Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives About this episode Gabor Mate is a multi-bestselling author and a world leading expert on trauma and how it effects us throughout our whole lives. A holocaust survivor and a first generation immigrant, Gabor’s knowledge and wisdom on the scars trauma leaves behind is deep and drawn from personal experience.
In a conversation that unlocks the answers to people’s most burning questions about trauma, mental health, ADHD, and the hidden hardwire of our brain, Gabor brings us one step closer to really knowing ourselves and our inner urges. Gabor’s voice, both literally and in terms of what he has to say, is like a balm for anyone who’s mental health has ever caused them worries. Gabor has been through things few of us can ever imagine, and his insights are those few of us could ever have thought of before.
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Transcript 20,071 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children. They didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease. They're just reacting to the environment.
0:09 Speaker 01 People call Dr. Gabor Maté "The People Whisperer", legendary thinker and bestselling author.
0:14 Speaker 02 He's highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, stress, and childhood development.
0:19 Speaker 00 The evidence linking mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer. And the average physician doesn't hear a word about that. It's astonishing. I can give you the example of Donald Trump. I mean, his father was a psychopath.
0:35 Speaker 01 You are the enemy of the people. Go ahead.
0:37 Speaker 00 For him, these were not choices so much as survival techniques. And that's the mark of a traumatized child, a denial of reality.
0:45 Steven Bartlett? What do I have to understand about your earliest years to understand you?
0:49 Speaker 00 My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, and my mother and I barely survived. And then my mother, to save my life, gives me to a stranger. The sense, I guess, that I'm being rejected and abandoned because I'm not good enough.
1:01 Steven Bartlett? How did that rear its ugly head throughout your life?
1:04 Speaker 00 Any number of ways. See, trauma, as I define it, is not about what happens to us. It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. It's costing us in terms of our physical health, our relationship, our mental health, and so on.
1:16 Steven Bartlett? How does one go about correcting that?
1:19 Speaker 00 It's a multi-layered answer. First of all...
1:24 Steven Bartlett? Without further ado, I'm Stephen Butler, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
1:40 Steven Bartlett? My dear little man,
1:43 Steven Bartlett? only after many long months do I take it in hand, the pen, so that I may briefly sketch for you the unspeakable horrors of those times, the details of which I do not wish you to know.
1:57 Steven Bartlett? Those are words that your mother wrote into her diary in the 1940s during the Holocaust.
2:05 Speaker 00 She wrote those words in April 1945, three months after the Soviet Army expelled the Nazis from Budapest, which is where we live. So she was referring to the previous year and the beginning of that year, late 1944 and early 1945.
2:23 Steven Bartlett? And in those diary entries, she's addressing many of them to you directly as a baby.
2:27 Speaker 00 She wrote a diary to me directly, as if it was like a card of my life addressed to me.
2:36 Steven Bartlett? You talk so much in all your books and much of your work about the importance of that early context. It's really been the centre point of all the writing that I've read recently. And I know because it's so evident in everything that you've done, that that's been a key, your own early context has been a key inspiration for why you've taken such an interest in these topics. What was your early context? What do I have to understand about your earliest years to understand you?
3:02 Speaker 00 So it's just a fact about human beings that the template that forms us will affect how we see the world, how we understand ourselves, how we relate to other people. And that early template is our earliest months, even in utero, already in the womb, we're being affected by the environment. But certainly in the early years, when our brain is being formed and our personality is taking shape. And so that forms our worldview. Now, my worldview was, and my sense of self, was shaped by the fact that at two months of age, when I was two months of age, the German army occupied Hungary. Hungary was the last
3:43 Speaker 00 country in Eastern Europe where the Jewish population had not been exterminated, and that was our turn. The day after the German army marched into Budapest, which was March the 19th, 1944, the day after my mother called the paediatrician to say, would you please come and see Gabor, because he's crying all the time. And the doctor said, of course I'll come, but all my Jewish babies are crying. And so that the fact is that when mothers are stressed or in pain, the infant feels all that and takes it personally. And it becomes part of their template for how they view the world. So that was that year, that's when that year began in which my grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. And my father was away in forced labor. And my mother and I barely survived.
4:25 Speaker 00 And it's a story I've told many times, but that's when my brain is developing. And that's when I'm forming my sense of myself. And then my mother, to save my life, gives me to a stranger. And I don't see her for six weeks. The sense I get is that I'm not wanted and I'm being rejected and abandoned and because I'm not good enough. That's how my life began.
4:50 Steven Bartlett? So your mother gives you away for five to six weeks.
4:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:54 Steven Bartlett? In order to sort of save you from starvation in a ghetto that she was going to, right?
5:00 Speaker 00 That's right.
5:01 Steven Bartlett? This is after, after your grandparents were killed in Auschwitz by
5:06 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:06 Steven Bartlett? the Nazis. How do you know in hindsight that that, that moment of those six weeks created that sense of abandonment in you?
5:15 Speaker 00 I, I wouldn't say just that, well, that one moment. Children very much view themselves through their interaction with their parents. Now, first of all, I had no father because he was gone. I hadn't, hadn't seen him. Except very briefly when I was a month old, but there was no father in the picture. My mother was grief stricken and terrorized and full of war and worry about what's going to happen to us. And just the, the task of surviving each day.
5:47 Speaker 00 She's not playful with me. She's not smiling at me very much. She's worried looking, she's stressed looking.
5:54 Speaker 00 The infant takes everything personally. That's just the nature of the infant. As infants, we're narcissists. We think it's all about us. So when things are great, hey, we're great. But my mother is unhappy. It's because she doesn't want me or I can't make her happy or I'm inadequate. So that separation from my mother.
6:15 Speaker 00 Certainly set a template for some of my relationship interactions with my spouse decades later, but the sense of not being good enough and being responsible, that was inculcated in me throughout that whole first year of life. So much so that in his book, The Myth or Normal, I actually talk about an experience with psychedelic mushrooms with a therapist. This is not that long ago, seven years ago maybe,
6:45 Speaker 00 when I'm at least seventy years old. And I'm in this therapeutic session with the psilocybin, the medicine, and a therapist. And I know that I'm seventy years old, and I know this is a therapy session, and I know her name, and I know who I am in the world. But at the same time, I'm experiencing myself as a one-year-old baby, and she's my mother. And I start crying. Tears come down on my face. And I say, I'm so sorry I made your life so difficult. Now, that was an unconscious memory of my sense of myself as a one-year-old, that I made my mother's life so difficult. Because that's the way the baby interprets it.
7:28 Speaker 00 So even if your mother loves you, which mine did infinitely, not that she always treated me the best way possible, but she did love me. And can you imagine what a great act of love even giving me to a stranger in the street would have been for her? You know? But because of her own unhappiness, I can only conclude that I'm not good enough. And it's my fault.
7:52 Steven Bartlett? At seventy years old, having that psilocybin experience, coming to that realization, or having that sort of, having that response to your therapist where they take the role of your mother and you're a one-year-old. How does somebody at seventy years old go about correcting that, that sort of interpretation you had of that traumatic early event?
8:13 Speaker 00 Well, by bringing it up to the conscious level.
8:18 Speaker 00 Then when I notice that sense of guilt or responsibility in me, I say, oh, that's what it's about. So it's a meaning. See, trauma, as I define it, is not about what happens to us. It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. And so the wound in my, and trauma means wounds. So the wound in this case is my sense of deficiency or not being good enough, not being worthy enough. Once I realize that, oh, this has got nothing to do with anything, except this interpretation that I made with my own experience all those years ago. Then when I notice it, I can no longer believe it. I don't have to any longer be a subject to that interpretation of myself in the world.
9:00 Speaker 00 So awareness is one step. It's not adequate, but it's an essential step towards letting go.
9:09 Steven Bartlett? That one belief that you weren't good enough.
9:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:12 Steven Bartlett? How did that rear its ugly head throughout your life?
9:17 Speaker 00 It made me a workaholic physician because I had to keep proving my worth. And it doesn't matter now. I don't know if you've ever had an addiction, but the nature of it is that we're trying to get from the outside something that only can arise and fulfill us from the inside. So when you're looking at it from the outside, it's addictive because you get it temporarily, but then that internal emptiness, that hole, never goes away. So it has to be filled over and over and over again. It can only be done so temporarily. So it becomes runaway addictive. So then, you know, work becomes an addiction because I keep trying to prove my worth. And it doesn't matter how many times, you know,
10:00 Speaker 00 I may show up in a positive way at the beginning of someone's life, at the end of somebody else's life, or any time in between. It never fills that emptiness that my sense of lack of worthiness creates. So that's one way it shows up. Another way it shows up is if in my relationship, I don't feel as satisfied. My wife doesn't please me the way I like her to. Then I get angry. But why am I getting angry? I'm getting angry because it's my sense of not being good enough that's being now revealed.
10:42 Speaker 00 It gets uncovered, this self accusation. But I get angry at her because her job is to make me not feel that. You know, we get into this relationship for all kinds of reasons. Some of them are conscious, some are not, some are positive, some are come out of trauma. In my case, I want that relationship to prove to me how good I am. So when it isn't proving that, then I get upset with my partner, you know. Well, except the gap is inside me, not inside, it's not coming from her. So it shows up, it showed up in my parenting, it shows up all over the place.
11:19 Steven Bartlett? I mean, I think both of those examples sound a lot like me, especially the first one.
11:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:27 Steven Bartlett? The second one as well, but the-
11:28 Speaker 00 In what sense?
11:29 Steven Bartlett? In the sense that I, I'm definitely a workaholic and I thought, I think in the earlier phases of my life, I like sacrificed everything in this pursuit of becoming a millionaire and having all this stuff and really getting this validation. Sacrificed meaningful connections, everything in the pursuit of this one thing.
11:43 Speaker 00 Well, part of the toxicity of the culture that I talk about in this book is that it actually rewards that kind of emptiness or that desperate seeking to fulfill that emptiness. Because you know, you get rewarded, you make a lot of money, a lot of people admire you, you get to feel good about yourself, mind you, my guess is that good feeling is only temporary, at least if my example is any guide, you know, that feeling good because somebody from the outside values you is only a temporary self for the, for the wound that's inside. But the world actually rewards it, you know, so you're a workaholic doctor, great, you make more money and all these people respect you.
12:26 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, you're hollowing yourself from the, from the inside and you're not available for your family, you know, so that, that's part of the craziness of this culture.
12:34 Steven Bartlett? And it's like the, it's like the hedonistic treadmill in a, in a sense, because you just never- Enough is never enough, as you say. So the last achievement needs to be surpassed by a greater achievement for me to get an applaud or a clap. I've never really made the connection that the reason why I'm a workaholic is because I am trying to prove to the world that I'm enough, but I think that is entirely true.
12:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. So in your place, like, like race and class in this society of inequality are certainly traumatic, potentially traumatic inputs, as I pointed in this book, and, you know, to, to the degree that it affects people's physiology, you know, but also then, I don't know, your family of origin or what kind of relationship you have with your parents, but there also may have been a sense, like I got with my mom for, you know, reasons and for whatever might have happened in your family, maybe you got the sense as well that even in your family of origin, you weren't good enough somehow.
13:32 Steven Bartlett? So my mum would scream at my dad for like seven hours a day and my dad would just sit there.
13:36 Speaker 00 Okay.
13:36 Steven Bartlett? And so my early memories of like, looking at my mum and dad are this kind of violent verbally, not like physically, this incredibly stressful screaming, one person screaming at the other. That's what I remember, but from reading what you've written in this book and from what you've said now, I actually might have learned, sort of learned that I was the problem to some degree.
14:00 Speaker 00 Children interpret it that way. That's just the whole point. That's what I mean about kids being narcissists. I don't mean that in a negative sense. I just, I mean, actually, they think it's all about them. So if your mother is unhappy, it's your fault, you know, and you're not good enough. So then you have to go out there and work to prove yourself, to prove to the world and to yourself that you're good enough. So that, going back to your first question about how these things show up in our lives, that's how they show up.
14:30 Steven Bartlett? And so 12 years old, you, you emigrate to Vancouver.
14:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:34 Steven Bartlett? By 28, you, you join the medical profession.
14:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:38 Steven Bartlett? And you spend the next 32 years roughly, working in.
14:41 Speaker 00 Well, at 28, I went back to medical school. Actually, I, I took a detour. I was a high school teacher for, and, and then I was 27, 28, when I started medical school. At age 33, I think I began my medical career of 32 years.
14:58 Steven Bartlett? And in those 33 years, what, what was your practice? What did you specialize in? What did you focus on?
15:04 Speaker 00 So I was a family physician. Which meant I delivered a lot of babies and I looked after people's problems from beginning to the end of life. I also worked in palliative care. I was the director of a unit at the hospital, which looked after people with terminal disease. And I did, that was twenty-two years or so of my practice, twenty, twenty-two years. And then, then I switched gears altogether and I went to work in the downtown east side of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more, people coming from anywhere in the world are shocked by what they see there.
15:45 Speaker 00 Thousands of people in the streets injecting, selling, using, inhaling, ingesting drugs of all kinds and people have suffered the consequences of drug use in a society that doesn't understand drug use, so it punishes it, excludes it, ostracizes it. So people get HIV from dirty needles and hepatitis C, so this is the population, often they're homeless. So that's the population I worked with for twelve years, till the end of my medical work.
16:15 Steven Bartlett? That experience working with patients that were in palliative care.
16:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:20 Steven Bartlett? So that's, for anybody that doesn't know, that's patients that are approaching the end of their life.
16:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:24 Steven Bartlett? That have terminal illnesses and that are aware that they're going to, to die. What did that experience teach you?
16:30 Speaker 00 It took an acceptance of one's lack of, lack of omnipotence as a physician. Cause you go into the, you wanna cure people, you wanna, you want people to heal. And now it takes a tremendous acceptance to say, you know, we've reached the limit of our knowledge. And that doesn't mean we can't help people, but we certainly can't cure them. You know? And so it taught me how to be with the inevitable. And, and, and you're working with people who are in the process of dying, but, I mean, by the way, who isn't in the process of dying, you know? But, but people whose time is more limited than the rest of us. Acceptance, you learn a lot of acceptance. It challenges you to do your best.
17:17 Speaker 00 When you know your best isn't going to be saving anybody's lives, but it's to help people live a life of as little suffering as possible and as much dignity as possible. So it really challenges the best parts of you to to show up. Patience, acceptance, intuition. Personally, it taught me a lot to listen to people. Interestingly enough, people really wanna be heard when they're dying.
17:46 Speaker 00 They wanna make sense of their lives. They wanna tell their stories, then I want their stories to be heard. And so I listened a lot. I just sat by the bedside and I listened. All that.
17:58 Steven Bartlett? When you listened, did you did you hear any themes relating to regret or things that actually mattered? Because I always imagine if I was given such news, that my life was coming to an end and there was an approximate date, it would be quite a powerful way of finally realizing what truly matters and what never did.
18:19 Speaker 00 You know, people react to their impending death in different ways. So there were some people who just fought it to the end, you know? They didn't really wanna accept it. But most people were more along the lines that you described, where they really get to see what's important. And so I mentioned this a number of times. It sounds strange, and I don't recommend it. But I've had patients say to me, "Doctor, I don't know how to tell you this, and I can't even explain it perhaps, but this illness that's gonna take my life is the best thing that ever happened to me." And what they meant, they meant a couple of things about it. They meant what you just said about finding out what's really important in life. In this book, The Myth or Normal, I interviewed a young man called Will Pye, who wrote a book called Blessed with a Brain Tumor.
19:05 Speaker 00 And I'm like, "Huh? What kind of blessing is that?" So I said, I asked Will, "What's the blessing?" And he said, "It made me appreciate every moment. It meant every time I talked to somebody, this, I knew this might be the last conversation I'm gonna have with them. So it better be a human, genuine interaction." So there was that aspect of it. The other aspect of it was that...
19:29 Speaker 00 Again, my view is, as I pointed in this book and in previous works, who gets sick and who doesn't isn't exactly accidental. There were certainly personality patterns based on traumatic experiences in childhood that make disease more likely. And people very often realize that throughout their lives, they had abandoned who they were, they lived a life that wasn't meaningful for them. And on death, they reconnected with themselves in an authentic way. And that seemed to be worth a lot to people. Again, I don't recommend that way of going to reconnect with yourself. But people have certainly, I certainly saw it. So those are the two big lessons.
20:10 Steven Bartlett? After your thirty-three years in medical practice, you described that you had a bit of a, you kind of tuned into a creative calling, which was writing.
20:20 Speaker 00 Well, I began to write when I was a physician. So my first book on ADHD, after I was diagnosed with it, was published in nineteen ninety-nine now. So that was twenty-three years ago now. So I began to write. And even before then, I wrote because I wrote columns for newspapers. But yes, there was a time in my life where the writing impulse, which had been with me all my life, was stifled and stymied. And so was I, because I had this frustration. In fact, I had this sense that there's something I needed to express. But I didn't know what and didn't know how. And at some point, I realized, oh, yeah, I need to write. So that began before I finished medical practice.
21:05 Speaker 00 But it certainly has been essential to my ongoing unfolding as a human being.
21:14 Steven Bartlett? I was so compelled by that when I read about that because I started to really understand the value of creativity in all of our lives, regardless of whether we have the luxury of being called an artist or not. And so what in your view is the importance of?
21:29 Speaker 00 Well, you're singing my tune here, if I may say it that way. Because I quote in this book, there's a great Hungarian-Canadian stress researcher called Janos Selly, S E L Y E. And Selly is the one who actually coined the word stress in the sense that we use it today. And he's the one that showed in a laboratory how stress diminishes the immune system and this organizes the hormones and also rates the stomach and all this kind of stuff. But. Salia also said, and I quote him here, "What is in us must out." "What is in us must out." That we all have to follow our creative urges in the way that nature prepared for us,
22:11 Speaker 00 otherwise we can be hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. I'm paraphrasing him very closely. So...
22:20 Speaker 00 We are created in the image of God. I mean, as, you know, whatever your religious views are, but that sense that we're created in images of God means that we are creators, because the essence of God is creation. In fact, we call God the Creator and we call the result of that creation. If we're created and if we're offshoots of that creative dynamic in the universe, then it means that it's in us to create. And whatever form that takes, I mean, you know, you don't want to see me
22:52 Speaker 00 do art, you know, unless you... I can do a pretty good stick figure, you know, by merit to a nurse.
23:01 Speaker 00 So that creativity doesn't have to take the form of formal art, but it does have to take some flow of something that's inside you that needs to come out. Otherwise, as Salia says, you get hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. And so in that sense, everybody's got that creative urge and that may take the form of social intercourse, it might take the form of gardening, I don't care, commune with nature,
23:26 Speaker 00 athletic expression, I don't care what. But there's somebody, everybody's got it. And if people don't realize they have it, it's only because life has hemmed them in and they're too busy. And sometimes they are, trying to make a living or trying to survive, or too disconnected from themselves. But it's in all of us and to the extent that we don't give it expression, we suffer.
23:48 Steven Bartlett? One of the things that really hems it in is is the prospect that we might not be good at it because we think to express ourselves creatively, we kind of join a competition of sorts. And that's, that's a trap we can fall into. So if I'm gonna DJ, I need to become a good DJ. But in social comparison, or else I don't wanna. But what I've come to learn is in fact, the act of DJing alone in my kitchen at midnight is, is the reward. Regardless of outcome or whether there's a crowd there, if it's just me and my dog listening. That is, the expression is the reward, not the achievement or the medal that I might get.
24:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, not the external. Well, look, I went through that in the writing of this book. So here I am, this, you know, writer who writes about, you know, trauma and, you know, healing. And all of a sudden I'm in a panic because I'm writing a book. And I realized that the problem was that you, you talked about identifying with your work. So I had identified with this book. So the problem wasn't the book. Because let's say I write the book and it's not a success. I mean, okay, big headline in the Sunday Times, book not a big success. You know, how big a big deal is that in the history of the universe? But if I identify with the book and it's not going well, then if the book fails, then I'm failing as a person, which then goes back to my very earliest concern about not being worth it, you know?
25:08 Speaker 00 So, once I disidentified, I said, no, this is just a book. It may be a good book, it may be an important book, maybe a book that doesn't hit the mark. But it's only a book. And how it goes says nothing about me or my worth. Once I could decouple that, then I could confidently and much more comfortably go back to the writing of it. But I went through that crisis.
25:31 Steven Bartlett? It seems like a bit of a paradox that the, the, the lack of self-worth would, would motivate someone to, to create great things because they want the approval, but at the same time, make the process so agonizing because their self-esteem seems to be on the line.
25:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:43 Steven Bartlett? Or their sense of self-worth is on the line.
25:46 Speaker 00 Well, that dynamic was in me once I realized that I let go of it, you know? So it didn't, it didn't dominate me in the end. And honest to God, by the time I finished the book, I'm not just saying this in retrospect. It's, it's a bestseller now in several countries, but.
26:01 Speaker 00 I actually said to myself, and I meant it. Now I've done the book. That's what matters. I've said what was in me to say. How the world reacts? I can't control. And it doesn't actually matter. On a fundamental level. It's not that I don't want this book to be a success. I mean, success. Of course, I wanted to sell 10 zillion copies. But that doesn't define my self-worth or how I function in the world or I feel about myself. Honestly, it does not. And I I understood that by the time I finished working on it. So once it's done, it's out there doing its work or not doing its work.
26:42 Speaker 00 But I don't have to hang my own sense of self on how the book does.
26:48 Steven Bartlett? Because at that point, that's an outcome you can't control, right? So trying to control that would be anxiety.
26:54 Speaker 00 And yeah, oh, yeah. Well, you can't control it, no.
26:58 Steven Bartlett? 10 years, this book.
26:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:00 Steven Bartlett? Took you to write.
27:01 Speaker 00 Took me to prepare. Took about three years to write, yeah.
27:05 Steven Bartlett? You describe it as a calling.
27:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:08 Steven Bartlett? The myth of normal.
27:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:10 Steven Bartlett? What four words to to sort of pull people in and to in some way summarize a 550-odd-page book? Why why those four words? Why that phrase?
27:22 Speaker 00 Can I pass for him to find a code on my cellphone?
27:24 Steven Bartlett? 100%.
27:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. I just. So this is, are you familiar with the work of Eckhart Tolle?
27:31 Steven Bartlett? Eckhart Tolle, yes.
27:33 Speaker 00 OK, yeah. So Tolle lives in Vancouver like I do. And in one of his books, he says, "The normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we would call dysfunction or even madness." You know? So in medical parlance, normal means healthy and natural. So there's a normal range of blood pressure, normal temperature. It's a range. Outside that range, there's no life. There's no health. Either too high or too low, you're gone. So normal means it's it's equivalent with synonymous with healthy and natural.
28:14 Speaker 00 However, we make that same assumption. That out in society, what we used to, what we call normal, is also healthy and natural, which is a myth. Because I'm saying that in this society, what we consider to be normal is neither healthy nor natural. In fact, it's hurtful to us. So that we're using the word "normal" in a way that doesn't apply. In a narrow medical sense, it's accurate. But in a broader sense, that which we're used to in this society, we consider normal, is just not good for us. You know? And "norm" is kind of a statistic, or it's a kind of a average.
28:56 Speaker 00 So if everybody, you have a dog, if everybody in London mistreated their dogs, and if you didn't, then you'd be abnormal. You know? So it's a myth to say that what is normal is healthy and natural. That's what I mean by the "myth of normal." That's one thing I mean. The other thing I mean is, if we understand that the actual science of the unity of everything, I'm not talking about spiritual insight here, I'm talking about, you know, physiological science, that our physiology and psychology is very much affected by our life experiences, beginning in utero, childbirth, early childhood, and throughout the lifetime. It also follows that illness and health are not individual attributes.
29:40 Speaker 00 They're actually manifestations of our relationships and our situation in the world and our history. That also means when the circumstances are abnormal, you expect people to be sick. You know, just as if you gave animals something that wasn't healthy for them, they'd be sick, that'd be what you'd expect. So this idea that the people who are ill, either physically or mentally abnormal, I say, "No, these are normal responses to an abnormal set of circumstances." And rather than being sort of those abnormal ones and then the rest of us, it's really a spectrum that we're all, pretty much all on it.
30:22 Speaker 00 So in those three senses, this idea of "normal" is a myth. And it's one that keeps us from seeing reality.
30:34 Steven Bartlett? And we're all abnormal in some way.
30:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:38 Steven Bartlett? So if you, maybe my, maybe my attention is different, maybe my, you know, my, my interpersonal relationships are abnormal, but in some way I'm going to be abnormal. As it relates to treatments, how do you think that the medical profession and the psychological profession would respond differently if we remove this idea that there is a normal?
30:57 Speaker 00 Hmm.
30:57 Steven Bartlett? How would, how would our approaches change to treating people?
31:00 Speaker 00 Hmm.
31:02 Speaker 00 Well, that's.
31:05 Speaker 00 It's a multi-layered answer. First of all, we would recognize that our diagnoses are not explanations for anything. So, you know, I've been diagnosed with ADD, you know, legitimately so, my first book was on it.
31:22 Speaker 00 But, but it doesn't explain anything. So, so I tune out easily, very easily, you know, and sometimes when I don't, often when I don't want to, but you know, unless I'm highly motivated.
31:37 Speaker 00 So, so you might say this person has ADD, how do we know because he tunes out a lot? Why does he tune out a lot? He's got ADD. How do we know he's got ADD because he tunes out a lot? And so, so first of all, we have to understand that our understanding of normal and what's outside the normal, they don't, doesn't explain anything. They, they can, they can describe, if you describe my mental functioning as that of somebody who's got an automatic tendency to tune out, you'd be accurate.
32:07 Speaker 00 So the description, it's helpful, is an explanation as to why this person isn't behaving quote unquote normally. It's, doesn't explain a thing. Now, if you understood that I spent my infancy under very difficult circumstances, where I was very stressed because of all the stuff I already talked about, and that tuning out was a normal response to, to those circumstances as a way of protecting myself from the stress of it all. And this is happening when my brain was developing, then you'd understand there's nothing abnormal about my, by tuning out. In fact, it is the normal response to a set of abnormal circumstances. So that's the first point.
32:49 Speaker 00 And I could go through the same kind of dialectic with all manner of physical and mental diseases, by the way, so-called. The second point is.
33:01 Steven Bartlett? Why do you say so-called?
33:06 Speaker 00 Well, look, the disease model is... As long as we understand it's a model, it's okay. When we think it describes reality fully, it doesn't. So, um...
33:22 Speaker 00 For example, we talk about mental illnesses.
33:28 Speaker 00 And we're assuming that there's a kind of definite pathology there, just as in rheumatoid arthritis, you can describe the inflammation of the joints and the blood levels of certain antibodies being abnormal and hormonal levels being disturbed, you know. We're making the same assumption in mental illness. There's no such evidence in mental illness. There's no physiological parameters that you can say somebody's got mental illness. There's just been a study a few months ago of thousands of brain scans of people with mental illness diagnosis. There's nothing diagnostic about the brain scans. It's not like I can take an X-ray of a lung
34:12 Speaker 00 and say that this lung is got what we call consolidation or fluid indicating inflammation. There's nothing like that in mental diagnosis. There's no blood test you can do and so on. So illness is a model. I mean, it might... Yeah, somebody's really depressed, even suicidal perhaps, and they might need pharmacological intervention, which would really save their lives. That may be true.
34:44 Speaker 00 And in that sense, you may say that they're ill, as long as we realize that this is a construct that we're applying here, but that there's no actual measurement of that that's at all similar to what we call physical disease. But even in physical disease, we make certain assumptions. For example, somebody has rheumatoid arthritis. No, that... Nothing wrong with that statement on the face of it, but there's an assumption there. The assumption is that there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis. And there's this person called me. And this person has this thing. Now, you know, the example I often give, here's my cellphone, I'm holding it in my hand. I have a cellphone. It's not part of me.
35:28 Speaker 00 It says nothing about me. It's a discrete object. Its nature doesn't depend on my nature. Nothing.
35:38 Speaker 00 Is that true about rheumatoid arthritis? Or is it more true to say, as I've found out, that this is a condition that shows up in people with certain life experiences and certain ways of functioning in the world? And that because of the science documented unity of mind and body and the impossibility of separating the activity or emotional apparatus from seeing our immune system, because it's all one organismic unit. Therefore, when the immune system turns against the body, as it does in rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system actually attacks the body? Is that a thing that's got a life of its own? Or is there a process that's happening inside that person because of certain aspects of their lives?
36:23 Speaker 00 Now, if I say it's the thing that happens to you, then that thing has got a life of its own. And that's how most doctors see it. They see somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, they say, okay, this is the kind you've got. This is what's gonna happen. This is the only thing we can do is to mitigate the symptoms. I find that's not true. I find that the rheumatoid, by the way, not just I find it. The science finds it. That rheumatoid arthritis is very much related to stress and trauma. And the more stress there is, the more likely it is to flare up. And if people deal with that stress, if they know how to prevent it, their illness abates. Which means that it's not a thing that's separate. It's a process that happens inside them. This is a subtle concept. I'm wondering if I'm explaining it clearly enough.
37:07 Steven Bartlett? No, you are. And it's really making me question how much we misunderstand the relationship between the mind and the immune system.
37:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:15 Steven Bartlett? Because... That's the real, that's the important connection to understand if you, if you are to accept all the things you've just said.
37:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:22 Steven Bartlett? Which we don't, we don't understand. I don't think typically we understand that my mind and my immune system have such a close relationship.
37:29 Speaker 00 Well, the, there's a whole new science that studies those relationships called psychoneuromatology, which studies the interlinked unity of the emotional apparatus of our brain and body with the immune system, with the nervous system and with the hormonal apparatus. I mean, it's just so obvious. I could change your hormonal state in this split second right now without touching you, just by screaming at you and threatening you. That would necessarily create a change. I mean, it's just clear that emotions are inseparable, you know, and, and the other funny thing is, well, several funny things. How do we treat most conditions in medicine, by the way, inflammation, if you go to a dermatologist
38:10 Speaker 00 with inflamed skin, if you go to a rheumatologist with inflamed joints, if you go to a gastroenterologist with inflamed intestines, if you go to a respiratoryologist with inflamed lungs, if you go to a neurologist with inflamed nervous system, as in multiple sclerosis, they're going to give you steroids to settle the inflammation. Now, what are steroids? They are stress hormones. And you would think that as physicians, we would ask ourselves, gosh, we're treating everything with stress hormones. The stress maybe has something to do with this condition. And when you look at the scientific literature, yes, yes,
38:49 Speaker 00 yes, and yes. So there's a great Canadian physician, actually knighted by Queen Victoria, one of the great medical teachers of all kinds, Sir William Osler. And he said in 1890, that rheumatoid arthritis is a stress-driven disease. The, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who first described multiple sclerosis, he said, this is a stress-driven condition.
39:14 Speaker 00 And since then, there's been so much research. So what I'm saying is that this way of looking at what we call disease as a process is so much more accurate scientifically, actually, in understanding the mind-body unity. And then, you know, naturally, when people are traumatized, that has a huge impact on their physiology. Their psychological trauma has a huge impact on their physiology. It's just science, but it's science that's not taught to medical doctors. It's just for some strange reason, well, the average physician never hears a single lecture about, say, trauma and its relationship to illness. And yet, there's studies internationally, thousands of them, showing those relationships.
39:58 Speaker 00 So there's this strange gap between science and medical practice. But it would change medical practice for the better. Because what would happen if you went to a physician and you presented with your symptom? And they'd say, okay, look, we'll give you such and such medication to deal with your symptoms. And then let's look at your life in the context that you live it and see how that, the stresses that you may be taking on, the traumas you may be carrying, might be affecting the physiology of your body. No, they don't have to be all trauma therapists to do that. They just have to raise the question and then to begin the inquiry. That'll make a huge change to that person's life and to their disease process.
40:43 Steven Bartlett? And clearly to their kids' lives as well, because I remember reading in your book about the study with the rats.
40:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
40:50 Steven Bartlett? And how they, could you tell me about that study? The stress study with the rats and how the parents' treatment of a child impacted their stress response? And then also they passed that on, which I think was.
41:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, that was a very interesting study. It was done in Canada at McGill University. I think maybe something in the last 20 years, early 2000s, I think. And they looked at how mother rats interacted with their infants, their newborns. And there's this process called grooming, in which the mother rat licks the infant or in the perineal area, you know, in the genitalia. This is shortly after birth. These mother rats just start licking their infants. Some other rats did it in a more efficient and caring kind of way than other mother rats. Those that had the better kind of caring, the better kind of grooming,
41:46 Speaker 00 grew to be calmer and responded to stress in more functional ways than those little rats who, as neonates, had not been given that same kind of efficient and quite as caring grooming.
42:06 Speaker 00 And what they found that in the brains of those adult rats who had been groomed one way or the other as infants, the stress apparatus was different, certain receptors for the stress hormones. So one of them could call themselves more easily than the other. What was interesting is, you might say, well, so what? That's just genetic. The calmer mothers passed on their genes to their infants. No, they didn't. Because if you took the infants of mothers who groomed beautifully and put them with mothers who didn't, and conversely, you took the infants, rats of mothers who didn't groom so well, but you put them with mothers who did.
42:44 Steven Bartlett? It changed.
42:45 Speaker 00 It changed the brain for the adult.
42:47 Steven Bartlett? It changed the brain?
42:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, it changed the genetic functioning, not the genes, but the genetic functioning. This is called epigenetics, how genes are turned on and off by the environment. And then those mother, and those rats who were groomed well as infants, doesn't matter what the original mother was, but those rats who were groomed well, they went on to groom their infants in exactly the way they'd been groomed. So this is how we pass on our parenting stuff from one generation to the next, both behaviorally, but also through the turning on or off of certain genes.
43:22 Steven Bartlett? So in essence, the, how nurturing our parents were, has a big impact on our own ability to handle stress positively or negatively?
43:30 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely.
43:30 Steven Bartlett? And then we pass that down to our children.
43:32 Speaker 00 How stressed our parents were, how they reacted to our own stress as infants, you know, that has everything to do with how our brains handle stress later on. And so some people just don't handle stress very well. They don't handle the frustration very well. You should have seen me this morning at the hotel when the swimming pool didn't open in time, you know?
43:52 Speaker 00 But I, I was a lot better than I might have been years ago, you know? But yeah, our stress responses are very much programmed by our early developmental experiences.
44:03 Steven Bartlett? Speaking about our early experiences, the first word in the subtitle of your book is the word trauma. It's a word that I've talked about a lot on this podcast and I've had a lot of people here that have opened up about their traumas. How do you define trauma? I know society has defined it in its own way, but how do you define it?
44:21 Speaker 00 I define it very specifically. It's not something bad that happens to you. It's not that, you know, I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized. No, you weren't. You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized. Trauma means a wound. That's the literal meaning of the word. It's a Greek word for wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain. And it behaves like a wound. So on the one hand, a wound, if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts. So if I have a wound around not being wanted, then, or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts
45:05 Speaker 00 as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound. So in one sense, trauma is an unhealed wound that touched, we get triggered. That's what triggering means, by the way. Some old wound gets activated or touched. And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over. And scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick, it has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling. And so people traumatized disconnect from their feelings. Scar tissue is rigid, it's not flexible. So we lose kind of response flexibility. So when something happens, we tend to react in typical stereotypical predictable dysfunctional ways because of the rigidity. And
45:46 Speaker 00 scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh. So people who are traumatized tend to be stuck in emotional states that characterized their development when they were traumatized. So when somebody says to you, don't be such a baby, it doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's some truth to it. It means that you're probably reacting according to the lines of some wound that you sustained as an infant. And now you're reacting as if that wound was happening all over again. This is what one of my friends in the trauma world, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past. So something happens in the present and we react.
46:27 Speaker 00 As if we're back there in the past when this first happened. And we're not in the present moment at all.
46:33 Steven Bartlett? And I was, I was trying to figure out how many people um as a percentage of the population have a have trauma. But then I, I, you know, I read this stat, sixty percent of adults um say that they've had sort of a traumatic early upbringing or whatever, or traumatic events from their childhood. But then I thought, maybe everybody has trauma.
46:50 Speaker 00 It depends on um how we understand trauma. So if we understand trauma, there's only the really terrible things that happen to people, which do happen to people. You know, in the book I talked about a British friend of mine, what now, living in Canada. Um, they are a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher and a psychologist and an artist, actually. And they grew up in some orphanage here in Britain where they were racially taunted every, every morning. You know, words that are in the book, by your permission, which I'm not going to cite here publicly. And that gave her a sense of deficient, a sense of self that I'm just not good enough, that I don't belong and so on. There's those obvious traumas or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused.
47:35 Speaker 00 So men who are sexually abused, according to Canadian study, have tripled the rate of heart attacks as adults. You know, and all kinds of physiological reasons, but that should be the case. So there's those self-evident large big T traumas that we call big T trauma, T with a capital T. Trauma with a capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that. If you include um all the known factors such as physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Spanking, by the way, has now been shown to be as traumatic as harsher forms of physical abuse.
48:14 Speaker 00 Spanking, which is still recommended by so-called experts, who should remain, remain unnamed for the moment. Uh, the death of a parent, violence in a family, violence, parental violence against each other. Um, a parent being jailed, a parent being mentally ill. Did I say a parent being addicted, a raunchy divorce. These are the identified big traumas, big T traumas, not, not to mention poverty, not to mention extreme inequality, um war and so on.
48:46 Speaker 00 But then,
48:48 Speaker 00 if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you is the wound. People can be wounded, not just by bad things happening to them, but small children can be wounded in loving families where they don't get their needs met. I mean, that's obvious in a physical sense. If a child doesn't get proper nutrition, their body will suffer. Their mind will suffer.
49:16 Speaker 00 We're also creatures with emotional needs as important as our physical needs. So when a child's emotional needs are not met, that child is wounded. And that's what we call small T-trauma, which is not the big ticket events, such as I described. But just the child's need to be loved unconditionally, to be held when distressed, to be responded to, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed their full range of emotion without them being stamped on in the name of so-called discipline.
49:49 Speaker 00 The right to play creatively, spontaneously, out there in nature, not with these damn digital gadgets that subvert and hijack the child's imagination. But spontaneous play, that's essential for brain development. So what I'm saying is that when these needs are not for the unconditional loving attachment relationship, when those needs are frustrated, children are also hurt. And I call that trauma as well, because it shows up later in life as the impact of painful wounds. So trauma in this society, for all kinds of reasons, is far more common than we imagine.
50:28 Steven Bartlett? From sitting here and speaking to, I don't know, somewhere over a hundred different people that come from all walks of life, but specifically people that are successful in their industries. And you talked about, you know, How an anomalous early upbringing can create sort of abnormality in an adult. A lot of people I sit here are successful because of some kind of abnormality, or at least their interpretation of some kind of early event that caused them to have some sort of abnormal belief about themselves, that they're not enough. So they become a billionaire or a gold medalist or whatever it might be. One of the things that I thought I could predict is, I thought I could, if they told me, I thought after doing a hundred episodes, if they told me the traumatic event they'd been through, I could predict the the outcome in them.
51:11 Steven Bartlett? But there's a disconnect there because, you know, I'd sit here with a guest who went through one of your tall, capital T traumas, like domestic violence. And one of them might become incredibly angry.
51:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:24 Steven Bartlett? And one of them might become the most peaceful, loving person I've ever met.
51:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:28 Steven Bartlett? And that taught me that there's this thing in between the event, which is what you call interpretation.
51:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:35 Steven Bartlett? And I found that really, I found that as, that kind of makes it really difficult to diagnose.
51:39 Speaker 00 Well, no, look, so the two examples you gave, that really peaceful person may be really peaceful for genuinely good reasons, such as they found the milk of human love flowing through their veins and they've had some spiritual reconciliation with the world, where they may have genuinely learned compassion for themselves and others. But they could also be very nice and peaceful because they're suppressing their healthy anger. Because they're actually sitting on their rage unconsciously, which is going to show up in the form of some kind of health manifestation, I guarantee you, later on. So you can't tell from the outside without asking some questions.
52:19 Speaker 00 Or I can give you the example of a Donald Trump who had a really traumatic childhood. I mean, his father was a, as described by his psychologist niece, Mary Trump. His father, Trump's father, who is Mary's grandfather, was a psychopath and who really demeaned and harshly treated their children.
52:45 Speaker 00 So Trump decides unconsciously that, by the way, I'm not talking about his policies here, this is not a political debate. And in the book, I point out that his opponent was also traumatized, Hillary Clinton. So this is a ecumenical view of trauma and politics, I'm not choosing sides. I'm just saying that you can see his trauma in every moment he opens his mouth. His grandiosities need to make himself bigger, more powerful, aggressive, and he's as much as said in his autobiography, that the world is a horrible place, a dog-eat-dog place, where everybody is after you. Everybody wants your wife and your house and your wealth, and this is your friends, never mind your enemies. That's the world he lives in. Now, that world that he lives in reflects his childhood home.
53:30 Speaker 00 He developed that world you. He came to it honestly, you might say, because that's the world that he lived in. And he gets to be really successful in this crazy world. You know, financially, although people question, you know, was he really as big a success as he says he was? But he certainly was successful politically, if by success you mean the attainment of power. His brother, on the other hand, Mary Trump's father, Trump's niece's father, drank himself to death. And there were both responses to the same, you can never say it's exactly the same for two kids, but there was that toxic home environment, one ends up dead as an alcoholic, the other
54:14 Speaker 00 ends up at the pinnacle of power. And when I look at them both, I see dysfunction there, significant dysfunction there.
54:24 Steven Bartlett? So one of the, one of those, the consequences of that early upbringing was it materialized itself as sort of addiction, and the other got the same psychological reinforcement or the thing missing from power and work and money?
54:39 Speaker 00 Well, Donald Trump learned that the way to survive is to be aggressive and harsh and competitive and to get the other before they get to you, which is a faithful reproduction of his early childhood experiences. So for him, these were not choices so much as survival techniques and...
55:01 Speaker 00 When they talk about his lying, well, I don't know when he's lying or when he's not, but my sense is that often he actually believes what he's saying. And actually, he's a biographer or the person who co-wrote his quasi-autobiographical The Art of the Deal. This writer says that he's never met anybody who's so capable of believing something that's not true to be true if he wants it to be true. Now, that's the mark of a traumatized child. You know, a denial of reality. It is an inauguration. There was a certain number of people that came to the...
55:43 Speaker 00 He couldn't stand it, that there weren't as many people there as came to Barack Obama's inauguration. There were a much smaller number of people there. He created this reality where many more people came to his inauguration. Now, what age behavior is that? That's a four-year-old, where more kids came to his party than my party. That can't be true. But that's Donald's way of dealing with reality. It's not a moral failing as such. That's how he survived. And these survival mechanisms then get to form our personalities. And again, in this world, sometimes they pay off
56:25 Speaker 00 in certain ways.
56:27 Steven Bartlett? Is that often the case with pathological liars? They've learnt to lie as a way to survive?
56:32 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. The German philosopher, writer Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, said, "People lie their way out of reality who have been hurt by reality." And so, I've lied. You know, like when I had my shopping addiction, I lied every day to my wife. You know, and even afterwards, when she tried, when she stopped trying to change my behavior, I said, "Just tell me, if you're going to shop, you're going to spend another thousand dollars on music. Just tell me."
57:06 Speaker 00 I still couldn't. Cause I was so ashamed of it. And so the lying became like a way of survival for me.
57:17 Steven Bartlett? Defense against reality.
57:18 Speaker 00 It's a defense against reality and it's a defense against being judged. You know, well, that says something about my childhood, you know? Nobody's born a liar. As we say in this book, there are congenial liars, but there are no congenital liars. No one day old baby tells any lies. No one day old baby pretends anything. If we end up pretending in any way at all, to the extent that we do, it's because we had to learn that's what we must do to survive.
57:47 Steven Bartlett? You said something at the start, when I gave the example that I have this, I sat with a guest here who went through domestic abuse.
57:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
57:53 Steven Bartlett? And they are the calmest person. And then you said, well, maybe they're suppressing it. And in fact, the minute you said that, it reminded me of something they said, which is they said to me on this podcast that they had angry outbursts all the time. So sometimes their child will come up to them.
58:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
58:11 Steven Bartlett? And want to play when they're working and they'll snap.
58:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
58:15 Steven Bartlett? And they're trying to, they're trying to deal with that.
58:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's what I meant, that they're sitting on this crater of, volcanic crater of anger, which sometimes bursts out of them. So their demeanor is like a really developed, suppressed way of handling rage, which rage, when they were children, had they expressed, would have got them into more trouble. So suppressing it, repressing it, became their survival. It's all about survival, you see? So it became their survival mechanism. Now, that person, as long as they keep it that way, they're at risk.
59:00 Speaker 00 They're at risk for mental health diagnosis like depression. Because what is depression? It means you're pushing something down. That's all it means. What do we push down? Our natural emotions. Why do we push them down? Because we have to to survive. So that that person, I don't know. I can't prognosticate what's going to happen to them. But if they don't work it out in general, they're at risk for some kind of mental or physical manifestation. That's my experience.
59:30 Steven Bartlett? You talked about expressing one's emotions. And something you've talked about in this book, but also previously is this idea that there is such a thing as healthy anger.
59:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
59:37 Steven Bartlett? It's one of the seven A's of your of healing, as you say. The first being the topic, a topic we've talked about already, which is acceptance.
59:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
59:46 Steven Bartlett? The next being awareness.
59:48 Speaker 00 Well, awareness, I wish we had put into this book, but we didn't. Not into this book. In this book, I put four A's and I left out awareness and that was an omission on my part.
59:59 Steven Bartlett? Really?
59:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was. I'm sorry, but it was.
1:00:01 Steven Bartlett? So in the book, you have authenticity, anger, autonomy.
1:00:06 Speaker 00 Authenticity and agency, yeah.
1:00:08 Steven Bartlett? And acceptance.
1:00:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:00:10 Steven Bartlett? So awareness, you've said before, before this book, that awareness is the starting point.
1:00:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:00:16 Steven Bartlett? I found that to be so true in my life, but it's not very easy. I feel like awareness is a luxury or a privilege that is very hard fought.
1:00:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:00:24 Steven Bartlett? Because you're guessing.
1:00:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:00:26 Steven Bartlett? You're guessing based on pattern recognition. So I was guessing 25 years old, I can't get into a relationship. Anytime a girl comes near me, even if I've pursued her, I run off. And to figure out why I was doing that, to even identify the behavior pattern and go, that's not helpful. That's not going to lead me to feeling whole.
1:00:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:00:43 Steven Bartlett? Where does that come from? Took 25 years and a lot of like introspection. But but most people, they're living unaware of the puppet master of trauma that is driving their life.
1:00:55 Speaker 00 That's a really good analogy. The trauma really is like a puppet master behind the scenes or in the unconscious, pulling your strings. And you're not aware of it, you know? Do you remember Pinocchio?
1:01:06 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:01:06 Speaker 00 So you remember what Pinocchio says at the end where he, when he finally becomes a real boy?
1:01:12 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:01:13 Speaker 00 He says, how foolish I was when I was a puppet. And to the extent that we're being activated by these unconscious strings that our trauma is pulling behind the scenes, and we're acting in our lives and we think we're autonomous, free beings, but we're actually being controlled by something in the past that we haven't worked out, we're puppets. We're actually puppets. And there's not, there's not much freedom in that. There's not, there's no freedom in it at all. So, I mean, I suppose the opposite of trauma, if you want to revisit that question, is liberation.
1:01:50 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. Liberation and by reconnection.
1:01:56 Speaker 00 By reconnection, but liberation from the, from the inexorable power of the unconscious.
1:02:01 Steven Bartlett? Which is like cutting the strings in a, in a way. Kind of brings me to, there's kind of two ways I want to go with that. But the first question I have about, about trauma and the puppet master analogy is, do we ever, do we ever really cut the strings? Or do we just kind of learn to pull against them when they try and tell us to do something with more force than they're exerting in the opposite direction?
1:02:22 Speaker 00 That doesn't work very well, pushing against it, because they're still reactive. You're still not in charge. You're just in automatic resistance mode to something. There's no freedom in that either, you know?
1:02:33 Steven Bartlett? Still.
1:02:34 Speaker 00 So, yeah. But awareness that you mentioned is huge, because once you're aware that there's this, see, the thing about, these strings may not fray right away, but once you're aware that, ah, this reaction of mine, it's not about what's going on right now. There's something old being activated here. That awareness alone weakens the, it slackens the strings a bit. Now you're no longer, they're no longer as taught, they're no longer as automatically capable of pulling on you. So it does have to begin with awareness of them. Ultimately.
1:03:16 Speaker 00 If we realize that this puppet master is just a desperate little person trying to get you to survive, the only way he, she, they knew how when you were small, when they were small, if you make friends with it, but relieve it of its duties, say, thanks very much, but I can handle it now. It eventually becomes our friend rather than sort of our master.
1:03:41 Steven Bartlett? On that first step of just acknowledging, just understanding that there is a puppet master there controlling us and exactly which strings that puppet master is pulling in our lives, how does one go about awareness, the process of awareness? Is that, I mean, is it introspection, keeping a diary, therapy? What is it?
1:03:59 Speaker 00 Well, all that, I mean, all or any. But even when you ask how you go about it, what is the it? Well, for you to say how to go about it, you already must have some degree of awareness. If you didn't, you wouldn't even be asking the question. So that's the very first step of realizing that there's something here to work on. There's something here to work through. It does not need to be the way it is. That already is the biggest step. The Buddha said that to recognize the source of your suffering is the first step towards relieving the suffering. And so as soon as you ask how you go about it, you've already taken a huge step. Because a lot of people don't even know that there's an it. They just think this is a reality, that this is life.
1:04:41 Speaker 00 So realizing that this it doesn't have to be the way it is, that's already a huge step now. Beyond that, yoga, meditation, nature, therapy of all kinds, body work of all kinds, like somatic experiencing or craniosacral treatments, or even massage therapy. It's incredible what can be revealed just through body work like that. Then all kinds of forms of therapy, the ones I teach, the ones other people teach, journaling, certain exercises in this book that we recommend,
1:05:26 Speaker 00 like just ask yourself where you have trouble saying no in life to things you don't really want to do and working not through on a regular basis. So there's lots of ways, once you open the door. You know, I have a chapter on psychedelics here, which is a... Again, it's not like a panacea or for everyone, but certainly it's a helpful modality for a lot of people. So some people may actually benefit from taking pharmaceutical medications if their situation is dire enough, but not as the final answer, but as a way of getting respite that allowed them to go to work on real issues that caused them to be depressed or anxious or tuning out, you know, so any and all of these things.
1:06:11 Steven Bartlett? A lot of people don't even want to open those doors, though, because there's so much pain associated with maybe going back or revisiting an early experience that they just think it's better to keep the doors shut.
1:06:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:22 Steven Bartlett? And get to tomorrow.
1:06:24 Speaker 00 That's true, to which I have two answers. One is, it's true, it's painful, because all the pain you didn't want to feel and you've been running away from through your compositorial behaviors, like your addictions, are nothing but an attempt to escape from pain. That's all they are. That's all, you know, they're not a disease, they're not genetic, whatever it is, addictions are very simply an attempt to escape pain, which create more pain, but that's what they are. And so we get addicted to work, to sex, to pornography, to gambling, to the internet, to shopping, to eating, to power.
1:07:02 Steven Bartlett? On that point, I find it so fascinating, when you mentioned in your previous book that, you know, you classified things like food.
1:07:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:10 Steven Bartlett? Social media.
1:07:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:12 Steven Bartlett? Shopping.
1:07:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:14 Steven Bartlett? Porn and work as types of addiction.
1:07:16 Speaker 00 Hmm.
1:07:17 Steven Bartlett? That was, that in and of itself was a bit of a revelation for me, because I never saw work as an addiction. The minute you said it was, and I kind of link it to, you know, heroin addiction, which is providing, you know, a certain psychological or physiological benefit to me.
1:07:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, temporarily.
1:07:34 Steven Bartlett? Temporarily. Of course, it's a fucking addiction. Of course, work is an addiction. Of course, I have that addiction.
1:07:39 Speaker 00 Well, work can be an addiction.
1:07:41 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:07:42 Speaker 00 Work can also be sacred, it can also be fulfilling and a manifestation of your creative urges, but it's, so it's not the... But strange to say, not that I recommend it, but it's possible even to use heroin in a non-addictive way. I don't personally get it and I would never want to. But the addiction is never in the behavior itself. It's in your relationship to the behavior. So if the particular activity gives you temporary relief or pleasure, and therefore you crave it, but it causes harm in the long term and you can't give it up, you've got an addiction. And I don't care what the activity is, could be drugs and all the other things that we mentioned. And it employs the same brain circuits, by the way.
1:08:26 Speaker 00 The workaholic is after the same brain chemical that the cocaine addict is after, dopamine, you know? And people can be even addicted to their own stress hormones, like adrenaline, the so-called adrenaline junkies. There's such a thing, you know? So almost anything can be addictive if it serves the purpose of temporarily easing some distress, but causing harm in the long term.
1:08:47 Steven Bartlett? Is escapism the right word to use then for it? If we're, because it doesn't sound as much like we're escaping rather than we are seeking something.
1:08:58 Speaker 00 We're seeking relief from a certain mental state. Like, I just gave you a definition of addiction. So think, I don't know what addictions you've had, or haven't, or have, or haven't besides, you know? But what did that do for you temporarily?
1:09:17 Speaker 00 It gave you something.
1:09:18 Steven Bartlett? It made me feel like I was valid and I was pursuing a sense of accomplishment and validation.
1:09:26 Speaker 00 Okay, a sense of worth.
1:09:27 Steven Bartlett? Worth, yeah, I was worthy, yeah.
1:09:28 Speaker 00 Is that something that people need or not?
1:09:31 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
1:09:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a good thing. But the real question is, why did you ever get the idea that you didn't have the worth? Why did I get the idea that I didn't have the worth? That's where trauma comes in.
1:09:41 Steven Bartlett? Because I was called the N-word when I was eight by a kid in school.
1:09:44 Speaker 00 Exactly.
1:09:45 Steven Bartlett? And then no one would speak to me that day.
1:09:46 Speaker 00 And because your mother screamed at your father.
1:09:48 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:09:48 Speaker 00 You know, and so all that together. And so, and that's emotionally painful. Like, what's it feel like to be not to have a sense of worth? That's painful. And so that's why my mantra is don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And if you want to understand why the pain, you have to look at that person's life.
1:10:09 Steven Bartlett? And what the benefit of the addiction is. That's something that you say in previous book that I found it's a flipping of narrative where you say we should be asking what the benefit of the addiction is.
1:10:19 Speaker 00 Well, like in your case, it gives me a sense of worth. Well, okay, I'll say to you, if you come to me, because you say like I'm vocal, like it's causing some harm in my life. It's keeping me from intimate relationships. It makes me stressed and tired, whatever it is. It's the first thing I would ask you for you of you is what is it doing for you? And you say a sense of worth. And I'd say, you know what?
1:10:44 Speaker 00 You deserve to have a sense of worth. I totally understand why you'd want to
1:10:50 Speaker 00 engage in an activity that gives it to you. But given that it's causing you harm, let's look at why you don't have a sense of worth and how else you might develop it that isn't harmful to you, you know? So, but you start with what's right about it? What are you looking for? And what you're looking for is always valid.
1:11:12 Steven Bartlett? And how one would go about, how would one go about getting that sense of worth? I'm asking for a friend.
1:11:19 Speaker 00 Well, that would be a matter of some form of work. People who meditate often deal with that issue through the meditation, not always. Certainly therapy, you know?
1:11:37 Speaker 00 By recognizing also that what you're doing to get the sense of worth doesn't really do it for you, just by getting honest about it, you know? So there's all kinds of ways, but the first step is the recognition.
1:11:50 Steven Bartlett? That's the first step that you say is missing, missing from the book, which is that sort of awareness. The next thing which I've been, it's been really front of mind in my life recently, because I've been asked this a few times on stage and I've been trying to find the words to really articulate the importance of it is, and this is one of your forays in this book about how to heal, is authenticity.
1:12:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:12:07 Steven Bartlett? Really interesting concept, because I've been trying to articulate why the fact that I've just shared all this stuff with you and the fact that I do this every week.
1:12:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:12:15 Steven Bartlett? I'm getting closer and closer to that sort of authentic self, where there's really, the mask is kind of dropping on me. Why that's been so healing for me? Why is authenticity such a good way and important way for us to heal?
1:12:26 Speaker 00 It's much more than a way for us to heal. It's actually who we are. Like what you're asking is why it is important for a creature to be true to its own nature? Because that's what we're meant to do. We're meant to be here as ourselves, you know? And when we are not ourselves, because we had to abandon ourselves or betray ourselves or disconnect from ourselves in order to survive, we lost connections with our essence. And I mean, how does it feel to be a successful CEO? And you know, more than realizing your financial dreams,
1:13:08 Speaker 00 but to be a workaholic and not to be available to yourself in areas of your life that really matter to you? As opposed to being honest about your stuff, sharing it with other people, dropping the veil, dropping the... I mean, to answer your question, what does it feel like? I mean, can you sense the difference in your body?
1:13:33 Steven Bartlett? It feels lighter.
1:13:34 Speaker 00 Well, yeah.
1:13:35 Steven Bartlett? Expansive.
1:13:36 Speaker 00 Exactly. Well, that's the answer.
1:13:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:13:39 Speaker 00 That's why it's so important.
1:13:40 Steven Bartlett? So many of us, so many of us live inauthentic lives. Because as you said, it's either because from an early age we were escaping some kind of, you know, reality in order to help us to survive. Or then the other thing that happens a bit later on in life is we develop an identity which becomes a career, which becomes a social circle, which becomes a prison of our inauthentic selves. We get trapped in there, you know? Because I was good at something or because I, you know, I felt accepted in this job as a lawyer. So I am now living inauthentically as this robot in this prison.
1:14:21 Steven Bartlett? And it's a, it's a, there's often a real perception of risk and loss and danger of trying to get out of that prison, of trying to get close to our authentic selves. We feel like we'll lose our friendship circle. We'll feel like we'll, we'll let our parents down who wanted us to become a lawyer. You know, all of these things. I guess you see that a lot in your, in your work.
1:14:44 Speaker 00 Well, that there is that risk and, but here's the issue. As a child, you had no choice but to go for acceptance and being approved of and being received under any, under any conditions. No matter what you had to give up of your authenticity, you had to give up your authenticity. You had no choice in the matter. At a certain point as adults, we get, we learn that this lack of authenticity, this disconnection from ourselves, this separation from our gut feelings is costing us. It's costing us in terms of our physical health, our, our peace of mind, our relationship, our mental health and so
1:15:23 Speaker 00 on. You'll never be as vulnerable again as you were when you were a child. You'll never be as helpless, as dependent, as resourceless. No, it's true that if you've developed a whole set of relationships based on your inauthentic persona, some people in your life may not like it if you gradually move towards authenticity. They may not like it. It's not what they wanted from you. You're gonna find out who your friends are. You're really gonna find, because your real friends will say, oh, I'm so happy for you. People were waiting for this. Other friends will say, it's not what I signed up for, you know?
1:16:07 Speaker 00 The question is, you still have to decide. As an infant, as a young child, I had no agency in the choice of authenticity and attachment. No, I do. Which one do I want to go with? What is the cost of being inauthentic? I can't make that decision for anybody else. Nobody can make that decision for anybody else. But most people will find that choosing authenticity has benefits way beyond whatever they might lose. That's what I find.
1:16:36 Steven Bartlett? And you said the word that agency, which is the second of the four As on how to heal. Now, agency, when I read that word, I hear like personal responsibility, taking personal responsibility over my life.
1:16:47 Speaker 00 Exactly, which also means not letting, you know, you don't use, you don't wear trauma as a badge, you know, or you don't use it as a get out of jail pass in a game of Monopoly. Oh, I was traumatized, so I can't, I can't be any other way, you know, I mean.
1:17:02 Steven Bartlett? Giving all the power to the puppet master.
1:17:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, agency means actually I take responsibility, not for what happened to me.
1:17:13 Speaker 00 Not even how I interpreted the world as a result going backwards, but how I interpret the world from now on. Do I still want to interpret the world and my role in it based on some decision I made when I was a one year old? That's where agency comes in. Agency also means that if I have any kind of dysfunction or illness, it's not just that I put my hands in the hands of a, put my fate in the hands of a physician or a healer, but I have, I make the decisions. I listen to your advice. I accept some, I don't accept some, but I'm the one who's making the decisions along with what seems right to me. So, agency.
1:17:54 Steven Bartlett? It's interesting in your, in your work, throughout your work, you use alliteration as a lot as a way to kind of summarize and make ideas really memorable. It really helps.
1:18:04 Speaker 00 It's an old trick.
1:18:05 Steven Bartlett? It's a trick. It's a writing trick, right?
1:18:07 Speaker 00 Well, it also works, you know, the four As or.
1:18:12 Steven Bartlett? The four Rs.
1:18:13 Speaker 00 I don't, I don't have to say, you know, I'm denigrating my work if I say it's a trick. No, it's just something, just the way things occur to me. That's all it is.
1:18:21 Steven Bartlett? One of the, one of the alliteration devices you use is also relates to limiting beliefs and how we can undo self-limiting beliefs with the five Rs.
1:18:30 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:18:31 Steven Bartlett? Relabel, reattribute, refocus, revalue and recreate.
1:18:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:18:36 Steven Bartlett? Now, from what I understood of those, relabeling is.
1:18:43 Steven Bartlett? The story and the belief that is limiting to us sort of redefining it.
1:18:47 Speaker 00 Well, it takes something like your workaholism.
1:18:51 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:18:52 Speaker 00 I need to go to work. I need to do this work. Relabeling has, I don't need to do this work. I just have a belief that I need to do this work.
1:19:00 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:19:00 Speaker 00 So that relabeling just takes a degree of separation from the behavior. And actually, it's true. It's not that you need to do all this work. You have this belief. So relabeling just says it for what it is. By the way, I have to acknowledge that these five R's, only one on his mind. I stole the other four from a psychiatrist.
1:19:22 Steven Bartlett? That's fine. That's all.
1:19:23 Speaker 00 I mentioned that in the book, but I find it a very helpful technique. But it was developed for people with obsessive compulsive tendencies. So the relabel is not that I have to wash my hands a hundred times. I just have a belief that I have to wash my hands a hundred times. That's the context in which it was developed. I think it works for all kinds of beliefs, all kinds of dynamics.
1:19:44 Steven Bartlett? And then if I, and then so I've relabeled it. I don't have to work to feel a sense of validation, but I have a belief that I do.
1:19:51 Speaker 00 That's right.
1:19:52 Steven Bartlett? And then I reattribute it, which is the second R, which means I get clear on where it's come from.
1:19:57 Speaker 00 Yeah. So let's say you have the belief that you're not worth it. It's not true that I'm not worth it. I just have a belief that I'm not worth it. Okay. Or it may not be true that I'm not worth it, but I do have a belief that I'm not worth it. Reattribute means this is an old brain circuit sending me an old message. It's got nothing to do with reality. It has to do with some experience that I had a long time ago. That's the reattribute. You just say where it's actually coming from. There's a circuit in your brain that's wired with the message, you're not worth it. And it's going to keep repeating that message while you say, okay, that's where it's coming from.
1:20:35 Steven Bartlett? Until I refocus, which is the third R.
1:20:37 Speaker 00 Yeah. So refocus is just to give yourself some space. So if I ever say, I need to go to work, okay, refocus me as well for five minutes.
1:20:49 Speaker 00 Maybe in five minutes, I'll go to work, but for five minutes I won't. I'm gonna put on some piece of music, or go for a walk, or meditate, or whatever. So you refocus, you put your attention somewhere else. Just so that, to prove to yourself that you actually have some agency over your brain. If only for five minutes. If you have this belief that I'm not worth it. Well, you can go back to it in five minutes if you want. Just for five minutes though, consider all the ways that you've made a contribution. Consider all the ways that people have acknowledged your benign presence in their lives. The times that people have told you that they've loved you, or that you told somebody else. Just for five minutes, hang out with that.
1:21:34 Speaker 00 Five minutes later, if you wanna go back to this belief that, or if you can't help going back to this belief that you're not worth it, well, that's okay. But at least create some space. It's all about creating space between yourself and these beliefs or these behaviors.
1:21:47 Steven Bartlett? And in that five minutes, you're basically accepting new evidence to be true, or you're proving that other evidence is true. I didn't need to go and work.
1:21:54 Speaker 00 Well, you're also proving that you don't have to spend all your time subjected to those beliefs. You can take a hiatus from it, at least for a while.
1:22:01 Steven Bartlett? And that they are not you.
1:22:03 Speaker 00 They're not you, yeah.
1:22:04 Steven Bartlett? And then revalue.
1:22:08 Speaker 00 Revalue it, really what it should mean, or maybe more accurately, devalue, because you say, what has been the actual value? This belief that I'm not worth it. What has been the actual value of it in my life? Or this tendency of mine to be a workaholic. What has been the actual value? Oh, it made me tired, it made me alienated, or it keeps me depressed, or it keeps me hopelessly trying to prove something which I can never prove to myself anyway through external activity. So you actually look at what does it mean, its actual impact on your life? What has been its real value?
1:22:43 Steven Bartlett? Sometimes the value is positive though, right? Like, I think about my own workaholism, if that's the term. I think, oh, there's some positives here.
1:22:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:22:51 Steven Bartlett? A lot of negatives.
1:22:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, is the positive due to workaholism? Or is it due to your capacity to work hard on behalf of a goal? They're not the same. Your capacity to work hard to achieve a certain goal is simply a gift that you have. And something that maybe takes some discipline and application on your part. That's not workaholism. That's just a strong, positive work ethic. The workaholism is when you're driven to work, you actually don't need to.
1:23:24 Steven Bartlett? It's funny because it reminds me of an analogy I've been talking about in the last couple of episodes of this podcast. The distinction between being driven and being dragged.
1:23:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:23:32 Steven Bartlett? It's like, am I, which side of the lorry am I flying down the motorway? Am I tied to the front and am I running and pulling the lorry? Or am I just like my ankles attached to the back of the lorry as it flies down the motorway because I'm being dragged?
1:23:45 Speaker 00 But if I may, I would say that neither of those are particularly desirable.
1:23:51 Speaker 00 But it's the distinction that I made before between being driven and being called.
1:23:56 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:23:56 Speaker 00 Because if you're called, see if I call you, say, Stephen, would you come and have dinner with me? You can say yes, you can say no. I just gave you a call and you could say, literally, I'm talking about a call now, a telephone call. You know, you can say yes, you can say no.
1:24:11 Steven Bartlett? It's a decision then.
1:24:12 Speaker 00 But you're the ones making the decision.
1:24:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:24:14 Speaker 00 When you're dragged or pushed or pulled, you're not making the decision.
1:24:17 Steven Bartlett? I'm a slave to the decision, to that, to the activity. One of the, one of the really interesting things I wanted to talk to you about is ADHD.
1:24:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:24:27 Steven Bartlett? I've had a few of my friends in my close friendship circle diagnosed with ADHD recently.
1:24:33 Steven Bartlett? And then I looked into some of the statistics around ADHD. And I found this statistic that said in the 1980s, one in 20 US children were diagnosed with ADHD. Today, the number is roughly one in nine.
1:24:45 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:24:47 Steven Bartlett? And just generally, you know, around me, there's, it feels like, and this could just be because of my own little narrow circle. Or it could be because of a wider thing happening in society. It feels like there's been an increase in diagnosis of mental illness and things like ADHD. And the causes, when I spoke to my friend about what he believed the cause of his ADHD was, and he's posted this on LinkedIn and talks about it very publicly now. It seemed to point to, he seemed to believe it was relating to some kind of genetic or heritable factor. Now, the issue, the issue that I've sort of been contending with myself and why I spoke to Johann Hari about this and others about this is.
1:25:30 Steven Bartlett? If I am to accept that, then I feel like I'm accepting that we're being born somewhat broken. And this is almost what Johann Hari talked about in the early stages of his teenage years, where he was made to believe that there was this chemical imbalance in his brain, and therefore he was born broken, and here's the medication to solve it.
1:25:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:25:49 Steven Bartlett? So, but I don't believe that. I don't personally believe that we're born broken.
1:25:54 Speaker 00 Well, anybody interested in the subject might do what I think you are, and actually this is to read my book on ADHD, it's called Scattered Minds. And I was diagnosed within my 50s, and so were a couple of my kids. But I never bought into the idea this is a genetic disease, or that it's a disease at all, genetic or otherwise. Now, as for the rising number of people being diagnosed with it, there could be two reasons, at least. One is we're better at diagnosis, so before we wouldn't have noticed it, but now we are. Or genuinely, there's more people who are having trouble in certain ways, such as with attention and impulse control and so on. But either way, the fact is that many
1:26:35 Speaker 00 more children are being diagnosed and medicated for this condition, particularly in the US, but also increasingly here in the UK as well, and in China and elsewhere. Now, as I said earlier, the fact is, here's the actual reality. Nobody's ever found a gene for ADHD. Nobody's ever found a gene that says, if you have this gene, you're gonna have ADHD. No such gene has ever been found. No group of genes has ever been found that says, if you're gonna have this gene, you're gonna have this condition. Nor ever will be. And no such gene or group of genes have ever been found that if you don't have these genes, you will not have the condition. Now, there are some diseases that are genetic.
1:27:16 Speaker 00 One runs in my family, muscular dystrophy. If you have the gene, you're gonna have the disease. My mother had it, my aunt had it. That's a genetic condition. And if you have the gene, you'll have the disease.
1:27:30 Speaker 00 Very rare, those kind of diseases. No, there are some genes, that the more of them you have, the more likely you are to have any number of mental health diagnoses. ADHD, depression, anxiety, even psychosis, bipolar illness. But there's no group of genes, or set of genes, or gene, that themselves determine any one condition. As a matter of fact, you can have those same genes, and not have any condition whatsoever. So something is being passed on, but it's not any kind of condition that's being passed on. What's being passed on is sensitivity. And the more sensitive you are, the more you're gonna feel whatever's going on in the environment. So you take the same sensitive kid with these genes
1:28:15 Speaker 00 that confer greater sensitivity out of them. And sensitive means to feel, from the Latin word "to feel", sincere. The more sensitive you are, the more you're gonna feel. The more you feel, the more bad stuff happens, the more pain you're gonna be in. And the more compensating you're gonna have to do. At the same time, with those same genes, if you treat it well, and you grow up in a healthy environment, you'd just be creative, and happy, and joyful, and a leader, and an artist, or a shaman, or a very creative CEO, or whatever you're gonna be. So the genes don't determine. They make you more sensitive to their environment. No, if you go back to what I said about the tuning out, it's simply a defense. So the more sensitive you are,
1:29:00 Speaker 00 and the stress in the environment, the more you're gonna feel the stress, the more you're gonna need to escape from it by tuning out. So you didn't inherit ADHD, you inherited a sensitivity that makes it more likely, under stressful circumstances, that you revert to tuning out, when your brain is developing. Which, by the way, is an organ that develops physiologically under the impact of the emotional environment. So if there's a lot of stress in a child's life, and what I'm saying is in this society, is that more and more parents are stressed, not because they don't love their kids, not because they're not doing their very utmost to provide for them, but because they're more stressed for all kinds of social, political, economic reasons. I mean, if you look at inflation in
1:29:41 Speaker 00 Britain, which is a high risk right now, more people are going to be stressed financially. Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children. Those children may want to tune out because it's too much to be in the present. Some of them will be diagnosed with ADHD. They didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease. They're just reacting to the environment. So if we're diagnosing more and more kids these days, I think it's because the parenting environment has become much more stressed.
1:30:11 Steven Bartlett? And that's backed up in this book where you mentioned that study of 65,000 parents and their children with ADHD, right?
1:30:19 Speaker 00 Well, there's more trauma in their lives.
1:30:21 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, so the children, they do a study with 65,000?
1:30:24 Speaker 00 I forget, you're better than I am.
1:30:26 Steven Bartlett? It was 65,000. I read it.
1:30:27 Speaker 00 You may know, so I didn't. Yeah, but many thousands of kids, yeah.
1:30:31 Steven Bartlett? So, because I found that to be really, really supportive of what you just said, where, again, I'm saying this from memory, but a study of 65,000 children and their parents, and they found that those parents who had more adverse traumatic events in their lives ended up having a higher chance of having a child that had ADHD.
1:30:52 Speaker 00 Well, look, if you look at the United States at least, poor kids and kids of so-called color are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
1:31:02 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
1:31:03 Speaker 00 No, why would that be the case? Because they're living with so much more stress.
1:31:07 Steven Bartlett? Men as well, right?
1:31:09 Speaker 00 Men as well? Adults, you mean?
1:31:11 Steven Bartlett? Men, yeah. So I read that more men, more boys.
1:31:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, more men are diagnosed partly because in men, the symptom of hyperactivity seems to be there more often. So when a kid is sitting in school and the cancer's still, that's obvious. The teacher will notice it. The girl who's kind of dreamy and tunes out, kind of fades away at the back of the class, she doesn't create any problems. So they don't, that's one of the reasons. But also, funny to say, but young boys, infant boys are more sensitive to environmental pressure than girls are.
1:31:50 Speaker 00 For some strange reason, so they're more likely to be affected by these factors.
1:31:55 Steven Bartlett? Seeing a boy like that in the class, that's a fidgety, that has a poor attention span, bad response to stress, we medicate. What is the impact of that approach to treatment, medicating super early?
1:32:06 Speaker 00 I used to, when I worked as a physician, I would certainly prescribe medication sometimes. It's a question of who's prescribing it and what intention. If I understand that the real problem in this child is not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the child, but that they were developed in a stressed environment, and those stresses are still acting on them. And more of the stresses is the parents don't understand the kid's behaviours, and they tend to react rather harshly. Then if I change, if I can help the parent understand the sensitive nature of their child, which also means that when positive changes occur in the environment, the kid will be very responsive to that as well. If the parents can create a positive, accepting, understanding atmosphere in the home and
1:32:50 Speaker 00 work on their own stresses, so they don't unconsciously pass them on to their kids, that kid will change very quickly.
1:32:57 Speaker 00 And I say, well, if in the short term, the child wants the medication to function better, and no child should be forced to take medication, and medication are never the final answer, at the very most, they're stopgap. There's no proof whatsoever that medications help anybody heal from ADHD. They simply suppress symptoms, which may be helpful in the short term, but for God's sakes, go to work on the long-term development of that child. And what does that mean? Create the conditions in which healthy development takes place. That child will do very, very well. If you think the problem is a disease, they're just gonna medicate away the symptoms of.
1:33:34 Steven Bartlett? What about for adults then? I'm thinking of my friend there, he's in his 30s and he got the diagnosis of ADHD in his 30s. He's been given this medication, which he presumably has to take for life. He's told me the medication has helped him focus.
1:33:47 Speaker 00 Has helped him focus.
1:33:48 Steven Bartlett? Has helped him focus. He goes, yeah, it's been a game changer, Steve, you know?
1:33:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, I've taken medication myself for ADHD, and it helped me focus, it helped me write my first book. I didn't take it for this one, as a matter of fact. More recently, when I was beginning to write the medication, I thought maybe I would take a bit of stimulant like I used to. And just to see if it helps me write the book better. All it did, all it did is give me side effects. My brain has changed. I don't need it anymore, you know? So I, I would say to your friend, if the medication is helping you right now and it's not causing you side effects, I got nothing against it. And you might want to give it a break, you know, every weekend. If you don't, you know, you might want to use it for when you're having to work or having to, you know, really concentrate. But it's up to you if it helps you function, take it.
1:34:34 Speaker 00 But go to work on the traumas and stresses that are driving your ADHD, going back to your childhood. And, you know, I may say my book on ADHD, Scattered Minds, does outline some ways to do that. You might find that you don't need the medication so much anymore, or not at all perhaps. Number one, number two, even if you do, your life will be so much fuller and so much more, less stressed if you deal with the underlying factors than if you simply medicate the symptom.
1:35:06 Steven Bartlett? Is there, I always think in life, there's a cost for all these things we use to medicate and stimulate ourselves.
1:35:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:35:12 Steven Bartlett? So I always, I always ask myself, like, there's got to be, it's almost like there's got to be a catch here. And even for coffee, I'm like, what's the catch? We can't just be all up and positive. And with, with my friend, when he said, when he had the conversation with me about being on this, this medication for life, my first thought is like, okay, what, what's the cost? It's going to make you really focused and better at work. But what is the, what is the long-term cost of?
1:35:32 Speaker 00 I'd have to talk to your friend, friend. Those are good questions to ask. When I took medication, it made me a much more efficient workaholic. You know, it did nothing for my workaholism, just made me much better at it. Cause I could stay up later now and I was more focused. I could even more things done, you know? So you've got to deal with these other issues.
1:35:54 Steven Bartlett? Did you?
1:35:56 Speaker 00 I did. Did I deal with them? Yes, I have. And there's so much more, like, like dealing with the trauma. Like I'm telling you, if your friend's got ADHD, I can tell you he had a stress relief for years. And his parent was, her parents were stressed, his parents were stressed. So deal with that. Deal with what conditions are you creating now in your life that create more stress for you?
1:36:21 Speaker 00 Are you taking care of your body? Are you exercising? Are you eating well? Do you get out there in nature? Nature has a certain kind of harmony to it, which actually calms the mind. You know, so are you doing all these things? If you're not, all you're doing is medicating a symptom. If you are taking the medication specifically to help you focus, but you're working on these other issues, you have a much fuller life and you may find you don't need the medication after all.
1:36:47 Steven Bartlett? You you came off the medication for your A D D?
1:36:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:36:52 Steven Bartlett? Because I'm a because I'm just not that medically well versed. What's the difference between A D A D D and A D H D?
1:36:59 Speaker 00 It's, you know, it's a kind of a confusion. A D H D simply means that the hyperactivity is present.
1:37:03 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:37:04 Speaker 00 So you can have A D D with or without hyperactivity.
1:37:06 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:37:07 Speaker 00 So the actual, you know, proper way to write it is A D and in brackets, A H D. So that's indicating that the hyperactivity may or may not be there.
1:37:19 Steven Bartlett? Got you. So you you you were on medication. You did the work.
1:37:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:37:23 Steven Bartlett? You're now not on medication.
1:37:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:37:26 Steven Bartlett? Do you still have the symptoms of A D D?
1:37:29 Speaker 00 To a certain degree, but not in a way that anyway blights my life. Like one thing I can be sure that when I go on a speaking trip, I'm gonna lose something. I'm gonna lose my my portable electrical tooth cleaner. Or I'm gonna, in this case, I left my rain jacket in Budapest when I came here on. I I you can take it for granted that my attention will just not notice something that I haven't packed yet. That's okay. I'm going back to Budapest next week. So I get to get my rain jacket back. But sometimes it's the cost of being me. So what? You know, so no, not in every way. But that's not the point. Nobody's life has to be perfect. It just has to be a life that I I want to live and I can enjoy living.
1:38:11 Speaker 00 That I have, you know, so who cares if sometimes I forget something or I lose something or even if I'm listening to a symphony and I can't keep my attention on it. Okay, so I can't.
1:38:24 Steven Bartlett? This you talk about this toxic society.
1:38:27 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:38:30 Steven Bartlett? Do you think society is getting more toxic? And if so, why?
1:38:34 Speaker 00 What measure shall we use?
1:38:36 Steven Bartlett? Your measure?
1:38:37 Speaker 00 You know, if we use the measure of a number of kids being medicated,
1:38:42 Speaker 00 or a number of adults having chronic illness, autoimmune disease, number of students, university students being depressed, contemplating suicide, number of children in the United States killing themselves,
1:39:01 Speaker 00 the number of people on medications of all kinds,
1:39:05 Speaker 00 the degree of safety that people have in society, the the rancor or peace that characterizes political discourse in this world, the intolerable fact that eight people in the world, I think, own as much as the bottom half, as the bottom 3.5 billion. You know, if I look at all those things, by those measures, if you look at what's happening to the environment, if I look at the fact that the people who are the worst polluters in the environment also happen to be the most successful people, by a certain measure of success,
1:39:41 Speaker 00 by any number of parameters, if I look at how racism still affects the lives of so many people,
1:39:51 Speaker 00 and not just affects it in an emotional sense, but actually physiologically, you know, then yeah, this is a toxic society and those measures are getting worse, they're not getting better. And inequality is getting worse, here in the UK and elsewhere. So yeah, I think it's getting more toxic.
1:40:10 Steven Bartlett? What's the antidote?
1:40:12 Speaker 00 What's the antidote? Well, how about, people, back to this word awareness. Like, people just have to get that this is how it is. And in the last chapter, I don't lay out a political program, you know, I don't see that as my role to do that. I have my own political ideas and preferences, but I don't want to impose them on the reader. But I do say, first of all, we have to lose our illusions, that this is, that this normality is actually healthy or natural. We have to just get cognizant that what we consider to be normal is actually bad for us.
1:40:45 Speaker 00 Number one, number two.
1:40:48 Speaker 00 Just if we introduced the concept of trauma into healthcare, the average doctor, again, strange to say, doesn't hear a single lecture in their medical training about the impact of trauma on physical or mental health, which is astonishing, given that it was a British psychologist, Dr. Richard Bentall, who pointed out not that many years ago that the evidence linking what we call mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer. And the average physician doesn't hear a word about that. It's astonishing. Education, teachers, if they understood child development, brain development, the developmental factors that children need
1:41:33 Speaker 00 that I cite in this book, and if they understood how trauma affects kids' capacity to learn, to pay attention, and to behave in functional ways. The Daily Telegraph, here in London, not that long ago, was bemoaning the fact that kids aren't caned anymore in schools. I mean, what they were moaning about is that we no longer traumatize kids quite as harshly as we used to. That's all it does, caning. So if teachers understood that the behaviors on the part of children are actually manifestations of emotional dynamics of frustration and needs not being met, and very often of trauma, that would change the educational system.
1:42:19 Speaker 00 If the legal system understood it,
1:42:22 Speaker 00 that most people facing the criminal justice system are actually traumatized people, they could actually be rehabilitated
1:42:31 Speaker 00 and healed if we understood that, instead of just exposing them to harsh punishments, we actually treated them like human beings who may have done things that are unacceptable, but that came from traumas they couldn't have helped, and that they can be helped back to healthy functioning, as we know from lots of experience. Just that little trauma information would change society. So that's what I can offer as a physician.
1:42:59 Steven Bartlett? What about parents? What do they need to know?
1:43:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, if parents actually understood, first of all... But the first three years are everything. That if they get the template right in the first three years, they can hardly set a foot wrong afterwards. But on the other hand, if we're not present for our kids emotionally, if we don't understand them, if we don't see them, if we don't attune to their emotional states, we're gonna hurt them. And if they understood what the needs of children are, when I mentioned some of them, for play, for experience of all emotions, for unconditional loving attachment, for the child being able to rest from having to work to make the relationship work.
1:43:46 Speaker 00 So the child doesn't have to be good or nice or beautiful or successful. They just have to be. So we don't impose conditions on our approval and acceptance on them. If parents just understood that, and if they understood how important it is that they take care of their own emotional needs, so that a child doesn't have to take responsibility, like perhaps you did, for the parent's stresses. If parents understood all that, and if society actually understood how important parenting was, and it supported parents who needed the support to be there for their kids, it wouldn't be financially costly. It would save us a lot of money. Not to mention, we'd have a lot more happier kids
1:44:30 Speaker 00 who don't need to be on medications. So, yeah.
1:44:33 Steven Bartlett? And lastly, schools.
1:44:35 Speaker 00 Schools? Well, again, like I said about educators. If educators... Well, here's the thing. If you look at how does the human brain develop? I quote an article from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child that appeared in a journal, Pediatrics, official journal of the American Pediatric Academy in 2012, February. The article said that the human brain develops through a complex process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Okay? Now, that means, A, we take care of the emotional needs of pregnant women. Number one. Number two, if it continues into adulthood, continues into adulthood, then the job of the schools, if they understand it right, is not to teach kids
1:45:19 Speaker 00 what year the Battle of Ostolitz took place or the Battle of Waterloo, or, you know...
1:45:30 Speaker 00 Any of that, any of that stuff. The most important job of the schools is to promote healthy brain development. With a child who's with healthy brain development will actually be naturally curious. They'll wanna know about history. They'll be keen to, to absorb the skills of algebra. They'll want to know how to use a computer and they'll want to know um how to write properly. The kid will wanna do that spontaneously because mastery and, and, and learning, these are human hungers, they're human needs. So.
1:46:05 Speaker 00 In other words, the most important job of the schools is not to cram the kids full of information, but to help them develop healthy brains. What does that require? Safety above all, lack of pressure, healthy relationship with nurturing adults. And if the kids are not gonna spend their time with the adult, with the, with the parents, which they can't in this society, like they used to throughout human evolution, let them spend their time with adults who are emotionally nurturing and emotionally penetrating the attentive to the child's needs. Now you're gonna have schools that are gonna really teach kids something and where kids will want to learn. And it's very simple. It doesn't take more training and it doesn't take more, well, it takes, takes some training
1:46:48 Speaker 00 perhaps, but not more than what teachers are getting now. So that's sort of a take in education.
1:46:55 Steven Bartlett? I was thinking there about the importance of doing certain psychological tests on certain teachers, because if they are also passing on a generational cycle.
1:47:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:47:04 Steven Bartlett? Of their own at a time when my brain is still being developed, they can have a huge impact positively or negatively on my.
1:47:09 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
1:47:10 Steven Bartlett? On my life, in the same way that my parents could.
1:47:12 Speaker 00 Absolutely. Uh, it, it's quite remarkable. Teachers don't know how much power they have because of the vulnerability of the young brain.
1:47:19 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
1:47:19 Speaker 00 Um, and well-meaning teachers will sometimes behave in ways that are really hurtful to kids, just because they don't get it, not because they don't mean well. So I've had many adults sit in my office, say, with tears in their eyes, about something a teacher said to them three decades before, like the class will. The class will continue when Johnny comes back to earth. This kind of sarcastic little dig can undermine a child's dignity and sense of self so easily. So if teachers just understood how powerful they are and how important they are in helping to promote healthy brain development, I think their profession would take on a whole new meaning that would be much more satisfying than it is right now.
1:48:03 Speaker 00 It's not the fault of individual teachers, we're talking about a system that isn't, that is toxic.
1:48:11 Steven Bartlett? Gabor, we have a closing tradition on this podcast.
1:48:14 Speaker 00 Oh, okay.
1:48:14 Steven Bartlett? Where the previous guest asks a question for the next guest.
1:48:19 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:48:20 Steven Bartlett? I don't get to see it until I open the book, so there's a question written here for you. Before I ask you this question, I did have a question of my own, which was, you know, you're in your seventies now. What are you still working on in terms of your own traumas? Is there anything, even though you're in a later stage of your own life, that you're still sort of struggling with as it relates to that puppet master pulling on the strings and that kind of analogy that we gave earlier?
1:48:45 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:48:47 Speaker 00 It's a sense of peace when I'm not doing anything.
1:48:55 Speaker 00 Just being, the capacity just to be.
1:49:01 Speaker 00 That's something I'm still looking for. Not, well, not looking for like, I was looking for a lost puppy, but I'm still searching myself for it.
1:49:12 Steven Bartlett? And where exactly does that come from in your own diagnosis?
1:49:17 Speaker 00 What if I tell you when I find out? I mean, I can give you a textbook answer, but it wouldn't be authentic.
1:49:24 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:49:26 Steven Bartlett? So you don't know entirely?
1:49:28 Speaker 00 I have some senses, I have some ideas and then it...
1:49:39 Speaker 00 It really means being okay with my mind the way it is and not needing it to be any different. That's what it would mean. Which means if I'm sitting there for five minutes, I don't have to reach for the cellphone to occupy my mind. And now in the midst of this busy book tour and all the speaking I do, I don't, I don't do enough to, to take care of that quiet little voice inside myself. I don't. I think it would take some attention.
1:50:10 Steven Bartlett? I can't either, though. I can't sit for two, I couldn't, five minutes. I couldn't sit for five seconds without grabbing my phone. It's weird. I noticed the other day that I was like going to the toilet and I had no intention of using my phone in the toilet, but I went to get my phone to go to the toilet.
1:50:25 Speaker 00 Because you can't be alone with yourself.
1:50:26 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I can't be alone with myself. I can't, sitting for thirty seconds, you know, my brain, is that, is that because they've built these algorithms to stimulate my dopamine? Or is it because there's something in me? I guess it goes back to your point about addiction.
1:50:39 Speaker 00 Well, it's both. I mean, they, they certainly create algorithms to stimulate your brain and get you hooked on that dopamine hit. They're sure for sure. They call that neuromarketing. Neuromarketing. Can you get that? They work on your brain to get, you know, to get you addicted. But it also comes from an earlier discomfort with the self that predates any cellphone use. It goes back to earliest childhood where it couldn't have been comfortable to be just with yourself because of circumstances.
1:51:11 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, my, because I've got friends that don't have the same, the same addiction with their cellphones that I do. They, they, they don't, they can take it or leave it. They put it outside their bedroom when they go to bed, charging in the kitchen. I'm like, how, I have to hold mine like my pillow.
1:51:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. Well, like your little safety pillow. And what's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
1:51:31 Steven Bartlett? I grab it with one eye open and all that gunk in my eye. I'm like, trying to just, you know.
1:51:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah. Well, how if both you and I work on not doing that so much?
1:51:39 Steven Bartlett? Okay. I'll give you my number. You'll, let, let, we shouldn't, we shouldn't discuss my phone, how we're getting on with this. That's just another reason to use my phone. But next time I speak to you in person, you can update me on how you're getting on with that. I am, I am, I am working on it. I'm working on it.
1:51:55 Steven Bartlett? I think I've got to become more cognizant of the cost of that addiction.
1:51:58 Speaker 00 Well, exactly.
1:52:00 Steven Bartlett? To really, I know one of the costs is meaningful connections and presence with and the cost to interpersonal relationships, but maybe I haven't had the the cost
1:52:12 Steven Bartlett? impact me enough yet, maybe. The question left for you,
1:52:18 Steven Bartlett? but I don't know the signature, so I'll have to figure that out later, but is
1:52:23 Steven Bartlett? what's your selfish dream?
1:52:29 Speaker 00 You know what, I'm not sure how to sit with that question because I'm not trying to get out of it, but I'm just trying to look at my own reaction to it.
1:52:40 Speaker 00 You know, at this point,
1:52:43 Speaker 00 I don't have too many, what does it mean selfish, by the way? Let me ask you that, what does that mean? Something that is for me at the expense of others? I don't think I have any dreams like that left. I might have, not might have, I did have at some point. But if I have a dream
1:53:02 Speaker 00 for myself in that sense of self enhancing dreams, something that enhances my ego or something, well, if this book sold a billion copies, well, that that'd be a nice selfish dream, you know? But I don't know how else to answer that.
1:53:18 Speaker 00 I do have dreams, but they're more about
1:53:21 Speaker 00 the state of the world that I'd like to see, the the world I'd like to see future generations inherit.
1:53:27 Steven Bartlett? Selfless dreams.
1:53:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, I don't have to selfless because it certainly involves my own history and certainly would make me feel better, you know, so in that sense it's selfish, you might say. But they're not, they don't have to do with personal. I have enough, you know, I've done enough and I have enough, so I don't have any. Anything lacking that I need to dream about?
1:53:52 Steven Bartlett? All of our selfless dreams are also very much selfish in that regard as well. They're going to help us.
1:53:57 Speaker 00 Selfish in a different sense. I mean, any dreams I have about a better world certainly have the function of making me feel better of maybe even the stuff that happened to me or the stuff that happened to you. It would mean a lot to me if they didn't happen to any more children, you know. So in the sense that it would mean a lot to me, you might say it's selfish, but it's not purely about me. It's about something larger. I'm not trying to paint myself as some kind of altruistic saint. I'm just saying that would make me feel better. If I really knew that kids in Gaza didn't have to face any more bombings,
1:54:37 Speaker 00 if kids in Israel didn't have to face any more danger of terrorist attacks, if, not that I see inequality there, but I like that for both of them, if kids in Ukraine didn't have to live under the threat of missiles falling, if people in Russia didn't have to live with the fear of perhaps a nuclear conflict or the young men being conscripted into a war, if kids in Britain, you know, didn't have to live in poverty, wouldn't that make you feel better, you know? So to the extent that it makes us feel better, you might say it's selfish, but is it?
1:55:18 Steven Bartlett? Gabor, thank you.
1:55:20 Speaker 00 Well, my pleasure. Thank you so much.
1:55:22 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much for writing such an important book. I think my only wish is that I discovered this book sooner because I think so many of my, I think it would have liberated, that's a good word, liberated me from a series of things that would have helped me to live a much better life and to understand myself. That's the point of awareness that we talked about.
1:55:41 Speaker 00 I know that your advanced age is over, isn't it?
1:55:44 Steven Bartlett? But we all, I think we all want the answers even sooner because we reflect on some of the consequences or the mistakes or the, that we made. Not that those are, I'm imprisoned by any of those, but it's, you know, and so it's so wonderful that this book now exists. You're, you're a name that I, I started to be peppered with by my audience over and over again, specifically in the last 12 months, people, really, really young people were messaging me and asking me to have a conversation with you about the topics we've talked about today, things like ADHD and their trauma and so much. And, you know, I sit here every day talking to a lot, a lot of people on this podcast. And I think my understanding of trauma has forever been redefined by both this conversation today, but also by your book. And I really,
1:56:29 Steven Bartlett? I'm so thankful to you because I think that will help me speak on the topic with more accuracy and therefore hopefully help other people understand their, their own trauma in a more meaningful way. It's just such an important book.
1:56:43 Speaker 00 Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much for giving me the platform to, to talk about my work and, and just the opportunity to meet you. Thanks a lot.
1:56:50 Steven Bartlett? And it's written in such an accessible way, which is so important because that means it can reach even more people. Thank you so much.
1:56:57 Speaker 00 Okay, thank you.
Previous Moment 82 - Michael Jordan & Kobe Bryant ALWAYS Won Because Of This: Tim Grover Next The Man Wrongfully Convicted Of A Murder He Didn’t Commit: Raphael Rowe Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
