Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The Body Trauma Expert: Medicating Kids Can Harm Brain Development! Eye Movement Trick That Fixes Trauma! The Secret To EMDR Therapy! - Bessel van Der Kolk About this episode 50-70% of people will experience a trauma in their life, but how do you heal from these devastating experiences? If the Body Keeps the Score, according to Bessel van der Kolk this is how you get even with trauma.
Bessel van der Kolk is Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and President of the Trauma Research Foundation. He is the author of the global bestselling book ‘The Body Keeps The Score’.
In this conversation, Bessel and Steven discuss topics such as, how to heal from childhood trauma, the benefits of EMDR therapy, the link between screens and loneliness, and how trauma physically changes your brain.
00:00 Intro
02:32 Bessel's Mission
03:09 What Is Trauma?
04:37 What Trauma Treatments Do You Disagree With?
06:03 Does Rationalising Your Trauma Help?
07:01 What Is Considered Trauma?
09:40 Can Small Events Lead to Trauma?
10:20 Bessel's Experience as a Psychiatrist
12:43 Bessel's Parents
15:31 Consequences of Child Abuse
16:07 Is It Important to Understand Childhood Experiences?
16:42 Was Your Mother an Incest Victim?
17:31 How Many Patients Trace Issues to Childhood Experiences?
18:01 Examples of Child Abuse
19:18 How Culture Influences Parenting
21:52 Disciplining Children
24:03 Liberation Equals Separation
25:44 What Did You Learn for Your Children?
27:01 Medical Treatment for Behavioural Dysfunctions in Children
30:36 Impact of Movement on Healing
32:00 Importance of Secure Attachment to a Caregiver
32:57 Can You Heal from Childhood Trauma?
34:32 The Body Keeps the Score
36:27 Somatic Approach to Healing
36:53 Are Women More in Touch with Somatic Healing?
38:02 Impact of Trauma on Creativity
41:14 Trauma as a Perception
45:05 How Many People Have Trauma?
45:50 How Does Trauma Affect Brain Activity?
50:00 Study: Reliving a Traumatic Event
55:13 Most Radical Improvement in Clinical Practice
55:55 EMDR
59:01 Demonstration of EMDR
1:04:12 Breath work
1:05:55 Impact of Yoga on Trauma
1:06:23 Study: Effects of a Weekly Yoga Class
1:08:09 Disconnection and Hypersensitivity
1:10:26 Impact of Physical Activity on Trauma
1:13:15 Picking Up People's Energy
1:16:01 Challenges of Individualistic Cultures
1:16:48 Role of Community and Social Connections in Trauma
1:17:37 Are Women Better at Forming Connections?
1:18:19 Building Relationships in the Army
1:19:13 Building Connections Through Sports
1:20:19 How to Get By in an Individualistic Society
1:21:13 Are You Optimistic About the Future?
1:22:12 Are You Able to Point Out Anything Good About Trump?
1:22:33 Human Inclination Toward Fighting
1:22:54 Three Ways to Reverse the Damage of Trauma
1:25:52 Types of Brainwaves
1:27:48 Psychedelic Therapy
1:28:26 Body Practices
1:29:07 Is Touch Healing?
1:29:21 Talk Therapy
1:29:46 Bessel's View on Taking Medications
1:30:08 The Bottom-Up Approach
1:31:53 Does Going to the Gym Help?
1:34:05 Bessel's View on Psychedelic Therapy
1:38:00 Effects of MDMA
1:39:25 Impact of Psychedelics on Treatment-Resistant Depression
1:40:32 Bessel's Experience with Psychedelics
1:43:11 How Did Psychedelic Experiences Change You?
1:43:48 Have You Healed from Your Trauma?
1:44:36 Psychodrama
1:49:33 The Rise in ADHD Diagnoses
1:51:45 Cause of ADHD
1:52:42 Is ADHD Over diagnosed?
1:55:21 How Can We Raise Untraumatised Kids?
1:56:24 Helping People in Traumatic Events
1:58:20 Question from the Previous Guest
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Transcript 20,157 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I've proven how helpful EMDR can be for PTSD and depression.
0:03 Steven Bartlett? Why and how?
0:04 Speaker 00 Well, trauma is a real thing and whatever you're feeling is real, as of course the feeling like a memory. But in our research, you discover 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 wounds at time and were completely cured.
0:22 Steven Bartlett? Can you do it on me?
0:23 Speaker 00 I could.
0:26 Speaker 00 What did you see?
0:27 Steven Bartlett? Vessel van der Kolk has been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century.
0:32 Speaker 02 And for over 40 years, his clinical research has revolutionized how we understand trauma and its impact on our brain and body.
0:38 Speaker 00 Your early childhood experiences create who you are.
0:41 Steven Bartlett? And how many of the people that you treated in your practice have childhood trauma?
0:45 Speaker 00 About 90%, and it's very difficult to change.
0:47 Steven Bartlett? Are they changeable?
0:48 Speaker 00 Yes, that is the great news. But the problem is the focus is not on helping people. The focus is on running successful financial organizations. And even though I was the first person who studied yoga for PTSD, which was very effective. And then there's psychedelic trauma and neurofeedback, where our results were stunning. People are so conformist, we already know the answers, let not explore anything new. But let's do the science and see how well it works and for whom.
1:12 Steven Bartlett? And what about psychedelic therapy?
1:13 Speaker 00 It's very effective.
1:14 Steven Bartlett? Have you ever done the psychedelic drug?
1:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, of course.
1:17 Steven Bartlett? What did you learn?
1:18 Speaker 00 That my quest for understanding trauma had to do with my own childhood trauma. All the pain is suffering.
1:24 Steven Bartlett? Earlier on, I asked if people could heal from their trauma. Have you healed from yours?
1:31 Speaker 03 The diary of a CEO is independently fact-checked. For any studies or science mentioned in this episode, please check the show notes.
1:38 Steven Bartlett? Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode.
2:25 Steven Bartlett? Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, 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?
2:42 Speaker 00 I have been interested in how people survive extreme situations, how people can overcome the history of people doing terrible things to each other, and how we can create a better world in that regard, actually. So the mission has been rather social, but the investigation has been very much based on what you're learning about brain science, what you're learning about psychological functioning, et cetera, et cetera.
3:14 Steven Bartlett? 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 in people using the word "trauma." What is your view on the subject matter of trauma, specifically how we've misunderstood what it is?
3:38 Speaker 00 Well, there has been evolution, which is quite striking. And when I first started to study trauma, I was on the research floor at Harvard, and my colleagues said, "Why are you studying trauma, Bessel? When you croak, nobody ever talks about trauma again. Like, it's a completely alien subject." And now everybody talks, everything is a trauma. And so from being non-existent has become a total explanatory mode. And so we have gone, as we do, from both 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 realise
4:23 Speaker 00 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.
4:43 Steven Bartlett? When people are suffering from some kind of psychological disorder, whether it's depression, anxiety, PTSD, what is it that you disagree with, with the traditional view of how to treat them?
4:55 Speaker 00 People are being taught methods that they say can cure people in eight sessions, which they can't. And so there still is, but people learn in school these days, although no good clinician, no actual practice of that, is to help people thinking out, to straighten out people's thinking and to make them not think these crazy thoughts like. And there really is no evidence that we can do that.
5:23 Steven Bartlett? Is that cognitive behavioural therapy?
5:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, cognitive restructuring sort of thing. Or you can get people better by blasting them with trauma and then before long they get desensitized to the trauma. And I think both of these methods are just, they don't get it, that completely doesn't get the issue at hand, actually.
5:41 Steven Bartlett? Why?
5:42 Speaker 00 I cannot talk to you being a reasonable person. People are not reasonable people. And trauma is as unreasonable as you can be. That's really at the core of, 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.
6:07 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so if I've, if I'm traumatised, talking about my trauma doesn't necessarily fix my trauma?
6:15 Speaker 00 Trauma is a speechless experience. So we did the first neuroimaging study about people believing in trauma and we saw that the entire cognitive part of their brain disappears. That when you're in your trauma, you're just one ball of emotion and there's no thinking. So you're confused, you're befuddled. It is, as Shakespeare says, 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 at this point is terribly important to help you to begin to organise your relationship to yourself.
6:59 Speaker 00 It's not enough, but it's but language and defining your inner experience is terribly important.
7:07 Steven Bartlett? The word trauma, as you say, has been thrown around a lot. 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. I'm traumatized, etc. What actually does count as trauma?
7:22 Speaker 00 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.
7:38 Steven Bartlett? People talk a lot about small T trauma and big T trauma.
7:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm not a fan of that.
7:41 Steven Bartlett? Okay, because so explain why not?
7:45 Speaker 00 Well, this you need to be more accurate. But but the small T trauma is is a very real trauma. When your environment around you doesn't acknowledge your existence. Most people, for example, after natural disasters do very well. Because people get together after natural disasters. I've seen it where we have a cabin in northern Vermont. 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 not acknowledging that what's going on with you. Saying to kids, stop crying or give you something to cry about. No, you don't matter.
8:29 Speaker 00 No, actually, your dad is a drunk because you are such a difficult kid. That your father was doing okay until you came into the family and you must were too much for him. And you caused him to be the person that he is. So it's I think that people mean small T trauma. It's relational trauma, which is a very big deal for most of the people I get to see in my practice.
8:55 Speaker 00 Most people come in not because of big T traumas. It is because nobody saw me, nobody heard me. I was irrelevant. We always had to take care of my mom or my dad, but there was no room for us.
9:13 Steven Bartlett? So if you get fired from your job and it's a traumatic event.
9:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:18 Steven Bartlett? For you because 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?
9:29 Speaker 00 Yes, you could, depending on how you define it. And for some people it doesn't, for some people it doesn't. No, it depends again on the context. For some people you get fired, you go like, well, I didn't like those assholes anyway.
9:44 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. I, I ask this because I'm, I'm wondering if, there's a lot of people listening now that I'm trying to understand if their small experience, which other people think is trivial, actually could have resulted in some kind of deeper trauma response.
9:59 Speaker 00 Absolutely. At the end, the issue is the perception.
10:03 Steven Bartlett? Your perception.
10:03 Speaker 00 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?
10:25 Steven Bartlett? 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. What is that sort of body of work?
10:35 Speaker 00 I had a very good psychiatric training.
10:40 Speaker 00 In Monta Harvard Hospitals. And then I was, I ran the last state mental hospital in Boston, which is also interesting. I, it was a sanctuary for very disturbed people. And so that is, she gets closed. I go work at the Veterans Administration Hospital.
11:02 Speaker 00 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 then it's all apart, I go, oh. And they reminded me of some of my relatives who I grew up with, who also have been concentration camp survivors 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.
11:36 Steven Bartlett? This is central to your story is this early experience. You said earlier that you, you were born in nineteen forty three.
11:43 Speaker 00 Nineteen forty three, very important. When you're born, it has a huge influence on who you become. So my early age imprint is of, my father at some point was detained by the Germans. He was not in a concentration 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 I have no conscious imprint of that, but I grew up like a kid growing up in Ukraine today. And a lot of kids my age died. I was a very sickly child, it was a lot of hunger and misery.
12:27 Speaker 00 Half my generation died of starvation. And so I grew up with the incredible pre-conscious imprint of what kids in Ukraine and Gaza are going through right now. And that must have left a trace in my curiosity and my being, including a trace of having a body that was very sickly.
12:49 Steven Bartlett? You were born in nineteen forty three in Nazi occupied.
12:53 Speaker 00 Netherlands.
12:54 Steven Bartlett? Netherlands, okay. And you're the middle children of five.
12:57 Speaker 00 That's right, yeah.
12:58 Steven Bartlett? You were very sick as a child.
13:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:01 Steven Bartlett? What were your parents like in terms of love, affection, all those kinds of things?
13:05 Speaker 00 My mother was more or less broken by the pandemic of nineteen nineteen, in which her father developed Parkinsonism and became one of those Oliver Sacks type people. So my mother was a very frozen person, which had a very impact on me. And my father was very conscientious, loving.
13:27 Steven Bartlett? You described your mother as being a frozen person.
13:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:30 Steven Bartlett? And it had an impact on you.
13:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, having a frozen mother has an impact.
13:35 Steven Bartlett? What was that impact?
13:36 Speaker 00 The impact is that if you have a mother who is not available to love you and care for you, that becomes part of your perception of the world. And that means that there's a lot of work to be done about learning about affection and intimacy and closeness and vulnerability and all those sorts of things.
13:58 Steven Bartlett? Your mother would faint whenever Bessel would ask her what her life was like when she was a little girl.
14:02 Speaker 00 No, no, I asked her only once.
14:07 Speaker 00 I was already a junior professor at Harvard, had two kids. And my parents came to visit me. And here's an example of, oh, sorry, parents I had. I left at age 18 for the US because I wanted some distance between me and my parents.
14:25 Speaker 00 Then, 15 years later, quite a few years later, I wrote to my parents. It's customary for parents to come and visit their children sometimes. We should be interested in coming to visit me. It had never crossed their mind.
14:40 Speaker 00 And so they came. And we actually had a very pleasant time, very civilized. And so on the last day that 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've picked up, that you were 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 her bed. So I don't know if my mother was sexually abused.
15:26 Speaker 00 She just fainted and answered the question.
15:30 Speaker 00 But that's how it goes. You barely get a straight answer to any of these things.
15:37 Steven Bartlett? 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.
15:49 Speaker 00 That's true.
15:50 Steven Bartlett? And in your book, you say that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two thirds, and suicide, drug use and domestic violence by three quarters.
16:01 Speaker 00 That doesn't come from me. This is data from this very big CDC study run by Vincent Finetti. And so this is a date on twenty five thousand people. Yeah.
16:13 Steven Bartlett? People have got increasingly interested in their early childhood experiences as a lens to understand who they are as adults.
16:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:19 Steven Bartlett? Is that overblown? Or is it important to understand?
16:23 Speaker 00 It's not overblown to be curious about how you became who you became and about the internal ingredients of your cake are. I think that's very good for people to be aware of. How do you be, how do you have come, become the creatures who they are? I think being curious about yourself is very necessary. Also to be curious, in order to be curious of other people.
16:48 Steven Bartlett? When you said about your mother and the incest thing.
16:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:52 Steven Bartlett? You'd realised 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?
17:03 Speaker 00 No, but I don't know if my mother was incest. I know that my mother was very uptight about sex. And I wonder what happened to her. And her fainting in response to that means that I triggered something, but I don't know what I triggered. I would not jump to conclusions that my mother was instantly victim. Something happened to her. But I don't know what it is.
17:27 Steven Bartlett? Okay, but the indicator was that she was always uptight about sex. It wasn't that you.
17:30 Speaker 00 Unbelievably uptight about sex. Terrified about sex. Yep.
17:37 Steven Bartlett? How many of the people that you treated in your practice have, could you trace their adult dysfunction back to an early childhood experience?
17:48 Speaker 00 Pretty much ninety percent, let's say, yeah.
17:51 Steven Bartlett? Ninety percent?
17:52 Speaker 00 But, you know, that's me. I mean, people with autism or people with OCD don't come to see me. That's why I have a very narrow filter, in a way, of who comes to see me.
18:06 Steven Bartlett? And what's the crux of what happened to them as a child, if you had to simplify it?
18:10 Speaker 00 The crux is not being acknowledged and honoured and for who they were as kids. That's the big thing is they were unseen and people did terrible things to them and nobody seemed to bother to protect them.
18:32 Steven Bartlett? When you say terrible things?
18:34 Speaker 00 Terrible things is being beaten up, being sexually molested, having their bones broken.
18:39 Steven Bartlett? What if it was just words?
18:41 Speaker 00 Also words. One of my patients, mother, said her all the time, "Oh, you will never have friends. If people really get to know you, they will all reject you because you're such a terrible person." That's pretty, that's pretty good.
18:54 Steven Bartlett? Who said that?
18:57 Speaker 00 Well, mother of honour, people, I'm free. But it would not be an unusual thing to say. People do terrible things to kids.
19:04 Steven Bartlett? Intentionally and unintentionally?
19:08 Speaker 00 Automatically.
19:09 Steven Bartlett? Automatically? Is that hurt people hurting people?
19:12 Speaker 00 Yeah. No, you see it in supermarkets and parking lots and stuff like that.
19:17 Steven Bartlett? What do you see?
19:18 Speaker 00 You see people abusing their kids, seeing terrible things to their kids.
19:23 Steven Bartlett? 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 got to have to punish them and I've got to have to discipline them as a way to make sure that they grow up to be healthy and well-rounded."
19:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's an interesting cultural issue. That's 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 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 I talk about the downside of physical punishment of their kids, often 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 church.
20:23 Speaker 00 And they don't argue with that because at least not fade on.
20:28 Steven Bartlett? I grew up in a household where I was punished physically in pretty significant ways, ways that I probably can share because it's just quite, you know, significant.
20:38 Speaker 00 Quite horrendous.
20:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
20:39 Speaker 00 And they are horrendous stories, actually.
20:41 Steven Bartlett? I was born in Africa, so I've got an African mother and an English father. It's funny because I look back on it and I go, and then this is just me rationalizing in hindsight. I go, I'm happy that I had a home where there was discipline.
20:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:57 Steven Bartlett? 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 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.
21:29 Speaker 00 You know, and your perception may change.
21:31 Steven Bartlett? Really?
21:32 Speaker 00 My perception about my life and who I became has quite changed quite a bit over time 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 for you to anticipate, to know what you are supposed to do, et cetera, et cetera. Chaos is a terrible thing.
21:57 Steven Bartlett? I think that point is really interesting because although there was, I was physically punished a lot, it was predictable.
22:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:06 Steven Bartlett? So I knew that if I, and I understood why I was being punished. So I kicked, I was playing football in the house and broke ornaments.
22:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:12 Steven Bartlett? Or something like that. It was never unpredictable.
22:14 Speaker 00 Right. But something comes to my mind as you're talking, is that same visits that my parents finally came. I had a three-year-old daughter at that time. We were staying at a 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. I'm saying, "I should punish my, my three-year-old." And I started to walk to her and go, "Oh my God, I'm about,
22:55 Speaker 00 actually, I feel like crying." Oh my God, I feel, I'm about to reenact what my parents did to me. And I made the decision, no, mom, she is allowed to use the bathroom. And I set the limit on my mom, which was one, a transformative experience for me to actually realize that I'm about to repeat what they've done to me, which people do routinely. And I was about to meet my daughter and I said, "That's the answer to it."
23:26 Steven Bartlett? It still causes you a lot of emotion.
23:28 Speaker 00 It's actually, I'm surprised how much emotion comes up talking about it.
23:32 Steven Bartlett? Why do you think it's so much, so much emotion comes up when you talk about that?
23:37 Speaker 00 Good question.
23:42 Speaker 00 Interesting question.
23:48 Speaker 00 Because it allowed me to have a life. Look, much of life is automatic. But we 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 it, follow up what I think is right. It's a really moment of liberation, but also a moment of separation. Like, I will not be like you.
24:17 Steven Bartlett? It's tremendously hard to do that. Because it's going against your...
24:21 Speaker 00 And I think that's a big thing for all of us. Because we want to belong. We want to be a member of a tribe. And if you do things differently, you lose your tribe. And you become a lonely traveller. So this is incredibly complex. Because 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 very, very major pilgrimage, Smig.
24:54 Steven Bartlett? There's parts of me that manifest sometimes. And I understand that this is the behaviour that I learnt.
25:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:03 Steven Bartlett? And I think there's a part of me that's worried, actually. Because I learnt, I grew up in a home where, you know, physical discipline was the response to most kind of forms of unwanted behaviour. That I'm worried that if I become a dad, that will be my natural...
25:19 Speaker 00 Probably will be.
25:20 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I don't want it to be.
25:21 Speaker 00 But you don't have to follow it.
25:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
25:24 Speaker 00 Your kids will drive you crazy. Girls can do it.
25:27 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
25:28 Speaker 00 And at that point, I think having kids has found a great learning experience in life, you know. We all... None of us knows what we're doing and the kids teach us how to be a very important teacher for how do you deal with this? Because it's very challenging.
25:49 Steven Bartlett? What did you learn from your children?
25:51 Speaker 00 I learned a lot from my kids. For one thing, so my first born was a is a what? Just easy and loving and luminous and pretty and girly.
26:08 Speaker 00 And she now is gender ambiguous and just divorced her husband to be with a 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.
26:33 Speaker 00 Many physical reactions, very bright, but
26:39 Speaker 00 reactive, staying in bed, only playing computer games. And he's grown up to be one of the most loving, thoughtful adult parents you can hope to meet. So both my kids have become very different people who I thought they were. But I have a very good relationship with both of them. Even though I really don't quite understand either of them.
27:06 Steven Bartlett? 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?
27:17 Speaker 00 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 wanting to put my son on medications. Because, but I was a psychopharmacologist. I really studied 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 on with my kids.
28:00 Speaker 00 But he doesn't have bipolar disorder and he is not going to respond to this. 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. But my wife, whom I'm now divorced from, she was really great also in terms of exploring what might be helpful. And so, but the medical to also be aware of is the issue of privilege. That I made enough money that we could spend a lot of time trying to find things that would help my son.
28:43 Speaker 00 If we had lived in a housing project, my son would have been a terrible misfit. But because we had, we were able to give him so much support and care by exploration, that he actually found a way of rearranging his, his mental state.
29:02 Steven Bartlett? I mean, just on that point, there's a stat I read that children from low income families are four times more likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines.
29:11 Speaker 00 That's right. That's, that's true.
29:16 Steven Bartlett? Four hundred percent more likely to receive antipsychotic medications.
29:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a very big issue. It's not really my expertise, but you know, giving drugs to kids is potentially very dangerous because you interfere with natural processes of brain growth.
29:34 Steven Bartlett? Brain growth.
29:34 Speaker 00 Yeah. So if you give people medication that changes certain chemicals in their brain at the developmental phase, it may actually change the way that their brain gets formed and may not allow, as happened to my son, who was able to compensate for many things and his brain was able to learn how to react differently. If you suppress all of that, your brain may not learn these new adaptations.
30:02 Steven Bartlett? You think we should be looking at social conditions before we look at...
30:05 Speaker 00 Social conditions, physical conditions, movement, touch, synchrony, music.
30:15 Speaker 00 So in our world, we got stuck in... Western people are allowed to do things. They can do one thing, is they can, what I call, take a swig. If you feel bad, you take 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 at is yakking. So let's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and all these things. And then, I'd like to tell people a story, that the first time we went to Beijing in 1992,
30:57 Speaker 00 and China was still very poor and deprived and miserable and... Coming back from this Cultural Revolution, and nobody could talk about anything. No, nothing happened on the Maor, no, nothing happened, no. Tiananmen Square didn't happen, it didn't happen. And China was filled, every park then as now, is filled with people doing Qigong and Tai Chi. And I go down into the park and do Qigong with the Chinese.
31:24 Steven Bartlett? What's that?
31:25 Speaker 00 Qigong, it's a Chinese movement, something. And I do that, and I go like, "Oh my god, that's how they survive, by making these Qigong and Tai Chi movements." Which if you do it in Boston, 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 around the world actually have very different ways of helping people to regulate their physiology and their synchronicity.
31:58 Steven Bartlett? I want to talk about all of that, specifically this idea of movement and the role it plays in healing, just to close off on the part of childhood trauma. Why is it so important for a child to grow up with a secure attachment to a caregiver?
32:12 Speaker 00 You become how people see you.
32:15 Steven Bartlett? You become how people see you.
32:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, so if you're a kid and most people, most kids, their parents find you being cute, or at least the grandparents, they say, "Oh, you're cute, you're lovely, you're so sweet." And no kid is able to say, "I'm just average, look at building kids in the world, I'm not any cuter than anybody else." No, when the kids get told you're really cute, that is your reality. And if a kid gets told you're really ugly and nasty and mean, that is, becomes our identity. And so you really become how people treat you early on in your life. And that's a very big legacy that I, as a therapist, deal with, is these imprints of early experience, which are very difficult to change.
33:02 Steven Bartlett? Imprints of early experience, are they changeable?
33:06 Speaker 00 Yes, that is the great news. And also the amazing news that even though we know how to do some of that, you're not going there.
33:15 Steven Bartlett? So you can heal from your childhood trauma?
33:17 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
33:19 Steven Bartlett? Everyone?
33:21 Speaker 00 That's my assumption when I see people.
33:24 Steven Bartlett? In your experience, you've dealt with patients your whole life, your whole professional life. How many of those patients do you think were healable?
33:31 Speaker 00 I really think that if given a chance and given the resources, you can pretty much do something for everybody.
33:42 Steven Bartlett? One of the other...
33:42 Speaker 00 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 behavioural 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, are unconventional methods that do not get practiced in mainstream psychological psychiatry. Because they need to be productive and they need to be cheap. And whether you get better or not doesn't matter, but you're cheap.
34:27 Speaker 00 Is the main motivation.
34:32 Speaker 00 I think the profit point is killing good practice.
34:38 Steven Bartlett? Your, your book was very interesting because when I read the cover and then I watched a video you'd made talking about the sort of six sort of treatments and stuff that exist within the body, things like yoga, you talk about theatre and acting and how that helps you to, to get out of your traumas and such. The body keeps the score. This was a, a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma.
35:03 Speaker 00 And it became a meme, which is an interesting thing to see.
35:07 Steven Bartlett? Well, I, I, I use it in my life, everyday language with my partner.
35:10 Speaker 00 Yep.
35:11 Steven Bartlett? And I've heard 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 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?
35:33 Speaker 00 It really that trauma is a visceral experience.
35:37 Steven Bartlett? What does visceral mean?
35:38 Speaker 00 In your body, heartbreak and gut wrench. You stiffen up, you surrender, you lose your power, you tighten up. That's really where trauma is lived.
35:53 Steven Bartlett? 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.
36:03 Speaker 00 But you could, but I do a lot of CBT with my wife, let's say.
36:08 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
36:09 Speaker 00 I point out her irrational behaviour and that she should really see things from a different angle and that she can really see things correctly. And I really have much success with that.
36:23 Speaker 00 And I'm a bit surprised that psychology does things that most spouses have failed in using very well.
36:31 Steven Bartlett? This somatic approach, I've only recently had 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 this somatic approach to healing?
36:43 Speaker 00 It's really approaches to really experience what your body feels. And also 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.
36:59 Steven Bartlett? Why are women just seem to be so much better than at this stuff than men? Because they're doing like pilates,
37:04 Speaker 00 I'm not sure.
37:05 Steven Bartlett? Pilates, yoga, these are all things, dancing, these are things typically women do more than men.
37:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:11 Steven Bartlett? And it seems women are just more in touch with it.
37:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it's an intriguing question because it's not exclusively women. Of course, men have always done it in armies. And basic training and the military. And what's intriguing to me is that, you know, when people join the military, they oftentimes are 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 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 yacking, but by having very deep shared physical experiences.
37:59 Steven Bartlett? 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 backgrounds, the more creative and successful they often become.
38:15 Speaker 00 Often, often. And we don't know how often that is, but I get to meet quite a few of them. Yeah, yeah.
38:21 Steven Bartlett? It's the people who have had to struggle, who often see new possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options.
38:30 Speaker 00 That's true. That's true. Yeah. But, you know, but those are the people who.
38:36 Speaker 00 Manage to get into my practice. How the people who don't find their solutions don't have the wherewithal and the capacity to make it into therapy with me.
38:46 Steven Bartlett? They might be outside with a drug addiction.
38:49 Speaker 00 Getting drugs, lying on the streets, et cetera, et cetera. And largely, I see it as an issue of accident. You know, this past year, I visited a program in Los Angeles called Homeboy Industries. It's a program for formerly incarcerated, largely Latin men who had no fathers, who had been criminals. And it's a spectacular program where they honor, they say, what do you need? How we can take care of you? How can we make a safe place for you? And I saw a real treatment there, St. Quentin Hospital, St. Quentin Prison, famous prison in California, is now trauma-based.
39:32 Speaker 00 They use my book as a protector. And they're 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. Like at St. Quentin, they have hula dancing classes. I go like, yeah. Moving together with other people gives you a sense of connection, sense of pleasure. They're really beginning to understand you can do it. At Harvard Hospital, you wouldn't do the hula with people, you would dance with people.
40:10 Steven Bartlett? I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment community that says you'll get better returns if you invest in someone, an entrepreneur or a founder that is a little bit traumatized. And I actually think, I don't want to misquote her, but 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
40:54 Steven Bartlett? if you thought there was any truth in this idea that.
40:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that's again a selection bias of people she worked with. I know certainly plenty of people have had, plenty of people working for me who, who really get paralyzed in the face of challenges and who don't have a solution and become very dependent on giving, getting the action. So I think she has a bit of an unusual sample, actually.
41:19 Steven Bartlett? Because I wondered if, if you've had an anomalous early upbringing, does that make you an anomalous adult? Is, does it increase the probability that you become a anomalous, slightly different adult?
41:32 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely.
41:33 Steven Bartlett? Okay, and that can go everywhere.
41:34 Speaker 00 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.
41:50 Steven Bartlett? Is trauma a story in your brain?
41:53 Speaker 00 No, trauma is a perception in your brain.
41:56 Steven Bartlett? A perception, what's the difference?
41:57 Speaker 00 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 and the circumstances, and it's very different for different people.
42:12 Steven Bartlett? Give me an example of a perception.
42:13 Speaker 00 If you beat me up right now, I'd go, this guy is crazy and I can call people and ruin your reputation, et cetera. If you're three, if I'm three years old and you start hitting me as a kid, I don't know what the hell to do about it. And I'll likely think, it's 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, has 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.
42:56 Steven Bartlett? Because you're still forming your perception of the world.
42:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Your brain creates a map of the world. In very deep ways. And so your experiences form an internal waster of the world 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 shuddering up to you because you're on that deep level. It 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
43:36 Speaker 00 profound research experiences I had was purely accidental. We started to do Rorschach tests on people.
43:42 Steven Bartlett? What's that?
43:43 Speaker 00 Ink blot tests. So you show 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 blot test. And that really brought home to me that we all are living in different worlds. And that our perception... Like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those cards. People who had never been in combat didn't see that.
44:16 Speaker 00 Rape 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 the answer in the past.
44:31 Steven Bartlett? And an ink blot test for anyone that doesn't know is basically just a piece of paper with random ink stains.
44:36 Speaker 00 As all this.
44:37 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
44:37 Speaker 00 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.
44:45 Steven Bartlett? I've never done an ink blot test. I feel like I should do one.
44:47 Speaker 00 You know, I learned as much from my ink blot test as I learned from my brain imaging. But the brain imaging is respectable and then the mind has sort of disappeared. But for example, in our psychedelic research, I still very much hope to do ink blot tests because as Michael Pollan says, "How to change your mind?" But we're not measuring how people change their minds.
45:11 Steven Bartlett? 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?
45:21 Speaker 00 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 violence being their parents, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, if I sit in a room, you know, it's not a binary issue. It's not either you were traumatized, 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 the group viscerally knows what trauma means.
45:56 Steven Bartlett? And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans. If I was traumatized and you scanned my brain, is there something you could see?
46:05 Speaker 00 Not necessarily. I can see how 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 parietal gray, a little bit less of the white insula. So you see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, you know, I think 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. You know, I love the Hubble's telescope or the Webb telescope. You know, our brain is like a universe and our technology is very inadequate
46:50 Speaker 00 to really know about all the unbelievably complex connections in the brain. But we have learned a few things in the last 20 years.
46:57 Steven Bartlett? So how does trauma affect the brain?
46:59 Speaker 00 It affects the brain that you tend to, you know, there's one part of your brain that I call the Cockroaches center of your brain, the parietal gray that lights up. It's underneath the amygdala. Everybody knows the word amygdala these days. It's the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger. When you're traumatized, you're likely that that little part of your brain, way back in the your brainstem, is firing all the time.
47:29 Speaker 00 All the time you go like, I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm in danger. And 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 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, the experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gut wrench. 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.
48:14 Speaker 00 You don't feel your body so much, you don't feel very alive either. 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. Stuff like that.
48:29 Steven Bartlett? So the part of my brain, you said just under the, around the amygdala?
48:33 Speaker 00 Below them.
48:34 Steven Bartlett? Below the amygdala. People that are traumatised, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically?
48:38 Speaker 00 The dysfunction is that it keeps firing.
48:40 Steven Bartlett? Keeps firing. And how does that make you feel?
48:43 Speaker 00 And then the amygdala, so there's a constant sense of subliminal dread.
48:48 Steven Bartlett? Is that anxiety?
48:51 Speaker 00 Anxiety is already too high of a mental function.
48:54 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
48:55 Speaker 00 It's more elementary, it's like you're dog shaking, like.
49:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, my daughter has adopted a dog, she was a trauma. And two years later, the dog still walks through my house.
49:08 Steven Bartlett? You've adopted a dog and it shakes in your house still?
49:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, but still, never quite comfortable. And that's how many traumatisers you meet, never quite comfortable.
49:17 Steven Bartlett? So when someone says they're triggered?
49:19 Speaker 00 Now, trigger isn't the higher level thing.
49:21 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
49:22 Speaker 00 So then the next level is indeed the trigger, that is in part mediated by the amygdala. It's your amygdala, if you're a smoke detector, that tends to become hypersensitive. So that minor things get blown up. And a minor thing that you may say to me, I take as the most insulting thing in the world. And so you're constantly triggered by things. And that makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me.
49:52 Speaker 00 And it's not like I'm hypersensitive.
49:56 Speaker 00 And when you have an off day,
49:59 Speaker 00 that is your issue and not my issue, no. When you have an off day, I feel your off day. And then we start getting into trouble together.
50:06 Steven Bartlett? I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector goes off. Is that what it looks like on the brain when it's...
50:13 Speaker 00 That is one particular guy. And nobody is exactly the same as everybody else.
50:17 Steven Bartlett? Can you explain this to me?
50:18 Speaker 00 But basically, what you see here is... This is a guy who is reliving a terrible car accident. He was involved in it. And what you see here is that the right posterior part of the brain, the temporal parietal junction, on the right side of the brain fires, and that's the feeding 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're not a reasonable person. You actually become a little bit of a blubbering idiot. All of us, when we really are angry, upset, are not very articulate, but we have a lot of feelings.
51:03 Speaker 00 And then the piece that I showed is as this guy is reliving his trauma, these two parts of your brain go offline. This is the dorsolateral frontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that's the timekeeper of your brain. So if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say, I'll go, "Oh, it's not a half hour and I'll be OK. So let me just sort of put up with this." But when you get traumatized, the timekeeper disappears. And this is all there is, your lucious sense of perspective. And that is what happens when you're in your trauma. You don't know the difference between the past and the present because the timekeeper of your brain goes offline. And whatever is your feeling is real,
51:48 Speaker 00 as opposed to feeling like a memory.
51:52 Steven Bartlett? So for people.
51:53 Speaker 00 You get it?
51:53 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, so for 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.
52:02 Speaker 00 Off, yeah.
52:03 Steven Bartlett? And then there's these two blanks, empty spaces that aren't activated called the doors.
52:08 Speaker 00 Those lateral prefrontal cortex.
52:10 Steven Bartlett? Those lateral prefrontal cortex.
52:11 Speaker 00 That's part of the system in the brain that give you a sense of time.
52:15 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
52:16 Speaker 00 And as long as you have a sense, it's like little babies always a sense of time either. It's like whatever happens, happens totally. Then you see a child slowly grow and they get a sense of perspective. This is happening right now, but tomorrow it will be different.
52:30 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so that's when, I mean presumably that's when you get anxiety, right? When you start thinking about the future.
52:35 Speaker 00 It is about having a 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 need to have the capacity for perspective and the perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma and you become a traumatized person.
52:57 Steven Bartlett? 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, an M, F M R I scanner. And he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain.
53:14 Speaker 00 Exactly.
53:15 Steven Bartlett? So he was shown maybe a car accident or something.
53:16 Speaker 00 No, no, we specifically his car accident.
53:19 Steven Bartlett? Oh, you showed him a picture of his.
53:20 Speaker 00 What did you see? What did you hear? What did you smell? What were you thinking? Very specific sensory details.
53:27 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so you're.
53:27 Speaker 00 Not somebody else's sensory, your sensory details.
53:30 Steven Bartlett? And the right side of his brain was illuminated.
53:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, lighter being became very active.
53:35 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
53:36 Speaker 00 But, but got inactivated was that timekeeper of his brain. So he could not lie there and say, oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday. He's reliving what happened yesterday.
53:51 Steven Bartlett? Instantly?
53:52 Speaker 00 You feel like it's happening right now. And that's the nature of trauma. Trauma is not a memory, it's a reliving.
54:01 Steven Bartlett? Are you consciously reliving it, or is your subconscious reliving it?
54:03 Speaker 00 You feel like it's happening right now.
54:06 Steven Bartlett? With all forms of trauma?
54:07 Speaker 00 But not, it's happening right now, but my feelings are happening right now.
54:11 Steven Bartlett? In my body?
54:12 Speaker 00 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.
54:24 Steven Bartlett? 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. And it's instantaneous. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's been there.
54:37 Speaker 00 And so people are confused about it, they say, oh, you relive the past. No, actually, you're not aware that you relive the past because the past is the present. So you don't think, oh, this reminds me about the time that my dad used to beat me when I was four years old. No, it feels like you are beating me right now.
54:57 Steven Bartlett? And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering?
55:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, he's done quite well.
55:05 Steven Bartlett? He's done quite well?
55:06 Speaker 00 He did EMDR, actually, eye movement desensitization.
55:10 Steven Bartlett? And what was his results?
55:12 Speaker 00 He's an all right guy, he's functioning, he's fine, he's no longer traumatized person.
55:19 Steven Bartlett? What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice?
55:24 Speaker 00 Oh, really, people really coming to life, people just saying it's over.
55:28 Steven Bartlett? Give me the most, the best example.
55:31 Speaker 00 A good example is the videotape I showed people yesterday of a woman, again, terrible car accident, freezing, upset, freaked out. And then three sessions later, we go talk about it, she says, yeah, this shitty thing happened to me. I was in this car accident and I jolted for it and my head was full and, boy, that was terrible back then. But I'm not, I have a granddaughter and I drive my car to my granddaughter, I'm fine.
56:00 Steven Bartlett? Three sessions it took?
56:01 Speaker 00 Three sessions, yeah. I've been saw it in psychedelic therapy all the time.
56:05 Steven Bartlett? What did you do in those three sessions?
56:08 Speaker 00 Wiggle your fingers in front of people's eyes. I mean, for me, for me, EMDR was really the gateway to work. I was like, sorry. You know, I've written three books about PTSD. I actually wrote the very first book in which the word PTSD exists in eighty-four or something.
56:26 Speaker 00 But I 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 reliving their 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 hears it and 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,
57:07 Speaker 00 after a few sessions of EMDR, go like, yeah, that really sucked. But it's over. It belongs to the past. It's not happening right now.
57:16 Steven Bartlett? You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal their trauma?
57:20 Speaker 00 Well, then, of course, we had to do a little research, which took us fifteen years to get enough funding to do it, to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth. And then we discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you, we call it traumatic experiences, you activate certain pathways between the temporal parietal junction, which is your sense of self, and your insular, which is your sense of your body. So your brain is able to say, oh, yeah, 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 make the distinction.
57:59 Steven Bartlett? And in the research that's been done on this, what does the, what did the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy?
58:06 Speaker 00 Oh, in terms of, in our research,
58:11 Speaker 00 seventy-eight percent of the people who had adult onset trauma, so being assaulted or raped by a stranger, seventy-eight percent of them were completely cured.
58:25 Speaker 00 But that's not the majority of people we see because most people we see have early childhood trauma, which is much more complicated.
58:33 Steven Bartlett? Early childhood trauma is much more stubborn and resistant to this treatment.
58:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, because your early childhood experiences create who you are.
58:45 Speaker 00 So if you go to a fancy college when you're 18, you do become identified with that college, but it doesn't radically change you into a new person. It becomes part of your identity. But if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life, you actually become that. The imprint is very deep early on.
59:06 Steven Bartlett? So it's called eye movement desensitation and reprocessing treatment. I was just looking up some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions. With PTSD, a 2014 meta-analysis of 26 randomized control trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size. Depression, a 2024 systemic review and meta-analysis encompassing 25 studies and more than 1,000 participants reported that it alleviated depressive symptoms. The same 2014 meta-analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect.
59:50 Steven Bartlett? And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data meta-analysis concluded that EMDR 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?
1:00:11 Speaker 00 Good.
1:00:15 Speaker 00 Can I move my chair?
1:00:16 Steven Bartlett? Of course you can. Are you going to come closer?
1:00:19 Speaker 00 So can you bring to mind a really unpleasant experience you have had not too long ago?
1:00:26 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:27 Speaker 00 And can you bring to mind what you saw at that point?
1:00:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:35 Speaker 00 Can you remember what the voices sounded like at that point?
1:00:42 Speaker 00 Or whatever it was. Any sounds come to mind?
1:00:46 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:47 Speaker 00 Do you remember what your body felt like back then?
1:00:52 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:54 Speaker 00 Can you remember what you were thinking? Or bring to mind what you were thinking?
1:01:05 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:01:06 Speaker 00 Okay. So, how vivid is your feeling right now of recollecting it?
1:01:13 Steven Bartlett? Make a six, seven out of 10.
1:01:14 Speaker 00 Okay. So stay there. Now, follow my finger with your eyes. So, look at me right now.
1:01:40 Speaker 00 Deep breath.
1:01:46 Speaker 00 So, what comes to your mind right now as we're doing this?
1:01:51 Steven Bartlett? I feel calm.
1:01:54 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I just don't feel calm.
1:01:56 Speaker 00 Okay. So, when you go back to what we're just feeling,
1:02:03 Speaker 00 what's it like now?
1:02:04 Steven Bartlett? Um, it's...
1:02:09 Steven Bartlett? It's hard to recall why I was bothered. It's the best way to describe it.
1:02:15 Speaker 00 That is the weird stuff.
1:02:17 Steven Bartlett? Why is that? Is that just because... Why is that?
1:02:18 Speaker 00 No, see, that is what's so great about his work. We don't know the linearity. And we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint is gone now. But it is.
1:02:34 Speaker 00 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 somehow EMDR seems to do, it creates new associative processes in the brain. So let's say, first time people did EMDR on me. Something really very, very nasty had happened to me and I started off being very upset. And then during the EMDR, I don't know if this 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. Sounds really, don't come to my mind.
1:03:16 Speaker 00 And then we stopped it and indeed, 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. And because I'm suspicious of language, because language is always an interactive process. And if I would ask you to tell me what happened, you will filter yourself because certain things may be embarrassing or you don't want me to know about it. And so we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it and we organize some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this. So you saw a little bit of this, very in minor way.
1:03:59 Speaker 00 For me, when I first saw this, I was blown away by it and thought, I need to study this. So when they quote the studies, the main study was done by me. NIH funded it, but I was also the last time that somebody could fund it for EMDR.
1:04:18 Steven Bartlett? Breathwork?
1:04:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:04:20 Steven Bartlett? What role did, Breathwork's become a really big topic. My partner runs a business called Bar Breathwork, hashtag ad. And she takes women away, she does these breathwork retreats all around the world, has a studio, etc. What do you think of Breathwork as a way to really?
1:04:34 Speaker 00 It makes perfect sense.
1:04:35 Steven Bartlett? Why?
1:04:36 Speaker 00 For one thing, it's been used since time immemorial in certain cultures. And people say, people always discover it. In India, people know it. Not in Europe, nobody knows about breathwork. And so these are culturally dependent things. I think the closers may know it. I don't know, go out there, see if people know. And so people are so conformist to be approved of by their teachers and their peers. That when people do something innovative, they tend to very quickly be, oh, they're a cookie. They're crazy.
1:05:16 Speaker 00 I've like, I really got into bodywork and I've not done breathwork myself, but I hear about it from people and I...
1:05:26 Speaker 00 So it's perfectly legitimate to me. But when I, we do something new, like I was the first person who studied yoga for PTSD. And people go like, putting your butt in the air and twisting your spine, that's all for trauma like. And I said, well, let's find out. And so we did a study and it turned out that yoga was very effective for treatment of PTSD. But the overwhelming reaction of my academic colleagues was, oh, there he goes again. He's gone off the deep end.
1:05:56 Speaker 00 And now yoga is pretty well accepted.
1:06:00 Steven Bartlett? So you can, you can use yoga to treat trauma?
1:06:04 Speaker 00 You can, no, you don't treat trauma. You, you, you yoga to treat your relationship to your body.
1:06:12 Speaker 00 It's not the same thing, but trauma really distorts your relationship to your body. And what our research also shows is that when you start doing yoga, certain brain areas that tend to get sort of dampened by trauma come to life.
1:06:28 Steven Bartlett? What did you find in those studies? I've got one particular sort of screenshot here.
1:06:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a little study.
1:06:33 Steven Bartlett? What's, so what's, explain here what's going on and there's something...
1:06:37 Speaker 00 This is a tiny study, so what you see here is that after doing yoga, your insula gets more activated. Your insula is the, the place in your brain that makes you know what your body feels. Like when it rains and you have no raincoat on, you go, I better get an umbrella. So that you need to know what your body experiences needs and anticipates. And that dimension of self-experience tends to get very damaged by trauma.
1:07:08 Speaker 00 The reason for that is it's an adaptive thing because trauma is so we lived in visceral, visceral experiences, as Darwin said, heartbreak and gut wrench is the visceral sensations. And so if you're constantly heartbroken and gut-wrenched, you charge to put that down. And so you lose contact with your body in as a defensive maneuver of feeling overwhelmed by these physical sensations.
1:07:34 Steven Bartlett? So I want to make sure you understand this. So the insular part of the brain is the part that links how we're what we do with how we feel?
1:07:42 Speaker 00 How we viscerally feel, yeah, what's happening in our bodies.
1:07:46 Steven Bartlett? Okay, it links, so it links how we're feeling in our bodies to?
1:07:50 Speaker 00 To what we know about ourselves, yeah.
1:07:53 Steven Bartlett? The stories we have in our head about ourselves. So that's what the insular does and trauma interrupts that, which causes what kind of dysfunction on a day-to-day basis?
1:08:01 Speaker 00 You're out of structure, you feel numbed out.
1:08:04 Steven Bartlett? Or disconnected.
1:08:05 Speaker 00 You don't feel alive, you don't feel connected, you can't feel pleasure.
1:08:11 Steven Bartlett? Or you feel hypersensitive?
1:08:12 Speaker 00 And you feel hypersensitive.
1:08:14 Steven Bartlett? Because you talk about the two responses being disconnection or hypersensitivity.
1:08:17 Speaker 00 There's always these two contradictory things that coexist, remembering too much and remembering too little, feeling too much and feeling too little. There is no happy medium, you go from one extreme to another, you're agitated and numbed out at the same time.
1:08:35 Steven Bartlett? And that's?
1:08:36 Speaker 00 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 it's a very uncommon human experience.
1:08:52 Steven Bartlett? And the insular is playing a role?
1:08:53 Speaker 00 The insular plays a big role in that and many other brain structures.
1:08:57 Steven Bartlett? So if I start doing yoga?
1:08:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:09:00 Steven Bartlett? What is that then doing to that hypersensitivity disconnection?
1:09:03 Speaker 00 Yoga makes it possible for you to reconnect. Your senses, in a way, to feel what you feel and to make it safe what you feel. So as we go to yoga studio with a teacher with a nice voice, who really helps you to now take a deep breath, stretch out your arms, feel that warrior three pose. And then you start feeling it. And for many people, doing yoga can be actually quite agitating, scary actually, in a way. For traumatized people, we see it all the time, is that something gets triggered. And you start getting upset just doing a simple down dog, let's say.
1:09:44 Speaker 00 Or certainly the yoga pose that all sexual abuse victims have great trouble with is the happy baby pose. Happy baby pose is when you put your feet in the air, you lie on your back, you hold your toes and you spread your legs by it. So your pelvis is up against the air. For most of us, that's a very pleasant pose, makes you relax. If you're a sexual abuse survivor, that's going to trigger a lot of stuff.
1:10:13 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:10:13 Speaker 00 Yeah. And you have to be very careful doing that.
1:10:18 Steven Bartlett? Because it's...
1:10:19 Speaker 00 It's triggering. And so because these positions may be triggering, you may hold your body in a frozen position in order not to trigger those feelings of sexual abuse.
1:10:32 Steven Bartlett? I was just thinking as you're speaking about a friend of mine who tends to go through life with a sort of crumpled up body. And they're low self-esteem, they're quite low confident. 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 goes...
1:10:57 Speaker 00 Absolutely. I told you I was a sickly child. I was really sickly until I had asthma when I was 13. And I think the most helpful thing I ever did was rolling. Rolling is a very intense form of massage where they sort of tear your muscles from your fascia. And I came to live in a new body. I no longer live frozen in that body of this little child who almost died. It had a profound effect on me, as much as anything I've ever done.
1:11:31 Steven Bartlett? Why and how?
1:11:32 Speaker 00 Because you get stuck in habits. In a way, trauma becomes a habit. My habit is that when I see a phone 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, you know, whenever a person like that comes in the room, I freeze and I sound like an idiot. 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?
1:12:12 Speaker 00 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, have you ever tried martial arts?
1:12:34 Speaker 00 See what it would be like for you to actually learn to use your body to fight somebody?
1:12:40 Speaker 00 And that's, for example, a 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 help gives them a visceral 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 visceral experience.
1:13:21 Steven Bartlett? People often describe meeting somebody and their body just being off.
1:13:25 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:13:25 Steven Bartlett? So they say, I met this person and my body was just, I just felt
1:13:29 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:13:29 Steven Bartlett? Something in my body.
1:13:30 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:13:30 Steven Bartlett? That they can't consciously articulate, but they just feel it in their body. This person's a bit off.
1:13:34 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:13:35 Steven Bartlett? What do you think they're describing there?
1:13:37 Speaker 00 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 in the past few years, but I think it's a very important invention. That you're, I pick up your energy. And if, let's say you're depressed, but you have a job to do some, 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 I 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, be very well, but you may pick up that anger.
1:14:23 Speaker 00 And that's really the very complicated stuff in psychotherapy. Am I picking up 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, huh?
1:14:47 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. And from an evolutionary standpoint, as you were speaking, I was thinking, where, where has this come from? You know, this ability to subconsciously just get a read for someone and then form a pattern of, okay, this type of person hurt me in the past. And 20 years later, I meet someone in the street and I immediately feel the same.
1:15:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:15:07 Steven Bartlett? Is that just a survival thing?
1:15:09 Speaker 00 I think that makes perfect sense to me, like, because we are primates.
1:15:15 Speaker 00 Something that came up in your interview with Trevor, the degree to which, 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 becomes a critical issue of our survival. The reason 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 sorts of stuff. It's all communal, communal things. So our, it's not central in our science anywhere today, but it's at the core of, if you understand, human beings. We are a collective bunch of creatures who collectively create something.
1:16:00 Speaker 00 And so knowing how to do that and how to adjust to each other is at the core of who we are.
1:16:07 Steven Bartlett? Are we losing that a little bit? You know, people are getting lonelier and lonelier and more individualistic.
1:16:11 Speaker 00 Huge, huge issue. Screens as virtual realities is our biggest challenge, I think. Yeah.
1:16:20 Steven Bartlett? Why?
1:16:21 Speaker 00 Because screens give you a virtual reality of pleasure, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not real and it's not a product of your efforts of doing something. You get a cheap reward, but ordinarily it 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 visceral reaction of pleasure of we are friends.
1:16:53 Steven Bartlett? What role does community and social connection play in trauma?
1:16:57 Speaker 00 Everything, critical. And there's another thing that is troublesome about the development of our field, namely in our generation, Thomas, who started with experiences like mine, working with combat veterans. I'm not a combat veteran. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. I don't even think about the US Marine Corps. And so I couldn't, I couldn't have told people what it's like. But they went in groups and they talked to each other and they learned about what it's like to be a combat veteran from each other. And the moment they made this connection with each other, they were becoming a band of brothers.
1:17:38 Speaker 00 And that's how people survive trauma, by bonding with other people.
1:17:42 Steven Bartlett? It seems that women are better at forming those connections than men.
1:17:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think so.
1:17:47 Speaker 00 Although, no, that's not entirely true.
1:17:51 Speaker 00 I learned a lot about love from my combat veterans. To some degree, I think most human beings don't know what love is until you know what it's like to be in combat together with other people. Creates an enormously deep bond between people. So I know something about male love more from with combat veterans than anything else. When you're in great danger, guys are there for each other. They really protect each other, they really look after each other.
1:18:24 Steven Bartlett? What is it about that environment that forms what you're describing there as real love? And how do we?
1:18:30 Speaker 00 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'd start clinging to each other.
1:18:44 Steven Bartlett? Is that because we would probably need each other?
1:18:45 Speaker 00 You'd 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.
1:18:54 Speaker 00 Us making commitment to each other is a very profound human experience. You don't get that from a screen.
1:19:00 Steven Bartlett? Well, as also in an individualistic society, you're almost trained to not need anyone else but yourself.
1:19:05 Speaker 00 Well, but, you know, I have friends who went to Eton. Actually, so the definition for me of many Englishmen is your mother hates you and sends you off to boarding school when you're six years old. Never looks after you anymore. And what helped my friends who went to the public schools in England was sports. Enormously powerful. People felt really close to each other, moving together, throwing balls together, fighting in the field. That traditionally has been the way that guys get close together.
1:19:39 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:19:40 Speaker 00 That may ring a bell with you somewhere.
1:19:42 Steven Bartlett? Of course, yeah, I was thinking back to playing football growing up and just you you 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.
1:19:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, I bet you you still make easy contact with your friends who you played football with twenty years ago, not thirty years ago.
1:20:01 Steven Bartlett? 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.
1:20:06 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:06 Steven Bartlett? In a modern world where we live on screens and.
1:20:09 Speaker 00 Exactly.
1:20:09 Steven Bartlett? White walls alone.
1:20:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:12 Steven Bartlett? You know, the studies say that.
1:20:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:13 Steven Bartlett? 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.
1:20:22 Speaker 00 Right.
1:20:22 Steven Bartlett? I'll have a look. I'll have a look at the stats. I'll pull up the stats. But the the general idea of like us being lonelier than ever before. And how do we, in a society that's like designed to be lonely?
1:20:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:33 Steven Bartlett? How do I, on an individual level, fix that?
1:20:36 Speaker 00 I think that's the big challenge. Actually, we have a foundation now. And the main thing that we're interested is in finding funding for projects like that, of how do you help people connect to each other, be in sync with each other. We're very much into people making music together, making theatre together, creating projects together. That is who we are. That is our glory as human beings, is this collaborative, active, physical creation of things. And that sort of has not been part of mental health. We talk, I mean, give pills, but but we don't really connect people on a very deep level.
1:21:19 Steven Bartlett? Is that, are you optimistic about this?
1:21:23 Speaker 00 Not after the last election, no.
1:21:26 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:21:27 Speaker 00 I'm very desperate after the election. Yeah.
1:21:30 Steven Bartlett? You're very desperate after the last election. Why?
1:21:33 Speaker 00 Because the last election was based on othering.
1:21:39 Speaker 00 You are different, projecting, you're evil. These immigrants come and kill us, and they project their own discomfort with themselves on people from different religions and different skin colors, et cetera, et cetera. It's all projection of people's own discomfort with themselves. And there's no honesty about the problem is inside of me and not you.
1:22:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. So I think you're not a fan of Trump?
1:22:09 Speaker 00 Let's leave it at that. No, I think, no, you're an obvious psychopath who doesn't give a shit about anybody else.
1:22:18 Steven Bartlett? Are you able to point at anything good about him? And 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?
1:22:29 Steven Bartlett? Because he's got a family.
1:22:30 Speaker 00 Anybody who goes to China and says, I've been received better than anybody else in Chinese history is a fool.
1:22:40 Speaker 00 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.
1:22:56 Speaker 00 He's a terrible person.
1:22:59 Steven Bartlett? Going back to this point of trauma, you said that there's three broad ways to reverse the damage of trauma.
1:23:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:23:05 Steven Bartlett? So if I came to you and I was a traumatized person, whatever that trauma might be, what would step one be if I came to you for support with my trauma?
1:23:13 Speaker 00 Step one is tell me about yourself. Who are you?
1:23:16 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:23:17 Speaker 00 What do you value? What is working? What do you want to work and what gets in the way? So at the start of, really, language is terribly important. I don't make a list of how screwed up you are.
1:23:34 Speaker 00 I helped to create DSM at some point in a very minor role, 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 gets in the way. And so we create a map together of who you are.
1:23:59 Speaker 00 And to some degree, who you are in relation with me.
1:24:03 Speaker 00 And I would check a lot with people about, is this helping you?
1:24:08 Speaker 00 So I don't prescribe.
1:24:12 Speaker 00 At some point, I may say, well, have you thought about doing some martial arts?
1:24:19 Speaker 00 We should be interested in going to yoga studio. But by and large, I give very little advice, but I help people to discover what is going on and where that leads them in a way.
1:24:34 Steven Bartlett? 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?
1:24:42 Speaker 00 That is another 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 you can 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 sort of 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 overwhelmed,
1:25:23 Speaker 00 let's start with yoga, or qigong, or whatever makes sense to you in terms of how to move your body. And I'd probably do neurofeedback.
1:25:32 Steven Bartlett? What's neurofeedback?
1:25:33 Speaker 00 Neurofeedback is you hook your skull up to electrodes that can harvest the underlying brainwaves. So you can project your brain activity on a computer screen. And then you can play computer games with your own brainwaves to organize your brainwaves in a way that you can be more focused and pay more attention.
1:25:58 Steven Bartlett? So I've got some graph up on the screen for anybody watching, and it shows five different types of brainwaves. Gamma brainwaves, which are very close brainwaves, 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 brainwaves, if we just categorize them from one being when the brainwaves 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?
1:26:32 Speaker 00 No, anxiety is very focused thinking.
1:26:34 Steven Bartlett? Okay, fine.
1:26:35 Speaker 00 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 dealing with the housekeeping of your body. The back of your brain tells you, you have to breathe a little bit more, you have to go to the bathroom, you have to eat, you have to, sort of bodily regulation, very large part of your brain is about your body regulation, which got messed up in a major way by trauma. So, for example, when you close your eyes, the back of your brain is supposed to develop nice, slow waves to tell you, I'm feeling peaceful. When you're traumatized, when they ask you to close your eyes, it is very likely that
1:27:17 Speaker 00 the back of your brain gets, 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, 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. Again, it's not, this is not about trauma, it's about brain organization.
1:27:47 Speaker 00 That means that, so trauma leads to brain organization, but you don't treat the trauma, you treat the brain disorganization.
1:27:53 Steven Bartlett? So for the average person that comes to you, what do you typically end up telling them to do? That the average person?
1:28:01 Speaker 00 Some people these days, I say, I think it would be very good for you to have a psychedelic experience.
1:28:06 Steven Bartlett? A psychedelic experience? And you found yourself telling people that more than, more and more recently?
1:28:12 Speaker 00 Well, because I have done the research now and our results were really quite stunning, much better than I ever expected, actually. But I may tell you, no, you're not ready for psychedelics. I think you should really do some neurofeedback and some body practices to live more in your body before we start blowing your mind open.
1:28:31 Steven Bartlett? When you say body practices, we'll get on to psychedelics, but body practices, these are the things you're talking about, like the yoga, the martial arts?
1:28:39 Speaker 00 Massages.
1:28:40 Steven Bartlett? Massages. Any massage?
1:28:43 Speaker 00 Well, I happen to know some very good body people.
1:28:46 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:28:47 Speaker 00 Who, so if you, if you have been beaten up or molested. Human touch tends to become very complicated. And so you may not feel comforted by human touch. And other humans may not have a calming effect in your body, which is really what we're supposed to have in each other. So learning to live in a body that can be touched is quite important.
1:29:13 Steven Bartlett? Is touch healing?
1:29:14 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. You don't have kids yet?
1:29:17 Steven Bartlett? No.
1:29:18 Speaker 00 Well, you have a girlfriend, you know.
1:29:21 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, that's true.
1:29:22 Speaker 00 Touch is an elemental human comfort thing.
1:29:26 Steven Bartlett? You described these three ways of reversing trauma. The top-down approach, which is, I guess, talk therapy?
1:29:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Talk is understanding inside, et cetera.
1:29:35 Steven Bartlett? And are you a fan of that?
1:29:36 Speaker 00 No, basically, 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 I tend to downplay that, the importance of that.
1:29:52 Steven Bartlett? Number two is taking medications?
1:29:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:29:55 Steven Bartlett? Which is to shut down the body's alarm signals, essentially. Are you a fan of that?
1:30:00 Speaker 00 Well, that's how I started life off as a psychopharmacologist. I did the first studies ever on Prozac and Zoro for PTSD. And so they're not bad. They can be helpful to people.
1:30:13 Steven Bartlett? And the third approach, the bottom-up approach, is allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the helplessness or rage or trauma.
1:30:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:30:20 Steven Bartlett? And this is really what you focus on, which are called somatic therapies, which target the body rather than the mind.
1:30:25 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, it's a very important piece. And 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's terribly important. But when I, you know, I wrote this book before I got into psychedelic therapies, I would add another dimension of experiences that really blow your mind. That really allow you to have an alternate reality experience also.
1:31:00 Steven Bartlett? 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 favourite Perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavour, from salted caramel to peach flavour, to mint flavour, to berry flavour. One of my favourites is this vanilla flavour, 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.
1:31:35 Steven Bartlett? Shake, shake, shake.
1:31:39 Steven Bartlett? 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 DAILY40. Head to perfectted.com and put in code DAILY40 to try this delicious multi-flavoured matcha now. Highly recommend. And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online. Can the gym help?
1:32:01 Speaker 00 Yeah. But that tends to become a very solitary experience also. You're sitting in your little treadmill watching Fox News is not my ideal trauma treatment.
1:32:14 Steven Bartlett? Because I go to the gym, I lift weights, and so I'm wondering if that's, if that's going to help me.
1:32:19 Speaker 00 But that's interesting. Like, one of my close colleagues, former friend, is a weightlifter. And she really is very committed at 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 says it's helpful for you, I go like, interesting. Let's see for how many people it's helpful.
1:32:54 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, one of the ways I think about it is actually a lot of the people that I've interviewed that are weightlifters are bullied kids. I think about Mike who I had on the show, Chrissie Cello, who I had on the show, both of them speak to, even Lane Norton, actually, I think he speaks to some early trauma as well. They're kids that were bullied in some form, or had a traumatic early upbringing, and they are just massive now. And I wonder, you know, if some people on the surface go, or even living, actually, you're that way because you're learning to defend yourself and to build your self-esteem, but there's some-
1:33:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, but that gesture is not the right gesture. Like, oh, you're just doing that because, 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 bulk. Interesting, my association is that I testified on behalf of many people who were abused by Catholic priests, and almost to a person they had become weightlifters and bodybuilders.
1:33:51 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:33:52 Speaker 00 Legally, 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 the connection with their helplessness.
1:34:10 Steven Bartlett? Psychedelic therapy?
1:34:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:34:14 Steven Bartlett? What's your view on psychedelic therapy?
1:34:16 Speaker 00 In terms of my own personal background, of course, I'm a child of the 60s, so I knew about LSD, and I think LSD for me at that time, I became a good medical student and
1:34:33 Speaker 00 came with the culture, stopped taking drugs, but my memory of taking LSD was very positive in 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 constructs of a much larger reality. And over time, I've had quite a few of my friends have become very, very good scientists, and they say the same thing about their early LSD 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
1:35:17 Speaker 00 Dublin and Michael Midhofer started to open up the world of psychedelics, and they-
1:35:24 Speaker 00 Asked me about it fifteen 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 interferes with your exploring larger realities. And I think in theory, having a psychedelic experience, an mind-opening experience, would be very helpful. But I discouraged them from doing it because I thought it's too... You'll never get by the regulatory practices. And then they raised enough money and asked me if I wanted to run the Boston side of a very large study, which I was eager to do, where we compared very good psychotherapy
1:36:08 Speaker 00 by people who I largely had trained with psychotherapy plus MDMA. And the results were stunning. You described... Stunning, that people... I thought that therapy would be very helpful in many of these cards. And it turned out that therapy didn't make that much of a difference. A little bit, but the MDMA vastly changed the situation. And I wrote up the paper, but actually astounded by how little that great paper gets quoted. I mainly focused on the so-called secondary data of the study, which was how trauma changes your experience of yourself.
1:36:51 Speaker 00 And what we saw is that people became much more aware of themselves. People had compassion for themselves. So people all the time went into their traumatic experience and had this sense of time of, oh my God, this happened to me. That was so awful. It happened to me personally also, actually, on psychedelics, of things coming up that you were unaware of.
1:37:18 Speaker 00 Were so vivid, deep down inside. And I think, oh, this poor kid. Look what he 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. And my poor dad, he never got to really enjoy this beautiful kid that he had. And they have compassion for their perpetrators. Like, it's an astonishing compassion opening drug,
1:38:01 Speaker 00 which is what we have been looking for in so many areas in life.
1:38:06 Steven Bartlett? You call psychedelics a true revolution?
1:38:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, it is, yeah.
1:38:10 Steven Bartlett? And you say it's a particularly revolution because we don't know how it works. And I was looking at some stats.
1:38:14 Speaker 00 But we don't know how anything works, you know.
1:38:16 Steven Bartlett? We just have a bunch of hypotheses.
1:38:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:38:18 Steven Bartlett? I was looking at some stats that say MDMA therapy assisted, which is an important point.
1:38:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's what we did, yeah.
1:38:26 Steven Bartlett? Assisted with a therapist there or someone who's a practitioner there. A phase three chemical trial reported that sixty seven percent of participants who received MDMA assisted therapy no longer met the PTSD criteria compared to thirty odd percent in the placebo group, which is a pretty drastic change.
1:38:48 Speaker 00 See, that is the main paper on which I'm also an author. It gets quoted. But I think it's more important, not that the PTSD did so well, but people's relationships themselves changed. And my other paper describes that, actually. But it doesn't get quoted as much. People can focus 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 we have this little list of symptoms in the PTSD scale, but are you a human being who embraces himself as a human being?
1:39:30 Steven Bartlett? So really interesting studies around treatment-resistant depression as well. One with psilocybin, which is what people know as magic mushrooms. A treatment-resistant depression study in 2021 showed that a single dose of psilocybin led to a significant reduction in depression with effects lasting up to six weeks for many participants. Thirty percent of participants were in remission after three weeks. And a study by Johns Hopkins University showed that 71% of participants experienced a more than 50% reduction in symptoms after two psilocybin 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
1:40:11 Steven Bartlett? maintained reductions in depression symptoms one year after treatment. But these compounds aren't even legal in America and the UK yet.
1:40:21 Speaker 00 That's right, but ketamine is.
1:40:23 Steven Bartlett? Ketamine is.
1:40:24 Speaker 00 And we do a fair amount of ketamine as 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.
1:40:38 Steven Bartlett? Have you ever done a psychedelic drug?
1:40:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, of course. As part of my being P I of this MDMA study, I had to do MDMA. But for example, I thought MDMA was ecstasy and gave it, which is a place of pleasure. 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, I'd always poo-poo the issue of vicarious trauma. No, it didn't really hurt me all that much to see all this trauma in the world. And while I was having my MDMA experiences, all the trauma test 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.
1:41:23 Speaker 00 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 MDMA experience. I became a much sadder but somewhat wiser man.
1:41:36 Steven Bartlett? You became a sadder man?
1:41:37 Speaker 00 Absolutely. I really felt all the pain. Much more deeply, yeah. I was able to sort of ball it off under that point and the ball came down and it was quite painful. But what helped me is that my guide, Michael Midhofer, when I told him how I felt like a failure having had such painful experiences, he said, "Yeah, I know. I used to be an emergency room physician and one of my psychedelic experiences, all the patients who died in my hands came to visit me." So that was helpful for me because it made me feel like I had a connection with another human being.
1:42:19 Speaker 00 And that context is terribly important and that's really what much of the issue is about right now and I think we may very well lose that. And that is that clearly you need to do psychedelics in very safe conditions with a lot of support. And that the set and setting of psychedelics, which Tilon's Hopkins study also took very good care of, all the studies you mentioned, did it, 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. And what our world, profit-driven world, is looking for is to give people psychedelics,
1:43:04 Speaker 00 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 me."
1:43:17 Steven Bartlett? Did that experience with psychedelics, the MDMA experience you had, change you?
1:43:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it did. It made me a much more humble person and much more compassionate to people in general.
1:43:28 Steven Bartlett? Just one dose?
1:43:30 Speaker 00 Well, I've had some other experiences also. I've had a number of other really painful experiences on psychedelics and it made me much more... So, you know, people say, "Oh, how's 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 more of that after age 70, actually.
1:43:53 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:43:56 Steven Bartlett? Earlier on, I asked if people could heal from their trauma.
1:43:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:43:59 Steven Bartlett? Have you healed from yours?
1:44:01 Speaker 00 No, healing is a complex word. I would say, yes, I'm I'm doing well.
1:44:07 Speaker 00 As do many people I've 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 who are better and as much science as I've been able to do. I've proven how helpful EMDR can be. I've proven how well York can be. I've proven how well neurofeedback 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 well it works and for whom.
1:44:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:44:41 Steven Bartlett? 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?
1:44:51 Speaker 00 There's another thing that's really helped me and that got me into theatre is the issue of psychodrama.
1:44:56 Steven Bartlett? Psychodrama?
1:44:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, the chapters in the book and I've never done the science behind it, but I still love doing it. And that is when you act out things in three dimensional space, it becomes a completely different phenomenon. If I tell you, let's put your family in this room.
1:45:15 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:45:17 Speaker 00 And I say, where where you choose somebody to play the role of your dad, where would you put your dad?
1:45:24 Speaker 00 You know where you'll put your dad.
1:45:27 Steven Bartlett? I'd put my dad in this room right now. I'd put him there.
1:45:30 Speaker 00 Right there.
1:45:31 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:45:31 Speaker 00 Not there, but there.
1:45:32 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
1:45:33 Speaker 00 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 feeling so much 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 that comes to your mind.
1:45:51 Steven Bartlett? Well, I'd 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.
1:46:03 Speaker 00 What's the reaction would you have as you see him here?
1:46:09 Steven Bartlett? It's complicated because
1:46:10 Speaker 00 Exactly.
1:46:12 Steven Bartlett? 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.
1:46:20 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:46:21 Steven Bartlett? But now as an adult, I have this other feeling, which is like, no, I'm in charge now. Because I'm the head of the table, I'm the head of my household now. So it's just this authority thing of like, yeah.
1:46:31 Speaker 00 Because that would come up. It doesn't come up abstractly, but concretely, when he's sitting there, it comes up. You may actually say that I'm the boss now.
1:46:40 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:46:41 Speaker 00 Or, I hate that you're being the boss, or something, some feeling comes up.
1:46:45 Steven Bartlett? My freedom.
1:46:46 Speaker 00 But the striking is that for everybody, when they put that virtual person in the room, the feelings toward that person become very vivid. And it often happens quite different from what the story that people tell, actually. That brings up the three dimensional effect. And oftentimes, people have had harsh and neglectful fathers. And then, but I say at some point after you sort of do things with him, I may even say, you want to hit your dad?
1:47:15 Speaker 00 Possibly, I might actually
1:47:18 Speaker 00 do that, actually, have you hit your dad. Put a pillow in front of him, but to feel it, oh my God, if I could have done that, it 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?
1:47:42 Steven Bartlett? The dad you always wanted.
1:47:43 Speaker 00 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 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 old or five years old or eight years old and I needed it, my life would have been completely different. And so you make a virtual new reality that is physical and visceral with other people. And that memory of what it feels like can be very profound.
1:48:23 Steven Bartlett? And you're doing this with a group of people?
1:48:25 Speaker 00 I do this about four times a year with a group of people. It's my favorite clinical activity because I'm always just so astounded by what comes out of it.
1:48:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:48:38 Steven Bartlett? It's almost role-playing, your past and...
1:48:40 Speaker 00 Role-playing, but you really, because you work in three-dimensional space, it feels much more real.
1:48:45 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:48:46 Speaker 00 And so, but therapists usually, they have this hope that if I'm respectful and caring towards you, I'll give you a reparative emotional experience 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, well, it's a mismatch. I, as an 18-year-old guy, cannot give you, as a 30-something-year-old guy, the feeling of what it would have been like if your mom would have loved you at age three. We cannot do that. But in these theoretical enterprises in three-dimensional space, very physical, you
1:49:26 Speaker 00 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.
1:49:38 Steven Bartlett? So, the subject matter of ADHD has become very popular in culture. In 2022, approximately 11% of children aged 3 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD, up from 9% roughly in 2016. And in the UK, between 2000 and 2018, 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?
1:50:20 Speaker 00 See, I really see that somewhat differently from the way you guys talked about it before. And that is, all these things are on a continuum. You don't, you don't have PTSD, or you have PTSD, or you 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 a dimensional issue.
1:50:47 Steven Bartlett? A dimensional issue.
1:50:48 Speaker 00 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't. And so 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 your mom took some toxins while you were, she was pregnant with you. It's possible that it is in your genes. Just about every traumatized kid I've ever seen met criteria for ADHD because trauma really messes up your capacity to focus and concentrate. So this is not an entity, it is a fictitious entity.
1:51:32 Speaker 00 It's not like cancer of the gallbladder. It's 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.
1:51:50 Steven Bartlett? When I spoke to Gabel Mate, he, do you know Gabel Mate?
1:51:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, sure.
1:51:54 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, he, he was describing what ADHD was to me. And he said, he reviews it as a response to early childhood stress and trauma rather than purely genetic or neurological.
1:52:04 Speaker 00 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 criteria, met criteria for ADHD. My son, other than that he disappointed me, was not a particularly traumatized kid. No, he really had real issues organically based, but that he outgrew also at some point. So these things are not stable. These are configurations that you can grow with over time. And they're not multi, they're multifactorial.
1:52:46 Speaker 00 They're surface phenomena.
1:52:47 Steven Bartlett? Because I was, I was diagnosed with ADHD, but the way.
1:52:52 Steven Bartlett? Other people that have ADHD have just like drastically different
1:52:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:52:56 Steven Bartlett? symptoms to me, like drastically different, like we're not the same people at all. We're not even close to the same ballpark. 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.
1:53:09 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
1:53:10 Steven Bartlett? On things.
1:53:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:53:11 Steven Bartlett? And so I I have struggled with understanding what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD when there can be so many types.
1:53:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's right.
1:53:19 Steven Bartlett? So it almost makes me feel that the label, the singular label, which we share, although there's all these subtypes, isn't necessarily helping me to understand myself in any way.
1:53:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, like I would really, like, everybody who who is serious about this stuff knows that our diagnostic system totally sucks.
1:53:38 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:53:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, but it just is a total artifact of us sitting in a room forty years ago, making up a little list of diagnoses. There's no scientific validity to this. Actually, PTSD is one of the more scientifically reliable diagnoses of all the diagnoses. They're just very primitive ways of categorizing human mind. And we know so much more and we should move beyond that. And everyone who knows something about science knows that we should move beyond it. But we are not.
1:54:07 Steven Bartlett? Why?
1:54:08 Speaker 00 I think we're not doing it because our focus is not on helping people. Our focus is on funding successful financially or financial organizations.
1:54:19 Speaker 00 You know, I I teach neurofeedback and there's a chapter on neurofeedback there. There's serious research in neurofeedback and we do neurofeedback trainings. And so the head of an insurance company took a training with me in neurofeedback. And he pulled me aside and said, Basil, 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 pen as I can. You know, if we really went back to being real doctors, we'd 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 organizes information, that it's time to actually update ourselves to twenty twenty four and start thinking
1:55:01 Speaker 00 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 a task and complete it?
1:55:26 Steven Bartlett? How do I not raise a traumatised kid? That's what, because I'm gonna have kids probably quite soon, hopefully. And I don't want to raise traumatized kids.
1:55:35 Speaker 00 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. So it's very important for a kid to be raised by a number of people. So the kid gets to see, oh, my dad is a little bit reactive, but my neighbour across the street is much calmer. And so the kid gets to see multiple perspectives. As all of us idealise African villages as people having many different parents who look after you.
1:56:06 Steven Bartlett? It takes a village.
1:56:07 Speaker 00 It takes a village. I think kids need to be really part of a larger environment where they can see their parents as safe people, but also flawed people. And the more nuclear you get, the harder it gets to keep your pathology out of your kid's, uh, life, actually. So community is everything, also in terms of raising a child.
1:56:29 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything that you think is healing towards trauma, childhood trauma, all forms of trauma that we haven't talked about?
1:56:36 Speaker 00 Well, the, 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, we see this all the time in our practice. People have a violent parent, usually the father, but not always.
1:57:16 Speaker 00 Um, and then mom or dad, in my case, my dad or my mom, turns a blind eye and doesn't say, I'll take care of you, even though the 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.
1:57:45 Steven Bartlett? Hmm, that's interesting.
1:57:46 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:57:48 Speaker 00 Having bystanders who do not come to your help, very big deal.
1:57:55 Steven Bartlett? And the way to recover from that is to counteract it with adult information?
1:57:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's have enough experience to let people come to your help. And I think being part of a sports team, being part of a theatre group, being part of a musical group, where people really feel now it's your turn, come in and you play, you know. I think the issue of rhythmicity and synchronicity is really at the core of our internal sense of safety and belonging.
1:58:26 Steven Bartlett? That's all. 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,
1:58:36 Steven Bartlett? what do you believe is the question that the audience have just heard this conversation are screaming down the camera?
1:58:41 Speaker 00 The question is, where do I get the help I need?
1:58:47 Speaker 00 I think that's really the big thing because it is so hard. It is such an exploration. Almost everybody who I know who have found a way of getting better has been an explorer.
1:59:01 Speaker 00 And quite an accidental explorer. And then I found this karate teacher, and then I found this yoga teacher, and then I found this psychodramatist. But it's very largely accidental. And I think the mainstream is not on the right road.
1:59:23 Speaker 00 So you have to discover what works for 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 yourself to, for yourself, it's not helping me because this person is not helping me. Rather 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 a long period 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 and my money.
2:00:08 Steven Bartlett? It was interesting, as you're 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 I actually think there's something deeper.
2:00:35 Speaker 00 Oh, no. It's that connection, passing that ball, somebody catching it, you know, I made a difference. Playing music, my little piece of music that I made, made a better place. Being in a theatre group, being a cook, you know, there's many dimensions, language you can do that.
2:00:53 Steven Bartlett? 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.
2:01:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, we do, I think. And we should say it to ourselves because I need to do more of that also.
2:01:08 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, we kind of just assume that society is designed in such a way where it'll give us what we need.
2:01:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
2:01:14 Steven Bartlett? 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 centres, the church is.
2:01:23 Speaker 00 A good example is, I grew up singing all the time and people around me, maybe singing schools. And now then we got iPods. Aren't we lucky we get iPods? And then before it's long, you stop singing and you start listening to your iPod. And so technology has been an unbelievable blessing and what a curse it has been for us. Yep. Yeah.
2:01:48 Steven Bartlett? Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, thank you so much for the work that you do. As I said to you before we started recording, you have so many extremely passionate followers, advocates, fans, because your work has made them completely rethink and understand their lived experience and also given them a much more optimistic, hopeful cure 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 the 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.
2:02:23 Steven Bartlett? But that for me is such a personal and sort of local 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.
2:02:35 Speaker 00 And you too.
2:02:36 Steven Bartlett? Thank you.
2:02:36 Speaker 00 I love your show.
2:02:37 Steven Bartlett? Appreciate you. Thank you.
2:02:41 Steven Bartlett? Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a 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 of 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 theconversationcards.com. They've sold
2:03:26 Steven Bartlett? out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.
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