Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic & How To Heal From It w/Dr. Paul Conti EP 1202

Today’s guest is Psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti. He’s a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his psychiatry training at Stanford and at Harvard, where he was appointed chief resident. He then served on the medical faculty at Harvard before founding his own clinic. He’s written a new book called Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It. In this episode we discuss how trauma is the root of so many problems, yet it’s not easy for us to discuss, how to better understand and heal from trauma, the first steps to take with yourself before seeing a therapist, why your inner dialogue heavily affects your mental health and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1202Get Dr. Conti's new book: TraumaMel Robbins: The “Secret” Mindset Habit to Building Confidence and Overcoming Scarcity: https://link.chtbl.com/970-podDr. Joe Dispenza on Healing the Body and Transforming the Mind: https://link.chtbl.com/826-podMaster Your Mind and Defy the Odds with David Goggins: https://link.chtbl.com/715-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,202 with Dr. Paul Conti. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:29Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, my friend. Today's guest is psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti. And he is a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his psychiatry training at Stanford and at Harvard, where he was appointed chief resident. He then served on the medical faculty at Harvard before founding his own clinic. He's written a new book called Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It. I was so inspired by this work because I feel like so many of us have dealt with different types of traumas in our life, from our childhood to adolescence to our adult lives. And sometimes we're not even aware of the types of trauma we're facing. So in this episode, we discuss how trauma is the root of so many problems, yet it's not easy for us to discuss.

• 1:13Lewis Howes?

  How to better understand and heal from trauma, the first step to take with yourself before seeing a therapist, why your inner dialogue heavily affects your mental health, and so much more. Again, I was moved by this. I was inspired by this. I think it's extremely important for us to take on this type of information to help us improve the quality of our thoughts, our emotions, and our life. So if you're inspired and moved as well and find this helpful for yourself, then please share this with a few friends that you think would love this message as well. Post it over on social media and make sure to tag me, Lewis Howes. And make sure to check out Dr. Paul Conti as well. And I want to give a shout out to our fan of the week from Amanda, who left us a review over on Apple Podcast. And Amanda said, "If you could bottle motivation and fuel for action,

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  this would be it." It's like drinking motivation every time I listen. I had been feeling invisible and like I didn't know myself. And somehow I feel like I'm back. I have the power to remove the cloak of invisibility and make my dreams. Come alive. Thanks for a great podcast with so many wonderful guests and words of wisdom. So big shout out to Amanda for being a fan of the week and leaving us a review over on Apple Podcasts. And again, if you want a chance to be shouted out on the podcast, just go to Apple Podcasts right now. Click subscribe to stay notified every week of our incredible content and leave us a review with a part of this episode that you enjoyed the most. But before the episode starts, I want to give a quick trigger warning that we do discuss different forms of sexual abuse and healing from those experiences.

• 2:41Lewis Howes?

  Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Paul Conti.

• 2:47Lewis Howes?

  This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp online therapy. And I know there's a stigma around going to therapy and I'll admit it, I used to be embarrassed about it, but I've realized how important and normal it is going to therapy. And going to therapy doesn't mean something's wrong with you. It just means you're investing in yourself to keep your mind and your emotions healthy. And we get our cars tuned up to prevent bigger issues down the road. We get annual checkups and we go to the gym to maintain physical wellness and prevent injury and disease. We do chores regularly, or at least most of the time, to avoid a giant mess in our houses. So why do we not do the same upkeep for our mental health? Well, BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video,

• 3:29Lewis Howes?

  phone, and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. And it's much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours. Why invest in everything else and not in your own mind? The School of Greatness listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/greatness. That's B E T T E R H E L P dot com slash greatness.

• 4:00Lewis Howes?

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• 4:41Lewis Howes?

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• 5:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. Paul Conti is in the house. Good to see you, sir. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Of course. I'm so glad you're here. You've got decades of experience on how trauma works and how we can heal from it. You have this new book called Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic, that I think is so exciting for me because I truly believe that it's hard to have a meaningful, fulfilling, peaceful life if you haven't dealt with your own traumas. Yes. You can achieve, you can accomplish, you can explore the world, you can, you know, build a big business. You can meet lots of great people, but there's like this something inside that is kind of like creates this anxiety

• 5:50Lewis Howes?

  or stress or not enoughness. I don't know what it is. And I had this for many years of my life. I've talked about this publicly many times, going through sexual abuse as a kid. In your book, you say you don't want to compare people's trauma, but you say sexual abuse for a kid is probably one of the most, the biggest traumas that there is. Yes. I'm glad you say that because I think the stat is one in four women have been sexually abused. I don't know if they're all children, but the, you know, abuse there for women and one in six in men. And again, it may not be as a kid, but there's abuse for men that way. And I feel like it's hard for people to understand trauma. It's hard for them to understand it. It's hard for them to deal with the shame behind it. Yes.

• 6:33Lewis Howes?

  And then how to heal the trauma. So I want to unpack some of this. Yeah. But I wanted to set the stage for this conversation because you've been doing this work for 20 ish years. Yes. And why did you decide to talk about trauma in this way? And what have you seen from your experience on how it impacts people in a negative way? If it's not dealt with properly?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I didn't set out to be a trauma person, to focus on trauma. But as I gained more and more experience, I thought, wow, like, this is an undercurrent of almost everything I'm doing.

• 7:12Lewis Howes?

  Everything?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:13Lewis Howes?

  Give me an example.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  So it's depression, anxiety, panic attacks, sleep problems, even addiction problems, even psychosis, right? Like, we have trauma pushing people to a point where there's a predisposition to not be able to cope with reality, but it's the trauma that sends the person over the edge.

• 7:30Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Right? Or triggering bipolar episodes. So if you think about more, the more severe mental health problems, right, all the way through to problems that have a scale of severity, right, depression, anxiety, and then certainly, trauma pushing and promoting abusive substances, drugs and alcohol, and addiction, which then, of course, furthers trauma, right? So I started seeing, hey, it kind of doesn't matter, really, what I'm engaging with someone about, right? More often than not, there's an undercurrent of trauma that unless that's thought about and addressed, we're kind of like polishing the hood, right? When we need to get under the hood and really get into the engine, right?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  And there's a mental health system that loves polishing the hood, right? Like, a lot of things we do in life in this country now, we kind of want to spruce things up and make them look a certain way and not look at what's really going on underneath the surface. And then I started seeing that the sort of reflexive creation of shame when a person suffers trauma, the sort of immediacy of that sense of shame and the response to it to keep everything inside, right?

• 8:42Lewis Howes?

  To not communicate about it.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:44Lewis Howes?

  Why do we not want to communicate about the shame that we have? Why is that so hard for us?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, it's the shame itself, like shame i- is synonymous with, with, with the message of like, you must keep this secret, right? And i- if shame is evoked, so if it's in a reflexive way created by trauma, in the vast majority of circumstances, I believe that to be true because I've seen that play out in front of me over twenty years, that the reflexive shame is in and of itself a, a message of secrecy, right? And that's why, as you, you were saying at the beginning, where the people are carrying burdens around with them, and you can look from the outside and tell like, this person's achieved this, this person's achieved that, and you know, what we see from the outside is so often not at all reflective of what's going on in the inside, and you know, part

• 9:34Speaker 01

  of the wonderful privilege of being a psychiatrist and, and consulting to people through the psychiatric lens is, is you get to learn, like what's on the inside, and then you see a commonality that I've seen across the, the whole socioeconomic spectrum, across like any different factor you can identify, right? Th- this is present in people across that spectrum.

• 9:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What would you say is the percentage, rough estimate, of people in America that have faced, that have experienced some type of trauma in their life?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  You have to stratify by severity, right? And i- if you, if you could say, okay, we can identify, like, trauma is negatively impactful in that person's life, and we can take stock of it and describe it. I think we're well over half the population.

• 10:21Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  We just have to be, the clinical work bears it out, the statistics bear it out, right?

• 10:25Lewis Howes?

  Mental health challenges, yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Right, if you're one in four women suffering from sexual assault, right? One in six men, I mean, so that's one aspect of trauma, and we're already up to, you know, twenty, twenty-five percent of people, right? So. Then there's the fact that trauma just pervades the environment we all live in, right? I mean, we experience it vicariously. We look at the news, which is now really more, you know, it's more marketing, right?

• 10:52Lewis Howes?

  Trauma marketing, yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Right, it's repetitive incessant trauma marketing. Look at what could happen to you. Look at what could happen to your kids. Look at what could happen to anyone around you, right? Over and over and over again. And you combine that with the political strife in the country, the worries about terrorism. And, you know, we're living kind of like this. We're living in it with a sense of very much escalated tension in us. So I think it pervades the whole world around us. And so I think in that way, we're all subject to it. I mean, I don't know anyone who doesn't know someone closely or intimately that has identifiable significant trauma. So in that way, it does affect all of us.

• 11:35Lewis Howes?

  What is, what are the common, you know, if you could talk about the theme of all the people that come to you, what would you say are like the five to seven main reasons they come to you? Maybe it's not what's under the hood, but the main things that come to you. Is it stress, anxiety? Is it, you know, depression? What are the main kind of themes that you're seeing consistently?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, what people mostly present with is just a sense of angst, a sense of frustration. You know, like sometimes a person will present and say, well, I have depression, right? And they may know that because maybe they do have very clearly delineated cyclical depressive episodes, right? Or they've been diagnosed with depression, right? But, but when people present kind of de novo of like, well, I don't, say if I say I don't care what your diagnoses are, right? Let's just talk about like, what's going on in you? Like, why, why did you come in, right? Then what people talk is that that sense of angst inside of them, right? This sense that something isn't right, right? And if they've checked a lot of boxes, right? Then, then we have an expectation, right? That, you know, if I'm doing the right things, right? And I have a good, stable career, right? And I have a good roof over my head and, you know, everyone's healthy around me.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Like, I should feel good, right? And, you know, that was part of my own challenges where like I saw that develop even in myself, where I started to develop an anger and a resentment that I don't feel good, even though I've worked hard enough to check all of these boxes. So I think even in those situations, let alone how many people are struggling with financial insecurity, occupational insecurity, housing insecurity.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  So you add that on top of it and you know, we just keep raising and raising and raising the level of tension, which then of course propagates and perpetuates.

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Trauma. The thought of it as an epidemic, you know, predates the pandemic. Like, you know, that was started writing this and thinking about it that way a long time ago, with the idea that we don't know this is here and it's spreading from one of us to another, to another and back, and we're not aware of it.

• 13:30Lewis Howes?

  It's invisible.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but it's, it's spreading quickly and it constantly stays with us. Like you were, you were writing in the book about how just because an event happened in the past five, 10, 20, 30 years ago, doesn't mean it's not still carrying with you today until you address it, until you start to really process.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:50Lewis Howes?

  The integrating of healing, right?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Right, right. I saw that over and over again, maybe, gosh, it was probably 17, 18 years ago, I covered about a dozen nursing homes along the, the seaboard of Massachusetts. And, and some, a lot of people in the nursing homes you could do therapy with, right? And, and I would see over and over again, what is, what's plaguing this person, right? And it could be trauma from 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. That, that was so fresh and alive, a- a- as if it had happened yesterday or last week, yet it could be a half a century ago. And, and that struck me so strongly that, that, you know, we, we tuck these things away inside of us and then they're sort of sealed in us.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And if we don't go back and look at them, we carry with us the burdens, which are often burdens of shame, right? They're burdens of self-blame, they're burdens of inadequacy. And unless we go back and look at that, we don't challenge those lessons, right? Like trauma teaches us these terrible lessons and then we just hide it away and then it becomes immutable, right? There's no way of then going and accessing saying, well, what's actually true about that?

• 15:01Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Right? What do you actually believe about that? And how many people have told me about something so, so very clearly traumatic done to them, right? So they're walking down the street and they're attacked, right? And they talk about it through the lens of shame. Right, that it was their fault. It shows that they're not a worthwhile person. They can't really make the way in the world. They can't keep themselves safe. No one will ever like them, right? No one will ever care for them. And like, these lessons are there for years and years about something, once you start talking about it and unpacking it, they logically know there's no shame to feel, right? But the logic doesn't matter if the emotion is telling us something different.

• 15:38Lewis Howes?

  Right. Now, if we go through a traumatic experience and we hold on to this shame, can it change our biology, our genes? Does it, you know, what's it do to the chemistry in our brain? To our heart? What does it do to us physically?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  What is so amazing is we have proof of things that even 20 years ago, if one had said, you know, "Oh, trauma can change the genes that you pass on," right? Not necessarily maybe the actual gene itself, but whether it's active or not, which makes all the difference, right? If you have it and it's not active, you may as well not have it, right? If you don't have it, that's the same as like, you got a good gene, right? But now it's not turned on, right? And the thought that like, how we genetically present, right, what's going on inside of us can be impacted by trauma that happened years before conception would have sounded crazy, right? So, if someone who is deeply traumatized,

• 16:37Speaker 01

  you look at rape as a tool of warfare, right? And the thought having been that, okay, it's a crime committed on one day by one person against another, right? That narrow conception doesn't even begin to touch what actually happens. That person is, without the right intervention, likely changed for the rest of their life. And if they have a child five years later, right? The genes that are active in that child are changed as a result of the trauma.

• 17:08Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And it sounds shocking. And I interviewed Darren Richarder, who's a friend of mine and an academic psychiatrist who's done a lot of the work around this. And he speaks to it so eloquently that, yes, what's going on here is not, "Oh, that crime happened on..." That day, but that trauma is transgenerational.

• 17:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  It impacts us from head to toe. It impacts our cardiovascular health, so therefore our risk of heart attack, our risk of stroke, our risk of autoimmune diseases. So, so it's not theoretical and esoteric, right? It impacts us from head to toe. And we know that now, like we, we have the physical proof of it, which is in ways like very gratifying, right, as opposed to like making assertions like this even a decade ago or, or closer to 20 years ago, when you couldn't really get any traction. It's what's esoteric, it's something, the person looks the same, so like they're still okay, right?

• 18:02Lewis Howes?

  Just suck it up. And it was, yeah, it was 20 years ago, so let it go or whatever.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 18:09Lewis Howes?

  What was a, a trauma that was extremely hard for you to heal? Or that took you the longest to kind of overcome? And does it still impact you today? Or is there hope for us that, hey, if you go through something traumatic, there are ways to heal so it doesn't have to impact you in a negative way for the rest of your life?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's definitely hope for that. And, and since you'd asked about me, you know, my, my brother's suicide when I was in then my early twenties was so dramatically impactful on me, on my family. And, you know, at the time I was very fortunate. I didn't know nothing about mental health. I was in an entirely different career field. And, you know, I was fortunate to have good people around me, like it was really good, supportive people. And that helped get me through it. And, and the knowledge of, hey, maybe I should get some help, right? Like, you know, no one really got therapy, you know? It was, it was an interesting, strange thing to do, right? It was, well, there's this helping resource there and it was immensely helpful.

• 19:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  To just, you know, someone just asking me like, well, how do you feel about that? And this sense of like, I feel doomed, I feel ashamed, I feel despondent. And, and, you know, that, that doesn't lead a person to good places, right? That leads a person to depression, to self-destruction, to addiction, alcohol and, right? And even just having some basic help like that helped me like stay on track, right? And then as time has gone on and I I've accumulated more really significant traumas since then. In the first half of my life, I didn't have major trauma.

• 19:41Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And then sort of the second half, I've had a bunch of major trauma.

• 19:44Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  And being able to sort of see it through that lens of like, oh, I just naturally felt differently. Right? I had a different view of the world as a place where I could make myself felt and seen and I could impact. And like good things would come to me. Like I had a whole set of beliefs that then really changed.

• 20:03Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  You know, it changed in a way that made me feel much more defensive of the world and afraid of the world. And it was, it was really getting very, very good psychotherapy in that second part of my life. I, I, you know, went to medical school and started training as a psychiatrist and started really getting good therapy. That I, I realized, yes, this doesn't have to control your life, but it is a struggle, right? Like it's, it's, it's on my mind. It's an active part of my self-care and my psychotherapy. And sometimes use of medicines. So I, I have to actively really take care of myself to maintain a perspective where I'm aware that it's there, but it's not, in a sense, pulling the wool over my eyes

• 20:43Speaker 01

  and telling me things that can really lead us down a path of, sometimes a path of destruction. But other times, just a path of sadness and sort of despondency and not living up to what we want to be. You know, not just career-wise, but interpersonally, like the kind of parent I want to be and the kind of husband and friend. And, and, and I think with a real awareness of like, hey, I'm laboring against this, right? Then it doesn't have to control me. And I found that in so, so many of the people that I, that I take care of. I found that to be true.

• 21:14Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So the first half of your life, pretty happy, normal, healthy lifestyle, no major traumas. Second half, a bunch of major traumas, it sounds like, starting with a suicide to your, your brother. Where do you think you would be without having healing therapeutic modalities to process over the second half of your life? Where do you think your life would be? You know, if you could think about it.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  I think probably not in a good place.

• 21:44Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And I don't know exactly what that means. Like, like, one worry would be the specter of depression, which runs in me and runs in the family. And, and I, I could see getting lost in that in a way that then narrows one's horizons. And, you know, that promotes frustration and anger, you know, and, and at times even bitterness in people. And, and it can lead us away from, you know, just like being a, a good person in the world, right? And we become more isolated from care and concern to or from other people. And, and then I think it's a very small step from that to abusive substances. I mean, they're just so there in front of us to say, yeah, like, well, you feel awful, right?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  And you feel awful and angry and frustrated and an injustice about feeling awful, right? Don't you want to soothe, soothe this now? Don't you deserve that now? Like, that's a very, it's a self-seduction, but it's a self-seduction that leads so many of us to a path of like short-term healing at the expense of, you know, the, the long-term of the rest of our lives.

• 22:46Lewis Howes?

  Is, is almost all addiction stemming from some type of shame based on a trauma, would you say? Or can addiction happen from other ways?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  I think addiction can happen in other ways, especially their genetic components to how we respond to certain substances. And there can be substances that are, well, some of them for everyone, like opiates, you know, are so powerful that it probably doesn't matter what our genetic predispositions are. Like, that can get the best of any of us, right? By, by creating such euphoria, followed by such withdrawal from that euphoria, right? That, that there are substances that can just take a hold of us, you know, no matter what our state of health is, right? But there are also then genetic predispositions of one person to another of what we may be exceptionally vulnerable to.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  So, so substances, I think, can have a life of, essentially have a life of their own in creating problems in us. But that being said, the vast majority of dysfunction I see in people, whether it's substances or it's acting out against the self, you know, it may be self-harm, right? Physically, or it may be just keeping a, a sort of sadistic accounting in our minds, right?

• 24:02Lewis Howes?

  Like what?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Of, of, well, I'm not doing well enough in life, so, so like. You don't get to go do that, right? You don't get to do that enjoyable thing. You don't deserve it, yeah. Right, you don't deserve to like have a good meal tonight, right? You don't deserve to get enough rest, right? You don't deserve to like go out with that person who might really be a really good partner, right? Like this, this sense of, of like there being an accounting inside of us that oppresses us. We've known for many, many years, you know, in my field, people thought about people a lot more, like a hundred years ago, right? Because we didn't have the advance that we have, which in many ways are wonderful, right? But we think less about people and, and this idea. What do you mean, we think less about like how other people are doing? Is that what you mean or what do you mean?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  No, we, we think less, like in my field, we think less about like, okay, if you're my patient, or what's going on in you? Like, how do you feel about life, right? And what are the dynamics of that? We, we've stepped away from that in very much a polish the hood kind of way. Well, whatever's going on with you, like your insurance authorizes 10 sessions of CBT. And you'll get that and you'll take a medicine, then you're going to be better, or you will have failed the intervention, right? Like, that's not helpful in most cases. And when, when people thought more about other people, they thought about ideas like, for example, there's no internal victim without an internal persecutor, right? Which I don't mean like feeling victimized, like somebody steals your wallet. You're like, look, I'm a victim, I fill out a report, right? But the idea that, no, no, I'm a victim.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I stand out as a mark to people, right? That if, if people are looking for someone to hurt in a relationship, they're going to look to me. People looking to someone to abuse and bully around, whether it's on the playground or it's in the office, right? It's going to be me, right? People, when people think like that, they also internalize the persecutor. Right, there doesn't need, I've, I've worked with people who've been, who are still in their minds being actively persecuted by someone who's been dead for 20 years. Right, because that person doesn't need to be alive anymore because they're doing it to themselves. And we can get like that. In fact, I think the internal dialogue in us that can say, oh, what an awful person. Or, you know, you're never gonna get anywhere and how stupid, right? Like, how many of us have that going on inside of us?

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And that arises from trauma and it blinds us to like, who am I? Who do I want to be in the world? What do I have to offer? Like, how are you gonna make the best of that? If there's a running dialogue in your mind saying, we're so stupid, you messed that up again. And like, that's present in so, so many of us.

• 26:30Lewis Howes?

  Is there a way around trauma? Like, I used to, I grew up thinking to myself a lot, like, you're stupid, you're never gonna mount anything. Like, saying these things internally all the time as a child in like, elementary school. Not knowing why I was doing it, but I just kept doing it. You know, I didn't have the tools to heal. And there wasn't, when I was growing up in the eighties, early nineties, there wasn't models of, you know, grown men that I could look to on TV or athletes or whatever, who were openly talking about their emotions, talking about traumas, talking about here, here's what you should do to heal if you've been hurt or something. And so I felt like I had to stuff it in until I turned thirty. And then I started to realize, wow, I've accomplished all these external things,

• 27:15Lewis Howes?

  but feel like something's still missing. You'll feel like, why am I not fulfilled? Why am I not peaceful? And then I went on a journey for many years of, of healing and, and letting go of the shame. And, and as my therapist says now, uh, healing is not an event. It's not a one-time moment where you're like, I'm healed because I talked about it. It's, it's a journey.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:35Lewis Howes?

  It's a process of integration.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:39Lewis Howes?

  Is there a way to go around trauma to just shine the hood and be okay? Or do you feel like the only way is to go to the core root of it? And deal with the process of healing it.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the only way is to go to the root of it and try and heal that core process. I mean, sometimes, you know, there are always outlying situations, right? Where, you know, a person can just polish the hood a little bit, go on with with their life and like sort of have things be okay.

• 28:08Lewis Howes?

  Be functional, but not like, yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  But that's the rarity, though. And I've seen over and over and over again that it festers inside of us. And some people are blessed with a sort of resilience gene. Like, you know, people have thought about this since the Second World War. Like, why did some people like survive concentration camps? Why were some people able to to like still see hope, right? Still persevere, still be resilient, right? And there are some genetics around that that we just don't understand well. And if a person is blessed with that, then when like you feel despairing, then then what you may do is is something that that seems productive or or positive in the outside world, right?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  That you that you do in order to get some like legitimate feeling of of something good, right? And it may be that you have that gene, where you have the genetics for that, right? And I think I have the genetics for that, right? And and those are like, but those are blessings, right? Like, we don't want to count on, like, I have a gene for resilience. So, you know, I didn't drink my life away after my brother's suicide, right? Like, we don't we don't want to rely on that. Because if a person has enough resilience, you can get yourself maybe to where you found yourself at thirty, where like, oh, wait, I've achieved a lot. And then something inside says, wait, is all that really true about me? Right? Because if I really am this like awful person, like, how did I wait? How did I do this? And then then you can have a greater breadth of perspective.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  And then what you probably start started, say, doing for yourself then was reconstructing a narrative. And that's why the construction of a life narrative. Right, really, wait, is that story true? Right? Because it's gotten a pass, right? Like, it's gotten a pass. And I see people who for years and years and years, the story of, you know, why they're not worth anything, right? Has just come forward without any challenge, right? But when you start helping them talk about it and think about it, like, you know, a lot of times I'll say, well, Look, from what you're telling me, there's, I mean, there's, there's some shame to be had in this story, but it sounds like it's not yours, right? And that's in the case of acute trauma, right?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  We can look at, oh, look, so wait, so somebody hurt you, right? And, and then you can start thinking, well, but you feel ashamed, right? Like, how does that work inside? Like, why does it work that way, right? Like, why do we have this reflexive shame? And like, where do you actually want that to go, right? Or do you feel anger or frustration about it, right? And people know, and often when people don't, how do you not feel that, right? It's just that it's coming back in towards them. And then you say, well, what is it like? Like, what do you say to yourself when you wake up in the morning, when you're driving in the car? Like, I remember working with someone who was taking, driving this really long drive to work. And I learned as part of working with her that she loved music, loved listening to music. And then, and then like, it just came up that she never turned the music on in the car. Why not?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Like, well, it was going on a long drive, right? Because she didn't want to block the narrative in her head. The negative narrative. Right, the negative narrative that was like, you're worth nothing. You were, because there was, there was, that was, in her mind, justified, right? That was the justifiable self punishment for, what? For being hurt by other people, right? And when we unpack that, we're like, wow. And how long do we hold on to that punishment for? Potentially, potentially forever, unless we go in and look at it. So, you know, the first prescription I wrote was turn music on in car, right? And, and then as she became more aware, she's like, right, there's, there's like a whole story in my head. And that story plays over and over and over again, and it plays over in that summarized manner. You're not worth anything, no one will ever love you, right?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  And, you know, this, I mean, the reason this person comes to mind, there's a lot of people like this whose lives have really, really changed. Once like, wait, that's actually not my story, right? And logic tells me something different, but logic hasn't had one thing to say about it. It's all been through emotion, so let's talk about that emotion, reconstruct the narrative, and then... Like it's remarkable how much better things can get because it's not a hocus pocus, right? It's a way from like the black magic, hocus pocus, towards what's actually true. There's a simplicity to it. And that's why the book is designed to be very practical. Right? It's not designed to be an academic treatise. It's designed to say like, we can make this better now. And we can start making it better

• 32:29Speaker 01

  right now by just saying, what's going on in my head? What am I saying to myself? What's going on in the people around me? You know, someone who may be a little different. I don't know why, or a little different after something difficult. Can I talk with them, right? Like, there's so much that we can do, but we become more and more isolated in society. You know, we're busy, we're running around, we're at odds with each other in lots and lots of ways that are politically or socially driven. And then we're so isolated that we never challenged these narratives. And that was like, the amazing thing that I saw with such sadness in the, you know, doing nursing homework so many years ago. It's like, so many people are carrying with them the trauma of so many years ago. And it's just as alive as it was in there, you know, when it happened.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  And it's been, it's since the pivotal force of how their life has gone forward. I mean, not everyone, but there was a lot of that.

• 33:19Lewis Howes?

  You were mentioning how, you know, there's a narrative that we say, you know, I'm not lovable, I'll never be good enough, or I don't deserve this.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:27Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are the three biggest lies we tell ourselves? Maybe that you hear from people when they come into your office? What would those three big lies be?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, I think you just, you said, I'm not lovable.

• 33:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Right? I'm not good enough. And what was the?

• 33:41Lewis Howes?

  I don't deserve.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Everything, right?

• 33:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Right, so the not, the thing about what not lovable means, right? It's, I mean, there's something, I'm intrinsically flawed. Right? I mean, to say one is not lovable, it's such a blanket statement of persecution. Right? If you think about what it would be like saying that outwardly to someone. Right, like you're just making a blanket statement, you are not lovable, right? I mean, it's awful, right? And it's why the persecutor inside of us can say things to us that like people outside of us, you know, generally don't, right? We wouldn't tolerate from other people, like how dare one say that, right? But it's going on inside of our minds. That's, you know, the practical, the practical shift of that is like the I'm not good enough, right?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Because if I'm not lovable is an intrinsic characteristic, then that translates, well, I'm not good enough to do what I set out to do, right? I'm not good enough to achieve, whatever that may be. And, and, and then, yes, like, and then, of course, one isn't deserving, right? I mean, if all that is true, then you're not deserving of anything. Like, think about how, talk about blanket statements, right? And, and I think the proof of like, why do I think for sure that this is true? Like, you know, psychiatry isn't math, right? But maybe it's because I was a math minor way back when, and I love mathematical proof of things, right? Is I've, I've seen more people than I could possibly count, who I know them are personally, professionally, they're people in my life, and I see them before trauma and after, right?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  And, and, and sometimes I marvel at how not only do they think about themselves entirely different, but they don't know that they thought any differently before. They think they've always been thinking this way. Yeah, I've never been good enough. Wow. Right? This has always been true, I mean, no one's ever loved you. Like, what do you mean? Like, before the trauma, you know, you had like a great job and friends and a wonderful girlfriend. Like, things were great before, but they don't, you know, because the, the consequences of trauma change our memories, right? Like, our memories only have meaning through the emotion that's attached to them. Interesting. So if you change memories and now there's a negative spin on that, you can say, well, what about, you know, I could remember a person who would tell me about some award, I think it was high school

• 35:52Speaker 01

  or early in college, like something to feel really proud of. And would talk about that and like, like anchor to that of like, hey, that says like, I can do things, right? Who then, on the other side of the trauma, remembered that in a very negative way of, Really? You know, something was given to me I didn't deserve and You know, and

• 36:11Lewis Howes?

  I got lucky or whatever, yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  And you know, it showed like, it didn't mean anything. Like, all it did was make pressure on me I could never live up to. And, and you know, now, so I, so there's an explanation for like, avoiding the better job. Right? Or from going from a lousy relationship partner, maybe even an abusive one, to someone who could be better. Like, why do you, why would you do that if you have an expectation of failure? And if the expectation of failure is based on the false lessons of trauma, well, we have, we have very powerful examples of what this does to us. We forget our own histories.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow. You said memories have meaning through the emotions we've attached to them, is that right?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  It's so true. And if we, if you have a memory, it sounds like what I'm hearing you say, if you have a memory of the past, from, that could be a good event for many years, and then you go through a trauma.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:05Lewis Howes?

  And somehow you reconnect it to that event or whatever, you can completely shift your emotions toward that event to being a negative experience.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:13Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  It, but it really, it really is. And like, this is, we think like shocking, since people ask me like, what's like shocking things you've learned? Like, being a psychiatrist? And that's, that may be the top of the list. I mean, it's certainly near the top of the list. Like, our, our own histories are malleable inside of us. And, you know, and people have brought up a, a couple times, like, I write examples in there. And like, and you know, the railway station in London, right? St Pancras, I'm, I'm sure not pronouncing it in like the correct English way, but, but it sounds like pancreas, right? And then like, I love England. I, I spent some time in college in England, and I just, I love being in England. I love being in London. And I was walking to meet a friend at the St Pancras Rail Station, right? And you think that that's like, it should be a joyful thing.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And as I'm walking there, I felt awful. You know, I felt terrible, and I felt like, what am I doing here? I deserve to be here, I'm gonna see my friend. Why is my friend like, I felt so terrible about myself. And then I realized a hundred percent like what that was is, you know, my mother died of pancreatic cancer.

• 38:17Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Pancras sounds a lot like pancreas. And like, it was that realization of like, that's absolutely what I'm thinking about. And I'm thinking, what a person, you didn't go home enough when your mom was sick. And, you know, I'm thinking all these things in my mind and I realized like, so my memory of like what that place was evoking in me had changed, right? And it changed my feeling and I needed, so you thought, can we get better? We can, but we have to have it in my head. Like, I need to stop and think, like, look, these are different things, right? And you're triggered to feel a certain way about this, you can actually feel that way, right? You're happy to be here and you think you did a decent job as a good son when your mother was sick. You actually believe that and you can't wait to see this person. He can't wait to see you either, right? That's why he took a train down from Northern England, right?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  And I could feel differently about it, but I mean, there's a lot of like work on that, right? To not just be carried away to some very negative feeling state where this myself talk went strongly along with that negative feeling state.

• 39:19Lewis Howes?

  So how do we, let's say we don't have a therapist to our, you know, as a resource for us.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:27Lewis Howes?

  Or we don't have the funds or for whatever reason, we're not comfortable doing that yet, which I'm a big fan of, I love therapy. What can someone do if they realize, you know what? I'm feeling some of these lies or these symptoms of angst, frustration, depression. Maybe I'm using a substance already, maybe I'm addicted to something.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:45Lewis Howes?

  Maybe I'm in denial that I'm addicted to something, whatever it may be. We're just feeling depressed or depressed feelings.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:51Lewis Howes?

  What are some practical things that people can do on their own before they go and start processing with a trained professional?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, really, it's such a good question, right? Because like, not everyone has access to that. And certainly it's not something we can get immediately, even if we have access to it, right? And I would give two very strong answers to that of to stop and think, hey, what's going on inside of me? Right, like we take what's going on inside of us as a given. You know, that woman who drove fifty minutes to work and back every day and didn't turn the radio on so she could say awful things to herself, never thought once about it. Until that offhand comment about why there's no music in the car, right? Wait a second, right? Now we start, now for the first time she thinks about it, right? So what is actually going on inside of me? Which is really closely tied to the second point, which is what's my narrative about myself and my life? And like, what do I actually think? It's going back and looking at the things that we now take as a given.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And if you think trauma so predisposes to that. I mean, I know trauma's not a thing, but I would say trauma like loves that, right? Because then we don't go back and look at it. We just take all that off of us, well, that's a given, that's that. And now like here I am. And it's like, that's not a given. It's not that's that, right? We can go look at what's going on inside of me. What's the narrative I'm constructing? And that can be very, very helpful to people who have no access to outside resources. And if you can find like one trusted person, right? You can just, you can talk to about that. Once you start doing that, if you can just sit with somebody, friend, family, clergy, it doesn't matter, somebody that's trusted. Because, you know, we have error checking mechanisms inside of us that we don't use when we're thinking.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  But we use when we're talking, right? And that's like putting, it's amazing how many times it's, oh, I said that. And now I feel totally different, even though I thought about it up ten thousand times. I hear that all the time. So start putting words, writing, you know, writing about it, speaking about it to someone else, even speaking about it to ourselves, right? Putting it into words, then we bring our whole brain online.

• 41:50Lewis Howes?

  How important is it what we think and what we say to and about ourselves on a daily basis?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  It's hugely important.

• 41:58Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  It's hugely important. So you think when I was a kid, people would talk about, oh, that's the soup you're swimming in. Right, it was just a turn of phrase, right? And, and like that is the soup that we're swimming in the environment that we're in. A lot of it does come from outside, but not as much as comes from inside.

• 42:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Right, so it's absolutely affecting us all day, every day, which is, which is, I think is how we can perpetuate over years and years and years, the trauma inside of us. Because, you know, you think, why don't our brains, I mean, our brains are very sophisticated in a lot of ways. Why don't we go back and do some inventory? Right, like reboot the system and, and look at everything in the past, like why don't we do that? You know, it's like, like constantly being in a hurricane, right? Like, you're just like trying to survive in the hurricane, right? But you give a person a little bit of peace and like, okay, wait, what's? I can, I now can think about that, whereas I couldn't before. So I think it's immensely important, and I've seen that play out clinically.

• 42:55Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Over and over and over, like, you know, that person doesn't realize they're living in a hurricane. And, and it's coming from in here, and they've been struggling with it, and they might say something, well, it's not, can't be from that. That was 15 years ago, like, and people will look at me like, I'm, what do you think, that was 20 years ago, that's not affecting me now. But then as we look through it, it's affected them every day from then until now. And that's the last story in the book, speaks to that, right? It, it speaks to someone who's, you know, whose life changed so much by, by being able to realize, like, no, that thing from 20 years ago has absolutely been oppressing me every single day since then, and I don't want that to be the case anymore. I want to look at that and say, is it true? Should I feel that way? And if I do, I'll keep doing it. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna give myself the chance of looking at it anew.

• 43:41Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Whole life is different.

• 43:43Lewis Howes?

  And so, asking yourself, what's going on inside of me? And what's my narrative about myself, the first two things that we should be doing? I mean, is that what that would happen, if you go to a therapist, it'd be essentially going through that process as well? And then, how could they start to? Where does healing actually begin? Is it an awareness? Is it the talking? Is it rewriting the narrative? Is it, just takes time? You know, how does healing actually occur?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Like, it begins in a, in a moment's notice, right? Like, just the, I, I, just the thought that, oh, there's like, there's something new. Like, there's like, there's like a new way to think about this, or new data. That's, a lot of times what will happen is someone comes in. So it comes in to do therapy, right? And then I could look and say if we work together for it, oh, there's so much better over months or even over years, right? But oftentimes, we can trace the improvement back to the very first session of saying, you know, there's, I hear what you're saying and, you know, there's another way of seeing this that I think is not just a sleight of hand, but is a way that's actually consistent with truth, right? And I can say that to you because, you know, we're all unique, but we fit patterns.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  And I've seen this pattern over and over again, which gives me the hope that through the unique lens of you, there's a different way of thinking about this is real and true and can really change. You know, there's like, sometimes it's like an amazed look because, you know, we don't like damned if you do, damned if you don't, right? And we often have these conflicts in us, these central conflicts of damned if you do, damned if you don't. Right. I gotta change this, but I can't change this, right? And then if you look, that's not the only two options and it's not a sleight of hand. And that's like very important because often people think, well, psychotherapy is about like getting you to feel better. It's not about getting you to feel better if that's through a lens of falsehood. Yeah. Right? If a person's really doing things to feel ashamed about, let's talk about that and change it, right?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Like the idea isn't to make you feel good about things that you should feel bad about, right? The idea is to help you not feel bad about things that you shouldn't feel bad about. Usually that's what we're doing. And then, you know, sometimes it involves medicines and like, there's other things to do and so there's medical problems involved, there's a thyroid problem. Like there's so many other aspects of it that need to be taken stock of. Yes. But the healthcare system is in a shambles and the mental health system is so surface focused and I don't mean to be critical, like there's so many good individual, like practitioners within the systems, but the systems are broken. So you could very well go in and get treatment and not have anyone actually talk about trauma. And I've seen this over and over, you know, people who've had, and I'm not making this

• 46:21Speaker 01

  up or exaggerating, four, five, six residential stays for addiction, right? And addiction where if you like just sit and talk with that person, you know, it's very obvious, like you're trying to, the person's trying to kill themselves, right? It's not, oh, they can't stay away from that substance. I mean, sometimes you see that, but you see stories, it's about, hey, What is this person looking for, right? They're looking for escape from suffering. Or they're trying to be not alive anymore because they want to end their own suffering. Or because they think they deserve that. That's just punishment, they feel, right? And the majority, the majority of times, no one has taken any trauma history from that person.

• 46:58Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  So that is a failure of our systems. When very clearly, if you start talking about trauma, like, that's where the money's at, so to speak. The majority of times, like, why is that person doing that? Then you start learning, what's their inner dialogue? What happened to them? Was it acute trauma, chronic trauma, vicarious trauma? But you come down to the trauma. And if you get under the hood and you address the problems, right? Then the drive to the substance changes. I mean, that's, that is, in my strong opinion, the way most people who are in remission from substance. They're not using substance anymore. It's not in their life, right? That illness, that disease, that addiction is over, right? How did that happen?

• 47:41Lewis Howes?

  What usually ends that? Oh, by addressing trauma.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  By addressing trauma.

• 47:44Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The vast majority.

• 47:46Lewis Howes?

  Almost all?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Because trauma's the drive.

• 47:47Lewis Howes?

  Almost all addiction is stemming from a trauma? Like a substance abuse addiction, let's say?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, the majority of it. Can I say it's 70% or 90%? But we're talking about very high numbers, which is why, when you look at, when you talk with people who have quote-unquote "failed addiction treatment," right? Which I think is a very awful way to put it. Often, they've, why have they failed addiction treatment? Because the addiction treatment didn't address what's actually going on in them.

• 48:13Lewis Howes?

  The trauma.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Right. It didn't address trauma. It says, "Look, you're gonna buckle down and you're gonna..." You know, I'm not, I think AA does people a lot of good service, right? But there's a way in which, like, this can get extrapolated. If we'll give it up to your higher power and take an inventory. But you're not really looking at what's driving the dysfunction, right? And that appeals to the aspects of our society that want quick fixes, right? We want quick fixes and we want them to be inexpensive.

• 48:41Lewis Howes?

  And not painful.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Right, right. And not painful, right. Right, and it's painful to talk about trauma, to go through the... People, when they see they're getting healthier, it's very interesting how people will, in a sense, welcome the pain. Really, like, the pain of working out, like, it's difficult, but you know you get healthier, right?

• 48:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes, of course.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  So the same thing can happen where, like, the trauma treatment is arduous, but the person's like, "Look, I know I'm getting healthier." But our systems... Really, I come back to this analogy that our systems are built to polish the hood. And trauma treatment is, it's more expensive, right? It takes place over time. It involves human beings who are well-trained, interacting with other human beings. It's a lot easier to just say, "Look, let's polish the surface of anything." And spruce it up a little bit and then throw some medicines at people. And that's why we absolutely do not solve these problems. And they're not rocket science problems to solve. Like by a redirection of priority and resources and recognizing what a problem this is, we can appropriately help the people who are suffering from it

• 49:43Speaker 01

  and often have no route to help, even if they're well insured.

• 49:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What will happen in the world over the next 20 years if we don't start addressing our traumas sooner?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  I think we're in real trouble. And I don't want to be a doomsayer, like, "Oh, things are just gonna get worse." But our increased interconnectedness, so say through social media, which, which can do a lot of good, but also is a route to instantaneously do a lot of bad. Right? And the ability to instantaneously reach one another, often in aggressive ways. And I believe that it's trauma that unhinges us from facts. Right? I mean, how many factual disputes has there been? I mean, a classic is, like, look at crowd size. Like, you know, you could have a third grader in any country in the world. Look, is this crowd bigger than this crowd? Okay, that's like, that's pretty obvious, right? Why would people insist that what's smaller is bigger? Right? How do we get that way, right?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  I think we get that way through trauma. Which says, so what does that say? I mean, if you and I can both add one plus one, but I insist it's three, right? When you're saying it's two and I'm gonna stick to my guns, you might say, "What's wrong with me?" Right? Well, what's wrong is, I'm not actually prioritizing what's right. I mean, it's a way of saying, "Look, I don't actually care what's right."

• 51:01Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  What I wanna do is assert myself. Right? I'm angry, right? I feel denigrated, I feel dismissed, I feel lousy about myself. And I'm gonna have my way. And if I say one plus one is three, I'll fight you, I'll fight you to the death about it. Right? Why? Because it's not about what's true, it's about the fact that I feel hurt and angry. And like, how is that not running through our... Society in all sorts of ways and the ability to reach one another so quickly, being detached from facts, right, which I think that comes from trauma, then escalates and we're more and more aggressive with one another, right? We're more and more, I think there was some of the behavior and demeanor. Like, you know, you and I grew up in a similar era. Some of what people say and do on a public stage. Social media, yeah, yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, you think about the like the criticism. You would never go up to someone's face and do that. We would never do that. Even the criticism of, it's almost like hard to say, right? The criticism of people who died or were captured in combat for our country, right? To have criticized someone, it was unimaginable, right? I mean, you know, I was raised in a Christian church. I would have just assumed gone into church and screamed profanity, right? It was such shame to do that. But yet somehow the aggression in that appeals to people who have their own frustrated aggressions. And somehow that's okay, right? And I think this loss of demeanor and comportment, like what does that actually mean?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  To say that, like, who are you hurting, right? How many people are you hurting who have a dead loved one, right? Or a loved one captured in combat, is missing in action? And we're just gonna denigrate that wholesale? Like, how do we get at a point in society where we trust? We accept that from people in positions of power instead of saying, hey, I don't care what your agenda is, like, you know, your agenda could be, make my life better, right? That's your whole political agenda. Make this guy's life better. I will still vote against you because there's a higher set of ethics and morals in me that says even if like what you're saying I think is good for me, I'm gonna reject that anyway, right? And we don't, we don't see that like we used to see it, right?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  And we need to re-ground to, what are our values, right? What are the things that are more important than like me being right? Or me getting my way or having some political say? And it's a sorry, it's a long answer to your question, but it speaks to why I think like, how's that gonna be better unless we look at what's undergirding us? That would lead us in the most basic of ways to argue that one plus one is three, when like clearly it's not. Like, we have to go and look at that and that is driven by. Trauma.

• 53:42Lewis Howes?

  So trauma, what I'm hearing you say is people who are hurt and angry, there's a trauma underneath that. Otherwise, you want to be angry if you didn't have a trauma that you haven't dealt with.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Right, right. And if we don't see that, we continue to like not understand, like how is it that we can't understand one another? Right? Because I'm trying to convince you and you're trying to convince me. But if, if we're both coming from that hurt, angry place, you know, what I often will witness is like, these two people are arguing, right? I'll see this in some political debate, and not one of them gives a about what the facts are.

• 54:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  They both just want to be right. And how does that not come from a place of hurt? Like if you feel reasonably good about yourself and you feel like, you know, I've been able to make my way in life, right? And if I, you know, if I put in five cents of effort, I can get five cents back for it, right? If you really feel that, you have opportunity, right? Then, then how are you hurt and angry enough to, you know, to argue over what's true and what's not true? Or it is, I just want to be right. I don't care. It doesn't happen, except through that lens of trauma.

• 54:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What would you say are the, the main, the main symptoms that you see then from people, majority of the time? Is it more based on a depression or an angst? Or is it, and when, where's that, what's the trauma underneath that? If you see depression, angst, frustration when they come in, is it sexual trauma? Is it, you know, their parents got divorced early, is that they were bullied? Is that they just didn't feel loved or they got, something happened? Kind of what's the, what's the main traumas that you're seeing underneath the depression and angst?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Well, so it's a complicated answer, but to try and simplify, like the most common traumas I see are the most common traumas, right? Like, so sexual abuse is so prevalent, neglect is so prevalent. So that's what I see the most of, but simply because it's most prevalent, right? How traumas impact us is so unique, right, to each individual person. And, and some of that involves, well, like when did the trauma occur, right? So the more formative the years, right, the more, the more difficult it is, or the deeper the impact can be. So part of it is like, what was the timing of the trauma, right? Part of it is, is, is also like, what is the person? Is the person internalizing or externalizing, right?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  So people who are externalizing can can become very sort of outspoken and impactful on the world in negative ways, right? Whether that's through a political lens or it's through a lens of being violent, right? Of abusing and hurting others, like there are people who are traumatized and they repeat that trauma on others. That's certainly not everyone, but like that's a known phenomenon, right? And that's the externalizing of feeling such fury and such vulnerability inside that the way to try and gain mastery is to then be abusive to others, right? Which can start with like kids bullying other kids, right? To kids repeating the same sexual or relationship trauma as was as adults as was perpetrated on them, right? So we see, so is someone more likely to be externalizing?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  More often than not, people are internalizing. And that's when we see depression, anxiety, isolation, right? Sleep disturbance because they can't get it to stop in their brains. And then the last factor is like what kind of sort of emotional compass we have. I mean, there are people who can be very resilient and have a lot of trauma, right? And then there are people for whom things that that we might on a grand scale of things consider relatively mild impact them very significantly because they're such a finely tuned than emotional trauma. So we have to say, okay, what? What is a trauma? What is the trauma doing in this person? Then we have to look to the what kind of support mechanisms do they have? Like, you know, there's there's so much to it.

• 57:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  So it's maybe a non-answer to the question, but it but it brings out like the like the factors involved.

• 57:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes. What happens to our brain? When we experience a big trauma, especially at a formative years?

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the brain. We have the ability now to look at like what's going on in the brain. Like, you know, not in the way hopefully we will someday, but to say, look, how's your brain functioning? What what parts of it are more active, right? What parts of it are communicating with other parts, right? And so trauma, for example. It makes the vigilance systems in us much more active, right? So you will see if you take people who, you know, some, they're similar in many ways as most we can get them, but they're, but one group has, has really significant trauma, the other doesn't, right? Now again, it's, it's an inexact science, right? But, but like you can divide it into two groups and then you see if someone without trauma, like sees a person coming towards them, right?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  The parts of the brain that are interested in like, well, who are you? How are you approaching me? You know, what, what's the context, right? Is there something like collaborative or interesting? You wanna shake your hand, like I'm interested, right? But if you see through the lens of trauma, it's all coming through vigilance, which is all like, I'm just looking at you for, are you gonna hurt me?

• 58:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Right? And like the changes in the brain are so profound. So if you think about, how do you navigate life in an optimal way? If like, you know, instead of like seeing your boss come towards you and thinking like, oh, I'm doing a good job. Like, you know, this person's coming towards me and we can have a conversation, like, I can get a promotion out of this, you know, I can, I can make a good point for myself. If you just think like, how's that person gonna harm me? You know, you act entirely different, right? Or people seeking relationships, you know? If, if everything is scanning for who's gonna be hurtful, right? How do you find the person, right? Who, who could be a good relationship partner? And by the way, people who are predatory can absolutely tell that, right? Cause when you see people who are predatory and say, how do they decide who to date? Who to work with?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  They're scanning the room for the person who.

• 59:32Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And, and predatory people who then are sociopathic and predatory is a form of sociopathy, right? Often have gone through their own trauma, but they're externalizing. And then they're absolutely, they're so good. Cause I, I'll see this sometimes, like we're in a room full of people and I know, say most of the people, I know people in the room and I know who's vulnerable, right? Now there's someone else in the room, I also know is predatory. And that person's sort of sharing with me who they're interested in. And I'm like, wow.

• 1:00:01Lewis Howes?

  They're probably not even thinking about it though.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  No, they're not.

• 1:00:03Lewis Howes?

  Probably just like unconsciously happening.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Right. Right, because they can see things like body language, micro affective changes, how you keep someone else's gaze, whether you look away. It's, you know, having some sort of training in it, I can see some aspects of that myself, but not nearly, I mean, as a psychiatrist for 20 years, I'm not nearly as good at that as someone who's predatory, because that's in them naturally.

• 1:00:29Lewis Howes?

  That's just in them.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Lewis Howes?

  There's a lot of talk about narcissists in the world today. Is a narcissist someone who's just been heavily traumatized and is externally communicating that as opposed to internally doing it?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:44Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yes. Narcissists, it's a relatively small portion of the population that does the majority of the damage. And I would say it that strongly, because people who are narcissistic, so there's that externalizing element, right? And that has nothing, there's no interrelation there with like intelligence capability, right? So people who are narcissistic can be very capable people in the world, and often those resources inside of them, the way they're imposing themselves on the world is in a way that's about destruction. Right? Because narcissism comes through the lens of envy, right? And envy is different, like there's different lexicons, right? But the way that I sort of learned this and the lexicon I use,

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  jealousy is sort of benign, right? Like if you have something I want, I'd like to have it too, maybe I'll work hard for it, right? Or maybe I can't get it, right? Like someone's younger than I am, I can't make myself younger. Okay, there are other things I can hang my hat on of how I feel about myself. Envy is very different, envy is destructive. And it wants to bring others down. It's to say, if I'm here and I think you're here, I don't need to come here, right? I could bring you down here, right? And people do that. Like a classic example is, like the old example of like men whistling at women, right? I mean, how many times has a woman turned around, oh, you whistled at me, like, let's go out on a date?

• 1:02:05Lewis Howes?

  Never.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  So in a way, it's not designed to be effective. Right, in what one might think, like, oh, it's a way of opening up some, you know, some possibility, right? It's not that. It's a sense of desire and a sense of anger and frustration that then says, hey, I can't take away that person's, whatever it is, their beauty or their youth, I can't take that away, but I can make that person feel awful.

• 1:02:28Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Right? So you can whistle at them and now they, you know, it feels predatory and be set upon and, you know, and people, you know, describe what that, it doesn't feel good, right? That's envy, is saying, I can't have what you have, right? And I can't actually take it away from you, but I can do just as good, right? I can make you feel awful about yourself, it doesn't matter you have those things I want, I took them away from you. And that's where narcissism, coming through that lens of envy and capability, when I see mass destruction, whether it's in a family, or perhaps on our political landscape, and you look, what's the roots of that? More often than not, you come to narcissism, we don't realize the immense dangers that not recognizing, what is that about? Right?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  And they did, that's about the self. And that person is trying to fill a bottomless pit. You don't ever feel bottom, you can take everything away from everybody.

• 1:03:23Lewis Howes?

  You're not full.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  And you're right, and you're not full, because you threw it all into a bottomless pit.

• 1:03:27Lewis Howes?

  How does a narcissist learn how to heal their own trauma when they typically would never want to say that something's wrong with them?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, it's very hard. People who are suffering from narcissism, whether it's internal, it's more like if it's internalizing, but even then, it's hard because there's so much shame associated with that and with admitting or acknowledging anything, right? It takes what's called ego strength, right? In the old sense of ego as like, what's good about us, us at our best, our most knowledgeable, right? It takes ego strength to say difficult things about the self, right? So people who suffer from narcissism Very, very rarely will bring themselves to treatment.

• 1:04:05Lewis Howes?

  Really? Yeah, they'll resist therapy for years, right?

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Very, very rarely. When they come to treatment, it's often because there's some external impetus.

• 1:04:12Lewis Howes?

  Like if they are obligated to, or they feel like they're forced to?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  That person's family says like, "Look, you really just can't come back unless you're behaving differently," right? Or they've gotten in some legal trouble somewhere, like, "You have to go do some therapy work." There often is some element of compulsion, like there are things we are more likely to seek help for as humans, and things we are less likely, and because narcissism is such a strong defense against shame and inadequacy, then you can see how that kind of falls into the category of people are much less likely, "So let me go get help for that." And it's a whole defensive structure, right? It's not about, like, people can often separate, like, "I kind of know who I am, and I know how I am when I get depressed, and I don't like that, because like, that's not me, to be like lethargic, and I'm not getting out of bed, and I'm not there for people I love,

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  and like, I don't like that, and I want to be back to me." It's different when what's going on is like, that is part of the character structure. Well, that is the person, and it takes a lot of courage to recognize something like that, and say, "Look, I want to make that, I want to make that better in myself, and I know I've got to look at really difficulties," and I've worked with people who do that.

• 1:05:21Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  You just don't, you just don't see it.

• 1:05:23Lewis Howes?

  It's rare.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Lewis Howes?

  When does that usually happen, where they come to you? Is it like, their world is falling apart, or they're just, you know, have a massive breakdown, or?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:33Lewis Howes?

  That's when they're finally like, "Okay, I surrender."

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  And that's what kind of makes the compulsion, right? Because like, something in the world falling apart means like, "Hey, you have to go," or, you know, "Your family doesn't want to see you anymore," something like that, right? But even then, there's often a push and pull, like, I'm, you know, we can all do this in therapy, sometimes we try and keep things on the surface, because like, let it go a little deeper, and it's going to be painful. But there can be a lot of that, because the idea is how I'm going to come to therapy, because I think I should, or something tells me I should, but I don't, I don't want the vulnerability, which is why you need to build a relationship and trust before you can start talking about difficult things.

• 1:06:05Lewis Howes?

  Is there any way to heal trauma without re-experiencing the pain of the trauma? Or do you just, you've got to go through the pain in order to get to the other side?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  I mean, to some degree, I think you have to go through the pain. Again, there are exceptions where someone, you know, is sort of blessed with a lot of ego strength and a lot of resilience and can look and say, "Look, I know this, this, and this is true about me." And this is like something I don't want it to be there for me. And they can sort of compartmentalize and partition it. But that's usually not how that goes. Yeah. Right? Usually, we have to look at the pain of it. But that doesn't mean, like, reliving every detail. Right. You know, and a lot of times, people sort of think, "If I'm gonna go, even in my own mind, like, do trauma work, let alone with another person, I'm gonna have to say every detail about something." You won't say every detail. Is that what you're saying, or you will? Most often, a person doesn't have to, right?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Sometimes, it's necessary when the, like, the sense of shame is so lodged in the detail. Sometimes, you do have to go through all of it. But more often than not, you know, we're talking about the idea of not having to go through every detail also emphasizes the shared humanity of it, right? That, like, you know, how many of us are traumatized? There's a commonality to that, that by someone telling me about their, what their trauma is and how that makes them feel, there's still vulnerability and exposure to that, then we can have a shared understanding of it. Like, I can put words and they can put words, so we're like, they can feel that I get what's going on inside of them without them having to, the person having to go through and say, you know, every last aspect of it.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  What's your definition of shame? So shame, there's this idea of like core affect in us. And it's just, it's kind of a technicality, but affects are sort of aroused in us, right? And like, we think often of aroused as a sexual word. You could see how it's that way, like, something turns a person on without choice, right? Yes. But lots of things are aroused in us, right? Somebody stands, comes in front of you and pushes you, you know, like fear or anger or aroused, right? And we know that because that courses through the person's body, right? And you see like changes in skin conduct, the person's getting ready for fight or flight, right? And the brain patterns change, and then they know it. Right. Right. So that's interesting, right? The knowledge of it comes after because that's actually less important, right?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  For say staying alive, right? And the same is true with shame, like shame is aroused in us. And it's just this awful feeling, right? Of like terribleness of the self, right? And you think, why are these core affects in us, right? It's very clearly about survival, right? I mean, that example, if someone appears in front of you and pushes you and your whole body gets ready to fight or flight and then you know it. So right, that's about survival. Right. And shame has a function in us too, right? Imagine like doing something shameful, say when humans, we still do in some cases, live in small groups, right? If you got up in the middle of the night and ate all the food. Like it's okay if you feel ashamed, like you have shame imposed on you the next day because like, don't do that again. Yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Because that could, you know, take everybody's life, right? So there's a function to it, right? But when it's aroused in us, and it's not aroused in a sense for good reason, like one hasn't done something shameful. Right, right. Right? But it's aroused because of that feeling of vulnerability, right? And you know, trauma can be chronic, like you know, the chronic trauma of systemic racism. They tell somebody like, oh, you are less than. They get that message over and over and over again, right? Like it's a different kind of trauma, but it's no less valid, right? Where we see it, of course, most dramatically is in acute trauma, right? You know, the person I would see in an emergency room after a rape who's talking about how ashamed they feel, right? And it's like, why?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Okay, because the shame is aroused in the person, it's created, right? From the sense of vulnerability, a sense of terror, right? And then if that person doesn't have a route like that says, of course that was created in you, right? And now we need to talk about what to do with it. Because if we don't, we know what it will do. It will go inside of you, right? There starts the changes to the immune system. And that person's more likely to then have an autoimmune problem later on in life, more likely to get cardiovascular disease, more likely to become depressed, more likely to abuse substances. It's like, that's what happens because that shame becomes the persecutor inside of you. Wow. So let's look at that. And if we can look at that in an emergency room, right after something has happened, like... That's a, that's a great time to do that and to, to, cause you'd be most helped with that

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  person acutely. But, but what's amazing is we can do that forty years later too, and still get an impact. Cause a parallel to physical health is like an abscess, right? It's like infection inside of us that's walled off, right? And sometimes there can be an abscess that doesn't do, do anything to us, right? But more often than not, it spins off symptoms. Low-grade fever, feeling of fatigue, jittery, like there's, it's not good to have inside of us. And we'll see it track forward like an abscess would, but over years and years and years, where that thing inside is spinning off all these negative thoughts and feelings and, and choices, right? And we can go get at that, unlock it, expose it to the light of day. And then it doesn't have to be doing that anymore. There's, there's actually kind of a simplicity.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  How would shame, how trauma makes shame that's aroused in us, comes back in towards us, gets walled off, it then changes our feelings about ourselves, which then changes our memories, it then changes our mood, anxiety, behavior, and everything else. Like, there's a simplicity to that story, right? And, and truth in mental health is grounded in simplicity. You know, brains are, lots of things are complicated, but, but like, things that are truths may mean they're easy, but, but, but there's a simplicity to understanding them. And it's, it's a long answer to the question, but that's how we get at what happens from trauma and aroused shame, and how we get to like forty years later and something's walled off inside the person and has harmed them now for all those years.

• 1:12:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the sooner you can address it, the better.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:12:08Lewis Howes?

  The sooner the better. I, uh, for twenty-five years, I wasn't able to sleep at night. It would take me hour, two hours every night to fall asleep. And I didn't know why. I was just like, you know, my mind is racing, but I didn't understand why it happened for so long. Literally, within a few days after I opened up about sexual abuse for the first time at thirty years old, it's like, I could fall asleep within like five to ten minutes. And I go, my whole life I haven't done a sleep, you know, or just I'd lay there in bed for hours, fine asleep, then have to, you know, wake up late. I never felt like I could really get a rhythm going. And now I can-

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Amazing that is. It's like so amazing what you said, like just by talking about it, opening up about it, and then something that- Deeply impactful for years. Like you probably had a conception of like, that's me.

• 1:12:55Lewis Howes?

  That's me. It was my identity.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Right. Right. That's not gonna change. So I'm up against that all the time. And then, oh, lo and behold, it changes.

• 1:13:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  And I, and I think there's brain biology behind that. And I would even locate that I think areas like the ventral tegmentum, the amygdala, like I can think of like the parts of your brain that I think were so spun up. Because when you internalize that feeling of responsibility or shame, or whatever was inside of you, that it comes with vulnerability and it makes hypervigilance.

• 1:13:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And then those parts of the brain don't wanna sleep. Right? It's not like you weren't sleeping.

• 1:13:31Lewis Howes?

  Protect yourself. Protect yourself. Yeah.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Right. It says, your part of your brain is saying, this is good for you. Because this inability to sleep may keep you alive.

• 1:13:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Right? So if that part of the brain has its say, that's why that gets perpetuated. Because the brain decides, right, this isn't great, but it's the best it gets. Right? But then when you, even opening up about it, which must have relieved, like glancing and abscess, right? Oh, my gosh. Then those parts of the brain quiet down and your whole brain decides, you know what's good at night? Restful sleep. Right? Why don't we get some of that? Because I am actually safe, right? If you just have that feeling, like I'm safe. I think I can go to sleep and like, I don't think anything bad's gonna happen to me when I'm sleeping. And like, look at the immensity of that change, just by talking about it. Like, it's so powerful, because it's so deeply impactful.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  And it can happen with such a rapid shift of just letting it out. And I think, why? Because it's a shift, what must have happened to you is a shift towards truth.

• 1:14:30Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. Talking about it and then rewriting the story, like you said.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:37Lewis Howes?

  Which is huge. And the story for me was, you know, I'm not enough. I'm not lovable. I'm abused. I'm taking, I get taken advantage of. It was like a constant. So I was always on guard, looking out for that.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:49Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to rewriting the story. And I think that's.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Isn't it fascinating that that's the same words I hear put to it from people across the spectrum, right? No matter what, demographics, age, gender, type of trauma. In myself, like that's my dialogue too, right? Because that's what shame makes of us, right? You're not good enough, no one will love you, you can never be safe. That's the messaging and that's the reason that I wrote that book. It was the realization, over years of doing this, that I hear that all the time, no matter what type of trauma or what type of person is in front of me. I thought, well, there's something going on here at a sort of foundational level of our brains, right?

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  And then if you think about the psychology and the neuroscience of it, it tells us the answer to it.

• 1:15:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, this is powerful stuff. What else do we need to know about trauma? Or for anyone listening or watching, if they haven't started to process certain things or maybe they feel this angst or frustration or depression feeling, what else would you say to them listening about what they could do next?

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the first thing I would say is to emphasize what's going on inside of you is not too complicated to be solved, right? Because that's the thought, like we get thoughts on top of thoughts on top of thoughts and it seems so impossible, like trying to untie a Gordian knot, right? Like, how am I going to figure my way out of this, right? And to know that like, that's not actually true, right? It's not too complicated to be solved, right? But we come at it in a different way. It's probably why the story of the Gordian knot is thousands of years old, right? I think, right? It's mythology, right? That's not what you do. There are things that we can't unravel, but that we don't have to, right? And the idea of make a new narrative, look at what's inside of you,

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  means you don't have to untie that anymore, right? So know that in a sense, simplicity is your friend, right? And that gives us a great deal of hope and that we can start to feel better very soon. Just as I think it's wonderful how you described how your life changed in just a few days, right? Like, that's really the truth. I mean, when I first went and saw therapists, I didn't know what to do with the person, like how am I supposed to perform? Like all these thoughts in my head. Like I remember saying like, My brother killed himself and it's like feeling so much, even putting it to words because like there's an immensity to it that was beyond me, right? So instead of like, that's my fault, I should have seen, I should have known, I should have done,

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  right, I'm bad because I went off to college and I got this job, so I wasn't around home, I wasn't close to him, like all these things, just saying that was like, whoa, this is bigger than you, right? And, and things that are bigger than us, give us some freedom from them. But even the idea that like, people do, do terrible things to other people, right? So, because we get so lost in like, the idea of the, that our, I mean, our traumas are unique, but the idea that like, this never happens to anyone else, right? And the idea that, no, like, people abuse other people and, you know, people die in accidents and, and people commit suicide and, and like, there's a shared humanness to this. And, and I think that's so important in doing the work, that like, I, I don't understand like, hiding who we are in our work, right?

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Because we're all traumatized, right? In my view of things, because that's what I see in the world around me and sharing that, have an idea of what you feel, because my trauma is, is not yours and I'm not being presumptuous in a way of saying, I, I understand that, but the underlying feelings of shame and frustration, like, I understand that. And that's mostly what, really what people want, is, is a sense of, because if, if I feel so isolated and, and then I talk to you and I get a feeling like, you're looking back at me like, you, you could understand me and you're, you're not recoiling from me, right? In fact, you may be coming closer metaphorically, right? Because you can relate to what's going on in me. It takes away the idea that, oh, if I share any of this, I expose to the world

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  what an awful, unlovable, undesirable person. It's like, like the old adage of like, turn on the lights and show the child the clothes tree, right, that looks like a monster, right? And that's how we get inside of us, I can't look at this, it's incredibly complicated and what shame will it make in me to talk about it? It's like, no, it's the exact opposite of, turn the lights on, look at it, we can, we can look everywhere around it and what does that make? Makes things better.

• 1:19:18Lewis Howes?

  By talking about your shame.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, by, I mean, shining the light everywhere, like, how do you, I've, I've talked to people about their feeling of shame and responsibility, let's talk about all of it. Again, it's gotta be done over time and in a careful way, and then a person can talk about. The nuances of what they they feel inside of it, they hold on to responsibility and can get to the to a point of saying, look, my responsibility is to take care of myself and be a good person in the world. I'm not responsible for things that I had no control.

• 1:19:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Over. And like, that's very, very liberating where you're not, on the one hand, you're acknowledging the uniqueness of that experience in that person. And on the other hand, you're mapping that to the shared humanity that says you are not singled out by humanity for awful things to happen.

• 1:20:02Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  To you. And like, that's a, wow, that can be a tremendous relief.

• 1:20:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, when I started opening up about it, I remember quickly being able to fall asleep at night. But it probably took me eight or nine months to be able to fully talk about it openly with friends, family, and not feel like stressed.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:22Lewis Howes?

  You know, every time I talked about it, first to family, I was a little worried what they're gonna think. Then to kind of close friends, then I started, through my podcast and my work, I felt more of an opportunity to really serve people. And I felt like this kind of nagging thing, like I should probably be vulnerable on my show.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:41Lewis Howes?

  So, but I was afraid to talk about it for many months. Cause I was like, what if it ruins my business and my life? And people look at me differently as a public. My friends and family have to love me. But you know, publicly it might be different. I felt more of a duty because as a young kid, I didn't see older men talking about it. You know, in the eighties and nineties, I didn't see men saying I was sexually abused on TV, or at least I wasn't exposed to it.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:04Lewis Howes?

  Maybe they were, but I wasn't seeing it.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  I didn't see it either. If they were, we both missed it.

• 1:21:07Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. And so I felt more like, the more I realized, like, one in six boys, I was like, man, someone's gotta speak up about it. I might as well do it, you know, if I had this opportunity. So, but it was, it was a process. It was a journey. It took, you know, eight, nine months till I felt more and more comfortable talking about things. But at least I was feeling more peaceful inside within days of exposing the light to shame.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Yes. And two really important points that that brings to the surface. One is, you're saying, like, what can people do today? Right? And it's remarkable. It's not just Some shallow thing to say, that like when you do good for other people, you know that there's good in you to do, you see your worth, right? So I think if I'm understanding, you're describing part of your healing was, I can talk about this in a way that like has to help other people, right? And then what's that, that puts the lie to those thoughts inside. Like, how can you not be good enough? Or how can you not make any positive impact? If you can do this and make life better for people. And that's often what people start doing is, they take a meal to the person down the road who lost, you know, lost someone in their life. Or, you know, they smile at someone when they might have been annoyed

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  because they held them up in line or something. Like, these things are really, really important. They're important because they are good for other people. But they reinforce like, hey, there's good in the self, right? So that part is very important. And then the, another aspect of this that I think is a huge deterrent in our society that wants immediate results, right? It's why we use like five times as much medicines as, say, the Dutch, right? Because they don't want immediate results, right? If you're overweight, like, exercise more, like that, right? Let me just give you a medicine, right? But we want immediate results. And then we get frustrated that things don't change in our brain immediately, right? There's an adage in neuroscience that the neurons that fire together, wire together, right? So if you and I just picked a word right now,

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  and we said it over and over again 500 times, like, I guarantee you'll be saying it tonight, right? I'll be saying it over my brain to you tomorrow morning, right? Why, right? Because just the fact that we said it 500 times, our brain's gonna hold on to it. It essentially doesn't believe us. If we said, "That was a silly experiment, like eject it from the brain, please." It doesn't do that, right? And, and these patterns inside of us only atrophy, right? You know, so, so people, I talk to people a lot about this, right? Because otherwise, people start feeling better and doing better, but they still have like that same thought in their head. It may be there less frequently, right? And someone needs to say to them like, hey, here's how this goes away. It atrophies. Right, over time.

• 1:23:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  It's less and less and I've worked with people who maybe had ten, twenty years of non-stop negativity. Then they changed their lives and they'll say, wow, it's ten years later and like that'll still come into my head. Right, I do something, I dropped, you know, I dropped a big, one person dropped a big thing of milk in a store and it shatters and everyone's looking at them and then they're like, you should kill yourself, right? Right, because that was in their head before, but they've gotten to the point where they know like, hey, I don't actually believe that, right? That there's the proof that those neuronal connections die hard.

• 1:24:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  If you reinforce them over time. So that's why we need to do like longitudinal work, whether it's on ourselves or in therapy. And to realize, like, it's okay that it doesn't go away all at once, right? Like, that's actually the best it happened. And what you described, in a sense, is very classic. Like, I felt, you felt better in really strong identifiable ways very quickly. But then the cognitive patterns and you took much longer to change.

• 1:24:38Lewis Howes?

  My comeback, yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Right, because that's the way it works in us, right? But we don't learn that, you know? I, I, I joke, half joke, I'm gonna write a book on everything I learned about, everything I need to learn about life or needed to know about life, I learned as a post-medical school psychiatry resident, right? Because I really believe we should be learning these things in elementary school. And I'm not the only one to think that, like, why are we not teaching about, like, why is that bully behaving that way, right? Why don't we look at how that person can feel better about themselves in a different way? Look at what's going on at home, right? Help the people understand who are being bullied, right? Like, that person is, something is hurting that person, right? So they're coming after you and they're making fun of like your clothes or your looks or whatever it is, right? But like, but that's, you know who that's about?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  It's about them.

• 1:25:24Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Right, so you then externalize them, but we don't do that. And then we, we grow up without all this like really basic knowledge. And I remember being a second year psychiatry resident, so I was, you know, I had another career before this, so by then I'm in my early thirties, right? I'm probably thirty years old and I'm a second year postgraduate resident, I was like, oh my god, why did I learn this in second grade? And I think we need to start teaching ourselves these things as adults and then also to kids because that's how we protect children. You know, and there's a chapter in there where I talk with Stephanie von Gutenberg, who's a child advocate, right, a child abuse advocate. And I think that chapter, you know, brings out like how we can educate and empower children in ways that we just don't now.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  And sometimes there are dramatic things that happen then, but sometimes there are things that are, in a sense, more, they're insidious if they're less dramatic. Like somebody who's just bullied, right, for whatever reason. Or they look different than everybody else, or they have less resources than everyone else. And there's nothing dramatic happened, right? No one identified that as problematic. But that person is every bit as traumatized and their sense of self is changing. We just have to change this. It's so, it's so clear and obvious that we have to change it.

• 1:26:37Lewis Howes?

  Well, if you could teach three things to second graders, what would you teach them?

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Well, pay attention to what's going on inside of you, right? The idea that we think, you know, my, I have a daughter who's seven and she likes, she wants to count together, but in our heads, right? Because like it's interesting to her now that like she could say things, but she can think them in her heads, right? And engendering that kind of reflective is what's going on inside of you, we can do with children, right? And we can help them put words to whatever that is, right? That and what we wouldn't use these words, but attribution, right? Whose fault is something, right? And again, the classic element of bullying, I mean, if you ask kids like, who, what's going on? The kids who are being bullied, I mean, they always, they blame it on themselves, right? There's not the cognitive mechanism.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Look, I've sat with kids who have horrible things. They've been burned with cigarettes and locked in closets, right? And they have a story of how that's their fault.

• 1:27:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Because the brain doesn't know enough to think differently. Like, you know, if you're, you got age, you can't make it a more esoteric attribution. You don't know enough, right? But if someone helps you to look and say, oh, you feel ashamed of yourself because that person tells you to, right? But what's actually, what's actually going on? Like, it's not that hard to communicate in like age-appropriate language. So like, don't just blame everything on you, right? And you can also go, what are you, are you doing things that you should feel bad about? Like, if you're talking to the bully, right? Do you want that person to understand like, you're hurting these other kids, right? And does that feel good? If so, why? Right, same way we would with adults. Like, why does it, if it feels good that you're hurting people, let's talk about, why is that? Right, because where do we get to that?

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  A hundred percent of the time, we get to trauma. We get to something that's some version of, I don't feel good about myself and it feels powerful to hurt other people. But boy, you get at that in second grade, instead of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years old, that you can really change that. Like, there's, there's an aspect of this that I do feel kind of regresses back to the mean of just common sense. You know, and, and I think that is, is in the book. I don't, if it were an academic book, I wouldn't have had it in me to put the time and effort into write it, right? But the idea that there's a simplicity and a common sense here, that can like, really like, the light bulb can go off. Like, I know how I can make this better. Right? I can look at what's going on in my head, I can rethink the narrative, I can do something good for someone else. That can all start happening today.

• 1:29:02Lewis Howes?

  This is powerful stuff, Paul. I want people to get the book.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:29:05Lewis Howes?

  It's called Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It. We'll have to have you come back on and do a couple more hours on this stuff, because I feel like it's fascinating work that you're doing. You've worked with a lot of big, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, CEOs, celebrities.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:29:23Lewis Howes?

  World-class athletes and individuals, and also people in day-to-day life. You know, living their lives, working their careers, in relationships, and dealing with their own challenges.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  You see that we're all people.

• 1:29:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Right? And you work across the socioeconomic spectrum. You, you just see that, like, we are so all the same, and we're kidding ourselves if we think that whatever we've gotten for ourselves, some status, something that, it's good to celebrate good things we make in our lives, but we, let's not mistake that for the shared humanity in all of us, which I think is very, very hopeful. The shared humanity of trauma is, is absolutely true. And if we think of it that way, well, that's how we heal from it as a, as a society.

• 1:30:05Lewis Howes?

  Is it harder to heal trauma if you have a bigger platform, or if you're a celebrity, would you say? As opposed to, you know, maybe not that many people know about you?

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:15Lewis Howes?

  It's harder.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, because fame... Fame brings to other people the feeling of they have a right to make some sort of pronouncement about a person, right? And sometimes that comes through the lens of someone who really legitimately admires someone, right? But there are, you know, a significant subset of people who are externalizing their trauma, right? Who are attracted to people who are famous in order to tear them down, right? And we see that in the media, right? Like fame is, it can bring good things, but it's, it also brings danger.

• 1:30:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. I have two final questions for you, but again, I want people to get the book, Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic, How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It. Lots of practical stuff in here. I see Peter Attia, who we've had on the show, who's left a quote for you as well, and a lot of other great people. So make sure you guys get the book. You're not on social media, but they can, or are you?

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Uh, LinkedIn.

• 1:31:11Lewis Howes?

  LinkedIn, okay.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  One social media platform.

• 1:31:14Lewis Howes?

  But DrPaulConti.com is where they can learn more about you and the book, and they can go get it on Amazon, obviously, and Barnes and Noble and things like that. So check out the book.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:31:25Lewis Howes?

  This question is called, uh, The Three Truths. And maybe you've already kind of answered it a little bit, but I ask everyone of this at the end of our interviews, and I'd like you to imagine that it's your last day on earth, many years away. You get to live as long as you want to live, but then eventually it's the last day for you. And you get to accomplish all your dreams, all the things you want to create, they come true. But for whatever reason, all of your written and, uh, written work and content, videos and audios, for whatever reason, they go somewhere else. So we don't have access to this content anymore.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:58Lewis Howes?

  Or the book.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:00Lewis Howes?

  Uh, but you could leave behind three things you know to be true, three lessons you would share with the world.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:04Lewis Howes?

  And this is all we would have from you. What would you say would be those three truths for you?

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Look at what's going on inside of you.

• 1:32:10Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  How are you treating other people? How are you treating yourself?

• 1:32:16Lewis Howes?

  Before I ask the final question, Paul, I want to acknowledge you for the incredible work you're doing. You know, to be doing this for, you know, two decades, to be helping so many people in your practice consistently, to be creating this book so that we can have tools and information to help heal ourselves and get to the root of why we're frustrated, or angry, or depressed, or something's off.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:32:38Lewis Howes?

  It's all based on the traumas that we've dealt with and we haven't, or we've experienced and haven't dealt with yet and integrated through healing. So I really acknowledge you for putting your work out there in a way that we can consume it and understand something that is so scary to look at for so many of us. It's terrifying for a lot of people to face their shame. And so I acknowledge you for doing this work and I hope...

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Thanks so much.

• 1:33:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course, and I hope people get the book. It's forwarded by Lady Gaga, so make sure people check this out. This is, um, the final question is what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Perseverance and humility.

• 1:33:19Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.