Summary
Joe Hudson interviews Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of “The Body Keeps the Score,” in a wide-ranging conversation about trauma, attachment, and healing. Bessel explains that the field’s focus on PTSD as an event-based diagnosis has obscured the deeper issue: attachment — how you were seen, known, and cared for by your parents. Secure attachment is the biggest predictor of outcomes, with traumatic events being secondary.
They discuss the “addiction to trauma” phenomenon — people returning to what’s familiar rather than what’s safe — and Joe’s observation that when people fully feel the emotions held back during their original trauma, they stop being attracted to re-enacting it. Bessel shares his perspective on healing: it’s not about managing symptoms but resolving them, so people genuinely feel loved inside rather than just scoring lower on PTSD checklists.
The conversation covers psychedelics (Bessel’s MDMA research), the importance of body-based therapies (Rolfing and yoga were transformative for Bessel personally), the power of community and group work, the necessity of confronting shame about the role you played in your own trauma, and the critical need for self-regulation to be taught in schools. Bessel emphasizes that self-compassion is the key outcome — mindfulness is only helpful if it leads there.
Key Concepts
- Attachment is bigger than traumatic events
- Trauma addiction is choosing what’s familiar, not what’s safe
- Feeling the held-back emotion ends trauma repetition
- Managing trauma versus resolving it
- Self-compassion is the real outcome of healing
- Shame about your role in your own trauma runs deepest
- Body work opens what mental process cannot
- Self-regulation should be core curriculum
- Deep healing includes a regression phase before breakthrough
- Love the protective part before asking it to change
Key Quotes
“The security of the attachment is the biggest issue… traumatic events are secondary.”
“People choose what’s familiar, not what’s safe.”
“The issue is really not how do we manage it and keep it under control — the issue is how do we resolve it.”
“Mindfulness is only helpful if it leads to self-compassion.”
“The biggest thing about trauma is hating the role that you played in your own trauma.”
“Every kid in America needs five hours reading, writing, arithmetic and self-regulation starting in kindergarten.”
Transcript
welcome everybody to this call between Joe and dr. Bessel Vander Kolk MD so this call is hosted by view which is a transformative education leadership development and corporate culture change company new stands for vulnerability and partiality empathy and wonder a state of mind that we trained as a beginning first step to relating to ourselves and others with deeper love and kindness view takes a three pronged approach with the intellectual emotional and nervous system to work on limiting beliefs and it’s really about lowering resistance to the experience that’s available in every moment in a container of love moving forward we will be focused on an intensive year-long program for senior leaders and organizational culture change programs prior to founding view Joe was a VC investor and foundation managing director both of which focused on companies and organizations with the mission to raise consciousness whether it was increasing social emotional fluidity in children or conscious parenting there was a range but it was all focused on how can we increase the holistic well-being of children and adults and for our guests we have the introduction of dr. Bessel Vander Kolk MD who were very privileged to have and has spent his whole career studying how children and adults adapt to traumatic experiences and has translated his emerging findings from neuroscience and attachment research to develop and study a range of potentially effective treatments for traumatic stress in children and adults he is the author of the body keeps a score our own recommended reading that we do as part of our 18-month course so everyone who’s attended the viewer shakers program has read your book on this call and his efforts have led to the establishment of the National Child traumatic stress Network a congressionally mandated initiative and now funds approximately Oh least supplies new treatment man the doctor a treatment center a research lab and numerous trainings worldwide for a range of individuals so with that let’s start the call between you two and we’re super excited and looking forward to the call today and I’ll stop my video so people will only be able to see YouTube from from now on enjoy good good thank you thank you Mina thanks for coming by so I really appreciate you taking the time with us let’s start up just with the question and when you think about trauma there’s something to let’s say there’s this range of trauma and one side is like beating daily and molested weekly trauma for a child and the other side of trauma would be the far end might be something like heavily criticized by a parent or not picked up as a two-year-old consistently when they were scared and being told you have to be tough in this world right where do you draw the line on what trauma is and and yeah well I don’t think you can draw a line of you can it’s not the binary issue now but but I think it’s very important and has been of increasing concern to me is that you know these are all historical developments they were all part of the culture and part of our political culture and so we started off looking at trauma through the eyes of Vietnam veterans and what’s interesting is that up to then child abuse basically didn’t exist rape didn’t exist domestic violence didn’t exist just amazing how until the middle 80s or something this whole issue was completely not being looked at and then we got Tom and we talked about it as an extraordinary event that’s outside of human usually human experience and in the events and then so it became like something terrible happens it changes you and turned out it mostly since up she was served wrong but here we have served run with him anyway and that term is about an event and these events happen sometimes in car accident wait did they occur Yorker feign really actually in my practice that’s not the overwhelming number people I see but because we got this PTSD diagnosis we organized our thinking around and events and that really messed up the other piece that is intriguing here is that this was all developed in the context of the u.s. being the largest war machine since the Roman Empire basically and our national treasure being devoted to arming our troops is any people cross and so our money and our thinking goes into veterans and it’s a grown-up man who get messed up in our culture of war making but this is to actually issues their veterans are very small minority of traumatized people in most men people who could traverse as guitarist at home by their own caregivers this is sort of an extraneous issue and the other thing is that when these veterans came to see us originally their chief complaint was I have become a monster nobody is safe with me I blow up at my kids my wife who helped me survive Vietnam by sending me letters and being taken care of it I have no feelings for her I’d beat her up and I’ve become this monstrous person but because of politics we had to link this monstrousness to the war and we said all the big issue is the memory about him or about events but that is a clinical move it’s not a scientific move because the real issue that you see is that people have a hard time engaging with people having having a hard time understanding other people of you be part of synchronicity with other human beings and that’s really where the main problem is but we kept going but it’s the events and now people can I love the research and newspaper article said if we just make them invent go away everything’s going to be okay but that’s a complete misunderstanding because it’s about these appearances change who you are they change how you see the world so that’s one aspect the second piece is in the political process again when we put his diagnosis together we were very aware that a lot had happened to these people before he went to the war but we had in Kansas diagnosis it’s a DSM so he said no it has nothing to do with past it’s all about seeing your best friend being blown up and horrible and it was horrible but we already sir smelled out these guys have pre-existing histories of childhood abuse and neglect which we serve pretty well guests had more to do with the eventual sanitation but they ignored that and then as we have come to to move around in the last three to five years we understand that the biggest issue actually is how you get taken care of by your parents which is not about trauma it’s about how you get seen and whether you’re known and ready have a voice and well if you cry somebody says oh honey let’s let’s take care of you or beat you up it says shut up I’ll give you something cry about it so we now have two parallel issues that are conflated with each other one is the whole attachment system and how you deal with other people other people deal with you and how you see yourself in the context of other people which is one dimension and the other dimension is that something terrible is happens that changes your knowledge II to be always be on the alert for danger because that event may come back to you but these are a lot of separate experiences and so what the research shows although most people don’t talk about it is that the security of the attachments thing is the biggest issue now at least so many events are secondary and but of course if you have long problematic attachment issues you become much more likely to get hurt in the context of other human beings that’s sir but that becomes a secondary issue yeah the the question I have on that is let’s say you have not a cute piece of trauma trauma what there are certain things that happen that are pretty consistent and is people are living in that moment even when that moments no longer existing there’s a physical response there there even mapping I would call it in our world we call it mapping where they’re kind of manipulating attracting and proving this reality yep it’s a very important point actually yeah and if a mysterious point actually yeah I called his addiction to trauma yes and somehow the thing that’s most terrifying also becomes the most meaningful in your life yes it’s a huge issue yes right yeah that’s really like you talked about it yeah yeah that’s our work and I find that that exact same thing happens when you’re dealing with attachment the trauma that happens from lack of attachment in the early then let’s say if a person has been taught that love is criticism they go around manipulating the world attracting critical people proving that love is criticism that you’re hearing criticism when it doesn’t actually happen and I’m wondering it yeah okay good yeah no please you have a good thought I want to hear it well my association is I’ve always also been puzzled by this addiction to trauma issue and my great revelation came when I read some piece of that research reading founded by bunch of rats who were in a very pleasant swarm and food environment another bunch of rats who were starved and noisy and miserable and they put them together in a common environment and then he did nasty things to them and the rest who went to came from safe environments went to safe places and the best who came from bad environments been back to the bad place yeah so people choose what’s familiar or what’s safe yes yeah the story the story I tell about this I mean I don’t know if the research but the story that I tell is that like our organism is a is looking for homeostasis again and so there are some oceans that they weren’t allowed to feel in those moments of trauma and if you allow them to feel what’s the body actually allows and looks boards to those emotions that are being held back then they no longer are attracted to the trauma that’s what I’ve seen is that if somebody yeah they’ll say be good yeah if somebody is I’ll give you a less making concrete somebody had an emotional abandonment by their parents in that process there was a deep feeling of aloneness and out of control that they couldn’t feel because if they did would be total chaos is a five or ten year old if they get to a point where they can look forward to that emotion that underlying emotion and actually invite it and feel it and process it in a container particularly in a container of love then that’s the moment they stop attracting or going towards the the that same trauma in their life they stop being attracted to and stop inviting into their lives people who will emotionally abandon them you see what’s the original lead gets satisfied once the emotion gets balanced fully felt right so there’s an emotion of basically hey this person who’s opposed care of me isn’t and the sadness and helplessness of that if it’s felt and and loved I would say look forward to like yeah or like the child never was then it vanished shifts that’s what I deal with it yeah in in our second romantic work is to sort of become that 10 year old kid yes and to feel the feelings and to put your father or your mother out there in space and to say you’ve never paid attention to me or you just kept putting me down that you choose somebody to be an ideal parents yes and who who holds you and you feel like you’re ten years old and it says if I be never even ten years old I will repaint attention to you I would have read your spare time stories every night and then you get the imprint of oh that’s what it feels like you really get the momentary visceral satisfaction of that of that emptiness that Khepri feeling over one yeah and I think this very seriously I mean you need to have a sense in your body of what it’s like to feel that hunger satisfied or that’s to know how it can be differently yeah and I think our biggest challenge is how do you get that into people’s bodies yes yeah exactly alternative reality right yeah and can you speak a little bit about complex PTSD is kind of there’s now a book on it and how do you how do you conceive of this when you think you know well complex PTSD is this attachment trauma issue combined with each other and it meanders have been so very much from the very beginning the moment that we got the PTSD diagnosis in Judy Herman and I started to talk about yeah but it’s more complex and if you’re were abused and neglected as a kid you have all these issues about self-esteem and your body gets very affected and you get all these illnesses you can always your problems and that’s complex PTSD and when Judy first wrote about it yeah I did say I did research on it and we always talked about in the major about the semantic aspects and the immunological aspects when Judy first talks about it that sort of body piece was left out still yeah our research has always said if you’re early on you get neglected abused it changes the hallways your whole organism response the environments yeah yeah there’s a you know the research that shows that aces will increase heart attack rates and and dilates and all that um I have a question for you howdy how do you how do you define the difference between managing PTSD and healing it I I think it’s a very important person actually and I think but they see people do in academic type research is to manage how the outcome measure is where the PTSD symptoms are less or rather still people still meet criteria for PTSD and there’s a certain cutoff point and I make actually very big deal out of no that’s not the right outcome criterion the work continues people say it’s over I used to be an abused and neglected kid but now I feel loved inside and so the issue is really not how do we manage it and keep it on the control the issue is how do we resolve it and in very large number of people’s cases you can resolve it yeah you can actually come into a court just say you know Jesus loves me or whatever the equivalent their offer is like I’m in love push I mean yeah and so one of the things that we talk about is that the the the the trauma that’s created in relationship is best healed in relationship and there’s two forms of that that can happen there’s the one-on-one of a doctor client and then there’s also a group of people and then in that group they can there gonna be a deep feeling of love and acceptance if that’s created that can do a lot of the healing I’m curious what do you see the differences between the one-on-one and the group if you can really create a container of love inside of that group well I don’t I also don’t quite agree with that the relationship is the one thing that curious at trial we won say one thing I would just say it’s very helpful in it but of course the relationship is central and my taken is although you know it’s it’s it’s not linear it’s not black and white is that in order to tell your story and to tease it out and to really know what you went through back there and the deeply feel developed a sense of compassion for your internal world I think the one on one relationship where somebody is just focused on you and you don’t have to worry about anybody else is pretty damn important mmm and I don’t quite maybe you can do it and really said seriously think maybe you know how to do it in our soccer drama stuff people do very deep work in a group but you know sorry drama stuff you also pay very deep attention to that particular person’s experience then the group can be very powerful in helping it but I think doing things in a group is enormous ly important also to know that this is our common fate it’s part of a human being that sometimes some of us have been luckier than others is that sometimes you feel unseen you feel don’t be gives a about you and you feel like you need to be there for somebody else enough for you and at the end knowing that you’re a member of the human race and playing it out as a member of human race is also terribly important yeah yeah like I have a question for you how do you define because there’s the reason I’m asking the question is because there’s a couple modalities out there that talk about awakening that’s found at the bottom of the trauma there’s a Tibetan work and there’s also lowens work also talks about this my question for you before we even get into that subject is how do you define awakening what do you like what does that mean to you from a psychological perspective that that it’s not the not the language that I use in any other ventures I am in although when they think about it I can see how people come to use that word in some way yeah and it’s a word of that word what for me means now having never heard it before in this context is of really seeing yourself with love compassion and saying yes this creature who is me got terribly hurt along the way yeah but it wasn’t that features fault that creature just was at the wrong time in the wrong place and I’ll help to execute that person who happens to be me out of that situation yeah I imagine that this awakening means yeah yeah in some in the human development research they talked about awakening being a moment where the sense of self shifts into Universal instead of an individual turns into a universal I think in other traditions awakening a heart awakening would be described exactly how you describe it that would be called more of a head awakening and but my curiosity is what’s your experience of working with people in their trauma and that trauma is the key that allows them to find is there another way to find that deep amount of self loved and outside of going through the trauma what what you know it’s a question that has been around as long as I have been in this field and I think most of us would say most of the time yes you need to go into the trauma and yes you need to experience what’s happened to that kid or that person back then but I’m not a hundred percent sure of that yeah I think it’s possible and let’s say one scenario could be like adolescence is a amazing time when brain is wide open and you can be a terrible abuse and and hurts child and if your first love in your life happens to be a very loving person who makes you feel like you’re just a lovely wonderful person who can share pleasure and commitment and joy with you as teenagers sometimes have the good luck to have yeah then I think that experience at the right time in the right place can be decent we set the whole system without having to revisit at all I could imagine that that would be true for some people yeah yeah yeah right yeah if basically that that idea of Ben you are lovable however getting is the thing that can create this for people whether it’s through the trauma or not through the trauma intentionally yeah but then it’s a question of what serves mental brain stage are you in to allow this new stuff to come in to you aha unless this happens to be a very good place for that to happen most of us when we get adults get pretty rigidify and barely get into a state of that openness although right now I main research is on psychedelics actually is also our state of mind in which all kind of new stuff can come in at Knossos can also do that but what we see in our secondary research people go back into their trauma wrap we have not seen people in our research who have a secondary experience and go into other places and they deal with that I’m always yeah one of the things that happens in our work when we do the week-long or the 18-month and the people are deep is really common for people to say I feel like I’m on that Allu synergetic it’s a really little thing for people to say and they’ll if it’s a big emotional process they’ll think that they feel like they’re on ayahuasca if it’s then there’s some processes where they feel like it’s MDMA and there’s some process really good mental deconstruction process they feel like LSD I wonder if you have any theories as to why somebody who’s not on hallucinogenics would feel like they’re on hallucinogenics are you you know one thing that one reservation area bar DeBarge are the current interest in psychedelics which i share is that people can think oh I need to take a pill or a drug in order to get in that states yeah I think that’s definitely not true and you know I don’t know the details of your particular work like you know I had experiences in my life also away my mind was very open and new new stuff came in in very profound ways and they were never folk didn’t ever involve drugs actually yeah that’s a they involve your mind being open you have a lot of state abase in your brain okay things need to be changed in your consciousness and when you’d say that the people you work with have that experience I go like yeah I totally believe that yeah I one of a neuroscientist who’s in one of the courses their thesis was that when the brain is has a whole bunch of new channels being created the visual field that isn’t prioritized anymore which is why there’s so so much there’s so much visual distortion or whatever hallucinations so I thought that was an interesting one yeah neurologically speaking again one of the things you know des cartes era if you’ve read the book when he talks about that we really basically make emotional decisions it’s a little more complex than that as my understanding but that our of our emotional Center goes away that we see it’ll take us like four hours to decide where to have lunch and I wonder yeah I wonder how do you how do you feel like that relates to the recovery of trauma if our decision-making processes you know how do you think that place yeah I think this is how we build we need our emotions to be our pilots not make atomic size your emotions become defied us to keep sending you back into the terminal direction so you need to actually squash that pilots for a while so you can not make a decision you know and and that you just love stuff to come in and that’s my having a loving and extremely skillful guide is so important really important because you’re so vulnerable to part but if if you can really let go I know with psychedelics and without then new stuff comes in a can be organized about it absolutely yeah on the psychedelic research that I’ve done there’s one there basically of the big five it can change openness that’s they’ve done the studies that show them and the big five it changes openness have you found any modalities that changed the neuroses aspect of the big five anything we’ve been measured I only have done I’m only doing MDMA research ah and you know I’m a small part is very large multi-site study and so we I have a limited number of subjects and and I can’t see it somebody’s on the MDMA research in my psychodrama work that I do which I’m not doing research we should probably closer to what you do possibly yes people do become less neurotic yeah people come less reactive they become less offended by minor issues of other people because I think it big the big issue is self compassion yeah and just the German research my name is Tania singer who has done a lot of mindfulness research very complicated extremely high quality research and she came at the end that mindfulness is only helpful if it leads to self compassion yeah and so I don’t know to what degree the various genetic agents or psychic mind-altering substances increase self-compassion MDMA certainly does yeah yeah but it don’t know how its house and there’s Studies on the psychodrama do drama work on the on the neuroses have you seen the studies that talk about a nobody nobody I know see there’s a of course big issue in our culture is that the but the study is the biology and if he can put people motionless with a head in a vise and put him in a scanner we do real science but in our culture the interest in mental processes has basically disappeared yeah and so well I say you know so but do I study I study neurofeedback which is where we can study neural traces I studied psychedelics because there’s a drug et cetera etc but my favorite clinical work is psycho drama and there’s no way in hell anybody’s going to give me a million dollars and take did good do go psycho drama study right and so so another question that I have for you is that there’s a I’ve noticed when I’m working with people in the long term it’s pretty rare but what happens is they’ll get they’ll get to a place where their people come to me or have their lives pretty well together right like half of the people or CEOs a lot of good colleges but they’ll the first year or two might be getting themselves into a place where the trauma isn’t really driving them anymore at any kind of measurable level they the they feel love they feel compassion for themselves they feel a sense of oneness and then and then something happens like somewhere like six months after that sometimes where it seems like they like revert and sometimes for three or four months deeply into something that’s even before I ever met them and they’ll go into this like they’ll really go into a sense of attachment issues where they are not seeing the world clearly they can even say it they can say I’m not seeing the world clearly and then and then when they pop out at the end of that and it’s a really touch and go thing that I noticed but when they pop out at the end of that like that they all of a Center a far softer they like that there it’s like they have a aura about them of just loving everybody that comes around them research do you know anything about that process or does it seem yeah see no I think your survey ssin is is a very important observation and this is exactly the stuff that people are not studying yeah so I hang out with the internal family systems and people yes and about dealing with parts and I find it internal family systems model a very indispensable model in some ways maybe you used to use very similar model summary in your mind so that people are built of parts and different parts I control at different times and when a part that has been managing you successfully like to not ever feel vulnerable or to never feel dependence yes yeah never give control of the solid that manager is going to scream like crazy like no I’m not going to make myself founder man and so since thing he talked about it house of phase because as an individual therapist I don’t see that I don’t see so much as a phased and my practice I see but they see these things coming up very much like no I’m not going to love you or anybody else I’m not going to give up part of my work in order to be with my kids because I need to be invulnerable yeah okay that’s I’m not gonna give up control and then I think the trick is to to really validate that parts right and how important that part is being you survived had same man that partners really allows you to to survive all this stuff it’s so importance love that part of you even though everybody else may hate us and then after it’s validated and it’s very important to to my mind to really validate how how useful that parties in help you to have become a relative independent person and to say to say this very good part and maybe you can sort of change the job description little bit yeah yeah yeah yeah it’s interesting it feels to me it’s almost fractal like that that exact process happens at different scales through the like I would say almost everything that we do and our work is about learning to love the different aspects of ourselves and yeah and the more usually the ones that are like the the ones at the very base of the personality the ones that are like hardly visible at the beginning of a process the ones that seem to have like that big hiccup near like near the later stages of it like the biggest yeah is there any researchers or anybody who focuses on on that kind of core I don’t know I didn’t see so see you know the mind has disappeared some research yeah yeah you know it’s a real very big deal you know and I would say if you have living there in that part of California this basically sends off the world these days and bossy used to be a sense of the broken now you guys in the sense of the world and men talk to talk to other people who have access to money and research like we need to study these mind process we need to study this part there are things I can’t Alex because that brain scans everybody because the brain is basically built on BET models and be human these are weird symbolic species and we live by symbols and are symbols cannot be captured in these brain scans I love brain scans done more than but you know at the end these mental processes are what makes us do unique human beasts if you are and we are not studying it yeah absolutely yeah that’s and because we’re not selling it you do your work and it sounds really fantastic and other people do their work but there is no common language because there’s no common scientific or a conceptual framework by which we all work together we should yeah one of the things I’m curious about in all those modalities because you you’ve been able to go around the world and and see a lot of them the this modality that we that were using is comes from a lot of those but it also has a strong sense of the spiritual the from Christianity to Buddhism to Taoism to that the Sufis like a lot of those practices we use as well and I was wondering here how how much of the the work that you see out there that’s really having a deep effect on on that early trauma is also using some of these practices because I know you mentioned yoga and mindless yeah well you know all these practices have been have evolved out of helping people to deal with their pain yeah and so you know very simple thing I’d like to talk about is that chanting is universal now even in the Dutch Reformed Church that I grew up in which the most lugubrious Church you can imagine people still go yeah so County together however however I’m beautiful maybe still gives you a sense of community and of course at the core of human beings you need to be communal yeah we need to be in sync with other people and so that is of course at the end you cannot avoid that going there yeah yeah cuz that’s our nature how do we how do you get a sense of belonging how do we get the sense of being in touch with each other how can you be an old person and commune with a young person unless that larger reality gets somebody incorporated into yourself yeah it’s one of the things that we’ll do in a in our week-long courses right from the beginning the whole week-long course is about looking at the voice in our head and particularly the abusive reoccurring voice in our head and laying it out in a way and then approaching it and how figuring out how to have different relationships with it not getting rid of it but learning to love it learning to let and we’ll have a full list on the wall everybody will list their voice in the head in a way that they can’t get it’s like very clear and one of the things that seems to happen there doesn’t seem to I know it happens is when people have excavate all this stuff and then they look around the room and they see 11 other people loving them despite of this but then that’s no excuse not to love yourself it does something for the for the human absolutely yeah one of the questions I have is how big how big of a process to you or how important do you think it is to actually just like it’s it’s big and a to where you’re just yeah owning these things that you don’t like about yourself just that simple act how important yes process is that you think it’s it’s huge because it’s this do is with shame of course mm-hmm hiding yourself is a shame yes anybody - no that’s not about you and indeed in order to fully become yourself the dark part you yourself in the nasty part of yourself need to be out there and to be realized that we all carry does suffer out and that is we could come just pretty projected on Mitch McConnell and because we all have a little bit of that in ourselves also it’s a like know part of me is also nasty and very important and to put it out here and say every part of me is is there and every part needs to be known to the people who I feel close to yeah yeah exactly um one of the most common questions in the list of questions so we took all the questions from people and then I’m asking as many other as I can because that seemed to make it most simple the one of the biggest questions was people wanted to know what was the personal practice not not going to a therapist not going into a group practice what was the personal practices that you found most effective at healing trauma should I hate answering so I imagine well I can tell you it’s been helpful for me along the road you know and some of it was professional someone was not professional I think one of the most helpful things that I ever got was roofing yeah you know I was a very sick child and so I was born at the end of the second world war in the Netherlands and about half of my generation died of starvation and so I was a very sickly little kid and they don’t feel that in myself anymore but I grew up having a body that was very defensive and and I think I was stuck in that body in a way and then I got lost I think the no mental process whatsoever I mean that’s very very issue of is it organizational and now it’s not all additional yeah yeah it was not even my list my body something is open up my body you know and and love my chest to open up with you stand big and to not be always frozen eternally was extraordinarily helpful for me so that is very important I think my yoga practice which is not doing so well these days was enormously helpful in the rough times my type just going through yoga practice having a practice and finding finding your core and worked very hard in this bus just enormously helpful again non-relational yes know the voice of your yoga teacher is terribly important but nothing about yoga teachers knew me as oppression yeah but still and a lot of pizza really get in touch with myself and to take care of myself in a certain secret way so there’s a very important things and on a professional level dealing with my parts is enormously importance and the shame you feel and it’s a very big thing that you know I saw both in my patients myself is that you know trauma is one thing but the biggest thing about trauma is hating the role that you played in your own trauma yeah not standing up for yourself or you getting along sucking up to your abuser or you know and so you hate yourself for not having be true to yourself at that point you to trauma you need to go there yeah I really feel that figure all the five year olds a 15 year old a 50 year old yeah yeah you work hours and and you can understand that because you’re really scared and so you need to go there and really deal with the parts of you that you really despise yeah and you know and you cannot do that for me can you travel do you want oh you have to love me more because yeah now I find that that’s a that it’s like a watershed moment and healing certain pattern in a human is that they there’s a moment where they grieve the fact that they’ve been doing this to themselves or they’ve been agreeing to this for the last 20 or 30 years and the big 50 years there’s eight years and that much yet missed yeah and that that is often the precursor to loving themselves and let me not aspect yeah is that grief I think usually you know I see a lot of people so quite late in life when they finally start taking themselves seriously due to work and they go like oh man I miss so much also but at least I have a few good years left to make use of oh speaking of this so I did a lot of work in philanthropy with early childhood we did mindfulness in schools and we did the the emotional the body part of it emotional fluidity practice with kids called hand-in-hand parenting which is amazing for anybody and what I noticed is that my experience I’m wondering if there’s research or if your experience is the same that huh trauma heals a lot quicker the younger they are when the neurology is still plastic it seems like there’s a oh absolutely there’s no question about it okay like no I suggest but say you get them get you’re getting you know and there’s you know and push Perry writes a lot about it like if you get people the first year of life you know you can change everything and the longer you wait and then a study shows the longer you wait the harder it is and it doesn’t mean it’s ever too late but no we really talk about you from your philanthropy my reaction is isn’t it great that you’re doing that and and there’s a lot of philanthropy going on schools did you know I see but it never becomes part of the school system yeah it’s always exterior you know so my dream is that every kid in America yes five hours reading writing arithmetic and self-regulation yeah starting in kindergarten regulation and taking care of yourself becomes a core of the curriculum because you need to have that in order to become a productive member of society it’s not like it oh let’s let’s get these nice people from California to fund this yoga program no I kids need it like it yeah we at some point we can talk not offline but and we our experience was that if you go you had to go to the teachers not to the school system absolutely and we when we when we did that we could scale with a half a million dollars we can scale to like 700,000 kids doing mine up and so that we found a business model that allowed us to reach a ton of people through the school system very cheaply but offline at some point I don’t think we would I think we bore look good I guess they the question that I have is if it to be political for a second aces like if we as a society have the moonshot of reducing aces right which is adverse childhood experiences for those but which we know is linked to everything from drug addiction rates to heart disease rates to mental illness rates if we were to do that two questions one we needed to do as a society to get there a to make that a priority in your mind and two what would be the back of your napkin plan for or for what would be the most important first steps to take in reducing aces in our society well it’s interesting because it made small meeting recently in which Jim Carroll also said you know much of politics should be an educational process and when we have questions debates at the base about politics to make Asus good aces where it should be namely our biggest national priority like it’s the biggest source of mental illness biggest source of opioid addiction biggest source of everything and talking a bigger friend biggest drain on our economy exactly you know and one of the disappointing things about the Obama administration is that they did not go there and they did more of let’s compete with kids in Finland and Denmark who score myself much better than our kids do why did I score much better because the societies actually no but aces had taken taken into account and set up school systems where the Aces are addressing is at the court and we should make it our national debate if you treat your kids well they will be curious they will be eager to learn there will be eager to get along with other people because they feel safe and it’s like it’s a big gigantic educational project project which sort of goes against the capitalist mentality of let’s make as much money as we can so that’s not only true for politics it’s also true for the medical system when people also are not doing it to give us lip service to it but they don’t do it and so there needs to be a pervasive and I think the best way of doing it is in school systems I think can get on the state-by-state basis get to accept the for our idea that self regulation gets taught from the very first moment on and get a bunch of people to teach and that’s the way to do tapping that region your breathing that singing and we do yoga and we do so i DRA mer and we do all this stuff all the stuff actually that my kids cause it’s cool because I’m a bellof person SM sorry able to send my kids to the school when they go all that stuff and certainly you get the whole again the income inequality saying now the poorer you are the less of the stuff you get and then where you get blamed for not being able to function yeah so that should be a big part of the national debates and to really talk about how but of course there’s an enormous what’s happening our current political system of course it’s just stunning we’re on the mind the time is thing big under buy any of the stuff like no we’re not do any of this in fact we go to make the worst broke into a worse place and I think when people address that they are not quite articulate enough like no why would you want to destroy everything that’s good about us and to really bring that issue up we need to be safe licenses to be predictable and to make a continuous refrain in response to everything that we do a basic yeah um thank you another question we talked a little bit before this started of how it was really important for you to keep your one-on-one practice because it yeah a certain level of humility whereas when you’re talking and you’ve written a book everybody looks at you like you have answers and then you’re working with somebody one-on-one and like the humanity and the reality of life sets in I’m wondering how um one can you just talk a little bit about the importance for you of that humility and and to what for those because there’s quite a few people on the call that are that are facilitators or coaches or can you also just speak to the importance and how you how you do it how you maintain that practice because my experience is that when we do that it makes a huge difference so well one thing I really get accused of humility no I wouldn’t even call humility but I would call it like curiosity is circulation it’s an issue and so I would hate to know everything because then there’s nothing else to be discovered yeah and so why do I have a practice and why do I take all kind of different people my practice is because I want to be challenged in but I do I had a t-shirt at one point though expect a guy in Boston who then became a administrator of a large Hospital I said but did you take this job he says personally you know at certain point you have seen it all and every be patient becomes like a predictable entity and I got like wow that’s weird is never happened to me and now I’m 76 years old it still is not happening to me and I find every person who walks in my office a unique individual the unique capacity so that uniqueness and finding out how everybody has different adaptation and different issues and that one size doesn’t fit all yes no I couldn’t do without you you know I couldn’t just put my little template and everybody said it works for everybody and I’m actually so I’m incredibly intrigued with all the different solutions that people find for having Delphis what they deal with and I hope it and where I know we’ll continue to be this curious till the day you die like yeah and on your personal journey where do you find your edge of your own development process where are you now at your own edge if you’re willing you know the big issue at my age is death yeah you know being relevant and possibly confronting the fact that you may not be relevant to a larger world at some point because of course you get spoiled at some point and people take you seriously and then I’ve found this first by kids about 15 years ago my kids started to treat me like an old man then let me do it for you there’s I mean like now it’s our turn now and and I think the reality is that people need to come into their own and they need to abandon you at some point and whether you did or our life does Mark think of the difference because they’ll remember you as his eye rather than as a person who is actively active and that’s of course is saying that is a real issue to come to terms with its to just to give up being a person who who is not there to move things around most striking business yeah what pleasure do you find in that new identity that’s coming online pleasure yeah pleasure it’s you know it’s very key that it’s something to be dealt with like do I keep my yoga practice going or do I love to myself to become a buffalo longer know it like it takes more and more energy to do things and what point do you accept your limitations I don’t at the first the first offers I ever had some patience so clearly a very messed up person broke on the bathroom mirror in soap live with live at the acceptance of your limitations or the pain of your transgressions I thought it was pretty good actually yeah and so learning to live with the exception of your limitations is also very Britain issue yeah Frank the pleasure will no I cannot say all right well this was our time I really appreciate thank you do you have any questions really or any em or anything else to say that we have it that I forgot anything important as you have the probably did anyway so real pleasure talking with you as a pleasure at the really see so in fear about wonderful work you’re doing El Sordo City it’s great to you yeah thank you it’s a privilege thank you I feel it thank you okay