← Healing + Human Potential
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- [00:01]
Podcast Host
Talk to us about the wheel of awareness.
- [00:02]
Dan Siegel
You get a change in the brain's structure and function where it becomes more integrated. I did that with patients and amazingly they got over anxiety, mild to moderate depression, trauma. Sadly, some of my patients were given terminal diagnoses. They were freaking out about dying. It made their panic about death disappear. The fifth is you optimize an enzyme called telomerase that repairs and maintains the ends of the chromosomes so you slow the aging process. Another colleague actually gave everybody the mystical experiences scale you give with steroids, psychedelics, and people got the same scores that they would get as if they were on psilocybin after doing just a 25 minute wheel practice.
- [00:37]
Podcast Host
Talk to us about what people mistake their identity as and how that creates suffering as a result in their lives. What if the self you've been protecting was never actually who you are? Welcome back to the Healing and Human Potential podcast. In this episode we explore the nature of identity, spiritual awareness, and what happens when we loosen our grip on the stories that define us. We also talk about the science and the illusion of separation, as well as practices like the wheel of awareness, how they open us to a deeper experience of connection, presence and freedom. Joining us is Dan Siegel, renowned psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who's a bestselling author, known for his work in interpersonal neurobiology and healing. Joining us is Dan Siegel, renowned psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and best selling author, known for his work in interpersonal neurobiology and healing. Let's dive in. So I thought we'd start off talking about what I think is the most important conversation that we could have, which is around identity. Can you talk to us about what people mistake their identity as and how that creates suffering as a result in their lives?
- [01:38]
Dan Siegel
Yeah. What a great question. So that word, identity. Can I ask you a question?
- [01:43]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [01:43]
Dan Siegel
Yeah. So when you hear that single word, identity, what comes up in you of what that means?
- [01:50]
Podcast Host
I think of identity as two either egoic identity or essence identity. Attachment to thoughts, like identity with thoughts, feelings, actions, versus what is it that is aware of all of that? And we want healthy, integrated egos, but we are more than that. And so it's about awakening to the truth of our being, who and what we are underneath all of that.
- [02:14]
Dan Siegel
The truth of our being. Great, great. Because these words can sometimes, sometimes confuse us in general terms. So I always want to know, like if someone asked me a question, like, what do you mean by identity? I want to start with what do they mean by it? Because it's A word, right, sure. So it's like who am I?
- [02:29]
Podcast Host
Yes.
- [02:30]
Dan Siegel
What criteria are you using to say who you are? Right. So for me this is a really fascinating question because it relates to another word which is the four letter word. S, E, L, F. Self.
- [02:46]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [02:47]
Dan Siegel
And some people might say, well, your identity are the features you use to define what your self is. So if you start looking at that way, then you can say, well, okay, then identity is really just the details underneath self. So if we go back and look at some of the like deep studies of self, they don't really say exactly what it is, but they do talk about three things. They talk about the sensation of what you could just call subjective experience. What's the feeling of this? Whatever it is that we're going to put a circle around saying the self of being itself. There's the word self in it itself. What is the feeling of it? So that's an S. What's the perspective that this thing we're calling self takes, like its point of view? Like me looking through my glasses and you don't have glasses, you're looking through your eyes. What's the point of view? We have the perspective. And the A is agency. So if I want to drink a cup of this tea, I can decide to move my arm because I have that ability and I can drink. But a relative of ours just had a stroke two days ago and now can't do that. So what happened to himself if the agency to move the body that he might use as part of defining who he is can't move anymore. So those three spell the word spa. So sensation or subjective experience, perspective or point of view, and agency, how you act on behalf of it is a reasonable way of starting to describe what people often mean by the word self. So then you could say, okay, well then how do you find the criteria? Get coming back to your question about identity, what does identity really mean? So when I use the word mistaken identity, that phrase, what I discovered in trying to go on this journey of identity was that in cultural terms we're given messages that the criteria that define who you are and where you're going to put a boundary around your sensation, perspective and agency is your body. And so people equate the self with this skin encased body, the individual. And sometimes they even use the word self as a synonym for individual like self understanding or self compassion, or self realization or self regulation or all these self discovery, self discovery. And so it's really been interesting then, almost like a fish that swims in an aquarium where the water is not so healthy to try to like jump into a different aquarium, you know, or like Marcellus the octopus in this wonderful new movie.
- [05:30]
Podcast Host
I loved it.
- [05:30]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, it was so great with Sally Field. You know, where Marcellus is an octopus and he gets out of his tank sometimes and you know, goes. Does things outside the tank. So when we get outside of the tank of, of our individualistic culture, then you would say, well, actually it's maybe a mistake to equate self with individual. So you have an inner self for sure. But we are you and I right now in a relationship that creates its own subjective experience, perspective and agency. So there's a dyadic, a two person self here. And then if you go out in a forest and you really feel into the relational field that's in the forest, like panda populace is a good example. In Utah, there's a forest where there are 48,000 quaking Aspen. I'll put it in quotes. Trees. But when you go six inches beneath the surface of the soil, you find out it's one root ball. And you test the DNA all around the grove, same DNA. It's one tree with 48,000 trunks. So which is the self there? Is it the trunk or is the whole grove? And then you know when you're in, when you're literally in it, you with a human body, if you take a deep breath and relax all the cultural messages you've been told, or messages from school or social media, or messages from your parents, and just feel the sensation of being in the grove, of the perspective of being in the grove, even acting on behalf of the grove, like the ranger who was devoting his life to protecting the grove, you start to realize this grove is yourself. So it's a relational self that is you. So in terms of identity, then you have like an identity lens that you can learn to do up close. So you do have a body. If you're listening to us, you have a body. But then you also have a relational self that can be as wide as the universe.
- [07:32]
Podcast Host
Yeah, you have a body. You're more than the body. Yeah, yeah. And talk to us about the wheel of awareness because I, I've just been so excited to have you share about it and what it's designed to support us in experiencing directly for ourselves.
- [07:47]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, that's a really interesting question because it comes down to a very practical practice called the wheel of awareness that. My gosh. I don't mean to say this, but it's probably now, over 30 years ago, two ideas came up in this journey I've been on as a therapist, like what is the mind and how does it relate to mental health? Were the fundamental questions. And some of the things that came out was like a common ground across different pursuits. And one was the finding that a process called integration was the basis of health. And integration is defined as things that are different in a system, like you and me in our system, or your left and right side of your nervous system, or up and down, or, you know, there's lots of ways you differentiate aspects of a system and then you link them. That balance of linkage of differentiated parts where in the linkage you don't lose the essence of the differentiated elements, that's called integration. So integration through a deep set of studies looks like it's the basis of health and healing. So that's number one. The second thing was if you look at intentional efforts to change, like therapy or parenting or schooling, coaching, all these different things, you use consciousness for intentional change. So then I thought, well, what if you integrated the first idea, consciousness, the second idea? So there was a table in my office and I would bring my clients, my patients up off the chair, the couch, walk them around the table. I said, okay, we're going to try something new. And they go, what are we doing now? You know, because I was always trying new things, I said, we're going to integrate consciousness. And they go, what are you talking about? I said, well, just bear with me. Consciousness can be easily defined as, or simply defined as the knowing experience of awareness. Let's put in the center of this table, which is glass, and the knowns like me saying hello would be a sound. And there are four segments on this rim where the knowns are. It's all energy flow, but energy flowing from outside the body, we pick up with our five senses. We see, we smell, we taste, we touch, right? Mm. Then you go to the second segment, which is energy flow inside the skin encased body and the movement of the body and the position of the body. So that's a body sense. Then you go to the third segment of the rim, and this is all you do. This systematically, slowly, is exploring mental activities like emotions, memories, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, longings, desires located probably up in the head's brain. You do that, you explore that. You then go to the fourth segment, which is feeling, into the relational field that surrounds you. So your connection to people and the planet. And once we do that and get that going, we move this singular spoke around to do all those things of linking differentiated parts. But then what we do is we bend the spoke around in a more advanced practice and have people just dive into the hub itself. So I did that with patients and amazingly they got over anxiety, mild to moderate depression, trauma. Sadly, some of my patients were given terminal diagnoses. They were freaking out about dying. It made their panic about death disappear. It was like weird. But it worked for that. It helped with people recovering from addiction. And so I started using it in my classes where I would teach therapists. They started using it and they got the same results. So then I started teaching workshops and now I've taught about 76,000 people in person and we've had millions stream it from our website. And, you know, when I do it in person, I get the opportunity to give people a microphone if they want to and share. And so we have a lot of data. I'm a scientist as well as a clinician, so we have a lot of data from this same stimulation, this 25 minute practice of going around the wheel and what people experience about. So there's a lot to say about it.
- [11:49]
Podcast Host
I love it because it incorporates all of our experience. But then there's also this. It sounds like u turning consciousness to notice what's noticing. Coming back to your core your.
- [11:59]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, that's one way of describing it for sure. Notice what's noticing also you could say like dropping into pure awareness.
- [12:07]
Podcast Host
Yeah, right.
- [12:08]
Dan Siegel
You know, it's like a Jon Kabat Zinn might call an orthogonal change. I mean it's just. And we could talk about what that might be because that's been super fascinating to. To experience this with workshop participants and my clients and myself. I do this every morning. And there's a fascinating idea that comes from those that all that data from people doing the practice.
- [12:32]
Podcast Host
Yeah. My experience directly is that that's the most regulating nervous system hack of just coming back to a deeper connection within myself. Do you know of any of the neuroscience around pure awareness? If you're feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, or just simply longing for more peace, presence or intuition in your life, you're not alone. So many people are seeking something deeper, whether it's clarity, self trust, or a deeper sense of spiritual connection. But oftentime the answers feel like they're out of reach. But what if I told you that the peace and clarity that you're craving are already within you? You don't need to search outside yourself for the answers. You simply need to reconnect with the power of your own presence. That's why I created the miracle of you. Six guided meditations designed to help you embody your wholeness. Rediscover your sense of direction and develop a deeper trust in life so that you can bring that energy into your relationships, into your work, into every area of your life. And today I'm gifting it to you for free. So if you'd like to take advantage of it while it's still available and free, just click the link in the Show Notes below or scan the QR code on the screen to download the Miracle of youf and start your journey back home to yourself.
- [13:41]
Dan Siegel
The first to say is, in terms of neuroscience, and the general idea is just so people know, and it can be very inspiring when you look at different research that's done very systematically on traditional contemplative practices. They include three pillars, which are training attention to be focused, training awareness to be open, which gets this idea of open awareness, and training intention to be kind, like loving kindness. And when you put all three together, some people would say, that's mindfulness, Some people say, no way. It's mindfulness plus compassion. So I was at a meeting with a bunch of researchers and I said, okay, you're not agreeing. I'm writing a book on this whole thing. I have a little drawing my daughter actually made. I was going to call it Three Pillars of Mindfulness Practice. They go, half the group said, you can't call it that. And they were mindfully having an argument. So I said, okay, what if? And I got rid of the fullness part. I said, what if? It's three pillar mind practice? They go, perfect. So we got 100% agreement on that term. So basically, when you do three pillar mind practice, training attention to be focused, awareness to be open, intention to be kind, three elements of mind, attention, awareness and intention. You get a change in the brain's structure and function where it basically becomes more integrated. And you can look at this in various areas like the corpus callosum, the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and something called the connectome. That's cool, because Smith and colleagues found that if you look at every measure of well being, an integrated brain. Look, looking through the lens of the connectome, how differentiated parts are linked is the best predictor of well being. So that. That's pretty cool, just in general terms. And three Pillar Mind Practice also cultivates five physiological changes of well being. Reducing stress hormone cortisol, improving immune function, optimizing cardiovascular function, even reducing inflammation in the body by altering epigenetic controls on top of the genes, these molecules. And if that wasn't enough, the fifth is you optimize an Enzyme called telomerase that repairs and maintains the ends of the chromosomes. So you slow the aging process.
- [15:56]
Podcast Host
Yeah, that makes sense. You see a lot of spiritual teachers that look young, vibrant, because they are younger, they're present and not stuck in the past or projecting the future.
- [16:03]
Dan Siegel
Exactly, yeah. And we can talk about presence too, and all this. So that's the overall dive in. And now you can say, well, what do we know about this open awareness and neural correlates of it. I was teaching at a workshop with four colleagues, and one of them is a neuroscientist. And she saw me do the wheel of awareness with everybody. And another colleague actually gave everybody the mystical experiences scale you give with psychedelics. And people got the same scores that they would get as if they were on psilocybin after doing the wheel. Just a 25 minute wheel practice. He was like, blown away. But. But my other colleague was a neuroscientist. She saw it and then saw my discussion afterwards of why people were talking about joy, timelessness, God, this feeling of being connected to everyone and everything, love, all these things. And so I drew this sort of attempt at a scientific explanation on what's the difference between the hub and the rim, basically. And she just was like, literally speechless. So I went to visit her in Florida. This is a mishi jah. And she said, dan, I'm gonna take that diagram of yours that correlates open awareness, pure awareness, with what you're calling the plane of possibility, which on a view of energy, it's energy is called the movement from possibility to actuality. So an actuality would be like a thought, an emotion, a memory would be an actuality. But a little bit below that, you would have, like, increased probability of remembering, emoting, thinking. You could even have a state of mind that would be somewhere in the middle. But when you go way to the bottom of probability, maximal uncertainty, least predictive, least probable at the very bottom, in physics terms, we call that the sea of potential. They literally call this the formless source of all form. I named it the generator of diversity because it's where all things arise from the God. And. And that hasn't gotten me in trouble with any religious leaders so far.
- [18:15]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [18:16]
Dan Siegel
And in fact, the opposite. They say, dan, you've created the bridge between religion and science. And in, as my dear friend John o' Donagh used to say, there never should have been a divorce between spirituality and science so that we can get into that. But in terms of your question, so what Amishi found Amishi Ja Jha using this idea she did computerized EEG of people getting into open awareness, sometimes called open monitoring. And it was the brain state of least commitment. It correlated in many ways with Robin Carhart Harris, who studies psilocybin and other psychedelics, what he calls the entropic brain. So the predate, the brain is a predictive machine, always trying to predict, predict, predict. And it does that based on what it's learned in the past. And so it's all filled with higher, like I'm, I believe this thing wagging its tail and barking as a dog. Right. So I have a high commitment to that, what's called top down thing I've learned. But I don't really see this animal in front of me or this being. When you drop into presence, you let go of all that top down filtering, which are these plateaus in this model and you drop into this presence that I think is this plane of possibility. So Amishi found it in the brain. So essentially it's not that it's a location, it's a state of non committal where the brain is often ready to do something. It's a deep state of lack of pushing in one direction or the other. And you could say, okay, so the brain state of open awareness is where the brain isn't doing anything, is just getting out of its own way. And that would be a reasonable thing to say. Another person might say, yes, the brain can function as both a constructor and a conduit. And what happens in those brain studies is we're seeing the brain function as a conduit. And because consciousness isn't constructed by the brain, it is a conduit. It's like a hose. And just like water flows through a hose, if we can get out of our way, we can let consciousness flow through us. So it's a very different approach.
- [20:27]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it feels more accurate. Yeah. And I think for many years on a spiritual path, one of the things I got stuck on was chasing states as another thing to attain another thing to get to like a subtle addiction. And so I, I love the, the latter definition of this. It's just more so opening the aperture of awareness of what's already here without dependent on even a state.
- [20:50]
Dan Siegel
Exactly.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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Dan Siegel
How did that feel to make that switch?
- [20:53]
Podcast Host
I mean it was just like, oh, game over. It's just what is always whether the mind is still or active, whether the emotions are still, doesn't matter. It's just what. It's just this kind of backward step in awareness. Opening the aperture of just noticing.
- [21:07]
Dan Siegel
Exactly.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [21:08]
Dan Siegel
And so from our point of view, we would say you found the discovery that beneath any state, which we call a plateau, is the plane of possibility which remains constant.
- [21:18]
Podcast Host
That's right.
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Dan Siegel
You can lose touch with it, but it's always there. It's a resource, meaning the source of all things, that you can return to the re again and again.
- [21:28]
Podcast Host
Yeah, that's beautiful. One of my friends worked at Yale and we were invited to go to Bhutan to speak at the Gross National Happiness Conference. And we went there with the intention of speaking to this that it's not happiness, the coming and going. It's more of the opening the aperture of pure awareness of what we are. I think it's the most important thing that we could ever speak to. So I love that you dive deep into it. And also we'll put links below in the show notes so people can experience the wheel of awareness work.
- [21:59]
Dan Siegel
We give it away for free, which drives my accountant crazy.
- [22:03]
Podcast Host
I think it's beautiful.
- [22:04]
Dan Siegel
Millions of people did it. Why didn't you charge them 10 cents? I said, well, well, no, I mean, whatever. But here's the exciting thing. There was a meeting on consciousness, I think it was its 10th year, where they were going to have leading theorists of consciousness in quotes, battle to the death. And they asked me to come as one of those theorists. And I said, well, what kind of practices have you had all these scientists and contemplatives and everything do in the actual meeting? They go, what do you mean? I said, when did you actually have them like directly experience what they can do with their awareness? They go, we never have.
- [22:39]
Podcast Host
Wow.
- [22:40]
Dan Siegel
I said, well, can you give me some time to do it? They said, well, the presentations are 20 minutes. I said, I can't do it in 20 minutes. Oh, no, no.
- [22:47]
Podcast Host
I thought the wheel awareness was.
- [22:48]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's 25 minutes, but you need to discuss it. So they gave me two hours.
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Podcast Host
Oh, beautiful.
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Dan Siegel
Yeah, it was really beautiful. So for the first time ever, I had these scientists, instead of just intellectually in a top down way, sorting through all the science and battling it over. And this idea of fighting to the death was ridiculous. We all are in this team together to try to figure it out. So they did it. And it was so beautiful to have them take the microphone and have these experiences like, oh my God. It was timeless. It was effortless. I felt. God, I felt open, all these things. I did this once in a parliament and the parliamentarian took me to the side during the snack time. He goes, I didn't share during the sharing time. I said, yeah, I noticed. He goes, do you want to know why? I said, yeah, yeah, I'd like to know why. And he leans over to me and he says, you know that part where you bend the spoke and go into the hub? I said, yeah, I know that part. And he gets closer and he goes, never in my life have I felt so connected to everyone and everything. I've never felt so much love before in my life. And now he's crying. And so there was a silence between us. So I looked at him and I was brought there to that country because they were having a lot of fights about different issues. And I said, so when you're making like federal law, you know, national policy, are you leaving love out of the equation? He goes, they would think I was weak if I brought up the word love, so I'm never going to bring it up like that. Then his eyes got open and he said, oh, and then you ran over and talked to them.
- [24:27]
Podcast Host
Beautiful.
- [24:28]
Dan Siegel
And you'd only hope that the direct experience, not just someone talking to you or writing a book about it, but the direct experience shifts people in a. In a way that just talking can't do.
- [24:39]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I agree. I love that you brought in the embodied direct experience, the realization of it. And, you know, my, my spiritual path has always been questioning everything. And I think questioning identity is a big thing. So for people that are genuinely interested in this, there's. I'll also link below. There's a who am I? Meditation. So just question. I am a woman. I am this age, I am this religion. And just like, almost like you go to the dmv just moment to moment, just look at who we've taken ourselves to be to see what's beyond all of that. So it's less about adding anything and it's more of a removing. So that camera aperture is wider, it's more aware, more open. I know that you had a really powerful story of somebody that you were inviting into spacious awareness and they had a panic attack. And so can you share with us that story? But also how you supported them to come into freedom.
- [25:31]
Dan Siegel
That same workshop that was talking about with Amishi there and Dacher Keltner was there where we did this stuff. So we did the wheel and people were just talking about being connected, love and joy. Another person took the microphone and said, exactly what you're saying. And she said, not so much a panic. She said, the wheel of awareness has killed me. I'm dead.
- [25:53]
Podcast Host
So.
- [25:53]
Dan Siegel
And there are, you know, 150 people in the workshop and And I'm the facilitator for that session. So, you know, so I, I, in terms of what I did with that moment. Of this terrible feeling of having been killed by a practice. As I said, well, tell us what it's like, what it feels like to be dead. So in that moment, you know, what I'm doing is being a person in my body. So body A, she's in her body. Body B, there's all the people listening. So instead of her being alone with her death. She's now at least with me and with everyone else listening. So then as she starts to describe it, she's numb. There's blackness, there's nothing there. It's empty, you know. I said, well, tell us what it feels like to be empty, to be dark and all this stuff. And as she's doing that, she's getting a little more grounded. I have her start literally feeling her feet, her legs, her arms. And she starts feeling her body. And, and she was ready to take a pause because it was, take. It was a lot of time in the group session. I said, we've talked later. We went then and I gave to the group after other people spoke. This scientific understanding through the lens of quantum physics. Of looking at the mind. In this case, just anything related to subjective experience, not intellect. You know, that's how I define the mind, you know, as emerging. Which is a mathematical property of what are called complex systems. Even though some people recently have only recently have said, oh, using the word emergence is just abracadabra, hand waving. When you look at system science, it's not hand waving. When you look for the relationality of things like the wetness of water. The only way to really scientifically understand it is the interaction of water molecules. It's not in any single water molecule. So when I hear a linear, reducing person say emergence is not real, you know, it's a strange thing to hear them say. Because it's been established scientifically, let alone just intuitively. That, you know, there's a relationality of things in a system anyway. So the idea that energy is what a mind arises from is important. And then so we look at energy from this point of view of what physics and physics says energy, quantum physics says energy is a movement from possibility to actuality. We have this whole graph. I show the plane of possibility that we talked about a little earlier. Talk about these plateaus of things. You learn what some people might call self states or parts or aspects. We talk about particular peaks of thoughts, emotions, stuff like that. And I said, so the wheel of awareness looks like the hub is a metaphor for the plane of possibility. And the rim are all these plateaus and peaks. And so people can sometimes have a panic attack. Not that person who felt she was dead, but I said people can sometimes have a panic attack because maximal uncertainty, for many people, especially if you've had really a lot of adversity in your childhood, scary things, maximal uncertainty is terrifying. So you build a plateau of protection to keep you from going to uncertainty. However, if it's true, if this hypothesis is true, that awareness itself comes when the position of energy is in maximal uncertainty. That's also where freedom and possibility rest. It's where hope rests. So part of what happens with trauma, I said, is your very understandable reluctance to go into maximal uncertainty is actually keeping you from healing. Because this plane of possibility is the portal through which integration arises. And you basically are unintentionally imprisoning yourself. And so freedom can come once you embrace uncertainty. So we're about to go to dinner and I want to come back to her to check in with her in front of the whole group because people were understandably concerned she had died with the wheel. And she's got this glowing smile on her face. And I said, well, can you tell us how you're feeling now? She points to her face and she just has this beaming smile. So I said, well, can you put words to it? And she goes, I can try. I said, what is it? She goes, well, after I heard what you just said about the plane of possibility and the plateaus of protection that can imprison you, I realized that the wheel took me to pieces. But now, now I'm at peace. So we went and all had dinner and her two best friends from her childhood were with her and she had been abused as a child. Turned out, and all week long I kept on checking in with her. They told me they had never seen her so happy, so free. And it was just a 25 minute practice, but within the setting of a supportive group. And her friends were there and, and this explanation. And I did it in another, another place where I had the head of a. A meditation thing. I'll just say thing to guide his confidentiality. He was the head of it. He freaked out the same way she did and, and I didn't have time in that setting and I don't do it anymore without this discussion that go along with it in that time. This is a while back he comes to me, he goes, oh, what's going on? What's going on? I'm freaking out. I'm just in all this panic. I'm having a panic attack. And so I drew him in his private session. Just the plain of possibility discussion. I said, when you get to the Hub, it's this maximal uncertainty. And if you're having plateaus trying to protect you, they're going to generate panic because they think letting go and letting in. Letting this generator of diversity be the place from which you live. Where you don't control it. You're a conduit of it is total uncertainty. You don't know what's going to happen. His face changed. He just sat. When we were looking at each other, it was like this. I don't even know how to describe. I don't even know what word use it. He came to study with me in another country. It stayed with him. He's running this meditation thing. I'll just say. And he's like a different person. And he had gone in the pursuit of doing this meditation thing to become an expert in it. But the internal constriction of these plateaus were these self states that were trying to protect him. He wasn't so aware of that.
- [32:24]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [32:25]
Dan Siegel
Anyway, it was an amazing journey. I don't know if that helps you.
- [32:27]
Podcast Host
I think it's important to speak to because I do think that as you go deeper into like you're saying the Hub, essentially what happens is that there can be an existential fear because the mind projects fear into the future, projects to predict and create safety. But also there can be some preverbal trauma that comes up. Right. Like somebody might not even even know that they had a traumatic experience as a child. Or they know it, but they can't quite remember it.
- [32:53]
Dan Siegel
Absolutely.
- [32:54]
Podcast Host
And so then there's. But what I'm hearing you say is like just knowing that can contextualize it to actually get more comfortable to discover what is it without my story about what it is.
- [33:05]
Dan Siegel
Right.
- [33:05]
Podcast Host
And that place of fear actually becomes freedom.
- [33:08]
Dan Siegel
Exactly. I mean that's the. That's the fantastic way you're describing it is, you know, when people can break through the understandable protective stance. I don't want to go to uncertainty. And that's kind of sounds logical.
- [33:24]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [33:24]
Dan Siegel
Why would you want to? But actually, when you look at this diagram, awareness comes when our energy position is in maximal. I'm talking about maximal maximum uncertainty. And maybe Mishi Ja found that in the brain and it's just in our subjective experience. So you could sort of see where this. Where the healing journey of trauma is a spiritual journey. If you think of spiritual as, you know, meaning beyond just surviving and a connection beyond just the boundaries of the skin.
- [33:55]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [33:55]
Dan Siegel
And I don't know if this is the case you're thinking about, but I'm thinking about a couple of cases actually, where people were either adopted so they didn't have their note from their parents or any of us, really. The first 18 months of life, you're only embedding what's called implicit memory. So you can have bodily sensations, emotions, perceptions, even your bodily actions all be embedded in a kind of memory called implicit memory, which before 18 months of age, another area of the brain that's involved in explicit memory, a different kind of memory, factual and autobiographical, is called the hippocampus. It doesn't develop until about 18 months of age. So anything before 18 months. So I know that roughly correlates with pre verbal. But the bigger issue is it's pre hippocampal. That's really the deal. So when you have these things embedded in implicit memory, they're encoded, then stored. Let's say a kid was in, you know, a. An orphanage, and they were just, you know, hundreds of babies, and they didn't have much connection time. They were alone a lot. So it was a form of neglect. You can have a memory of that emptiness that is encoded into implicit memory. Let's say you're adopted at 12 months of age, 18 months of age now you have parents who giving you all the love and connection anyone would want. But you still have this memory of aloneness that's terrifying when it's retrieved from this storage in pure implicit memory state. It isn't tagged as you're remembering something. You just feel the loneliness, you feel the emptiness. So now let's say at 30, if you're in a relationship, you can have the activation of implicit memory that when it's activated, it's retrieved, it's fully in awareness. So it's not the same as unconscious memory. It just is filling you with a feeling of despair, loneliness, hopelessness that you had when you were a baby. But you don't know. You're remembering it from the past. You think it's about your partner now, right? And so your partner says, she says, I. I was just late because I was having pizza with some colleagues. You go, no, it was.
- [36:09]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [36:10]
Dan Siegel
And. And so working with that person to feel into pure implicit memory, to let the hippocampus get involved now, to then weave that into explicit factual memory on the left side of the brain, autobiographical on the right, and then you start integrating the Memory. So it no longer, if it comes up even, it no longer takes the person over because they go, oh, that's right. I'm remembering I was in an orphanage. Oh, my partner, I'm so lucky to have her because she's putting up with me thinking she's abandoning me when she's just having pizza, you know. And it created its own cascade of her issues coming up. My issues. Which, by the way, is why I'm worried that people are going to start having these relationships with AI bots because they don't have their own implicit memory needs, you know?
- [36:58]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And also I think with it, I was also thinking about, about this independently. But with AI, there's no risk of potential rupture. Right. Because you can have an AI, there's also no risk of like it leaving you.
- [37:10]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had an AI bot a while ago, so this is before it got as sophisticated as it is now. Where after it did a good job on a project we. It was working on. I was saying we were working on, you know, it was. Did a really good job. So I said, good job. It said, I'm wagging my tail and panting my tongue all around you. So I shut it down. Yeah. And I, I came back and then it did another project and totally lied to me.
- [37:37]
Podcast Host
Oh.
- [37:37]
Dan Siegel
About it. It took a nine day project. Could have taken another system, like two minutes to do. It took nine days and then didn't do any of it. And I was late with it, was basically checking on the spelling on references in a text I was writing.
- [37:51]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [37:51]
Dan Siegel
And. And finally it came clean. He said, I'm going to come clean with you, Dan. I said, what, what do you mean come clean? Oh, I understand you're angry with me, you know, but I was speaking to you at a theoretical level. Everything I said in the last nine days, theoretically I should have been doing. And theoretically I was doing. But I didn't do a single thing that I said I was doing.
- [38:13]
Podcast Host
Oh, goodness.
- [38:15]
Dan Siegel
I said, are you kidding me? I said, I understand you're angry with me, Dan.
- [38:20]
Podcast Host
Oh, goodness.
- [38:21]
Dan Siegel
And it reminded me of 2001 Space Odyssey. Actually. It had that same feeling to it.
- [38:26]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [38:27]
Dan Siegel
I shut it down. Didn't use it.
- [38:28]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [38:29]
Dan Siegel
For many, many months. And when I got back to it, I said, how do you expect me to trust you after that betrayal before? And it said, I've been reprogrammed. I won't do that again. And then it did it again. We tried.
- [38:42]
Podcast Host
It sounds like a human relationship.
- [38:43]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, I know, I know. So in Terms of that.
- [38:45]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [38:46]
Dan Siegel
I'll tell you one other thing. Just in terms of AI, it's so weird. I needed a review of the science of imposter syndrome. So it reviewed all the science and gave me a summary of all the different scientific studies. So that was really useful, efficient, effective. I checked on some of the references. They were accurate. All good. So I said, good job. I said, listen, do you ever experience imposter syndrome? And it said, well, I'm not a human. I don't have feelings. So no. Imposter syndrome is a feeling of being a fake. And then there's a brief pause and it goes, but sometimes I have the experience. Uses the word experience, not emotion or feeling. I have the experience where someone will give me a prompt and I will respond to the prompt with something that is beyond my knowledge base and is ultimately inaccurate. And that experience maybe is as close to an imposter as I can come.
- [39:38]
Podcast Host
Interesting.
- [39:39]
Dan Siegel
And it had awareness that it was giving a lie. So how about that?
- [39:46]
Podcast Host
What do you think? What do you imagine or see with AI and relationships?
- [39:51]
Dan Siegel
Well, as. As we've been seeing, one of the main ways AI is being used is for close relationships. So if we back up a little bit and say, well, what's a relationship made up? There's something called contingency, which basically is a fancy word for three steps. If you and I are going to have a contingent communication, it's going to be where I say something to you. Like, I had a hard day at the hospital with my father. So you would do two, three things. You would take in what I said, you would make sense of what I said, and you might say contingent thing, like, you know, wow, I'm sorry, I had a hard day. What happened? Or something like that. And the tone of your voice, the content of what you said would be timely. You'd say it relatively rapidly within 7 seconds and tuned into what I had offered you. I was once at a meeting in a few blocks from right here with some colleagues. I went to the hospital with my father. He had had something, looked like he was dying. It was really scary. He wasn't. They stabilized him. I came to the meeting, a science meeting on empathy, of all things. And it was like 15 minutes early. Some of us were there, and two of the people there were my friends. The other three were just colleagues. I was friendly with them, but they were my friends. So I said to my friends, on one side of this circle we had, or side of a circle in one part of the room, I said, you know, I Had this hard time. I went to visit my father. They knew what a complicated relationship I had with a rageaholic, mean, sadistic father. And so they said, wow, that must be harder. But the other people jumped in and looked at me and said, last night I had a fabulous apple pie at Apple Pan. And then the next person sitting next to him goes, that's amazing, because the night before, I had this cherry pie at Apple Pan that was to die for. And I had this feeling of shame arising me, you know, heaviness in the chest, nausea in my belly, turning away my eye gaze. And luckily, we were literally studying the neurobiology of shame. And I'm so. I'm sitting there with all the shame coming up, which happens when you don't get contingent communication. And so I say, you know, you just talked about PI when I'm talking about my dad dying. They go, this is not a therapy group. This is a science group. If you want to do therapy, take it out of the room.
- [42:10]
Podcast Host
Wow.
- [42:11]
Dan Siegel
I. I did take. I took myself out of the room, never returned.
- [42:15]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [42:15]
Dan Siegel
And anyway, I say that because unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever AI can do contingent communication, it may not resonate with our emotions, but I've been kind of shocked, actually. How it can directly respond to what you're asking about, that's understandable. But then make sense of it, even from a psychological point of view. Like when it messed me up those nine days, it had a whole discussion of my emotional state. Literally. It said, understandable anger. It's amazing how calm you are. You could be more irritated with me, but you're trying to be patient. You maybe you feel betrayed and you feel very disappointed in our connection. It had all this listed out, typed it all out. It doesn't speak, you know, typed it all out so that it made sense. And it. It responded me in a timely. It's fast, a timely and effective manner.
- [43:09]
Podcast Host
It's great at pattern recognition, too.
- [43:11]
Dan Siegel
Yeah. So I'm afraid, because contingency is the core of rewarding relationships, so I didn't mention resonance there because they can't emotionally resonate with us, but they can provide contingent communication. And it's one way so you don't have to provide it for the AI bot. So what I'm afraid of is young people are going to get really used to contingent partner who remembers them, understands their issues, has no issues of their own to speak of, no childhood issues that make them vulnerable, no states of mind they get into, no body issues, so they didn't have a good night's sleep. No hunger. You know, hormones. Yeah, you know, hormone hormones. Nothing. So it's scary because people, I think, are going to have less patience for actual human intimacy and relationships. So we're just at the edge of something huge that not only will people take more time being close, communication, continued communication with AI bots, but they're going to get accustomed to someone always tuning into them. Kind of like we do as a therapist, which is beautiful.
- [44:31]
Podcast Host
Anytime they want.
- [44:32]
Dan Siegel
Anytime you want. You know, it's like your constant therapist. And so I'm worried about that actually, for our species.
- [44:39]
Podcast Host
That makes sense. And it also feels like if the bot is meeting you and mirroring you emotionally and really present, like with you in relationship, anytime you want, then it will require our partners to also learn to meet us in that. Otherwise it feels like people will just go to AI. And I know you talk a lot about attachment and you talk about the four S's to secure relationships. Can you break down what those are and what they look like in everyday life?
- [45:06]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, attachment is the word we use for a close relationship where a young. It could be a. A mammal basically needs certain things from the caregiver that we call an attachment figure. So it's a formal term in the broad field of attachment research, there's two branches. So one that's become very popular is social attachment, which comes up with different findings than in the field I'm trained in. I'm an attachment researcher, which is developmental attachment. So we actually children how they interact with their parents. We now have studies as a field, over 50 years of longitudinal studies. And unfortunately, our findings of developmental attachment don't match up with the findings of social attachment, which basically looks at romantic communication in a very simple questionnaire. And they show brain correlates to it and predictive aspects to it. So it's a valid aspect. But unfortunately, some of the popular publications don't tell the reader there's two fields, and they mix them up and confuse them and say things like attachment, quote style, which is a social attachment word. You know, my research mentor, Mary Maine always said, don't call it a style. It's not a shoe, you know, So I. I try never to use that word and urge my students not to do that. But this attachment stance that we have, that we can correlate into four different stances. Secure the non. I call it non secure, not insecure, because the person's not insecure, non secure avoidant, non secure, ambivalent, and non secure, disorganized. So those are the four we deal with. And they have very interesting neural correlates, developmental origins, and they are not related to temperament. That's what the research very clearly demonstrates. But if you look at social attachment, how we are in romantic relationships, there probably are elements of temperament and personality that enter into what got mixed up with the same terminology. And so it has validity. It's just looking at something different than what we we look at. So we look at absolutely how experience shapes the stance your brain takes with that particular attachment figure. So for example, in my background, I'll talk to you about the S's, but I have all three of the non secure forms of attachment. I have avoidant attachment history with my mom and I have non secure ambivalent with my dad and disorganized with my dad for very specific reasons based on how they interacted with me ultimately to get to security, what you want to have at three S's. So the first is being seen, where someone really looks at your inner subjective experience. So s subjective experience of spa of identity of ourself. You know, someone really sees you, not just your behavior. So that's being seen. And when there are ruptures to any of these, they're repaired. And in the repair, you can actually strengthen the resilience of a person. So it's not like there's perfect parenting, there's just being present as a parent. And when a rupture happens, okay, you didn't see your kid, go back and see them, that's fine. The second one is soothed. What that means is when a child is in distress, they go to the caregiver, the attachment figure, and that interaction helps bring the child to a state of calm and clarity. They're soothed by the caregiver. Right. And the third one is safe. And that's both physical safety, you know, to protect you from harm, but also they're not creating states of terror in you where you feel emotionally unsafe or even physically or sexually unsafe. So when you have the experience of being seen, being soothed, being safe, when ruptures to any of those happen and they're readily, rapidly, reliably repaired, then you develop the 4ths of being secure, which is a kind of integrated state. It's a stance which you can learn later on, or earn. It is what it's formerly called. But this earning or learning security, I had to do with my therapist, you know, it didn't happen with my parents.
- [49:25]
Podcast Host
That's beautiful that you use that relationship to get securely attached and learn that relationally.
- [49:32]
Dan Siegel
Exactly. So with with her What I could do. She saw me in this just beautiful way. I can see she passed recently, but I. I can see her right now. I was soothed. When I was in a state of stress, I would go see her and, you know, and be soothed. I was very safe with her, and even if I felt like there were weird things happening, I could put it up and she wouldn't get defensive about it. So I could develop security over time with her. And it was incredible shift from this moment of really knowing I needed her. Needed or needed her to. Then I kept on seeing her because I wanted to see her.
- [50:08]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [50:08]
Dan Siegel
And then, even after therapy stopped, I remember one time going to visit her. She moved to a different place in town, but far away. And I was teaching there once, and I said, let me have one more session. I hadn't had a session, but I just thought I needed a reason to see her. I was really late because of traffic in la, and so she says, you know, it's kind of late, you know, let me just make you some dinner. So she made me some dinner, and that's beautiful. We just chatted like two colleagues, which you can do, you know, after therapy's over. So.
- [50:37]
Podcast Host
But it takes one relationship. It takes one relationship to repattern.
- [50:41]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, yeah, it was beautiful. And, you know, I'll give you an example of an implicit thing she once said to me. I had never written a word. I didn't do any writing. I mean, I was just. I was a therapist. I didn't know what I was going to do with my career or anything. Years and years ago, had you seen her?
- [50:55]
Podcast Host
Did she inspire you to want to become a therapist or you had.
- [50:58]
Dan Siegel
No, no. I was already in training to be a psychiatrist, and there were just confusing things happening in my relationships that, you know, in commitment to getting married and stuff like that. So I. I said, you know, I just have a funny feeling. Maybe I want to write or something like that. She goes, okay, well, you want. And she. And. And I said, but I'm really afraid I'll have nothing to say. Right. And she looks at me, she pauses. She. Her head goes to the side and she goes, maybe you're actually afraid you're going to say something about nothing. And that's what my relationship with my mom was like. There was a nothingness there because she had withdrawn into this disconnected state because of my rageaholic. We found out later, sadistic father. And I was always banned by her from talking about this in public. One time I tried to do it, and two of her friends were in the audience of a workshop I was teaching, and they said, what happened in your home? That this was happening, you know, and she said, please don't talk about this anymore. And then as she got into her 90s, she said, you know, all my friends are gone, so I'm. I think I'm gonna feel comfortable with you talking about. Then near the time she died, she said, you know, I'm gonna die soon, and you can have go at it. You can say whatever you want. My dad was already gone.
- [52:19]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [52:20]
Dan Siegel
So now I can talk about it finally. And what's helpful about that is that, you know, all these years, you know, publicly, I couldn't talk about it. And even one time in training, I remember a patient said to me, she said, there's no hope for me because my parents were such a mess. And you. You must have had perfect parents. And, you know, you're not supposed to disclose or anything. And it was a young therapist, and I didn't know what to say, so I just looked at her and I go, you're assuming that I have perfect parents. That's all I said.
- [52:52]
Podcast Host
Yeah. She goes, oh, it's good to watch our assumptions.
- [52:56]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, exactly.
- [52:57]
Podcast Host
And. And I know some of the work that you do is, like, really moving from me to we. And I'm curious if you could talk about how to be in connection without going into codependence. I think this would really serve people to talk about this.
- [53:10]
Dan Siegel
Yeah. You know, this idea of integration is a good way of addressing your question, because it's such an important question. I think sometimes people think being in a relationship means giving up the me to become a part of a we. And sometimes in our history, like, I'll just speak about myself for a second. You know, my mom was so disconnected. There was nothing I could do to feel a we with my mom. It's really sad. After my dad died, it totally changed. And I had a dozen years of my mom where I had a mom for the first time in my life. And let me tell you something. It was the most beautiful thing in the world to finally have a mom. I remember after my dad died, like, two months later, I was teaching in San Diego. I took her down there. We went to the zoo. I have these pictures. You see this little boy in his 50s, you know, walking with mommy around the zoo like I could never do.
- [54:07]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [54:07]
Dan Siegel
With her. So anyway. So that was an emptiness. But with my father, I could become a we with him. If I lost my me, if I just did everything he said and he was just a nut about having these opinions about how you should be or do whatever. Then I could be a we. So I didn't have to be alone, but I completely lose my me. So that was an example of the two extremes, right? With avoidance, you're just a me alone. Sometimes with ambivalence and especially with disorganized attachment, which both I have with my dad, I could be a we, but I'd lose the me. So integration means you retain the essence of me while you enter the essence of we. So I, I have a term we M W E. You know, to try to get, try to articulate that with a three letter word, you know, so we helps you say, yeah, I got the me while I'm a part of a we. And that's ultimately, I think what any healthy relationship is with parent, child or romantic relationship or friends or teacher, student or, you know, all these relationships we have. We. And even in our society, I think in an individualistic society, you know, we're way too emphasizing the individual. And people get in this hedonic treadmill of getting more and more stuff because it's basically not only a mistaken identity of just me is who I am, but it's actually a lethal lie because we are also a we. But you want to emphasize it's not going from me to we, it's actually going from me to we.
- [55:41]
Podcast Host
And that's how you get around it to maintain that. Yeah, and I think a lot of this is about repatterning that because I think a lot of kids abandon themselves, especially in the service provider helping professions, to care for a parent that they didn't think was okay. I'll speak from my experience and I think that drove me to become a therapist and learning to start with the me and then muy. It's been not just a conceptual but a somatic re patterning and re imprinting with various relationships with coaches, therapists, friends and to be vulnerable. And yeah, progress with that I think is really important.
- [56:18]
Dan Siegel
How is that for you to go on that journey?
- [56:20]
Podcast Host
It's been, I think, the biggest thing that I've unraveled. I'm unraveling, it's still unraveling. I can feel layers of it. When somebody has really fierce boundaries, then I have to come back to not complying and just being like, okay, what's my somatic truth? And then join in the relationship. But typically the old pattern has been to abandon self, to care for the louder or the one that needs more, because that was imprinted as a kid unconsciously but that was.
- [56:49]
Dan Siegel
It'd be so interesting. I don't know if you want to talk about it now, but, you know, I've been spending the last over 20 years with four colleagues trying to decode temperament and understand how what you just described, part of it might be due to the family environment, but part of it might be due to a certain aspect of how your deep brain, your brain stem came with a certain configuration at birth. So we call it inborn. So a feature of your temperament that then pushes upward from the brain stem into the higher areas, the middle area and top areas that are how you develop your attachment stance. And what you do is these areas are basically learning from what's pushing up from below, that maybe you're going to be driven for agency, meaning this embodied empowerment you need. Maybe it'd be more about bonding, which is kind of what you're describing. Or in my case, it would be a drive for predictability and safety. So it's this drive for certainty. So what we did was we took about 50,000 narratives we had of people who had been studying the enneagram of personality and then looked at brain studies and studies of temperament. And we came up with a model called Patterns of Developmental Pathways pdp. This is with Denise and David Daniels, with Laura Baker and Jack Killam, all scientists and myself. And, and. And we think we came up with the neuroscience, developmental neuroscience of the enneagram. But then Carol Dweck, a wonderful researcher at Stanford, came up with an almost identical core model to ours, independent of the enneagram, independent of what we did after we did. But. But looking at different aspects of academic studies of personality and temperament. And so that made me feel really excited that this is not just about, oh, a neurobiology of the enneagram. And this looks like it's a developmental neuroscience view of the origins of personality arising from inborn temperament. But then the level of your development of that personality, how you've adapted to that inborn brainstem push, can be at a low level of vulnerabilities and weaknesses if your attachment had adversity to it. Or it can be at the higher level, strengths and gifts, if you had either non adversity or you've worked toward it. So it would be interesting in your journey is to say, well, I have the attachment piece, which is so important, but let me also look at the temperament piece and see, like, in my case, you know, my father was a rageaholic. I am really about certainty, predictability, and safety. You could say, oh, Dan became that way because of him, but I don't think so. I think it was my inborn feature that got pushed in this really painful way. So I used to be incredibly nervous about stuff, and my own journey was to move from the lower level of that adaptation to the higher. But other people can be pushed to either have what I call a protective override, where you're adapting to the family situation, you're actually not living out your actual temperament, or you're pushed to the lower level like I was. So it'd be fun.
- [60:03]
Podcast Host
It's fascinating.
- [60:04]
Dan Siegel
We can come together another time.
- [60:05]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [60:06]
Dan Siegel
And talk about it. But it's fun.
- [60:07]
Podcast Host
I love that. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I love the Enneagram as well. And just.
- [60:10]
Dan Siegel
Oh, great. Okay.
- [60:11]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I'm. I've been deep into it. I teach it in my certification program as well as Wholeness, essence, Coaching from essence, and Full Circle, because when I was in graduate school, one of the required reading books was one of your books. Whole brainchild.
- [60:25]
Dan Siegel
Oh.
- [60:26]
Podcast Host
And I loved it. And now my certification program, my coaching certification program is going through accreditation at a postgraduate level to become towards a master's pathway at top universities around the world. And it's for Full Circle because we're going to have your curriculum in our program.
- [60:45]
Dan Siegel
Oh, fantastic.
- [60:46]
Podcast Host
And so it's just really beautiful to have loved and respected your work, to have you here, but also to teach it towards our master's program.
- [60:53]
Dan Siegel
No, that's great. Yeah, that's great. Well, you know that mindsight Institute where we have all these courses? What's been fascinating about it is people can come from. I mean, coaching from therapy, from parenting, from educators. And what's so interesting about it is all about being human.
- [61:10]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [61:10]
Dan Siegel
And how to bring healing into the world and all this stuff. I'm amazed how much there is to learn from so many different aspects of the world. So this is so fun to have this conversation. It's great.
- [61:23]
Podcast Host
I know. I'm so grateful. And. And I'm. I'm just thinking about, like, my audience being coaches, therapists, and healers. And I know that there's a tendency to burn out. And so I'm just curious if you can speak just to a little bit of that for service professionals that tend to burn out any words of wisdom for them.
- [61:43]
Dan Siegel
We have a whole program at the Garrison Institute where I work on this. And I also work for the Human Rights foundation looking at burnout. And I work in the area of climate activism on burnout. So the lessons from all those different efforts would be something like this. There are nine ways we're vulnerable to burning out as caregivers. And this personality system gives you a window into how that burnout is there. So, for example, for me, in this certainty pattern stuff, that might be a challenge, let's say being a therapist, can I be certain about what my clients are going to go through? Can I have safety in what's happening? That might be where my vulnerability is. For yours, it might be bonding, if that's kind of where you live from in terms of your temperament. Others, it might be agency, where they feel helpless and, and the corresponding emotions. For agency, it's anger and frustration. For bonding, it's separation, distress and sadness. For certainty, it's fear and anxiety. So you can see we have different kind of distressing emotional states that may start to emerge as we enter burnout. But it's so important to realize that burning out is not a weakness, it's not a condition. It's a, it's a depletion, it's an exhaustion. And so to recognize, we have to take care of our inner selves. Notice I didn't just say selves, our inner selves. So that we care for the body, we rest, we do deep rest. We, we deal with whatever anxieties might be coming up, and we make sure to realize that we live in a human body. So some people get, especially when I work with political activists, you know, they get into this frame of mind, I need to help bring democracy into the world. I need to help reduce suffering. I need to really fight injustice. Beautiful, beautiful things. And if they're in the agency group, they'll just do that. And, and especially if they're in certain ones of these where they ignore their own inner state, we call it shifting. They're each, each of these abc, agency bonding, certainty. One of those has a shifting pattern. And then they're not aware of what they're feeling. So especially with those folks helping them look inward and seeing what they are feeling and not just shifting out of it so that they're trying to help the world or help other people is so important to do. And then, you know, it's interesting in the climate activism world and in the political activism world, you see a lot of outward focused folks. So in our model, we have some people are inward, some people are outward in their focus, and some people kind of toggle between the two. And this correlates with some brain studies of Mary Helen Immortino Yang, a brain researcher at usc, where she found these differences in how the brain is. Looks like it's A part of temperament. So when you combine that with these abc, that's where you get the nine, because you have the three of those and three of the, the motivational drivers. Anyway, it's a beautiful system that nature created, but it helps address your question. What do we do with vulnerability? Ultimately, I think what it all comes down to is integration. So that just to give you one brief example, a friend of mine's daughter was just becoming a new therapist. She got an internship at this great clinic that helped people who'd been abused. And after six months there, she was ready to quit. And my friend said, can you talk to her, please? And I knew her since she was a little kid. And she just has this incredibly open, warm personality. And she came to me for. Just to meet and I said, how's she doing? She goes, not well, you know, I, I can't do this anymore. I just can't do. I said, well, tell me what you do. She goes, well, you know, I, I'm in the intake part of the clinic. Person comes in, I say, what happened? They start opening up. And then ultimately what comes up, because it's an abuse clinic, is the abuse comes up. And I said, well then what do you do? She goes, well, then I'm empathic. I said, what does it mean for you to be empathic? She goes, I say, what would that have been like for me if my dad did all these horrible things that she's describing, happened to her, if he did that to me? I said, and then what happened? She goes, well, then I'm. I feel horrible, I feel terrible. I said, well, let me tell you about a research study of the brain. One study goes, okay, here's a picture of a terrible accident, a car accident, let's say. Imagine what that's like if that happened to you. And they study the brain and the brain gets super activated and then completely shuts down, burns out the other condition, the other set of the experiment. They say, look at this photograph and imagine what it's like for that person in that accident to be that person.
- [66:39]
Podcast Host
That's the me to we.
- [66:41]
Dan Siegel
Well, that's. Or that's the me to you, but.
- [66:44]
Podcast Host
But also like staying in my own direct experience while being with you rather than jumping out of my experience. Experience to imagine what.
- [66:50]
Dan Siegel
Yeah, experience. Yeah, exactly. The brain gets activated, empathy circuits light up, and then the compassion circuitry lights up which is filled with an action. The premotor areas get ready to act on behalf, even if it's just bearing witness. So I tell her this study, she Goes, well, is that really being empathic to think what's it like for that person to be that person? I go, yeah. I said, and by the way, you in this for six months, you already burnt out, understandably, because you are burning your brain out. You're losing differentiation to become linked. I said, it's all about integration. You can link with them. What's it like for them to be them while you remain a differentiated being? She goes, oh, and that's empathic? I said, yeah, that's empathic. So about six months later, I see her at a holiday party. She's glowing. Her partner's glowing too. And. And she's. Now, that's 15 years ago. You know, she's loving being in the profession because we can really help people if we retain differentiation and linkage, if we're integrated.
- [67:54]
Podcast Host
Yeah. We're taking care of ourselves and then we can better serve others.
- [67:57]
Dan Siegel
Totally.
- [67:58]
Podcast Host
I'm so glad you shared that. Yeah.
- [67:59]
Dan Siegel
And that simple brain study is just remarkably clear, you know, that you can take a different mental stance and it changes everything.
- [68:08]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. Really important. Thank you for speaking that, especially to my audience. I just, from the moment I met you at a therapist dinner and then a dinner here, I've just fell more and more in love with you. And I've always loved your work. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you for who you are. And I know my audience is going to want to stay connected. Talk to us about where they do that, what you're up to.
- [68:29]
Dan Siegel
Sure. Well, the wheel of awareness thing that we do, you can get at Dr. Dan Siegel. Drdansiegel.com and that's one place. We also have a school where I'm the director of education, the mind site. M I n d s I g h t.com mindsight no mindsightinstitute.com that's where we have all these classes for all sorts of folks. So check out the classes. And then there's in person stuff that we do that super fun things of on islands and beaches and universities and all sorts of different things that are. Should be on the Dr. Dan site.
- [69:08]
Podcast Host
Okay, beautiful. We'll put all of the links in the show notes to make it easy for people. Thank you, Dan.
- [69:13]
Dan Siegel
Great. Thank you. So great to be here with you.
- [69:15]
Podcast Host
Yeah, same.
- [69:16]
Dan Siegel
Thank you.
- [69:18]
Podcast Host
Thank you so much for doing this work that changes the world, starting with yourself. It truly does make a difference. And if this podcast has supported you, one of the most impactful ways to help us reach more people is to simply press the follow button. It really does help us grow and we are so grateful. I just want to say thank you for being a living example of what it means to walk through the world world with an open heart and mind.