How to Rebuild Mental Health and Heal Emotional Wounds | Dr. Paul Conti - EP 766

Summary

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Passion Struck with John R. Miles

Episode 766: How to Rebuild Mental Health and Heal Emotional Wounds | Dr. Paul Conti
Date: May 12, 2026
Guest: Dr. Paul Conti, Psychiatrist & Author
Host: John R. Miles

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Overview

This episode explores a powerful rethinking of mental health led by Dr. Paul Conti, an acclaimed psychiatrist, trauma expert, and author of the new book What's Going Right? A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health. The conversation moves beyond conventional diagnostic labels to focus on self-understanding, the architecture of the healthy self, the role of trauma, and our innate "generative drive"—the uniquely human urge to grow, heal, and make life better for self and others. The episode is rich in practical wisdom and heartfelt personal stories, ideally timed for Mental Health Awareness Month.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rethinking Mental Health: Moving Past Diagnosis

• Current System’s Shortcomings:
  • Dr. Conti asserts that mental health today is too often defined by what's "wrong" with us, as opposed to the strengths and wellness that can be developed proactively.
  • Quote:

    “The thought that a book about mental health would be about mental illness is a natural thought to have. And I think it follows from how the system frames mental health and it frames it just in terms of what's wrong with us... It creates fear and confusion in us.” — Dr. Paul Conti [01:17]

• Paradigm Shift Proposed:
  • Mental health should be seen as a spectrum, not a binary switch ("broken" or "not broken").
  • Building good mental health should parallel how we pursue good physical health, focusing on long-term wellness and positive habits, not only illness management.
  • John Miles’ Reflection:

    “I think a lot of people carry those invisible emotional effects for years without fully understanding what's happening underneath them.” [02:40]

2. The Limits and Problems of the DSM

• DSM’s Taxonomy Critique:
  • The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has become an unwieldy “catalog of problems” that often obscures genuine understanding.
  • Quote:

    “It was born of an effort to understand people... but now we have this book of taxonomy... In all those numbers is not understanding.” — Dr. Paul Conti [18:09]

• Numbers vs. Narrative:
  • Dr. Conti suggests clinicians should use narrative, not numbers alone, to truly understand patient experience and context.

3. The Roots Approach: Understanding the Structure of Self

• Roots vs. Leaves Analogy:
  • Systems often focus on surface symptoms (leaves/branches) rather than root causes (childhood trauma, TBI, habits).
  • John describes his own two-year journey of “me-search” to uncover and integrate gut health, sleep, TBIs, and psychological pain.
  • Quote:

    “What I found... is that the system was only looking at the leaves and the branches and… not looking at the trunk and... the roots.” — John Miles [23:28]

4. The Five Components of the Self

• Five-Part Model:
  • Unconscious, conscious mind, defense mechanisms, character structure, and sense of self.
  • Conscious vs. Unconscious:
    • Majority of human experience is governed by unconscious processes, deeply affected by trauma, beliefs, and defense mechanisms.
    • Bringing the unconscious into awareness is critical for healing and change.
  • Quote:

    “We all have an unconscious mind. The vast majority of what goes on inside us goes on in unconscious mind... That sets the climate inside of us.” — Dr. Paul Conti [30:56]

5. The Three Human Drives—Assertion, Pleasure, & Generativity

• Redefining Motivation:
  • Traditional psychology centers on assertion (agency) and pleasure—but Conti asserts that the generative drive is foundational.
  • Generative Drive Defined:
    • The drive “to move toward growth, meaning, and contribution even after hardship”—seen in altruism, creativity, resilience, helping others, art, and purpose.
    • Quote:

      “All the things that are best about our humanness come from our generative drive... More is always better.” — Dr. Paul Conti [35:24, 63:41]

• Application:
  • Pursuing the generative drive (for self and others) is essential for robust, lasting mental health and joy at any age.

6. Transformational Questions: “What’s Wrong With Me?” vs. “What’s Happening Inside Me?”

• From Shame to Curiosity:
  • John’s personal turning point came when he shifted from self-condemnation to compassionate curiosity.
  • Quote:

    “When I shifted the question I was asking myself... from ‘what's wrong with me’ to ‘what's happening inside of me’... it was a huge shift.” — John Miles [45:31]

  • Dr. Conti’s Validation:

    “You made the gigantic leap across the chasm right here... bringing compassionate curiosity to yourself, not beating yourself up…” [46:26]

• Identifying and Rewriting Internal Narratives:
  • Becoming aware of “unconscious narratives” (such as “I don’t matter,” “I’m broken”) enables rewriting one’s story.

7. Cynicism as a Self-Made Prison

• Function of Cynicism:
  • Cynicism is a defense mechanism that justifies withdrawal and stagnation by cloaking itself as intelligence.
  • Quote:

    “Cynicism... is a rationalization for giving up on life, vitality, generativeness... it's like the prison is made of cynicism wrapped in... I feel good about myself, like I’m smart and I know the world, right? Boy, we seal ourselves inside of a prison.” — Dr. Paul Conti [55:25]

• The Antidote:
  • Staying generative and open, and not buying into “society’s lies” about one’s potential or value, especially with age.

8. Aging, Meaning, and the Generative Drive

• The Stories of Fred & Walter (Aging Joyfully):
  • Dr. Conti and John discuss older adults who flourish via generativity—bringing wisdom forward and remaining actively engaged.
  • Quote:

    “Walter and Fred are living through the generative drive... This is a way for all of us to live.” — Dr. Paul Conti [58:55]

• Generativity as Timeless:
  • “It doesn't matter if the impact is small or significant... the generative drive is boundless.” — John Miles [61:49]

9. Practical Application: Three Reminders for Listeners

• Start or Return to Yourself:
  • Bring the spotlight back inward, not just to external factors.
• Communicate Often:
  • Ground yourself in understanding before reacting; engage in open dialogue, internally and externally.
• Fight Well:
  • Approach conflicts with awareness, seeking solutions rather than blame.
  • Quote:

    "I'm the person who has agency over me. Let me try and understand myself as best I can so that I can solve these problems." — Dr. Paul Conti [67:51]

• “I don't have to be afraid to look at myself. If I want to really see who's behind most of what's not going right in my life... I can go look in the mirror.” [67:51]

10. The Spotlight Metaphor

• “Truman Show” Moment:
  • John likens personal transformation to noticing the “spotlight” about to fall in one’s own life—a cue to inspect, question, and reconstruct the self, not to continue “as if nothing happened.” [70:42]

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Notable Quotes by Timestamp

• On Paradigm Shift in Mental Health:
  “...We see mental health through that reflexive shame, what's wrong with me? lens, as opposed to seeing, hey, I'm interested in this. I want to build good mental health just as we build good physical health.” — Dr. Paul Conti [01:17]
• On Generative Drive:
  “The generative drive is a human birthright... what inspires people to self-sacrifice... more is always better. More goodness, more human goodness, is always better.” — Dr. Paul Conti [63:41]
• On the Elusiveness of ‘Diagnosis’:
  “It was born of an effort to understand people... In all those numbers is not understanding... the route to real understanding [is narrative].” — Dr. Paul Conti [18:09]
• On Self-Understanding as the Route to Change:
  “You got yourself to a healthier place because you realized, I need to understand myself… Am I saying to myself over and over again, ‘you're not enough?’” — Dr. Paul Conti [50:46]
• On Cynicism's False Comfort:
  “Cynicism is a rationalization for giving up on life, vitality, generativeness... the prison is made of cynicism...” — Dr. Paul Conti [55:25]
• On Looking Inward for Agency and Change:
  “If I want to really see who's behind most of what's not going right in my life... I can go look in the mirror...It becomes empowering.” — Dr. Paul Conti [67:51]

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Key Timestamps

• 01:17 — Dr. Conti introduces the conceptual shift: mental health is more than absence of illness.
• 14:04 — Personal story: Dr. Conti’s loss of his brother to suicide and awakening to “what really matters.”
• 18:09 — The DSM: how diagnoses can create distance rather than understanding.
• 23:28 — “Looking at the roots,” John’s experience navigating TBI, trauma, and depression.
• 30:56 — Explaining the five-part structure of self.
• 35:24 — Drives: Assertion, pleasure, and generativity’s central role.
• 45:31 — The transformative power of reframing internal questions.
• 55:25 — On cynicism as a self-made prison.
• 58:55 — Stories of generative, joyful aging (“Walter and Fred”).
• 67:51 — Three actionable reminders: start with self, communicate, fight well.
• 70:42 — “Truman Show” as a metaphor for recognizing moments of possible transformation in life.

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Further Resources

• Dr. Paul Conti’s Website: drpaulconti.com
• Pacific Premier Group: pacificpremiergroup.com

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Episode Tone and Style

• Language: Compassionate, reflective, candid.
• Overall Tone: Encouraging, visionary, both practical and philosophical.
• Notables: Blends science and personal narrative, supportive of listeners at every stage of healing.

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Closing Reflection

"Transformation begins the moment we become curious about ourselves instead of ashamed of ourselves... Lasting mental health is not built through self-condemnation, it's built through self-understanding, through compassionate curiosity, through awareness, and through reconnecting with what he calls our generative drive, that deeply human desire to grow, to contribute, and to make life better for ourselves and others." — John Miles [73:20]

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This episode is an essential listen (or read) for anyone seeking to move beyond the “symptom management” model and embrace a more empowering, strengths-based, truly transformational approach to mental health and life.

Transcript

[Dr. Paul Conti]

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[Dr. Paul Conti]

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[John Miles]

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[Dr. Paul Conti]

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[John Miles]

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[Dr. Paul Conti]

What is this, your first date? Oh, no.

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[John Miles]

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[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

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[Dr. Paul Conti]

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[John Miles]

Coming up next on Passion Struck.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

And the thought that a book about mental health would be about mental illness, right, Is a natural thought to have. And I think it follows from how the system frames mental health and it frames it just in terms of what's wrong with us, right? And there are enough numbers in the book of diagnoses to give all of us a whole bunch of diagnoses. What does that do? It just makes us. It creates fear and confusion in us. And we see mental health through that reflexive shame. What's wrong with me? Lens, as opposed to seeing, hey, I'm interested in this. I want to build. Build good mental health just as we build good physical health.

[John Miles]

Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of. Of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection and impact is choosing to Live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome back to episode welcome to episode 766 of Passion Struck. We're continuing our May series Forged in Adversity, and last week we explored what it means to endure hardship from two very different perspectives. Last Tuesday I spoke with Kathy Giusti about surviving a terminal cancer diagnosis and transforming that experience into purpose and service for millions of other people. Then Last Thursday, with Dr. Majid Fatoui, we explored explored the hopeful science of neuroplasticity and how the brain is far more resilient and adaptable than many of us have been led to believe. But what stayed with me after both conversations was adversity doesn't just change our circumstances, it changes us internally. I know for me, after trauma, military service, TBIs, and some of the darker periods of my life, there were moments where I didn't fully realize how much those experiences had shaped the lens through which I saw myself and the world around me. And I think a lot of people carry those invisible emotional effects for years without fully understanding what's happening underneath them. That's why I am so excited for Today's conversation with Dr. Paul Conti. Paul is a psychiatrist, trauma expert, and author of the brand new book what's Going? A Powerful New Method for Optimizing your Mental Health, where he challenges the idea that mental health should begin with labels and diagnoses and instead ask a more human question, what's happening inside of you? And honestly, that's the question that sits at the heart of recovery. Because recovery isn't only about getting through hardship, it's about understanding what hardship leaves behind and the ways adversity quietly reshapes how we experience ourselves and our lives. In today's conversation, we talk about trauma, identity, emotional repair, cynicism, and what Paul calls the generative drive our innate human capacity to move toward growth, meaning, and contribution even after hardship. And honestly, this conversation felt especially meaningful to me because May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and so much of what Paul discusses connects deeply to the themes I explore in my upcoming book, the Mattering Effect, while feeling unseen, disconnected or insignificant, quietly shapes our emotional lives and our sense of self before we dive in. One quick note. If this show has ever made a difference in your life, please share it with someone who might need it. Leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and follow along on YouTube for full episodes. It helps us reach more people who aren't just searching for answers, but for a better way to live. Now let's dive into this conversation with Dr. Paul Conti, thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now let that journey begin.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[John Miles]

Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

What is this, your first date? Oh, no.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[John Miles]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

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[John Miles]

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[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[John Miles]

Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

What is this, your first date? Oh, no.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[John Miles]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[John Miles]

I am absolutely, absolutely honored and thrilled Today to welcome Dr. Paul Conti on Passion Struck. Welcome, Paul. How are you today?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I'm doing okay, thank you. And thank you for having me.

[John Miles]

I first became aware of your work years ago listening to a podcast you did with Andrew Huberman. And then since then, I've listened to you on the Good Life and more recently with Mel Robbins. But I've always wanted to have you on the show, and you are someone my listeners frequently request. So it is such a profound honor to have you here today.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Well, thank you. That's great to hear. Makes me extra happy to be here today.

[John Miles]

We are going to be discussing this brand new book for those who can't see what I'm holding up. It's titled what's going right? A powerful new method for optimizing your mental health. And Paul was kind enough to send me an arc of this, which is one of the advantages of being a podcaster. And I have to say, I really loved the book, Paul. I came away feeling that it isn't really in totality, a book about mental illness. It's a book about cultivating the architecture of what I see as a healthy generative self. And that is what really, like I took away when I was finished with it. Is that your intention for how you wrote it?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yes, absolutely. And the thought that a book about mental health would be about mental illness. Right. Is a natural thought to have. And I think it follows from how the system frames mental health. And it frames it just in terms of what's wrong with us. And there are enough numbers in the book of diagnoses to give all of us a whole bunch of diagnoses. What does that do? It just makes us. It creates fear and confusion in us. And we see mental health through that reflexive shame, what's wrong with me? Lens, as opposed to seeing, hey, I'm interested in this. I want to build good mental health just as we build good physical health. Right. We don't want to go to the doctor just because something is wrong. Right. What we want to do is take care of ourselves. And that's why we understand how our bodies work. And okay, diet and exercise. Good diet and exercise. These are good for us. We want to get enough sleep. We have basic understanding of our bodies, how they function and our physical health. So we can think of physical health through the lens of wellness. Right. And wellness, of course, is so important. It's a whole industry of wellness now around physical health. And that makes sense, that that's good preventive medicine. Right. It helps to prevent problems and it lets us approach life on the front foot. Right. Why would we not see mental health in the same way of, I want to understand myself. I want to build good mental health. Why? Because I'm trying to build a healthy self in body and mind. That's how I have the best life. So what I'm advocating for is a paradigm shift from the what's wrong with you version of mental health that just provides no insight, tells us to polish the hood when there's something going on in the engine. Right. If we look at ourselves from the perspective of, there's a lot going right in me, way more going right in me than is not going right. If I'm just here and I'm paying attention, I'll get myself out of bed each day and I'm doing what needs to be done, and I'm trying to think about my life, way more is going right. I want to understand myself. What? Well, it's not a Pollyanna. Let's just look at what's going right. Saying no. What's going right is telling us the truth about ourselves. And it's through that lens, we can look at what needs to be different so that we understand ourselves, bring change, and build good mental health for our futures.

[John Miles]

I want to start off in the introduction of your book. You write that we've been conditioned to see mental health as almost like a switch. And this resonated with me because that's oftentimes how we've learned to approach it. Either we're broken or we're not. But you describe it in reality as a spectrum. So let me start there. What do you think the biggest mistake we've made in mental health is about how we treat it, but instead how we define it?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think it is in how we define it. How we treat it will come from how we define it, right? And if we define it in a way that just makes no sense, right. That good mental health is something we don't think about, that's a nothing thing. What we're interested in is when there are problems, now there's something wrong and you're broken, right? Imagine if we looked at physical health that way, and we'd say, well, the only people who are in good physical health are people who are in perfect physical health. We know we have no one, right? We have no one who's in that category, right? Why wouldn't it be? We look at our physical health saying, here we. We have our issues, right? Someone sprains an ankle, or someone might have a chronic illness, or we have a little bit of a high blood pressure. We're trying to keep ourselves, our cholesterol in an ideal range. We all have physical health issues like this part of life. Why would we expect it to be any different? So when it comes to mental health, we don't define it in a way that says what we're looking for is we want good, healthy, robust mental health. Right? Just like we want good, healthy, robust physical health. We didn't say it's either perfect. Is your physical health perfect? Oh, wait, it isn't. Well, you're broken. What's wrong with you? And then we just give you a bunch of numbers and then you feel bad, right? But that's what we're doing with mental health. And if we say, no, this is the most important aspect of our lives because everything, including our physical health and how we take care of ourselves, comes through the lens defined by our mental health. So let's understand ourselves and build good mental health for our futures. I would argue that, yes, it's a frame shift or paradigm shift I'm arguing for, but I would also argue it's just common sense that what we're Doing doesn't work right? It is not working. Our mental health is getting worse over time. And when you think about how we're conceiving of it, of course it's getting worse over time. It just makes sense that it would unless we bring this change and we understand and are empowered to build good mental health for ourselves.

[John Miles]

Paul I believe that we all have defining moments in our lives, and a lot of those moments, unfortunately happen around trauma. Some of them also happen around joyful moments like getting married or having the birth of your child. For me, one of those defining moments happened when I was 37 or 38. My best friend had been diagnosed with colon cancer at the time, and I remember he was visiting me at my home in North Carolina. And I just had this gut feeling that it was probably the last time I was ever going to get to see him in person. And so I purposely took that time to really tell him how much he meant to me. I understand. In a different situation, when you were around 25, you had a defining moment with a close family member of yours that really set you on this path of doing the work that you're doing today. Can you tell us about that incident, if you're open to it, and how that reshaped everything that you knew in your life?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yes. And I'm sorry to learn of your friend and his illness. But it's good to hear that you carry with you, having done what you did in that time when you told him how you felt, you were real and true and honest, which comes from a great, a well grounded place in you and is, of course, was so good for him. And you carry that forward with you. So that part is good to hear about. You'd asked about the tragedy in my life when I was in my mid-20s, which was the loss of my youngest brother to suicide. And what it showed to me is just how mental health was completely unaddressed. He had a serious medical illness that had come out of the blue a couple of years before. And I remember as he was going through it, thinking, gosh, there's a lot of attention to his physical health. But you could see there were changes in him. And I was off at school too. There were things that I missed. But I, when I checked back in, you could see, gosh, there are differences in him that I could see when I would go away and come back home, and they weren't being addressed. And there were some conversations about it, but nothing was really looked at. And it's amazing to me that what ended up the illness I think was part of what in the. At the end of the day, ended up killing him. Right. But it wasn't the physical part of the illness. It was the mental health part of changes. You could see in retrospect, he didn't feel as safe in the world. He didn't feel that he was strong anymore. He felt a sense of weakness and a sense of vulnerability. And he was then compensating in unhealthy ways. And it was so clear to me, my God, we didn't look at what was most important here, right? And I could see that because of the changes in me, I became much less healthy afterwards. And it was by realizing this can't be going anywhere good in me. I don't want to repeat this where I'm having mental health problems. I need to do something about it. I need to put my hand up and say that I need help. And it really just made it so clear to me how our society doesn't look at mental health and doesn't address, hey, let's help this person build good mental health. No matter who the person is, let alone if they've had some real injury to their mental health. And the fact that we don't do that has awful consequences. And I saw right in front of me, sometimes the consequence of that is death.

[John Miles]

The topic of suicide is always a touchy one. And being a veteran, it is so tragic that outside of the soldiers and seamen that we've lost in war, they pale in comparison to the 150,000 veterans that we've lost outside of conflict, to suicide. And having myself existed in this system at the VA especially, I have always found while I'm there that they're constantly trying to give you a label. Whether that label is post traumatic stress or bipolar or this or that. We seem to get categorized almost as much as medicine is now categorized by the different. Some compartmentalizations. So I remember going through this process because I've unfortunately had childhood trauma and combat trauma, other things in my life, and I was getting all these labels. I think by the time they were done with it, I had 10 or 12 different labels. And I didn't like the wording on many of them, and I didn't think they were accurate. So it led me to start studying this dsm, which is the bible for mental health, because I wanted to learn, where are these diagnoses coming from? And I'm going here because you're really critical on how the system is structured, especially the DSM being largely a catalog of problems for a Listener who might not be familiar with what we're talking about. What is the DSM and what does it get right and what do you see it's getting wrong about how it's shaping how we see ourselves, those who are being diagnosed by it.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

The DSM is a book of over 1100 pages that's just filled and filled with diagnoses and modifiers of diagnoses. There's an infinite amount of numbers in those 1100 pages which guarantees that if we're following through that book that we will not understand people. So it was born of an effort to understand people to say, well, we also need to be able to communicate, right? So we would have diagnosis numbers. So one clinician can communicate to another clinician. You could say, okay, here's the syndrome going on here and you communicate with insurance companies for billing purposes. There was a reasoning behind it that has gotten wildly out of control, right? So now we have this book of taxonomy and we think of it as you said, like a bible. And it gets called like the bible of mental health. To equate this book of taxonomy, it's a book of taxonomy. It's an inventory of numbers, right? To equate that to a religious book. And again, I'm not being critical, this is how the field does. The field sees it this way. It shows how lost we are. Because in all those numbers is not understanding. So it burgeoned out of control. We'll make more numbers and more numbers. Now there's a system that wants to understand you. There are good people. I've worked in VA systems. There are good people in the VA systems who want to help, but they're working under a misguided premise. So they keep adding numbers. Now there's a thought, that system really understands you now. Why? Because it's giving you 10 numbers? No, the system does not understand you. In its desire to understand you. By giving you more numbers, it steps further and further away from understanding you. Right? And if we step back from that and we say, just as an example, a person is having depression, and depression is rooted in part in some biological facets and some childhood trauma and some adult trauma, perhaps combat trauma. I'm just making this up. This may not be your diagnosis, but let's say we look at it that way, or there's trauma driven issues in this person, we could capture that in a narrative. We could give it a number if we want. But then we're being respectful to you by not thinking we're going to capture you in a bunch of numbers, right? We might say, okay, you're having mood issues or you're having post trauma issues. Okay, let's note that. Right? But we can do all that in a book this thick. How about a book this thick instead of this thick? But we then write about you. Here's how you're having mood issues or here's how you're having issues after trauma. That's the route to real understanding. But we're operating in this facade that we keep giving people numbers and it also tells us their medicines indicated for the numbers. Right? And sometimes medicines make sense, Right? But a lot of times this is what lets the system just try to just polish the hood when there's something going on in the engine and say, well, if you have these numbers, this is what we use, this medicine or cbt, which cognitive behavioral therapy can be helpful, but it's not an answer to everything. Not even close. Right. But what it ends up doing is letting the system use medicines or some of these more superficial therapy tactics, right? In order to try and just sanitize things to get you feeling a little better without ever understanding and going to the root. And of course, how do we change things for the better about anything in life? We understand and we go to the roots. If we don't do that here, we will not get good results. And we know that the data is out, right? That tells us we are not getting good mental health results. And when we think about that, it's clear and obvious why we aren't, which is why we have to change.

[John Miles]

Before we continue, I want to thank all of you who continue to support Passion Struck and share these conversations with others. One of the biggest themes emerging from this Forged in Adversity series is that transformation begins with self awareness. Understanding the stories, patterns and beliefs shaping our lives. That's why I created a companion workbook for this episode with Dr. Paul Conti, along with weekly reflections and tools in my Ignited Life newsletter. You can download the workbook and Explore [e-mail] Now a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. If you're into tech, you'll love this. TikTok is a live lab where users post instant reviews of the latest trends. Download TikTok and check it out.

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[Geico Spokesperson]

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[Dr. Paul Conti]

Hey, good morning.

[Geico Spokesperson]

Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here. Here where he needs us most.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yep, they sure are.

[Geico Spokesperson]

We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs all in one place with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

It's all right.

[Geico Spokesperson]

We're so far up here.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Look at me. Take a deep breath.

[Geico Spokesperson]

I'm good. So good.

[John Miles]

Get a commercial auto insurance quote [e-mail] and see how much you could save.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

It feels good. To Geico.

[John Miles]

You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now back to my conversation with Dr. Paul Conti. And Paul, I'm going to build upon this because when I was going through that period of time, one of the major things I was trying to deal with and you talked about physical health and mental health was I had experienced a number of traumatic brain injuries throughout my life starting when I was at 5 and then they just progressed. And some of them are sports related, some of them are combat related. I was actually in a coma for a couple weeks as a result of one of them. And the symptoms of a lot of mental health disorders and the symptoms of long term effects of TBIs overlap in many ways. And so I decided I really had to start understanding my makeup. Like what, what was going on? Because what I found given your analogy of the roots, is that the system was only looking at the leaves and the branches and they weren't looking at the trunk and they weren't looking at the roots. So I started to go through this, what turned out to be a two year period of me search where I started to unpack. What is going on with my gut health? What is going on with my sleep patterns? What's going on with my circadian rhythms? How much is drinking playing a role in this? How much is my depression playing a role? And what it led to is me developing a structure of self which is at the core of what you talk about. And it leads me to this question, why do you think people are trying to change their behavior so much without first understanding that structure of self?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think the systems don't guide us to understanding. It's great and I'm sure it's made a huge difference in your life to go down this pathway where like, hey, I need to understand myself, right? But you had to bring that to yourself, right? You were already in a system to get help, and the system did not say to you, you know, what would be best is let's try and help you understand yourself. If you're feeling depressed, there's going to be a number of factors. Let's just think about what those factors might be. Let's think about something that relate to childhood. Let's think about something that can relate to traumatic brain injury. Let's think of something that can relate to the psychology of combat experience and injury. Let's look at all of this, right? Because there's a whole you there that wants to understand yourself and you don't want to be depressed. You want to make your life better. If we looked at it that way, we could still say, okay, this is depression, right? But we're not trying to give you five numbers of here's your traumatic brain injury associated depressive symptoms, and here's what's trauma related, and here's what's not. And is it major depression, is it recurrent, is it severe? Now we're just lost in a jumble of numbers. What's lost in the jumble of numbers is you. So you had to go do that for yourself. And it shouldn't have to be that way because many people will not. They won't see that, oh, I need to go do something for myself that the helping system isn't doing for me, right? So why people are trying to find results or often are scared and just spinning wheels, or we feel like deer in the headlights is because the helping systems aren't helping us, right? If you had a physical health problem, I don't know why I feel short of breath. You could go down a system that will try and understand that, right? It'll a doctor listen to your heart, listen to your lungs, maybe get a CAT scan, get an ultrasound. We're trying to learn now why are you short of breath. We would bring a process that says, we would like to understand this. If we don't do that for mental health, then, yeah, some people will be fortunate enough to be able to do it on their own, but most are trusting the systems. And if the systems aren't saying, we're going to help you by helping you understand you, we're interested in understanding you, then that's how people are not helped. And they can go through a system that then is interested in throughput, Right. A VA system. All healthcare systems are very busy with mental health, right? Why? Because we're not solving problems. Right. If we polish the hood and call it good, right. That problem is going to come back, right. The car is going to come back to the mechanic if we just polish the hood and called it good when there's something going on in the engine. So the systems are designed for throughput and what we make by not actually addressing what's going on is more need for throughput. People keep coming back to the systems, so they're just trying to get people through to the other side of the system. And that's not how we make people better. Again, the proof, this isn't me making a projection that, oh, if we do this, it's not going to work. I'm saying, here's the data in front of us, we've done this and it doesn't work. And we need to take an approach to it that is more simple. It can acknowledge, can we have mental health problems? Yes. Just like we can have physical health problems. Depression, for example, is a neurochemical imbalance in us. That's it's a health problem. Right. So those health problems are real, but it's how we conceive of them. If we start saying we want to help you understand yourself and build good mental health. Now let's look at all the ways in which, for example, in your case, you're resilient, you're perseverant, right? You're able to bring health to yourself when the helping mechanisms are failing you. We say there's a lot going right in you, right to be at the place that you're at now from that real and true perspective. We're also going to look at what's not the way you want it to be. We're going to look right at that depression and we're going to help you get to the roots of it. Now we're talking right now we're in a place where we can solve problems.

[John Miles]

I love what you're alluding to because for most of us, our primary care provider is the gateway into our health ecosystem. And my wife is a primary care provider and one of the things she talks about all the time is how the insurance system is a thorn in their side because it, it really pays them based on volume and because of that volume, they're expecting you to see a patient every 15 to 20 minutes. Now, luckily, when I was at the VA earlier this week for my yearly physical, the my doctor, who's a do was using AI to help him circumvent having to do written medical records. And he was telling me that it's been profound because it's given him an extra 10 to 15 minutes that he's now able to spend on patients instead of having to leave and write all it up. But when you're that consumed on time, obviously you're not going to have the time to do. What I did was start looking at every aspect of what was working and what's not. So you approach this structure of the self using five different parts. And I found these to be really interesting. And they're unconscious, conscious defense mechanisms, character structure, sense of self. I'm going to start with unconscious and conscious, because my first book that I wrote a few years ago, I have a chapter that basically goes into unconscious and conscious. Mine is looking at it through a different lens. I was looking at it more on how we're living our lives. And I was saying most of us are doing it unconsciously. We're living like we're pinballs bouncing off of things. System one, as Danny Kahneman would say, instead of being consciously engaging and being the master of the game who's learning how to play the ball. But I think the same thing goes with a lot of our mental health journeys. Would you say that's an accurate analogy?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think that's true, yes. I think if we don't have a method of understanding, then we will not understand. Right. So just as if you go to see a doctor for a physical medicine complaint, there's a method of understanding like, okay, you have a human body, it has organs in it. Right. We have an idea of how those organs function. Right. There's a basic premise. The same is true for mental health because you have a human brain and a human mind. So there is now a process to go through that that starts with an unconscious mind. We all have an unconscious mind. And the vast majority of what goes on inside of us goes on in unconscious mind. And that sets the climate inside of us. Then what sits on top of that is the conscious mind, what I'm actually thinking about now, which is a very small subset of everything that's going on inside of me. And that climate inside of me has a big effect on what is in my conscious mind. How am I thinking about it, how am I feeling about it? Then we have an array of defense mechanisms that we use to protect ourselves in the world. And that also comes from the unconscious mind. And it grows up around the conscious mind to protect it. Then we have a character Structure based on that, a set of characteristics of us as we interface with the world. And then there's a sense of self that this is an I. Right? That I am an I. And just as I can conceive of the I physically, how my body is doing, how my organs are doing, how my health is doing, the same is true for our mental health. So the idea is we can understand physical health problems because we have a route of approach, right? So we need that route of approach for mental health. Saying, just as we can examine you, get labs done, get studies done, we can do the same. You have a structure of self and a function of self, just like you have a structure of your body and a function of your body and you have those things because you are human. Right? So now we're off to the raises of helping because this applies to everyone and we're also doing justice to it. You were saying before, I want to say also a real word of gratitude to your wife and to all people out there who are primary care medical providers. It is so difficult to do, right, that more than half of all complaints brought to physical health doctors are coming from a mental health origin. So now they're trying to deal with physical health and mental health. And you think your doctor said, oh, with this AI tool, I get 10 minutes back. Why should a doctor ever have had 10 minutes of the 15 minute appointment taken by documentation? Right. Why should we as patients allow this to happen? Right. I think our primary care doctors are so put upon and we owe them a debt of gratitude for operating in a system that just inundates dates and buries them in paperwork in numbers in order to just try and get their job done. And then they're trying to take care of people in a single digit number of minutes to actually pay attention to them. That is not fair to the primary doctors, it is not fair to the patients, meaning it's not fair to any of us. Right. We may not all be primary care docs, but we're all patients at one time or another. So to look at that and say this doesn't work, and the insurance systems, within the rules we give them, they're going to do whatever they do to try and optimize and be a successful business. The blame rests upon us as humans, as people who have accepted that this is how we're going to get our health care met, let alone that we're driving the primary doctors to greater mental illness, greater substance abuse, higher rates of suicide. So yes, we're doing that to the demographic that's on the front lines of helping us. And as we're doing that to them, we're ensuring that we as a population are not adequately understood and helped.

[John Miles]

Paul, I want to sit with this unconscious and conscious for another minute. To me, one of the books organizing ideas was that we as human beings are governed by three major drives. Yes, Something. Assertion. So agency, protection, autonomy, those types of things. The next one is pleasure, which has healthy and unhealthy elements to it. But then you bring up something that really piqued my interest because when I think of the word passion struck, to me, people mislabel it. To me. It's really about our drive, like what drives us. And so I loved your word that you used, generative drive. Can you talk about those three things, how they impact us, and specifically this defining term, generative drive?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yes, yes, thank you for asking. It's one of the main points of the book. In addition to saying, hey, we can understand our mental health and build good mental health like we do our physical health, and here's a route to it, right? I'm making this point that we have been misguided in how we conceive of ourselves. That a field of mental health has traditionally and across time seen us as having just assertion and pleasure drives in us. So that was considered as gospel. There are two drives in people. Assertion. We want to assert ourselves because we want to be able to do something and change the world around us. And why is that? That because we want pleasure, right? And that pleasure could be things that we associate with pleasurable things, food, sex, etc. But it can also be the pleasure of safety, right? Of knowing there's a roof over my head. So we're just asserting ourselves so we can massage and manipulate the world around us, so we can find our way to pleasure. To conceive of humans this way is so patently and obviously false, right? Like we would not be here as a species if that is all that was going on in us. There would be no altruism. There would be no people who joined the military and put their own health at risk in order to protect others, right? None of this would happen. We would not create art, right? We wouldn't offer a hand up to someone who's down when no one is watching. All the things that are best about our humanness come from our generative drive. Our traditions of philosophy, literature, history, we've known this across hundreds and thousands, and not hundreds, but thousands of years, right? We have understood this, but we haven't acknowledged it in modern psychology that what we want is to be generative. We want the world to be better that we want to leave the world better than we found it. And it's not just at our deaths, right? It's each day. Even if someone gets up and has a quiet victory of getting through their day, right? No one's going to celebrate them. Their day is difficult from when they wake up to when they go to bed. And they might think, all I'm doing is getting through all this so I can do it again tomorrow. That person is being generative. That person isn't driven by, oh, I just want to massage the world and find some pleasure in it. That person sees a value higher than themselves, right? Maybe they're taking care of their. Of a family, right? Maybe there's a primary care doc getting up and doing the job because people rely on that person, right? That there's something in us that's at the core of our humanness. And this is when we're happy. Again, it's not a Pollyanna concept like when you see humans that are happy and we have a lot of data about this too. People who age happily, who've had a lot of trauma or tragedy in their life, and they feel good about life, they're living through the generative drive and we can't expect. It makes sense in a sad way that if we're just going to conceive of ourselves as assertion and pleasure machines, right? Then of course, why would we not try and understand our mental health completely in an 1100 page book of numbers, right? It would make sense, right? Except none of it makes sense at all because the overarching concept is wrong. If we have to see ourselves as humans, right? What is it that we want? We're driving towards happiness. We want a sense of peace. We want contentment when we're considering our own lives, right? Even the things that are negative, we want a capacity for delight. This is when we enjoy life, we feel good about life, we age healthily, we take care of our physical health. We're good people in the world around us. This is what we want. And we're missing entirely the point that it's that we should be striving towards. And how do we do that?

[Geico Spokesperson]

I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Hey, good morning.

[Geico Spokesperson]

Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yep, they sure are.

[Geico Spokesperson]

We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs all in one place with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

It's all right.

[Geico Spokesperson]

We're so far up here.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Look at me. Take a deep breath.

[Geico Spokesperson]

I'm good. So good.

[John Miles]

Get a commercial auto insurance quote [e-mail] and see how much you could save.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

It feels good to Geico. I drive my bus in a busy city. That's why road safety is so important to me. I know that I must slow down and be extra careful when I make a wide turn. Buses need more room than cars. Everyone can help keep our roads safe. Next time you're driving, remember to give buses plenty of time and space to finish turning before driving ahead. Let's all plan to share the road safely. Learn how at www.sharetheroadsafely.gov. well, we build good mental health. Yes. We look at what's wrong. We look at if I'm having panic attacks or I'm having depression or look at what's wrong. But we look in an orientation that says we know what we're striving for and we know what good mental health health looks like. And we know that there's a process to go through, right, in order to get ourselves there. So now we're not afraid. We're not turning away from mental health. We're saying, yo, that makes sense, right? I'm going to approach my whole life through a lens, determined by my mental health. I want to look at that. I don't want to be afraid of that. I don't want to polish the hood or look at the leaves when there's. When we need to go to the roots. Hey, let's go do that. Because here's the good news. There are mechanisms of understanding. We can understand the structure of self, the function of self, how our drives are balanced, and we can make change. That is the sea change that I'm really advocating for because I think it's there in front of us and we know enough to do it. I like to think that there's some things in the book where there's some things that are original. I hope right. But by and large, what I'm doing is taking what we know right through years of human experience in psychology, in literature, in philosophy, and our understanding of history and sociology and modern neuroscience science, in modern psychiatry. There's so much that we know that when we pull all this together, I think this is what we get. I'm not making it up in the sense that I'm just seeing this is in front of us. We know enough to put this out there and say, why maybe we should adhere to this. Right. Because this is how we really take control of our lives. Right. By taking control of our mental health.

[John Miles]

Even if you go back to Henry David Thoreau or William James or other great philosophers, a lot of them are really talking about this container. When Thoreau talked about quiet desperation, he was really putting a box around the architecture of the human self and that we were living differently from the way we should. So what I really enjoyed about the book is this underlying notion that you have that if you're going emotions, behaviors that you want to change, it gets well beyond just symptoms management and it really gets into the core architecture. And that's one of the core aspects that I thought was this linchpin to the five part structure that you bring up. Is that how you think of it as an architecture and operating system?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think yes, in the sense that we have these two foundational pillars and one is our structure of self and the other is our function of self. And upon those pillars, if we have health in those foundational pillars and we go and look and we see what isn't healthy, okay, let me go change that. What is healthy, let me make that stronger. Then we end up with these really good things. We end up with a sense of empowerment inside that lets us meet the world with agency. Agency. We end up with a sense of humility inside. We let ourselves be human, including all the trials and tribulations and failures and everything else that comes along with being human. Then we meet the world with a sense of active gratitude. Now we're engaged in the world with agency and gratitude and they're grounded in good, real healthy places. And it's upon that we can keep our drives in balance. And keeping our drives in balance, where we're governed by the generative drive helps those foundational pillars stay healthy. Healthy, right. And now it helps us find that happiness that we're looking for. The peace, contentment and delight. And that helps keep the system all in check. So you can see how we can have an upcycle of goodness where the foundational pillars are in check and the things that ride on top of it are in a good place. And we're governed by our generative drive. So our assertion and pleasure drives are imbalanced. I mean, I've seen over a quarter century of being a physician. This is what health looks like, right? When people are mentally healthy. And it doesn't mean that it's perfect. Right. If we're alive, we all have our issues, right? Okay, that's Part of being alive. We can meet the world from a place of good mental health, and then we're ready if difficult things come our way. And difficult things will always come our way. And we're also ready if they don't. And when they don't, we're ready to get the most and the best out of life. It is this that we want. And you mentioned Thoreau and James, and we can go back farther. We can go back to Shakespeare and Cervantes were writing about this several hundred years ago, and we can go back to mythology, and we can go back to folklore, traditions around the world. We're like, this is what we feel as humans. We're aware of the generative drive in us. We're aware of the purpose that we want to feel. But we haven't taken that knowledge, which is historical human knowledge, and integrated it to our conception of mental health right now. And then we end up with this giant book with 1100 pages of diagnoses. And then you end up going to a system that wants to help you. And at some point you realize, I'm just a jumble of numbers that I don't understand. And when I go look at those numbers, I certainly don't feel understood. And that's not. We have to bring ourselves current. We owe it to ourselves to take everything we know as humans that have a species that survived across all this time, and to put it together and say, hey, let's use what we know to take care of ourselves. And yes, of course, it's about us, right? It's about the generations that come. It's about children. And if we don't have children, it's about young people, right? It's about doing the right thing for ourselves and for those who come out after us.

[John Miles]

PAUL One of the things I. I experienced and I was diagnosed with D. I can never pronounce the word dystemia.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Oh, dysthymia, yeah. Dys.

[John Miles]

Along my journey is the world was changing, and I didn't understand how, but I knew parts of me were starting to vanish and the world around me was starting to seem less bright. And I couldn't put my finger on it, which was one of the reasons that I went to get help. But an important part of my journey was I shifted the question I was asking myself, and from what's wrong with me to what's happening inside of me. And when you think about that question, someone who's listening might think, well, that's a small difference. But to me, it was actually a huge shift.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Oh, no, it's a huge difference.

[John Miles]

Why is that such a big difference? And I'll let you talk and then I'll explain it for me.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

No, I think this is talking about something very important. Think about what you said. And I'm not trying to diagnose you during this, the time together, but it's interesting to say dysthymia, which just means chronically low mood. Right? And I think given what you're describing, you're going to have a chronically low mood, right? It's like me coming in and saying, my knee hurts. And then if you say back, oh, you have hurt knee. Okay, you told me something true, but it doesn't help me understand and it doesn't help me change anything, right? So the idea. Why would a person have dysthymia? The whole concept there is. There are people whose neurobiology, whose brain chemistry mean that even if everything is going really well in their life, there aren't traumas weighing on them. There aren't worries and anxieties intruding onto them. They'll still have a low mood. It's meant to capture something neurobiology, neurobiological. That is not what's going on here. Right. There aren't a lot of people who have life where it's running along very well, but their mood is chronically low, no matter what. That's interesting. And it's a brain biology, a brain chemistry issue, and we should look at that. You're telling me about a person, you, who's had a lot go on in his life, and because of all the stress and responses to that, then you get your mind pulled off into some aspect of unhealthy behaviors or thoughts or conceptions of yourself. Of course you're going to have a low grade, low mood. It's not that thing dysthymia is meant to capture. Right? But now someone gives you that diagnosis, as if somehow that tells us anything, right? It doesn't tell us anything. Right. And I think it leads us astray because now you probably felt worse. Okay, you have low mood. Let's give you another number. And you realize this isn't helping me at all. And instead of thinking about what's wrong with me, that wasn't helping you, right? You got a lot of numbers that told you that, Right? What you said is what's going on inside of me. You made the gigantic leap across the chasm right here. The chasm comes from the position, the place that modern mental health is at, which is not a healthy one. Right? So you cross that chasm of being curious about yourself, of doing something the system didn't invite you to do. How about, why don't we get curious about you? Why don't we, the system or the treaters, and you collaborate in a way that says, let's get curious about you and what's going on inside of you. Were you like this when you were younger? Okay, you had some childhood trauma. Do you remember before then what your mood was like? If you don't, okay, how were you after that? How are you between then and military related trauma? I want to understand you as best I can because that's going to be the route to finding solutions to this. And you realized that this what's wrong with me Diagnostic paradigm was getting you nowhere, so you leaped across the chasm to say, hey, how about I bring curiosity to myself? Compassionate curiosity, not beat myself up. What's wrong with me? Me, curiosity, but real curiosity. And it sets you down a path of understanding yourself better and making your life healthier.

[John Miles]

One of the things I realized I was doing is I was following in the trap of the unconscious narratives. I was telling myself, such as this feeling I wasn't enough, that I was broken, that I didn't matter, that I wasn't seen by other people. But what I learned when I started to understand myself and, and look at the underlying things that were going on was that whole story of myself could be rewritten. But you have to be conscious of it first. I think I had to become aware of the patterns that I was reinforcing in order to overcome them. And then once I understood that, I started taking the steps to then consciously engage with my life and to start trying to figure out what was at the root of them. Because I figured if I'm having all these things, there's got to be something that was the starting point. And so that became my mission was, how do I get at if there are tons of things bothering me, what was the core of that? And so that's what I ended up doing. And when I was able to do that and became conscious of it, I was then able to respond, bond. And that restoration gave me back my agency. And I think through that, then I came back to center and back to self. And I think this is what your whole book parallels. Yes, that journey.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yes. I think the example you're giving of your own life is a beautiful. It's a beautiful example. You got yourself to a healthier place because you realized, I need to understand myself and I need to understand what is this story I'm telling myself, myself, right? And how am I telling myself this story? Am I saying to myself over and over again, you're not enough? You're not enough. You're not good enough. What's wrong with you? If that's my dialogue to myself, maybe in those words or in similar words, how am I ever going to understand anything? Right. I painted myself into a corner here and I need to stop and look at what it is that I've done. Why are these voices in my head? They're not the voices of your own. It's your own thought thoughts, Right. Saying that you're not enough. Wow. Like, why would that be? Right. Why would I say that to myself? Right. You start becoming interested in that and then that's your route to change. And I would argue it makes sense that you could not have gotten yourself better through any other route. Right. How could it have been through any route other than understanding yourself? Then you start realizing, oh, I'm inclined. Even though I'm doing all these things and I've done these things in life. Life to feel good about myself, I feel like I'm not enough. Wow. Like, where did that come into me? Do I want to tell that story to myself? Right. I write in the book there's two different descriptions of my own life. Right. And they're both true. They're both based in fact. One is very negative and the other is quite positive, which the truth is, whichever one I choose, the same was true of you. You could decide that you're not enough by telling yourself you're not. Now you've made that declaration. But is that really fair? Is that really what you want to choose? Right. It becomes a choice. And if, you know there's another conception of you that doesn't involve, oh, what's wrong with me? Why am I not enough? There's another conception that looks at perseverance and resilience and lets you own the things that you maybe don't feel great about in your life and still feel good enough. Right? Right. That this is the difference that allows for health. But I think that it is really quite amazing that you would have to come to that on your own own. Right. And you're a person who, you know, who has a lot of agency in him. Just from what I know of you, that you're able. Your brain and light bulb goes off. This isn't getting me anywhere. And I have to understand myself. Just like in me after the loss of my brother, when I was having unhealthy relationships, unhealthy friendships, Drinking more than I should, becoming less healthy. There was something that said, hey, you need help. And I called the number on the back of the insurance card for mental health help, even though I was embarrassed about it because of the environment I'd grown up in. We were able to do those things. But people shouldn't have to find their way to that.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Right.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

The system should say, here's how we're going to come at whatever is going on with you. We want to help you understand yourself right now. Let's talk about practical change. The system has to bring that to people. Otherwise we're not going to. Most of us won't find our way to it. Right? And maybe we find our way to it just from some element of good fortune or I was fortunate to have an insurance card that had that number. I was afraid to it call, call. But at least I had the card and I called it. What if I didn't? Or what if you didn't have that light bulb go off? We are losing people to so much loss of good life that could be in life, loss of people having better lives and at times actual loss of life. Because the system isn't framing things the way that you just said. Let's help you understand yourself and bring change. This is not what we're doing, but this is what we need to do to make our lives better. And sometimes it's what we need to do just to. To survive.

[John Miles]

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Paul. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Stanford professor Jamil Zaki.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Very little bit. It's a very small. So please help me understand more, Jamel.

[John Miles]

I love his books and his work because he studies cynicism. And where I'm going with this is I was a complete cynic for a long time. And, and I love the way you describe this. You say cynicism is a self made prison. And that's basically what I had created for myself. And out of that prison I became. This term I use is a visionary arsonist. I wanted all these things in my life and because of that cynicism and the statements I was making to my inner self, I was arsoning the very things that I wanted to back better my relationships, my work environment, how I was interacting with my kids, all those things. And I think, as you suggest, cynicism masquerades as intelligence. How does that function for a listener to understand this?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Cynicism is a very unhealthy defense mechanism. Right. It justifies in us. It's also as Aspects of denial and avoidance and rationalization. It's false justification for stepping away from in our life. So someone who's had their last three romantic relationships didn't go well. Who says I don't? No one ever wants to be a good partner. There's no one good out there to be found, right? I'm just, I'm not. I'm too smart for that to try and go find another partner or someone who is in a job they really don't like and they're miserable in the job and says there's no better jobs. Everybody's the same everywhere, right? What it is, it's a rationalization for giving up on life. Vitality, generativeness in your life, right? And because it's rooted in us thinking we understand something, it provides another little bit of payoff to us that is just short term and is bad for us. It makes us feel smart and not naive, right? Anybody who thinks there could be a good relationship or a better job, that person is naive, right? So now we feel good about ourselves for feeling cynical. I'm smart enough and I know enough about the world to know, no, there's no goodness out there, right? But think about how dramatic. Talk about making a prison, right? It's like the prison is made of cynicism. Wrapped in all that, that feeling of, I feel good about myself, like I'm smart and I know the world, right? Boy, we seal ourselves inside of a prison, right? Because that is a lie. Is it true that it's difficult to find a good partner and a mutual relationship? Yes. Is it true that it's difficult to find a good job in a good environment? Yes. But difficult is 100% different from the lie of saying that it's impossible. If we recognize that things are difficult, we could say, okay, let's talk about how you could do this difficult thing. Maybe you could go about it differently than you've been going about it for. Let's help you do something different, difficult. But now that's. That is inspirational. As for Asia, we said, come on, you can do it, right? Let's just figure out how things have not gone the way you want them to. Let's help you understand yourself and bring routes to change. We're acknowledging something is difficult and helping a person understand themselves and get to the other side of it, as opposed to this lie of saying, well, there's no good to be found anyway. And that, I think, is really the curse of cynicism.

[John Miles]

Paul earlier this week, I was interviewing a gentleman named Walter Green, And Walter is 83 years old. And he reminded me of someone you, you talk about in the book, a gentleman in the book named Fred. Walter has the typical things that an 83 year old would. But the reason I interviewed him is he is one of the most optimistic people I have met in a long time. And as a person who's 83, if I hadn't seen him in the camera, I would have thought he was 27 or 28. Because he had so much passion and rigor for life and for this cause that he has to get people to start telling others how much they matter to you before it's too late. And it made me think about Fred because in Walter's case, it seemed like. Like what was helping him remain as active and vibrant as he was remaining mentally and physically active. Maybe you can take this story of Fred and my story of Walter and build upon it. What does this tell us about joyful presence?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think Walter and Fred are role models for all of us and they give us insight, right? What it tells us about, I think is the seduction that the society we live in brings to us. And seduction isn't just about romance and sex. It's anything that promises you something good and gives you something bad, right? So here there's a seduction in the world that's trying to tell Fred and tell Walter, you should feel bad about yourself. You should feel bad about your life. You're 83, might not live that long. You're not going to live 30 years, right? Feel bad about that. Feel like, oh, there can't be a meaning to your life. You can't feel good about, about your life and your best years are behind you. This is all a lie, right? This is not bringing truth to us. It may be that, okay, I have more years behind me than in front of me, but so what? I'm alive right now. I'm not alive in the past and I'm not alive in some future. I'm trying to think to. So then these are people who have within them, right? They have a healthy generative drive. I can say this for sure that Walter and Fred are living through the generative drive. Well, I'm 83 years old. Walter must understand. Look at what I've learned over these years and I can bring something good to the world around me and say, talk to people, tell them you care about them before it's too late. It's something I've learned over 83 years. I'm overjoyed to bring that to people, to bring that realness. Walter's finding a value beyond himself, right? He is being generative. This isn't about manipulating the world so that he has some pleasure and enough food on the table. This is about the best of humanness saying, I want to live this way, way, right? And these are people who are not afraid of dying. We can learn a lot from people who say in their 80s and not afraid of death. And they can find peace. They can have just peace that there's freedom inside of themselves. They can have contentment. They can think about their lives, including things that haven't been the way that they want them to be or tragedies. And they can feel good about their lives and how they've made their lives. They have the capacity for delight and getting excited about things. This is how people age happily. So shouldn't all of us be looking and saying, if there's a group of people who are really happy when they're in their 80s, say, or their 90s, let's look at that, right? And when we look at that, lo and behold, we think they are living through their generative drive. And they're not buying society's lies that say, feel over the hill and feel sad for yourself and just feel bad and talk about death all the time and lament, the world is telling us to do that around this. And when we deny that, oh, that's someone who's happy, who realizes that he's 83 and isn't pretending, he's likely to be here in 30 years. Right? But gets it and is okay with that. Why? Because he's aware of the 83 years that have been. And he's aware of the things that are difficult and sad in that time. He's also aware of the things that he's learned. And he's so excited to bring something that he's learned that can change the lives of others. This is a way for all of us to live. And the answer is how? How is Walter living or Fred living through the generation drive?

[John Miles]

I'm bringing this all up because when people I talk to, especially those who are Fred and Walter's age, hear about passion struck, they always say to me, I would say 95% of the time, that's for someone much younger. It's not for me. And what I love about your definition of generative drive, because it really speaks to what I think of being passion struck. You write, generative drive is something where more is always better. It doesn't sit on a spectrum. Rather, think of it as something boundless, an endless ocean or the cosmos Itself that you'll always be able to tap into and pull from as a resource. And then you go on to say, the generative drive is an incessant drive towards goodness for yourself and others and everything else on the planet. Planet. And whether that impact is small or significant, it doesn't matter. It always is the case that kindness, creativity, altruism, art, feeling grateful are the compelling expressions of the generative drive for making life better. And what I love about what you wrote there is if you utilize that at any age, because that is what I came to embrace after going through, through this examination of self that I was going to focus on man. It has completely changed the whole way I look at life. And it's why I do this podcast. Because if I can live this way and think of life this way, I want everyone to feel this way. Because I think if more of us were living with generative drive, which I think is the point of your book, how much would the world be different and how much of the polarization, divisiveness, everything else that we're facing would go away? Is that part of what you're hoping to inspire with the book?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Yes. The generative drive is a human birthright, right? We're human. We have bodies like this, with organs like this one example. We're human. So we have a generative drive in us. And that generative drive, because it's the human goodness in us, what's kept our species alive and what leads people to do altruistic things. You learn something and you want to bring the news. You want to do something good for the world, right? What you're doing isn't just for you. It's good that it brings goodness to you, but you're doing it because you want to be a healthy, a good presence in the world, right? This is what inspires people. It inspires people to self sacrifice. It inspires people to great things. This is the best of our humanness. More is always better. More goodness, more human goodness is always better. And it keeps everything else in balance, like assertiveness. Like too much assertiveness becomes over control. Too little assertiveness can be learned. Helplessness, right? So we want balance in the rest of us. We want our unconscious mind to be in a healthy place. We want to keep balance, our whole structure of self, our whole function of self. We're trying to keep something that's living and breathing us and our mental health and our structure and function and drives. We're trying to keep all this in balance. The way to do that is to be governed by what is core to our humanness. Right? And that's what saves us from cynicism. Right? And it's what leads us to realness. Right? It's not saying, just feel good about everything and everything will be okay. Okay? It's the exact opposite. If you approach life through the generative drive, then we will acknowledge to ourselves what isn't good. Right? And saying, okay, you know what? I'm doing okay, except I'm interfacing with the world in a way that I'm too irritable. It's making this up. I'm snapping, I'm jumping at people, right? What is going on in me? I want to go look at that instead of turning away from it. That's how I stay generative. When I'm generative, I can look at the problems in me because I'm coming from what's going right, including the human birthright of the generative drive and the good that it leads me to do each day. So an example would be the person who gets up in the morning and says, oh, all I'm going to do is I'm going to wake up and I'm going to do things for other people. I'm going to check boxes and check. I'm going to be exhausted at the end of the day and I'm going to get in bed and you tell me how that's generative or how there's any goodness in that. I would say, no, don't fall victim to cynicism. That's all generative. You have no expectation that pleasure is going to come to you from any, any of this all day. But you get up and you do it anyway. There's a lot going right in you. There's a lot that's inspiring you. Look how resilient you are. Look at your perseverance. Let's talk about why you're doing that, why you get up in the morning. Is it someone you love? Is it spiritual? Is it religious? Hey, let's talk about that. Because you're being generative all the time, but you're not letting yourself even feel good about it, right? That. Okay, I'm going to be generative. I'm not even going to get any reward for. For it right today. So I should be able to understand what is going on in me when I'm able to do this and feel good that I'm able to do it right. It tells us we can look at ourselves and that's how we bring our lives. Maybe that person who doesn't have any pleasure in the day. We'd say, come on, can you take. Carve out 15 minutes of something that can be about you, or can you take pleasure in that you're making sacrifices for others? Can we look at what you're doing and why is there a time horizon when things could get better? Now we're strategizing, right? We're looking at what's real, and we're only going to look at what's real if we. We have to have a mechanism of understanding ourselves and a mechanism of bringing change. But we have to be like, positioned about ourselves in the right way that says we're human. Our birthright is the generative drive. Let's look at how we're being generative. Let's cultivate more of that in us. And it's just guaranteed we are not steering ourselves down the wrong path. Path. If we're doing that.

[John Miles]

Paul I want to end by giving the listener how they can apply what they're hearing, start using this in their lives. So in the last chapter of your book, you give three reminders. You say start or return to yourself. I think the next one was communicate often, and then the third one was fight. Well, can you explain those to the listener and why these three things can help propel them to use all the concept we've been talking about today?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think yes, yes. What they're intended to do is just to help us ground to ourselves, right? Touch base with ourselves, but then stay there, right? So what is going on in me? There's so much temptation to look outside of us, right? If I feel upset is like, who am I upset at? Who's making me upset? What am I mad about in the world, right? How is something else getting to me from outside? And we have to bring the spotlight back to ourselves and say, okay, I don't have to be. I don't have to be afraid of looking at my self. What is going on in me if I'm having conflict with another person, okay, what is that person bringing? What am I bringing to the table? What can I do to bring a solution state to this? Or maybe I want to disengage, right? I'm the person who has agency over me. Me. Let me try and understand myself as best I can so that I can solve these problems, right? So in. In bringing the spotlight, what the idea is to help us be intentional and to remind us that we can look at ourselves. And I don't need to be afraid to say, hey, if I want to really see who's behind most of what's not going right in my life. Who has responsibility for most the of of it? I can go look in the mirror, right? I can go look in the mirror and I'll see, right? The answer to that is me. And I don't have to beat up on myself because I can find that empowering. What can I bring to understanding myself and having it better and making my own life better? If I'm doing that, I will be healthier and happier and I'll bring that to the world around me. So I'm having conflict with someone and I stop and think, that person always wants to have conflict. They're cynical. That's how they go about life. Then I think, well, do I think I have to set a boundary between me and this person? Right? Or maybe I'm having conflict with the person because whenever I get more frustrated with life, I feel less patient with that person. Let me bring this spotlight back to me. We don't have to be afraid. Am I going to find the problem in self or other or both? Right? Because I have a route to understanding myself. I'm not beating up on myself. I'm bringing compassionate curiosity. Why am I doing all this? Because I want things to be better. And I try and bring in the book a lot of routes of inquiry of here's how you hear our steps, of how you can make this better. And I want to bring that message here that we're only scared to have the spotlight on us, right? If we feel ashamed because of some reflexive stigma about mental health and we feel disempowered, how about we get rid of both of those things and say if you're having mental health issues, that's because you're human, right? So it's okay to look at yourself. And if you're looking at yourself, yourself, right, and you have a structure around doing all of that, then the thought is like, you're going to find a route to healthy change. That's okay. Right now we've taken away so much of the fear and confusion that makes us turn away from mental health.

[John Miles]

Paula, I'm smiling because my, my solo episode tomorrow, I capture the Truman show, the movie in it. And I use this analogy of a, of a spotlight. But I used it differently. When people think of the Truman show, they often think of the last moment when he runs into the side of the sphere that he's in. And I think the real moment of transformation that initially gets not even noticed is when the spotlight falls from the sky as he's driving down the road and he's what is going on and yet everyone around him is acting as if everything is normal. And I think a key point is we need to look for those moments because I think we do what Truman does in our own lives and we have these things that are pent up and we just go along with life as normal instead of looking at the sign and then starting to build the structure of ourselves. So I thought I would just end there.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

I think that's a beautiful way to end. And I think we could think of that as saying, if it's my life, it's okay. The spotlight is on me. I don't have to be afraid of that. And if I let the spotlight be on me, it's not a selfish thing either. I'll be the healthiest I can be for myself and others. It's okay. It's your life. It's okay that the spotlight is on you, Right? Because if the spotlight is on you and you're looking at yourself, well, you're going to bring understanding. You're going to be better able to define your life that way.

[John Miles]

Paul I always try to end by having the audience have the opportunity to understand more where they can reach out to you. Where is the best place for them to learn more about you and your work?

[Dr. Paul Conti]

So there are two websites. One is drpaulconti.com and it's just Dr. And then my first name, Paul, my last name Conti. So Dr. Paul Conti drpaulconti.com and then I work with about 30 like minded people and we do a lot of different direct mental health and consulting based work. We do general work, we do intensive work with people and with couples. And to see a little bit about me and then also how do we work here? How do we feel like this is the approach to helping people? How do we feel mental health should be practiced? The website there is pacificpremiergroup.com so just pacificpremier groupstrungtogether.com and then there are links there to the podcast and to media and to the book. So from there there's be links to anything else.

[John Miles]

Paul, it was such an honor to have you today and congratulations on this fantastic new book, what's going Right. I highly encourage it for all my listeners.

[Dr. Paul Conti]

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

[John Miles]

That brings us to the end of Today's conversation with Dr. Paul Conti. And what stayed with me most is this transformation begins the moment we become curious about ourselves instead of ashamed of ourselves. Because so many People move through adversity carrying invisible narratives that they're broken, that they're damaged, that something is fundamentally wrong with them. But as Paul shared today, lasting mental health is not built through self condemnation. It's built through self understanding, through compassionate curiosity, through awareness, and through reconnecting with what he calls our generative drive, that deeply human desire to grow, to contribute, and to make life better for ourselves and others.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Others.

[John Miles]

Because maybe transformation isn't about becoming someone entirely new. Maybe it's about reconnecting to the parts of ourselves adversity tried to bury. And next up in our Forged in Adversity series, I'll be joined by psychologist and best selling author Dr. Guy Winch. In that conversation, we explore emotional at first aid and why heartbreak, rejection, failure, loneliness and shame often leave wounds just as real as physical injury. Because transformation doesn't only happen through major life events. Sometimes it begins the moment we learn how to care for our emotional lives with the same seriousness we give our physical health.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Moods are extremely contagious, as when somebody comes home irritable or preoccupied or anxious or worried or tense. It radiates to the it creates that vibe. Then the home. And so there are all these ways in which we really bring work home. Not to mention that so many people are dealing with after emails that they have to check in all the time. So they're not even they're still really at work. They're still dealing with it. They're still in that mindset. They don't even get the evenings or the weekends to fully detach and to be somewhere else mentally, physically. For all of those reasons, we absolutely bring it home. And then it really infects them.

[John Miles]

If today's conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who may need it. Leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts or Spotify and Explore [e-mail] until next time. Remember, adversity may shape your story, but it doesn't have to define your future. I'm John Miles, and you've been passion struck.