992 and China was still very poor and deprived and miserable and coming back from the cultural revolution and nobody could talk about anything no nothing happened on the mar no nothing happened no gentleman Square didn't happen it didn't happen and China was filled with every Park then as now is filled with people doing chiong and taii and I go down into the park and do CH chiong with the Chinese what's that Chong is it the the Chinese Chinese movement of and I do that with and I go like oh my God that's how they survive by making this CH taii movements which if you do in Boston you people say you're crazy but in China you cannot talk you can calm that body down by the way you move and I became very interested in how cultures about the world World actually have very different ways of helping people to regulate their physiology and their synchronicity I want to talk about all of that specifically this idea of movement and the role it plays in healing um just to close off on the part about childhood trauma yeah what why is it so important for a child to grow up with a secure attachment to a caregiver you become how people see you you become how people see you yeah so if you're a kid and most people most kids the parents find being cute or you at least a grandparent say oh you're so cute you're so lovely you're so sweet and no kid is able to say I'm just average look at building kids in the world and I'm not any cure anybody else no when a kids gets old you're really cute that is your reality and if a kids gets told you're really ugly and nasty and mean that is becomes identity that's you really become how people treat you early on in your life and that's a very big Legacy that I as a as a therapist deal with is these imprints of early experience which are very difficult to change imprints of early experience are they changeable yes that is the great news and also the amazing news that even though we know how to do some of that we're not going there so you can heal from your childhood trauma absolutely
everyone uh um that's my assumption when I see people in your experience You' you've dealt with patients your whole life um your whole professional life how many of those patients do you think were healable I really think that if given a chance and giving the resources you can pretty much do something for everybody one of the other but but but the problem is again we go back to where we started before the microphone was on is that our Focus these days is on productivity and behavioral change and not in how do we find out how to help you all the things that I describe in my book almost most of the things that I describe in my book as being helpful and that was 10 years ago I know some other things since that time uh are unconventional methods that don't don't do not get practiced in mainstream psychology Psychiatry because they need to be productive and they need to be cheap and whether you get better or not doesn't matter are you cheap is the main motivation I think the profit motive is killing good practice your your book was very interesting because um when I read the cover and then I watched a video you had made talking about the sort of six uh sort of treatments and stuff that exist within the body things like yoga um you talk about theater and acting and how that helps you to to get out of your trauma the body keeps the score this was a a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma and it became a meme which is an interesting thing to see well I I I use it in my like everyday language with my partner yeah and I've heard other people say the body keeps the score the body keeps the score when we're talking about how our body is holding on to those y traumatic memories traumatic things that have happened to us for someone who has never read your book and doesn't even understand the like base premise here what is the like base premise of your of the title there it's really that trauma is a visceral experience what does visceral mean in your body heartbreak and G bench you stiffen up you surrender you lose your power you tighten up that's really where trauma is lived I kind of see it as two approaches you can either go let's try and change
the mind which will then change the body Downstream or you can say let's change the body which will then change the mind right is that you could but I do a lot of CBT with my wife let's say yeah I point out her irrational behavior and that she should really see things from a different angle and I should really see things correctly and I really have much obessed with that and I'm a bit surprised that psychology does things that most spouses have failed in using very well this sematic approach I've only recently heard this term from my partner and she says It's amazing And she's told me she told me to speak to you on this podcast because she says you know you'll really help to change her opinion on this what is the sematic approach to Healing sematic approach is to really experience what your body feels and also uh allowing your body to do things that it has been afraid to do and to explore how your body moves to the world in some ways why women just to seem to be so much better than at this stuff than men because they're doing like plat sure plates yoga these are all things dancing these are things typically women do more than men yeah yeah yeah yeah and it seems women are just more in touch with it yeah I think it's a intriguing question because it's not exclusively women of course men have always done in armies and basic training and the military and what's intriguing to me is that uh you know when people join the military they often times they're not very well put together people and they go through basic training and they really March together they sing with people and they climb barricades and they go through uh composite physical experience with other people at the end of 12 weeks they feel competent and they feel connected and they have found a Band of Brothers how do they do it not by yaking but by having very deep shared physical experiences one of the interesting things that you write about which I found particularly interesting because I saw little flashes of myself in the words is you said I found that the more traumas your patients have in their background the more creative and successful they often become often often and we don't know how often that is but get to meet quite a few of
them yeah yeah it's the people who have had to struggle who often see new possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options that's true that's true yeah but you know but those are the people who manag to get into my practice and the people who don't find those Solutions don't have the wherewithal and the capacity to make it into therapy with me they might be outside with a drug addiction getting drugs lying on the streets etc etc and to large degree I see that as as an issue of accident you know this past year I visited a program in Los Angeles called um Homeboy Industries is a it's a program for formerly incarcerated largely Latin men who had no fathers who have been criminals and it's a spectacular program where they honor they say what do you need how we can to care you how can we make sa safe place for you and I saw a real treatment there St Quinton Hospital uh s wenton prison famous prison in California is now trauma based I use my book as a PO texor and they transforming people's lives by acknowledging the reality of what they dealt with helping people to be part of the healing system working in groups working with movement um like it's in Quinton they have dancing classes I go like yeah moving together with other people gives you a sense of connection sense of pleasure uh they they're really beginning to understand you can do it at the Harvard Hospital you wouldn't do the whole with people you would dance with people I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment Community um that says you'll get better returns if you invest in someone an entrepreneur or founder that is a little bit traumatized and I actually think I if I I don't want to misquote her but I had Barbara Cochran who's a shark on Shark Tank in the USA here on the show and one of the things she said to me was with all of her Investments the ones that tend to do the best are those that have a little bit of a trauma in their past and she says because when they call me with a problem they call me with the solution attached versus people who have never had trauma they call me and just tell me the problem so they'll call me and say listen Barbara this has happened and this is what we're going to do about it and that was her you know she said it in
a slightly humorous way but I wondered if you thought there's any truth in this idea that yeah I think that's again a selection bias of people she works with I know certainly plenty of people have had plenty of people working for me uh who who really get paralyzed in the face of of challenges and who don't have a solution and become very dependent on giving getting the action so I think she has an bit of an unusual sample actually because I wondered if if you've had an an anomalous early upbringing does that make you an anomalous adult is does it increase the probability that you become a anomalous slightly different absolutely and that can go everywhere you you develop a mind and brain to fit with that particular situation and if that particular situation doesn't help you need to find new Solutions and so trauma and abuse really forces you to find try to find other Solutions but many of them are not successful you is trauma a story in your brain no trauma is a perception in your brain a percep what's the difference so the issue is something happens and your brain and mind takes it in and then makes an adaptation to that particular event that depends on how old you are in the circumstances it's very different for different people give me an example of a perception if you would beat me up right now I'd go this guy is crazy and I can call people and ruin your reputation Etc if you're three if I'm 3 years old and you start hitting me as a kid I don't know what the hell to do about it and I will likely think as probably I did something wrong that I caused the guy to beat me up and I'm a terrible person and no wonder that he beat me up because I'm a horrible creature and that's what almost everybody who I know who was beaten as a child uh that's the internal understanding of it not when you're eight years old or 15 years old but when you're very young that becomes your experience because you're still forming your perception of the world yeah yeah and your brain creates a map of the world very in very deep ways and so you experiences form an internal V of the world that that makes you expect certain things at certain times so if I walk into a room and I see a person who looks like my old Uncle who he has to play with I start Sil ling up to you because
you on the Deep level might be of that very nice uncle that I once had I don't know that but my brain is set to interpret the world in a particular way so one of the things most uh profound uh research experience I had was purely accidental we started to do warshock tests on people what's that in BL test so you saw some formless ink picture and we showed it to people and we saw that people had completely different interpretations of what they projected on that ink BL test and that really brought home to me that we all are Liv living in different worlds and that our like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those cards people had never been in combat didn't see that uh Vape victims saw torn vaginas and torn bodies other people didn't see this so once that becomes lodged into your perceptual system you continue to interpret the world in that particular way having to do with what you have gone through in the past and an ink block test for anyone that doesn't know is basically just a piece of paper with random yeah but it's been analyzed on about 100,000 people over the years so there are certain patterns you can detect in it yeah yeah I've never done an ink blot test I feel like I should do one I learned as much from my ink blot test as I learned from our brain Imaging uh but the brain Imaging is respectable and the mind has sort of disappeared but for example in our psychedelic research I still very much hope to do in Blau test because as Michael pollen says how to change your minds but we not measuring how people change their minds how many people do you think I mean this is maybe a ridiculous question but how many people what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form how you define it uh you know the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused one out of five people get sexually abused one of eight kids Witnesses V has being their parents uh etc etc so you know if I sit in a room you know it's it's not a binary issue it's not I you traum you didn't get traumatized but when I talk to a room of professionals which I do a lot I assume that at least half of the group
viscerally knows what trauma means and what is trauma doing to my brain you said you've done a lot of neuroimaging yeah scans um if you if if I was traumatized and you scanned my brain is there something you could see not necessarily I can see how uh your brain may be different from other people's brains I may take a particular population you can average it out and you can say oh there's a little more activation of the Bara to gray a little bit less of the white insulin so you see see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain but to some degree you know I I think we we learn a lot about the brain but we don't know much about the brain and I think people tend to overstate how much the brain pictures can teach us uh you know it's I love the Hubble's telescope or the web telescope you know it's our brain is like a universe and our technology is very very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably con complex Connection in brainers but we have learned a few things in the last 20 years so how how does trauma affect the brain it affects the brain that you tend to there's there's one part of your brain that I call the Cockroach Center of your brain the per accur gray that lights up itself underneath the everybody knows the word migler these days there a part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger when you traumatized you're likely that that little part of your brain way back in the your brain stem is firing all the time all the time you go like I'm in danger I'm in danger I'm in danger and so that's where it starts in a very Elementary sensory level you don't know what the danger is but you just feel that you should be scared and then there's certain um Parts other parts of your brain for example your insula which makes the connection with your physical Sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down because trauma basically experience of trauma is a visile experience of heartbreak and God venge and if you have a lot of that you can learn to shut that part of your brain down so you don't feel your body so much anymore I you don't feel your body so much you don't feel very alive either but you don't feel so scared all the time but it's likely that you will
want to take some drugs to make yourself feel alive sometimes um stuff like that yeah so the part of my brain you said just under the amig around the amydala below them below the amydala people that are traumatized they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically well the dysfunction is that it keeps firing keeps firing and how does that make feel and then the mea so so there's a constant sense of of subliminal dread is that anxiety anxiety is already to hire mental functioning okay it's more Elementary yeah it's like your dog shaking like yeah my daughter has adopted a dog was time and two years later the dog still walks to my house you've adopted a dog in it shakes in your house still yeah yeah but still never quite comfortable um and that's how many time you meet are never quite comfortable so when someone says they're triggered now trigger is an higher level thing okay so then the next level is indeed the trigger that is in part mediated by the amula is your M if your smoke detector that tends to become hyp sensitive so that minor things get blown up and a minor thing that you may say to me I take is the most insulting thing in the world and so you're constantly triggered by things and that makes makes you feel like you you are doing terrible things to me and it's not like I'm hyp sensitive uh and when you have an off day uh that is your issue and not my issue no when you have an off day I feel your off day and we start getting into trouble together I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector yeah yeah um goes off is that what it looks like on the brain when that is one particular guy and nobody is exactly the same as everybody else can you explain this to me but basically but what you see here is this is a guy who is reliving uh terrible car accident he was involved it and what you see here is that the right posterior part of the brain there's temporal paral Junction on the right side of the brain uh fires and that's the feeling part of your brain so you go oh my God oh my God I'm terrified but there's no cognition basically the left side of the brain shuts down so when you're in your trauma you don't become you're not a reasonable person you actually uh become a little bit of a
blubbering idiot all of us when we really are angry upset and not very articulate but we have a lot of feelings and then the the piece that by I show this is that as he is this guy is Rel living his trauma these two parts of your brain go offline this is the dorsal Lal prefontal cortex that's the part of the brain that's the timekeeper of your brain and so if something unpleasant happens between us let's say uh I go oh it's not a half hour and I'll be okay so let me just put up with this but when you get traumatized the timee keeper disappears and this is all there is you lose your sense of perspective and that is what happen when your in your trauma you don't know the difference between the past and the present because the time keeper of your brain goes offline and whatever is you're feeling is real as opposed to be feeling like a memory so you get it yeah so people that can't see it in this brain scan what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated the left side looks like it's off off yeah and then there's these two blanks um empty spaces that aren't activated called the doors dorsal lateral prefontal cortex soal pre part of the system in the brain give you a sense of time okay and as long as you have a sense it's like little babies only a sense of of time out whatever happens happens totally then you see a child slowly grow and they get a sense of perspective it's happening right now but tomorrow it will be different okay so that's when I mean presumably that's when you get anxiety right when you start thinking about the future it is about get having the perspective of this is happening right now right now I'm really scared but the moment I go home the moment I call my friend I'll feel better so that that you you need to have the capacity perspective and that perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma and you become a trauma Des person so this particular person this brain scan that I have here this guy was in a car accident and the the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in a uh an m fmri i scanner and he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain exactly so he was shown maybe a car accident or something no no we specifically his car
oh you show him a picture of his what did you see what did you hear what did you smell what were you thinking very specific sensory details okay so not somebody else's sensory your sensory details and the right side of his brain was illuminated yeah the light side of brain became very active yeah but what got inactivated was the eke keeper of his brain so he could not lie there and say oh I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday he's Rel living what happened yesterday instantly you feel like it's happening right now and that's the nature of trauma trauma is not a memory it's a reliving are you consciously reliving it or is your subconscious reliving you feel like it's happening right now with all forms of trauma but not it's happening right now but my feeling is happening right now in my body you don't know that the feelings actually belong to the time that your dad used to beat you it is now I feel the same way because I disagree with you so I've been triggered in the past and I felt that sort of instant fight or flight response because Something's Happened or whatever it can and it's instantaneous so although I don't feel like I'm back there my body does feel like it's not there and so people are confused about it say oh you weiv the past no actually you notw that you live the past because the past is the present MH so you don't think oh reminds me about the time that my dad used to be beat me when I was four years old no it feels like you are beating me right now and is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering yeah he've done quite well he he did he did uh EMDR actually yeah I movement decentralization and what was his results he a all right guy he's he's he's functioning he's fine he's no no longer trauma Pres what's the most radical Improvement you've seen in your clinical practice oh really people really coming to life people just saying it's over give me the the the most the best example the good example is the videotape I showed people yesterday of a woman again terrible car accident freezing uh upset freaked out and then three sessions later we got talk about it she says yeah this shitty thing
happened to me uh I was in this car accident and I jolted for it and my head was F and boy that was terrible back then but I no I have a granddaughter and I drive my car to my granddaughter I'm fine three sessions it took three sessions yeah every we saw it in psychedelic therapy all the time what did you do in those three sessions wiggle your fingers in front of people's eyes I mean for for me for me EMDR was really the gateway drug like um soorry you know I've written three books about PT they actually wrote the very first book in which the word pgsd exists in 84 or something uh but they didn't know how to treat it so I'm a world-renowned expert but I have no idea how to treat it because people keep relieving that trauma and they don't know how to stop that and then somebody starts telling me about EMDR and I don't believe a word of it and they say just you move your fingers in front of people's eyes I mean you move your eye from side to side as you relive the trauma and I go that's crazy everybody who hears that's crazy and then people start doing it and they show me how it works I go like wow and people indeed had a certain subsample of people we studied indeed after a few session of EMDR go like yeah that really sucked but it's over it belongs to the Past not happening right now you're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal that trauma well and then of course we had to do a little research which took us 15 years to get enough funding to get do it to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth and then we discover that if you move your eyes back and forth as you recall a traumatic experiences you activate certain Pathways between the temporo petal Junction which is your sense of self and your insul your s your body so your brain is able to say oh this is what happened to me but that happened to me in the past so these are Pathways that makes it possible for your brain to uh make that distinction and in the research that's been done on this yeah what does the what did the outcome what was the conclusion in terms of it efficacy oh in terms of uh in our research um 78% of the people who had adult trauma so so being assaulted or raped
uh by a stranger 78% of them were completely cured but that's not the majority of people we see because most people we see have Early Childhood trauma which is much more complicated to treat Early Childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment yeah because your Early Childhood experiences create who you are Al so if you go to fancy College when you're 18 you do become identified with that college but it doesn't radically change into a new person I bet it becomes part of your identity but if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life you actually become that you that the imprint is very deep early on yeah so it's called eye movement desens and reprocessing treatment yeah um I was just looking up some stats about it it says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across ious conditions with PTSD a 2020 2014 Metro analysis of 26 randomized control trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PD symptoms with a large effect size depression a 2024 systemic review and Metro analysis in encompassing 25 studies and more than a thousand participants reported that it alleviated depressive depressive symptoms the same 2014 Met analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect uh and finally a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data meta analysis concluded that EMDR is an effective is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates so can you show me how it works can you do it on me I could uh I'm G be can I move my chair of course you can you're going to come closer so can you bring to mind an really to rather unpleasant experience you have had not too long ago yeah and when can you bring to mind what you saw at that point yeah can you remember what the voice sounded like at that point or whatever it was and sounds come to mind yeah uh do you remember what your body felt like back then yeah okay can you remember what you
were thinking or bring to mind what you were thinking yeah okay so how Vivid is your feeling right now of recollecting it make a six seven out of 10 okay so so stay there now follow my finger with with your eyes so look at my look at me right now take a deep breath so what comes to your mind right now as we doing I feel calm uhhuh yeah I just don't I feel calm okay so when you go back to what you were just feeling what's it like now um it's it's hard to Recall why I was bothered it's the best way to describe it that is the weird stuff you know why is that is that just cuz why is that now see that is that is what's so great about his work we don't know the linearity we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint is gone now but it is and you know of course if you bring up something much worse than what you had going to it takes it much longer and a lot of other stuff comes up but what somehow EMDR seems to do it creates new associative processes in the brain so let's say um first some people did EMDR on me something really very very nasty that happened to me and I started off being very upset and then during the EMDR I know if that happened to you I had images of sitting at my dining room table as a kid and I had images of playing in a playground in Primary School something don't come in mind but and then we stopped it and inde so yeah that really sucked time to go on an important part of this you did not tell me what you were going through no um because I'm suspicious of language because language is always an interactive process and if I would ask you to tell me what happen you will filter yourself because certain things may be embarrassing or you don't want me to know about it and so we we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it and we reorganize some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this so so you saw a little bit of this very in minor way for me when I first saw this I was blown away by it and thought I need to study this so when they quoted studies the main study was done by me uh NIH funded that
but I was also the last time that somebody got funded for ni for EMDR breath work yeah what role did breath Works become a really big topic my partner runs a business called B breath work hash ad um and she takes women away she does these breath work Retreats all around the world has a studio Etc um what do you think of breath work as a way to makes perfect sense for one thing it's been used since I'm time Memorial in certain cultures have people people always Discover it no in India people know it not in Europe nobody knows about breth work that's why these are culturally dependent things I think uh um the Clos us may know it I don't know go out there see if people do it and and so people are so conformist to be approved of by their teachers and their peers that then when people do something Innovative they tend to very quickly be or they're cookie they're crazy that's like um I really got into body work and I've not not done breath work myself but I hear about it from people and I so it's perfectly legitimate to me um but when I we do something new like I was the first person who started yoga for PDS and people go like putting your butt in the air and twisting your spine pessel for trauma like and said well let's find out and so we did the study and it turned out that yoga was very effective for treatment of PTSD but but the overwhelming reaction of my academic colleagues was oh there he goes again he's gone off the deep end and now yoga is sort of pretty well accepted as a so you yeah you can use yoga to treat trauma you can no you don't treat trauma you you you you yoga to treat your relationship to your body it's not the same thing but trauma really distorts your relationship to your body and uh what our research also shows is that when you start doing yoga certain brain areas that tend to get S dampened by trauma come to life it's an Adaptive thing because trauma is so relived in physical physical experiences Darwin said heartbreaking gut venge is the visual Sensations and so if you're heart constantly heartbroken gut vened you try to pull that down and so you lose contact with your body in as a defensive maneuver of feeling
overwhelmed by these physical Sensations so I want to make sure understand this so the insular part of the brain is the part that links how we're what we do with how we feel how we viscerally feel yeah what's happening in our bodies okay it link so it links how we're feeling in our bodies to to what we know about ourselves yeah the stories we have in our head about ourselves so that's what the insula does and Trauma interrupts that which is what kind of dysfunction on a day-to-day basis you are out of s you you feel numbed out or disconnected you don't feel alive you don't feel connected you uh you can't feel pleasure or you feel hyper sensitive and you feel hypers sensitive because you talk about the two sort of responses being disconnection or hypersensitivity there's always these two contradictory things that coexist remembering too much and remembering too little feeling too much and feeling too little uh there is no happy medum you go from one extreme to another you're agitated and num out at the same time and and and I bet you know what it's like because we all have been there that we feel agitated and at the same time we feel completely nothing at all and there's almost no mind there and I think is a very not uncommon Human Experience and the in sealer playing a ro the insul insul plays a big role in that and many other P structures so if I start doing yoga yeah what is that then doing to that hypers sensitivity disconnection yoga makes it possible for you to reconnect your senses in a way uh to to feel what you feel and to make it safe what you feel so as where you go to yoga studio with a teacher with a nice voice who really helps you to not take a deep breath stretch out your arms feel that Warrior 3 pose and then you start feeling it and for many people do yoga can be actually quite agitating scary actually in a way for traumatized people we see it all the time is that uh something gets triggered and you start getting upset just doing a simple down dog let's say or certainly the the yoga pose that all SE abused victims have great trouble with is the happy baby pose happy baby POS when you put your feet in the air you lie on your back you hold your toes and you spread your your legs wide so your pelvis is up
against the air for most of us that's a very pleasant part makes you relaxed if you're a sexual abuse Survivor that's going to trigger a lot of stuff really yeah and you have to be very careful doing that because it's it's triggering and so so because these positions may be triggering you may hold your body in a frozen position in order not to trigger those feeling of sexual abuse I was just thinking as you were speaking about a friend of mine who um tends to go through life with a sort of crumpled up body they and they're low self-esteem they're quite low confidence I've never I don't know if they're traumatized in any way can't pass judgment on that but they started doing yoga and it really has helped their mental health in a profound way and I'm just wondering what you think the link is between someone who I'm just telling you on the surface is like crumpled up through their life but then go absolutely I told you I was a sickly child I was really sickly until I had asked when I was 13 and and I think the most helpful thing I ever did was roling roling is a very intense form of massage ready so tear your muscles from your fascia and I live came to live in a new body I no longer live Frozen in that body of this little child who who almost died had a profound effect of me as as much as anything I've ever done why and how because you get stuck in habits in a way trauma becomes a habit my habit is that when I see a strong guy in a room I get scared hypothetical situation and so you have habitual responses and part of what you do therapy for is to get to realize your habitual responses and become curious about it like like you know whenever a person like that comes to the room I freeze and I sound like an idiot and and your therapist says so what happens to your body and how long have you felt this way you feel this way when you were six or three or eight and then at some point people get a narrative that may begin to explain it and that narrative may say oh I was bullied by somebody and that feeling comes back when I meet somebody who reminds me of my bully and then you go like um have you ever tried martial arts and see what it like be like for you to actually learn to use your body
to fight somebody and that's for example treatment that I have never studied but I was amazed how many of my close colleagues who are very much into trauma tell me at some point oh and now I have to go to my martial arts class and that is nobody sees that as a legitimate way of dealing with what they're dealing with but I think people are doing their martial arts because they have memories of being victimized and it help gives me a vis experience of my body can defend itself my body I can use my body to take care of myself and that's not an intellectual process that's a visual experience people often describe meeting somebody and their body just being off y so they say I met this person and my body was just I just felt something in my body y that they can't consciously articulate but they just feel it in their body this person's a bit off Y what do you think they're describing there I think they're describing two things we pick up each other's energy there's such a thing as the mirror neuron system which hasn't received much attention the past few years but I think it's a very important invention uh that you're I pick up your energy and if let's say you're depressed but you have a job to do so to talk with me today it's very likely that I on some level will pick up your depression and it will affect our conversation I'm not saying that it do that's a hypothetical thing you know but we pick up each other's energy and so we may be somebody who is very angry but who's trying to behave themselves and be very well but you may pick up that anger and that's really the very complicated stuff in Psychotherapy am I picking up your your energy or am I picking up my energy and so if I feel uncomfortable in your presence is that because you're triggering something in me about my past or am I picking something up about you and that is the complexity of of our interactions so yeah and from an evolutionary standpoint um as you were speaking I was thinking where where has this come from you know this ability to subconsciously just get a re for someone and then form a pattern of okay this type of person help me in the past and 20 years later I meet someone in the street and I immediately feel the same
yeah is that just a survival thing what you I think that makes perfect sense to me like because we are primates uh something that came up in your interview with Trevor the degree to to the Deep degree to which we're interconnected creatures that we really don't exist as individuals so we are meant to live troops we're meant to be with other people and so what is safe with other people uh becomes a critical issue of our survival the reason that that humans have survived is not because of your individual gifts or mine it's because we can band together and build buildings and airplanes and all stuff it's all communal communal things so our it's it's not Central in our science anymore today but it's it's at the core if you understand human beings we are a collective bunch of creatures who collectively create something and so knowing how to do that and how to adjust to each other is at the core of who we are yeah are we losing that a little bit you know people are getting loner and loner and more individualistic huge huge issue screens as virtual realities is our biggest challenge I think yeah why uh because screens give you a virtual reality of pleasure etc etc but it's not real and is not a product of your efforts of doing something you get a cheap reward but ordinarily takes a lot of activity and so you get your little dopamine rush and it feels like you had experience but you don't learn how to get along with other people you don't learn that visual reaction of pleasure of we are friends what role does community and social connection play in trauma everything critical and there's another thing that is troublesome about the development of our field namely in our generation traumas who started with experiences like mine working with combat veterans I'm not a combat veteran I was a conscien objector during the Vietnam war um I don't think about the US Marine Corps and so I couldn't I couldn't have told people what it's like but they went groups they talked to each other and they learned about buts like to be a combat veteran from each other and the moment they made this connection with each other they were become a band of
brothers and that's how people survive trauma by bonding with other people it seems that women are better at forming those connections than men yeah I think so I think so although no that's not entirely true uh I learned a lot about love for my combat veterans to some degree I think most human beings don't know what love is until you have know what like to be in combat together with other people creates an enormously deep deep bond between people uh so I know something about male love more from working with combat R anything else when you're have great danger guys are there for each other they really protect each other they really look after each other what is it about that environment that forms what you describing there as real love and how do we it's danger the natural instinct when you are in danger you know you and I become much better friends than we are if something bad happened to us right now we start clinging to each other is that because we would probably need each other you need each other yeah you need each other and you count on each other and you have each other's back and you're saying to me I have your back um us making commitment to each other is a very profound Human Experience you don't get from a screen well as also in an individualistic Society you're almost trained to not need anyone else but yourself well but you know um I have friends who went to eatan uh so the definition for me of many Englishmen is your mother hatte you and send you off to buring school when you're six years old and never looks after you anymore and what helped my friends who went to the the public schools in England was Sports enormously powerful uh people felt really close to each other moving together throwing balls together uh fighting in the in the fields um that's additionally has been the way that that guys get close together yeah that may bring a bell with you somewhere of course yeah I was thinking back to playing football growing up and just you you yeah you're one you're one unit effectively and if there's a problem in this part of the pitch then it's my problem too if you're in trouble I I'm there to help you yeah and I bet you you still make easy contact with your friends when you
played football with 20 years ago no 30 years ago it's it's really interesting because as you were talking I was wondering how we can bring that back into our lives in the modern world yeah in a modern world where we live on screens and exactly white walles alone yeah you know the studies say that the average I think it said something like the average American has an average of zero people that they feel they could turn to in a time of Crisis which is down from like three I think two decades ago right I'll have a look I'll have look at the stats I'll I'll pull up the stats but the general idea of like us being lonelier than than ever before and how do we in a society that's like designed to be lonely how do I on an individual level fix that I think that's the big challenge actually uh we have a foundation now and the main thing that be is in finding funding for projects like that of how do you help people to connect to each other be in sync with each other we're very much into uh people making music together do making theater together creating projects together that is who we are that is our Glory as human beings this this collaborative active physical creation of things and that sort of not has not been part of mental health we talk and we give pills but but we don't really connect people on a very deep level is that is are you optimistic about this not after the last election no really I'm very desperate after the election yeah yeah yeah you're very desperate after the last election why because the last election was based on othering you are different projection you're evil these immigrants come and killers and they project their own uncom discomfort themselves on people from different religions and different skin colors etc etc it's all projection of people's own discomfort for themselves and there's no honesty about the problem is inside of me and not you yeah yeah so I say you're not a fan of trump Let's uh let's leave it at that yeah no I think no obvious psychopath who doesn't give a [ __ ] about anybody else are you able to point to anything good about him and I've when I've had people on this show that are pro Trump I ask them the same questions I say can
you point about anything bad about him because he's got family anybody who goes to China and says I've been received better than anybody else in Chinese history is a fool the guy's gone bankrupt any number of times he says terrible things to other people he insults other people all the time I'm sure there's something good about him Ivanka seems to have loved him at some point um he's a terrible person going back to this point of trauma um you said that there's three broad ways to reverse the damage of trauma yeah so if I came to you and I was a traumatized person whatever that trauma might be what would what would step one be if I came to you for support with my trauma Step One is tell me about yourself who are you okay uh what do you value what is working what you want to work and what gets in the way so it at start of really language is terrible important I don't make a list of how screwed up you are I help to create a DSM at some for in a very minor role uh but the DSM is not a good way of starting off namely how sick are you I first I want to know who you are what is working what isn't working what has helped you what hasn't helped you what it gets in the way and so we create a map together of who you are uh and to some degree who you are in relationship with me um and I would check a lot with people about is this helping you um so I don't I don't prescribe at some point I may say well have you thought about doing some martial arts uh would you be interested in going to yoga studio but by large I give very little advice but I help people to to discover what is going on and where that leads them in a way and then once you've done that so you find out that I had some early traumatic experience how do you know what treatment would you give me that is a not of tricky thing and that is something in my book I tried to do that and I failed and in my new book I'm not doing very much better I would see how agitated you get how much can you stay in focus and if I would see that whenever a particular subject comes up I see you're getting agitated or shut down
I would focus on that particular experience and if I would see that you are so chronically agitated unable to focus I would say let's just do something you should do some things that help to calm your body your brain down and I'd say when you're sort of overall overwhelmed let's start with yoga or chiong or whatever makes sense to you in terms of how to move your body and i' probably do neuro feedback what's neuro feedback neuro feedback is you hook your skull up to electrodes that can Harvest underlying brain waves so you can project your brain activity on a computer screen and then you can play computer games with your own brain waves to uh to to organize your brain waves in a way that you can be more focused and pay more attention so I've got some uh a graph I put on the screen for anybody yeah watching and it shows five different types of brain waves yeah gamma brain waves which are very close brain waves beta Less close Alpha Less close Theta Less close and then Delta which is when you're sort of sleeping dreaming the waves are very very far apart almost flat so looking at these different types of brain waves if we just categorize them from one being when the brain waves are really tight and close to five which is Delta when they're really far apart is one gamma is that like anxiety or something no no anxiety is very focused thinking okay fine but it depends on where it is so the back of your brain is supposed to have these slow waves because your back of the brain is uh dealing with the housekeeping of your body the back of your brain tells you uh you have to breathe a little bit more you have to go to the bathroom you have to eat uh uh you have to about bodily regulation very large part of your brain is about your body regulation which get messed up in a major way by trauma so um for example When You Close Your Eyes the V your brain is supposed to develop nice slow waves to tell you I'm feeling peaceful when you're traumatized when ask you to close your eyes it is very likely that the back of your brain get will get agitated and create much faster waves than you should and so you get a sense of agitation the moment you close your eyes um which is course Very detrimental to your health so my job
then becomes how to train your brain so that when you close your eyes your back of your brain becomes very calm for example as again it's not this is not about trauma it's about brain organization mean but so trauma leads the brain organization but you don't treat the trauma you treat the BR this organization so for the average person that comes to you what do you typically end up telling them to do the average person some people these days I say I think it would be very good for you to have a psyched experience a psychedelic experience and you found them yourself telling people that more than more and more recently well because I have done the research now and uh our results were really quite stunning much better than I ever expected actually uh but I may tell you no you're not ready for pschs I think you should really do some neuro feedback and some body practices to to uh live more in your body before we start blowing your mind open when you say body practices we'll get on to psychedelics but body practices these are the things you talking about like the yoga the martial arts um massages massages any massage well I happen to know some very good body people okay who so if you if you have been beaten up or molested uh human touch tends to become very complicated and so you may not feel comfort by human touch and other humans may not have a calming effect in your body which is really what we supposed to have in each other so learning to live in a body that can be touched is quite important is touch healing oh absolutely you don't have kids yet no well you have a girlfriend like you know yeah that's true touches touches an elemental human comfort thing you described these three Broadways r versing trauma the top down approach which is I guess talk therapy yeah yeah talk is understanding Insight Etc and you a fan of that no basically uh I'm such a cerebral person so I'm very suspicious of that piece that's you know explaining things understanding things is not my greatest handicap so um so I tend to downplay that the importance of that number two is taking medications yeah which is to shut down the body's alarms signals essentially um are you a fan of that well that's how I started life off as a saop
pharmacologist I did the first studies ever on proac and Zoro for PTSD and so they're not bad uh they can be helpful to people and the third approach the bottomup approach is allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the helplessness or rage or trauma yeah and this is really what you focus on which are called sematic therapies which Target the body rather than the mind yeah well it's a very important piece and I I very much think that's a very big missing piece in the therapy mental health and medical field in general to give people experiences of connection and pleasure that is terribly important but when I uh you know I wrote this book before I got into psychedelic therapies I would add another dimension of um experiences that really blow your mind that really allow you to have an alternate reality experience also in terms of energy there are so many reasons why I'm a big matcha fan if you don't already know by now and so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading matcha company called perfect Ted and one of my favorite perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavor from salted caramel to Peach flavor to mint flavor to Berry flavor one of my favorites is this vanilla flavor which I'm going to make in just two seconds you just take this mixer here get a little bit of the powder pop it on top of the shaker like that put the lid on shake shake shake delicious if you haven't tried this yet you can find perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores or online where you can get 40% off with my code diary 40 head to perfect ted.com and put in code diary 40 to try this delicious multi-flavored matcha now highly recommend and if you do it please tag me send me a message online can the gym help yeah but it tends to become a very solitary experience also you sitting your little treadmill watching Fox News is not my ideal of trauma treatment because I go to the gym I lift weights and so I'm wondering if that's if that's going to help me but that's interesting like one of my close colleagues former friend uh is a weightlifter and she really is very committed that waiting lifting weights can be extremely helpful for trauma and
when she says that I'm sure that's true for her and I wonder for how many other people that's true the trouble is that in their current system you're not going to get the money to study weightlifting for trauma even though you say it's helpful for you my friend Mariah say it's helpful I go like interesting let's see for how many people it's helpful yeah one of the ways I think about it is actually a lot of the people that I've interviewed that are weightlifters yeah are bullied kids I think about Mike who I had on the show Chrissy Chell who I had on the show both of them speak to even Lan Norton actually I think he he speaks to some early trauma as well um there kids that were bullied in some form or had a traumatic OT bringing um and they are just massive now and I wonder you know some people on the surface go or even li King actually you're that way because you're learning to defend yourself and to build your self-esteem but there yeah but that yes is not the right gesture like oh you're just doing that because yeah as if you're being dismissive instead of saying good for you you're doing that because you felt so helpless and you want to build up your bu interesting the my Association is that I testified on behalf of many people were abused by Catholic priests and almost to a person they had become weightlifters and bodybuilders really clearly for the reason that you also mentioned they were just trying to bulk up to feel a sense of agency and power and it didn't work well enough for them so that alone wasn't enough I think you also needed to make a connection with their helplessness psychedelic therapy yeah what's your view on psychedelic therapy there's my own personal background of course I'm a child of the 60s so uh I knew about LSD and I think LSD for me at that time I became a good medical student and U came into culture stopped taking drugs but my memory of taking LSD was very positive and that at that time I got to see that I'm a very small part of a very large universe and that whatever constructs I make in my mind are just very small construct of a much larger reality and over time I've had uh quite a few of my friends have become very
very good scientists and they say the same thing about her early LD experiences of really truly having opened up their minds to many possibilities but then the culture changed and they became illegal criminalized and people stopped doing that and then Rick doblin and Michael mid Hofer started to open up the world to psychedelics and they asked me about it 50 years ago or something and I said I think it's a great idea because when you are traumatized you live in a very constricted World basically the trauma dominates your perceptions and regularly sort of interferes with your exploring larger realities and I think in theory uh having a psychedelic experience and open mind open experience would be very helpful but I discouraged them from doing it because they thought it was too you'll never get by the regulatory practices and then raised enough money and asked me if I wanted to run the Boston side of a very large study which was eager to do very compared very good Psychotherapy by people who I largely had trained uh with Psychotherapy plus MDMA and the results were stunning you describe stunning that people I thought that therapy would be very helpful in many regards and it turned out that therapy didn't make that much of a difference a little bit uh but the the MDMA vastly uh changed the situation and I wrote up that paper but I'm actually sounded by how little that paper gets quoted I I mainly focus on the so-called secondary data of the study which was how trauma change you experience of yourself and what we saw is that people became much more aware of themselves people had comp compassion for themselves so people often times went into that traumatic experience and had the sense of time of oh my God this happened to me that was so awful happened to me personally also actually on psychedelics of things coming up that you were unaware of were so vivid deep down inside and I feeling oh this poor kid look what they went through he was so little he was so small he couldn't defend himself and so you get this very deep sense of self-compassion instead of the usual response of self-hatred and self-blame and then the next thing that we saw
happen all the time is and I was such a beautiful kid and I had this alcoholic violent father not talking about myself but good uh and my poor dad he never got to really enjoy this beautiful kid that he had and they have compassion for the perpetrator like this St a compassion opening drug which is what we have been looking for in so many areas in life yeah you call psychedelics a true Revolution yeah it is yeah and you say it's a particular Revolution because we don't know how it works and I was looking at some stats well we don't know how anything works you know we just have a bunch of hypothesis I was looking at some stats that say um MDMA therapy uh assisted which is an important Point that's what we did yeah assisted with a um a therapist there or someone who's a practitioner there a phase three clinical trial reported that 67% of participants who received MDMA assisted therapy no longer met the PTSD criteria compared to 30 odd perc yeah in the placebo group which is a pretty drastic change see that is the main paper that on which I'm Al also an author gets quoted but but I think is more important not the PTSD did so well but people's relationship to themselves changed and my other paper describes that actually but it doesn't get quoted as much people can be focused on the PTSD the real issue is do you love yourself is your heart open are you open to new experiences you know not do you have this little list of symptoms in the PTSD skill but are you a human being who uh who embrace himself as a human being so really interesting studies um around treatment resistant depression as well um one with cybin which is what people know as magic mushrooms a treatment resistant depression study in 2021 showed that a single dose of cybin led to a significant reduction in depression with effects lasting up to six weeks for many participants 30% of participants were in remission after three weeks and a study by joh Johns Hopkin univ University showed that 71% of participants experienced a more than 50% reduction in symptoms after two cybin sessions with 54% achieving remission four weeks after the treatment and the last study that I'll share is a follow-up study found that nearly 60% of
participants maintained reductions in depression symptoms one year after treatment but these compounds aren't even legal in America and the UK yet that's right but ketamine is ketamine is and we do a fair amount of ketamine is just a therapy these days and I'm intrigued that ketamine seems to have similar effects to psilocybin and MDMA even though they're completely different chemical substances have you ever done a a psychedelic drug yeah of course I as part of my being Pi of this MDMA study I had to do MDMA but for example um I thought MDMA was ecstasy and gave put you in place of pleasure uh as part of my job I had to take MDMA myself and I was ready for my magical experience I'd never done it before and instead IID always poo poo the issue of vicarious trauma no it didn't really hurt me all that much to see all the trauma the world and while I was having my MDMA experiences all the trauma TZ people's pain that I had experienced over time came back I lied there for eight hours in agony going oh my God oh my God and I got in touch with that hearing all these trauma stories did have had a profound effect on me and so I was really changed by that experience I became a much sadder but somewhat wiser man you became a sad man absolutely I really felt all the pain much more deeply yeah I was able to sort of ball it off onto that point and the ball came down and it was quite painful but what helped me is that my guide Michael mofer when I told him how I felt like a f having have such pain Full Experience he says yeah I know I used to be an emergency room physician and one of my psyched experiences all the patients who died in my hands came to visit me so that was helpful for me because it made me make me feel like I had a connection with another human being and that through that context is terribly important and that's really about much of the issue is are right now and I I think we may very well lose that and that is that uh clearly you need to do psychedelics in very safe uh conditions with a lot of support and that the set and setting of psychedelics which John's Hopkins study also took very good care of all the studies you mentioned did that is that
the context is terribly important and while you're in these experiences the environment needs to be completely supportive and safe and be there for you um and what our world profit driven world is looking for is to give people sakad give them one pill and go off by yourself and then deal with it the majority of the people in our study said to us the study was over I couldn't have done this if you guys hadn't been here with with me did that experience with psychedelics the MDMA experience you had changed you yeah I think it did it made me a much more U humble person and much more compass to to people in general yeah yeah just one dose well I've had some other experiences also I've had a number of other really painful experiences on psychedelics uh and it made me much more so you know people say oh you how how your life gone I became much more aware to what degree my quest for understanding trauma had to do with me than and I learned most of that after age 70 actually really yeah earlier on I asked if people could heal from that trauma yeah have you healed from yours no healing is a complex word I would say yes I'm I'm doing well as do many people I've have worked with I I know that's what I think the real power of my book is that it's a very hopeful book every chapter tells stories about people go better and as much Sciences have been able to do I've proven how helpful EMDR can be I've proven how well Young can be proven how well neur feedback can do that's really has been my mission is to not only be an advocate but really say let's do the science and see how El works and for whom yeah what is the of all the things that you've tried in your life to help you with your own personal trauma what are the things that have personally helped you the most there's another thing that's really helped me and that got me into theater is the issue of saak drama like a drama um yeah it's a chapter in the book and I've never done the science behind it but I still love doing it and that is um when you act out things in threedimensional space it becomes a completely different phenomenon if I tell you let's put your family in this room yeah um and I say where where you choose somebody to play the role of your
dad where would you put your dad you know where you would put your dad I'd put my dad in this room right now I'd put him there right there yeah not there but there yeah yeah so that's what the hell is happening here you know precisely where you want him and if somebody would play that role for you the feelings of which your dad would come up maybe even in your imagination to some degree right now if you imagine your dad there that's the first thing it comes to your mind well I put my dad at the head of the table that we're at because he was always at the head of the table in my household he was always the one when we're at a table he was in charge of us eating what sort of reaction would you have as you see him here um It's Complicated because exactly yeah it's complicated because one of the reactions is like one of the reactions I had is when he sits there he's in charge yeah but now as an adult I have this other feeling which is like no I'm in charge now cuz I'm the head of the table I'm the head of my so it's just this Authority thing of like right yeah that would come up mhm it doesn't come up abstractly but concretely when he sing there it comes up and you may actually that I'm the boss now or I hate that you're being the boss or something some feeling comes up and what is striking is that for everybody when they put the that virtual person the room the feelings toward that person become very Vivid and the overlap is quite different from what the story do people tell actually that that brings up the threedimensional and often times people have had harsh and neglectful fathers and then but I say at some point after you s do things with him I may even say you want to hit your dad possibly I might actually do that actually have you hit your that put a pillow in front of you have people hold but they feel it oh my God if I could have done that would be so great or how guilty I feel so you do something virtually which you could never do in your words and then I would say would you like to pick somebody in this room to play the role of the dad that you always wanted the dad you always wanted it and then you choose
somebody and I encourage you to see how you would like that person to hold you and when you have that you got you usually have a very deep emotional release and say oh my God if my dad would have helped me like that when I was three years older 5 years older 8 years old and I needed this my life would have been completely different and so you make a virtual new reality with that is physical and visceral with other people and that memory of what it feels like can be very profound and you're doing this in with a group of people I do I do this about four times year with a group of people it's my favorite Clinic activity because I'm always just so astounded by what comes out of it yeah uh it's almost role playing your past and role playing but you really because you work in three dimensional space it feels much more real yeah and so but but therapists usually they have this hope that um if I'm respectful and caring towards you I'll give you a reparative and emotional experience uh that will give you the feeling of what it would have liked been like if you had gotten that in the past and what my old teacher about it said about it's a mismatch I as an 80y old guy cannot give you as a 30 something year old guy the feeling of what it been like if your mom would have loved you at age three we cannot do that but in these theatrical Enterprises in three-dimensional space physical you do get an imprint of oh that is what it felt like that's what I was missing so you it's a very powerful way of creating a virtual reality so the subject matter of ADHD has become very popular in culture in 2022 approximately 11% of children Age 3 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD up from 9% roughly in 2016 and in the UK between 2000 and 200 18 ADHD diagnosis in adults Rose 20 fold what with a 20-fold increase in medication prescriptions among men aged 18 to 29 and that's from the nhr and in Australia over the past decade ADHD medication has surged nearly 300% with more than a 450% increase among adults and a significant rise among women what is going on here see I I really see see that somewhat differently from the way you guys talked about it before and that is all these things are on on a Continuum you don't I
you don't have PTSD or you have or you have don't have ADHD or you don't have ADHD these are no binary issues so this capacity to focus to pay attention to be flexible in your attention is is a dimensional issue dimensional issue so people some people have it better more than others some people cannot sit still at all and other people can sit still under certain conditions other people can so um it's not like you have ADHD or not you may have some issues staying focused or staying still or paying attention and that may be very many underlying issues it may be that um your mom took some toxins while you were she was pregnant with you it's possible that it is in your genes um just about every traumatized kids I've ever seen meth criteria for ADHD because trauma really messes up your capacity focus and concentrate so this is not an entity it is a fictitious entity it's not like cancer of the gallbladder is not having astrocytoma in your brain and these mental phenomena are networks of complicated ways of organizing your mind and our diagnostic system just sucks when I spoke to Gabel mate he do you know Gabel mate yeah sure yeah he he was describing what ADHD was to me and he said um he reviews it as a response to Early Childhood stress and Trauma rather than purely genetic or neurological well but I wouldn't say that I'd say it could be genetic it could be toxic it could be trauma this is the surface behavior of not being able to focus and concentrate like my son certainly had criter met criter with ADHD I other than that he disappointed me was not a particularly traumatized kid um no he really had real issues organically based but that he outgrew also at some point so these things are not stable these are configuration that you can grow with over time and they're not multi they're multifactorial they're surface phenomena because I was I was diagnosed with ADHD but the way other people that have ADHD have just like drastically different yeah symptoms to me like drastically different like we're not the same people at all we're close to the same bpark like for example I'm really good at focusing on something for quite a long time if I'm interested whereas I often
hear people with certain types of ADHD be very unfocused absolutely on things yeah and so I I I have struggled with understanding what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD when there can be so many types yeah that's right so almost makes me feel that the label the singular label which we share although there's all these subtypes is necessarily helping me to understand myself in any way yeah I would really you know everybody who who is serious about it stuff knows that our diagnostic system totally sucks really yeah but just is a total artifact of us sitting in a room 40 years ago making up little list of diagnosis there's no scientific validity to this actually PTSD is one of the more scientifically reliable diagnosis of all the diagnosis they're just very primitive ways of categorizing human mind and we know so much more and we should move beyond that and everybody who knows something about science knows that we should move Beyond it but we are not why I think we're not doing it because our focus is not on helping people our focus is on bonding successful financially or financial organizations you know I I I teach neuro feedback and there's a chapter on neuro feedback there and this serious research on neuro feedback and we do neuro feedback trainings and so the head of an insurance company took a training with me neuro feedback and he pulled me aside he said best of course you know that as a head of insurance company I'm not interested in getting people better I'm interested in having as many subscribers to my b as I can you know if we really went back to re being real doctors we say how do I get you better what is wrong with you and and we know so much about Neuroscience these days about how the brain organize information that it's time to actually update ourself to 2024 and start thinking about networks in the brain and what part of the brain is connected with but and mental functioning at different ages and what kids understand at age three which is different than age five and think in terms of how well is your brain able to filter out irrelevant information how well is your brain able to be still and quiet and how well are you able to take on the task and complete it how do I not raise a traumatized kid Vel because I'm gonna
have kids probably quite soon hopefully and I don't want to raise traumatized kids um be sure to listen to people in your environment don't raise them by yourself I think raising a kid by yourself um you'll give the full brunt of your own pathology leave on your kid so it's very important for a kid to be raised by a number of people so the kid gets to say oh my dad is a little bit reactive but my neighbor across the street is much calmer and so the kid gets to see multiple perspectives as all of us idealize African villages as people having many different parents who look after you it takes a village it takes a village I think kids need to be really part of a large environment where they can see their parents as safe people but also flawed people and the more nuclear you get the the harder it gets to keep your pathology out of your kids uh life actually so Community is everything also in terms of raising a child is there anything that you think is healing towards trauma childhood trauma all forms of trauma that we haven't talked about well the the critical issue is that trauma is about being helpless and not nobody coming to your rescue and so it's very important to have the experience that if you really cannot do something or you're scared that somebody comes to your help at this point and you get an imprint that even when I feel really bad somebody will come and be there for me and that is what many people miss when you have a drunken parent so we see this all the time in our practice people have a violent parent usually the father but not always um and then Mom or Dad in my case more my dad than my mom uh turns a blind eye and doesn't say I'll take care of you even though other parent is hurting you and the Betrayal of a parent to let the other parent do terrible things to them and not really say no you cannot do this to my kid is a huge thing for many people it's interesting yeah this by being having Benders who do not come to your help very big deal yeah and the way to to recover from that is to counteract it with adult information yeah it's um have life experience where
people come to your help and I think uh being part of a sports team being part of a theater group being part of a musical group where people really feel now it's your turn coming and you you know you I think the the issue of rhythmicity and synchronicity is really at the core of our internal sense of safety and belonging yeah vessel we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is what do you believe is the question that the audience have just had this conversation are screaming down the camera the question is where do I get the help I need I think that's really the big thing because it is so hard it is such a expiration Mo almost everybody who I know who have found a way of getting better has been an Explorer and uh and quite an accidental Explorer like and then I found this um kavadi teacher and then I found this yoga teacher and then I found this psycho dramatist and then it's but it's very largely accidental that I think the mainstream is not on the right road so you have to discover what work free you and that's a very tough one because you'll feel stupid and ignorant and if something is not helping you it is very hard for you to S to for yourself this not helping me because this person is not helping me but than blaming yourself there must be something wrong with me that is not helpful for you and making that distinction is a very tough one I know it from my experience I've been in treatments for long periods of time despite all my qualifications where it took me a long time to go like I'm wasting my time and my money and if you don't have my education and background it's even harder to say I'm wasting my time my money yeah it was interesting as you were speaking I was reflecting on the things that I was thinking a lot about this idea of community and you're talking about how being in sports teams helps and I was thinking about in my adult life in some of my most difficult times when things were difficult and I went and played football or some kind of sports with a group of people I just
felt radically better and I think actually I put it down to oh well because you know I did some exercise but actually think there's something deeper oh no it's that connection passing that ball somebody catching it you know it made a difference playing music my little piece of music that I made made a better place being in a theater group um being a cook you know there's many dimensions long which you can do that many of us especially I think adult men don't have these kind of things I mean we go to watch Manchester United play or something like that we go to football ground but maybe we need to fill our lives with more of these things yeah we do I think and we should say it to ourselves because I need to do more of that also yeah we well we kind of just assume that Society is designed in such a way where it'll give us what we need yeah yeah but in fact if you think about the loneliness stats and the way things even like the pub is less pubs on the High Street shutting down across the UK and less community centers the church is a good example is I grew up singing all the time and people around me May me sing in schools and now then we got iPods aren't we lucky we get iPods and then before too long you stop singing and you start listening to your iPod MH and so technology has has been unbelievable blessing and what a curse it has been for us yeah yeah Dr Bessel Vander Co thank you so much for the work that you do um as I said to you before we started recording you have so many extreme passionate followers Advocates fans because your work has made them completely rethink and understand their lived experience and also giving them a much more optimistic hopeful cure uh or treatment for their lived experience one of which is my partner who when she she's been telling me for three years to get you on this show and was so extremely excited I think it's the happiest I've made her in the last three years when I said that you'd agreed to come on genuinely um but that for me is such a a personal and sort ofal um sign of evidence of the impact you have on people it is tremendous so thank you on behalf of all of those people for the work that you do and please do keep on doing it because it's opening all of
our eyes and you too thank you I love your show I appreciate you thank you isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the DI of CEO at the very end of it you'll know I ask the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly [Music] h