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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Body Trauma Expert: Medicating Kids Can Harm Brain Development! Eye Movement Trick That Fixes Trauma! The Secret To EMDR Therapy! - Bessel van Der Kolk
02:04:28
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- [00:00]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I've proven how helpful EMDR can be for PTSD and depression.
- [00:04]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why and how?
- [00:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, trauma is a real living and whatever you're feeling is real, as, of course, the feeling like a memory. But in our research, you discover that if you move your eyes back and forth as you recall traumatic experiences, your brain is able to say, this is what happened to me in the past. And 78% of the people we studied who had adult muscle trauma were completely cured.
- [00:23]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Can you do it on me?
- [00:24]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I could. What do you see?
- [00:28]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Bessel van der Kolk has been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century. And for over 40 years, his clinical research has revolutionized how we understand trauma and its impact on our brain and body.
- [00:39]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Your early childhood experiences create who you are.
- [00:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And how many of the people that you treated in your practice have childhood trauma?
- [00:45]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
About 90%. And it's very difficult to change.
- [00:48]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Are they changeable?
- [00:49]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yes, that is the great news. But the problem is the focus is not on helping people. The focus is on running successful financial organizations. And even though the first person who studied yoga for ptsd, which was very effective. And then there's psychodrama and neurofeedback, where our results were stunning. People are so conformist. We already know the answers. Let's not explore anything new, but let's do the science and see how well it works and for whom.
- [01:12]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And what about psychedelic therapy?
- [01:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It's very effective.
- [01:15]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Have you ever done a psychedelic drug?
- [01:16]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, of course.
- [01:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What did you learn?
- [01:18]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That my quest for understanding trauma had to do with my own childhood trauma. All the pain, all the you're suffering.
- [01:25]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Earlier on I asked if people could heal from their trauma. Have you healed from yours? The diary of a CEO is independently fact checked. For any studies or science mentioned in this episode, please check the show notes. Quick one. Before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show. Week after week means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, Please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, you've been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century by the Financial Times. What is the mission you've spent your life pursuing?
- [02:42]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I have been interested in how people survive extreme situations, how people can overcome the history of people doing terrible things to each other and how we can create a better world in that regard, actually. So the mission has been rather social, but the investigation has been very much based on what we're learning about brain science, what we're learning about psychological functioning, et cetera, et cetera.
- [03:15]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And this word trauma seems to be central to your work. And when I looked before this conversation at the rise in the use of this word online and people searching this word, it's pretty staggering what I found. There's this graph that shows a huge jump in people using the word trauma. What is your view on the subject matter of trauma, specifically how we've misunderstood what it is?
- [03:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, there has been evolution, which is quite striking. And when I first started to study trauma, I was on the research floor at Harvard and my colleagues said, why are you studying trauma, Basil? When you croak, nobody will ever talk about trauma again. It's a completely alien subject. And now everybody talks. Everything is a trauma. And so from being non existent has become a total explanatory mode. And so we have gone, as we always do, from one extreme to the other. And my primary interest these days is not so much into trauma. Trauma started it, but somewhere along the line I got to realize that trauma is to a large degree a breakdown of connection between human beings and synchronicity between other human beings. And these days I'm much more focused on how we can help people establish a relationship to themselves and to the people around them.
- [04:43]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When people are suffering from some kind of psychological disorder, whether it's depression, anxiety, ptsd, what is it that you disagree with, with the traditional view of how to treat them.
- [04:55]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
People are being taught methods that they say can cure people in eight sessions, which they can't. And so there still is what people learn in school these days, although no good clinician I know actually practices that is to help people thinking out, to straighten out people's thinking and to make them not think these crazy thoughts like. And there really is no evidence that we can do that.
- [05:23]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is that cognitive behavioral therapy?
- [05:25]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cognitive restructuring sort of thing. Or do you get people better by blasting them with trauma, and then before long, they get desensitized to a trauma? And I think both of these methods are just. They don't get it. That completely doesn't get the issue at hand, actually, why I cannot talk into being a reasonable person. People are not reasonable people, and trauma is as unreasonable as it can be. That's really at the core of, if you understand trauma, is that your brain and perceptual system gets rewired so you see things almost entirely through the life. The past experience rather than current experience.
- [06:09]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay, so if I'm traumatized, talking about my trauma doesn't necessarily fix my trauma.
- [06:16]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Trauma is a speechless experience. So we did the first neuroimaging study about people reliving their trauma, and we saw that the entire cognitive part of their brain disappears. That when you're in your trauma, you're just one ball of emotion and there's no thinking. So you're confused, you're befriended. It is, as Shakespeare says, you suffer from speechless terror. You become dumbfounded. So the whole traumatic experience is just beyond belief. And so you stay in a state of confusion and agitation. And then finding language for yourself at this point is terribly important to help you to begin to organize your relationship to yourself. It's not enough, but language and defining your experience is terribly important.
- [07:07]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
The word trauma, as you say, has been thrown around a lot, and it's become a bit of a cultural joke to some people. When you say, you know, something happens to you, you go, oh, I feel triggered. I'm traumatized, et cetera. What actually does count as trauma?
- [07:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Trauma really is an overwhelming experience of, oh, my God. When something happens and you're completely helpless and there's nothing in you that knows how to deal with it.
- [07:38]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
People talk a lot about small T trauma and big T trauma.
- [07:41]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I'm a fan of that.
- [07:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay, so explain why not.
- [07:45]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, this. You need to be more accurate. But the small T trauma is a very real trauma. When your environment around you doesn't acknowledge your existence. Most people, for example, after natural disasters do very well because people get together after natural disasters. I've seen it where we have a cabin in northern Vermont. We have had terrible floods. The neighbors get together. They help each other, and you get a sense of cohesion, actually, and a sense of meaning. We're doing this together. The small T traumas have to do with not acknowledging what's going on with you saying to kids Stop crying. I'll give you something to cry about. No, you don't matter. No, actually, your dad is a drunk because you are such a difficult kid that your father was doing okay until you came into this family and you were too much for him and you caused him to be the person that he is. I think there's people, small T trauma. It's relational trauma, which is a very big deal for most of the people I get to see in my practice. Most people come in not because of big T traumas. It is because nobody saw me, nobody heard me. I was relevant. We always had to take care of my mom or my dad, but there was no room for us.
- [09:14]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So if you get fired from your job and it's a traumatic event for you because you get, I don't know, you lose your friends, you lose the job, your parents are embarrassed about you, can that become trauma? Something like that?
- [09:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yes, you could, depending on how you define it. And for some people, it doesn't. For some people, it doesn't. Depends again, on the context. For some people, you get fired, you go like, well, I didn't like those assholes anyway.
- [09:44]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Or I asked this because I'm wondering if there's a lot of people listening now that I'm trying to understand if their small experience, which other people think is trivial, actually could have resulted in some kind of deeper trauma response.
- [09:59]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Absolutely. At the end, the issue is the perception. Your perception, your perception. The issue is not the event itself. You and I may have had the same event happening. And for me, it reminds me about my brother torturing me, or it reminds me about my mom being sick and not paying attention to me or whatever. And for me, it becomes a very big deal. And for you, it goes like, yeah, but I have so many talents. Why not try something else?
- [10:25]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And can you give me an overview of the work you've done in your life that have fed into all of the knowledge and information that you have? Just for anyone that might not know who you are, what is that sort of body of work?
- [10:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I had a very good psychiatric training in one of the Harvard hospitals. And then I went the last state mental hospital in Boston, which is also interesting. It was a sanctuary for very disturbed people. And so that institution gets closed. I go work at the Veterans Administration Hospital. I met these guys who were people who I looked up to. They were good athletes, competent people, helicopter pilots all my age. And these guys had broken apart and they had fallen apart and go, oh. And they reminded me of some of my relatives who I grew up with who also had been concentration camp survivors and Japanese camp survivors. And then I learned much else after that. But that really opened up my eyes to the. That people can be broken by life experiences. And that really intrigued me tremendously.
- [11:37]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
This is central to your story is this early experience. You said earlier that you were born in 1943.
- [11:43]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
1943. Very important when you're born, has a huge influx on who you become. So my earliest imprint is of my father at some point was detained by the Germans. He was not in Holsters Camp, but you're supposed to go off there. My mom is by herself raising small kids in hiding right next to the place where the Nazis are launching their rockets to go to London. So half of the rockets fell into our backyard. And I have no conscious imprint of that. But I grew up like a kid growing up in Ukraine today. And a lot of kids my age died. I was a very sickly child. It was a lot of hunger and misery. Half my generation died of starvation. And so I grew up with the incredible preconscious imprint of what kids in Ukraine and Gaza are going through right now. And that must have left a trace in my curiosity and my being, including a trace of having a body that was very sickly.
- [12:49]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You were born in 1943 in Nazi occupied Netherlands. Netherlands. Okay. And you're the middle children of five.
- [12:58]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's right. Yep.
- [12:59]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You were very sick as a child.
- [13:00]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [13:01]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What were your parents like in terms of love, affection, all those kinds of things?
- [13:06]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
My mother was more or less broken by the pandemic of 1919 in which her father developed Parkinsonism and became one of those Oliver sex type people. So my mother was very frozen person, which had a very impact on me. My father was very conscientious, loving.
- [13:27]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You described your mother as being a frozen person.
- [13:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [13:30]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And it had an impact on you?
- [13:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. Having a frozen mother has an impact on you.
- [13:35]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What was that impact?
- [13:37]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
The impact is that if you have a mother who is not available to love you and care for you, that comes part of your perception of the world. And that means that there's a lot of work to be done about learning about affection and intimacy and closeness and vulnerability and all those sort of things.
- [13:58]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Your mother would faint whenever Bessel would ask her what her life was like when she was a little girl?
- [14:03]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No, no. I asked her only once. I was already junior professor at Harvard, had two kids, and my parents came to visit me. And here's an example of what sort of parents I had. I left at age 18 for the US because I wanted some distance between me and my parents. 10, 15 years later, quite a few years, I wrote to my parents. It's customary for parents to come and visit their children sometimes. Would you be interested in coming to visit me? They had never crossed their mind. And so they came and we actually had a very pleasant time, very civilized. And so on the last day my parents were visiting us, I said to my parents, you probably don't really know what I do for a living, but a lot of my work has to do with incest, and I wonder where does that come from? And I turned towards my mom and I said, I wonder if something happened to you that I picked up. Were you ever sexually abused? And my mom fainted, fell off her chair. And my father said, look what you did to your mother. And my then wife and her. My father carried my mother into her bed. So I don't know if my mother was sexually abused. She just fainted when I asked her the question, but that's how it goes. You barely get a straight answer to any of these things.
- [15:37]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You said that child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.
- [15:49]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's true.
- [15:50]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And in your book you say that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two thirds, and suicide, drug use, and domestic violence by three quarters.
- [16:01]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, that doesn't come from me. This is data from this very big CDC study run by Vincent Fetti. And so these are data on 25,000 people? Yeah.
- [16:13]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
People have got increasingly interested in their early childhood experiences as a lens to understand who they are as adults.
- [16:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [16:20]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is that overblown or is it important to understand it's not overblown to be.
- [16:24]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Curious about how you became who you became and what the internal ingredients of your cake are. I think that's very good for people to be aware of how they have come, become the creatures, who they are. I think being curious about yourself is very necessary also to be curious in order to be curious of other people.
- [16:48]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When you said about your mother and the incest thing, you'd realized as an adult, much of your work focused on incest. And then you turned to your mother and asked her if there was an experience she had had and she fainted. Do you believe that there's a part of you that knew?
- [17:04]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No, but I don't know if my mother was incested. I Know that my mother was very uptight about sex, and I wonder what happened to her. And her fainting in response to that means that I triggered something, but I don't know what I triggered. I would not jump to conclusions that my mother was instant victim. Something happened to her, but I don't know what it is.
- [17:27]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay, but the indicator was that she was always uptight about sex.
- [17:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It wasn't that you unbelievably uptight about sex. Terrified about sex? Yep.
- [17:37]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
How many of the people that you treated in your practice have could you trace their adult dysfunction back to an early childhood experience?
- [17:48]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Pretty much 90%, let's say.
- [17:50]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah, 90%.
- [17:52]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But that's me. People with autism or people with OCD don't come to see me. That's why I have a very narrow filter in a way of who comes.
- [18:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
To see me and what's the crux of what happened to them as a child? If you had to simplify it, the.
- [18:10]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Crux is not being acknowledged and honored for who they were as kids. That's the big thing, is they were unseen and people did terrible things to them and nobody seemed to bother to protect them.
- [18:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When you say terrible things, terrible things.
- [18:35]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Is being beaten up, being sexually molested, having their bones broken.
- [18:39]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What if it was just words?
- [18:41]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Also words. One of my patients, Mother Cat, said her all the time, oh, you'll never have friends. If people really get to know you, they will all reject you because it's such a terrible person. That's pretty good.
- [18:55]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Who said that?
- [18:57]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, mother, of all the people I'm treating. But it would not be an unusual thing to say.
- [19:03]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
People do terrible things to kids intentionally and unintentionally.
- [19:08]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Automatically.
- [19:09]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Automatically. Does that hurt people? Hurting people?
- [19:12]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, you see it in supermarkets and parking lots and stuff like that.
- [19:18]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What do you see?
- [19:18]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
You see people abusing their kids, saying terrible things to their kids.
- [19:24]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I guess it's difficult for parents because they sometimes think, well, I've got to raise a child that's not dysfunctional, so I've got to have to punish them and I've got to have to discipline them as a way to make sure that they grow up to be healthy and well rounded.
- [19:37]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, that's an interesting cultural issue. That is sort of how my parents and grandparents generation saw their kids. And then people who grew up in northern Europe completely changed their attitude. Now you go to jail if you hit your kids in Sweden, for example. I think me in Holland is also not in the US So people have really changed their mind. But in the us, when they talk about the downside of physical punishment of their kids. Oftentimes, particularly black people will say I want to raise my children knowing about right and wrong. And the Bible says I need to punish my children and that's what I'm doing. And you should not subvert the teachings of my church. And they don't argue with that because at least not straight on.
- [20:28]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I grew up in a household where I was punished physically in pretty significant ways. Ways that I probably can share because it's just quite, you know, significant.
- [20:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Quite horrendous.
- [20:39]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [20:40]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And they are horrendous stories actually.
- [20:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I was born in Africa, so I've got an African mother and an English father. It's funny because I look back on it and I go, and this is just me rationalizing in hindsight I go, I'm happy that I had a home where there was discipline because if I didn't have that home then I wouldn't maybe have left the city. We're one of the few families that actually left the city, the fairly small town, relatively small town to some of the towns I live in now and went and did a lot of things with my life and I didn't get caught up in drugs like some of my friends. I wasn't dysfunctional and my mother couldn't read or write as well. So I feel somewhat thankful. But I'm doing, I'm like rationalizing in hindsight because it somewhat ended up okay in certain measures of my life. In other areas of my life there's.
- [21:29]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Dysfunction and your perception may change really. My perception about my life and who I became has changed quite a bit over time as layers come open. But what you talk about, that things were predictable is very important. My parents also were predictable, which is enormously helpful for at least for you to anticipate to know what you are supposed to do, et cetera, et cetera. Chaos is a terrible thing.
- [21:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I think that point is really interesting because although there was, I was physically punished a lot. It was predictable.
- [22:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [22:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So I knew that if I and I understood why I was being punished so I kicked. I was playing football in the house and broke ornaments.
- [22:11]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [22:12]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Or something like that. It was never unpredictable.
- [22:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Right. But something comes to my mind as you're talking is that same visits that my parents finally came. I had a three year old daughter at the time. We were staying at a house and put my parents on the first floor right next to the main bathroom and then my 3 year old daughter went to that bathroom that was next to my parents bedroom and My mother came out and yelled at me, said, how dare she use our bathroom. You should punish her. And I almost did. I had an immediate impulse. Mom said I should punish my three year old. And I started to walk to her and go like, oh my God. I'm about. Actually, I feel like crying today. Oh my God. I feel I'm about to reenact what my parents did to me. And I made a decision. No mom, she is allowed to use the bathroom. And I set the limit on my mom, which was a transformative experience for me to actually realize that I'm about to repeat what was it done to me, which people do routinely. And I was about to beat my daughter. I said, that's the end of the story.
- [23:26]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It still causes you a lot of emotion.
- [23:28]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It's actually, I'm surprised how much emotion comes up talking about it.
- [23:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why do you think it's so, so much emotion comes up when you talk about that?
- [23:37]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Good question. Interesting question. Because it allowed me to have a life. Much of life is automatic, but you can make a choice to do things differently. You start owning yourself. And that's the moment I started to own. I'm responsible for my kids. I'm going to follow what I think is right. It's really a moment of liberation, but also a moment of separation. Like, I will not be like you.
- [24:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's tremendously hard to do that because it's going against your.
- [24:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I think that's a big thing for all of us because we want to belong. We want to be a member of a tribe. And if you do things differently, you lose your tribe and you become a lonely traveler. So this is incredibly complex because people want to be part of a tribe. We cannot do without a tribe. And so the act of actually leaving your tribe is a very, very major pilgrimage to make.
- [24:55]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
There's parts of me that manifest sometimes and I understand that this is the behavior that I learned.
- [25:02]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [25:03]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And I, I think there's a part of me that's worried actually because I learned I grew up in a home where physic, you know, physical discipline was the response to most kind of forms of unwanted behavior that I'm worried that if I become a dad, that will be my natural.
- [25:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Probably will be.
- [25:21]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah, I don't want it to be.
- [25:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But you don't have to follow it.
- [25:24]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [25:25]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Your kid will drive you crazy because kids do. And at that point, I think having kids has found a great learning experience in life. You know, we all, none of us knows what we're doing and other kids teach us how to be very important teachers for how do you deal with this? Because it's very challenging.
- [25:49]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What did you learn from your children?
- [25:51]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Oh, I learned a lot from my kids, for one thing. So my firstborn was just easy and loving and luminous and pretty and girly. And she now is gender ambiguous and just divorced her husband to be with a woman. So that was completely transformed in her case. And to see go through that journey with her like wow, wow, wow, wow. And my son was a neuro atypical child, very out of control much of the time. Many physical reactions, very bright but reactive, staying in bed, only played computer games. And he's grown up to be one of the most loving, thoughtful adult parents you can hope to meet. So both my kids have become very different people who I thought they were. But I have a very good relationship with both of them, even though I really don't quite understand either of them.
- [27:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When we see dysfunctional behavior in children, I think one of the natural reactions is to give them some kind of medication or to attach some label to them and say that they're broken in this way. How do you feel about that?
- [27:18]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, that is what saved my son because I am a psychiatrist and I know about how these labels are little crutches that never quite capture what somebody is suffering from. And people started wanting to put my son on medications because. But I was a psychopharmacologist. I really studied drugs and what they can and cannot do. And it was very clear that they were not helping him. And I didn't have to submit to authority as most parents would do and say, oh, my doctor says this and this and this. I say, I'm a doctor, I know about brains and I know about kids and I don't know what the hell is going on with my kids. But he doesn't have bipolar disorder and he is not responsible to respond to lithium. And so my. Both my kids were major inspirations for really exploring what was good for them. I'm particularly grateful for my son, who was such a really very scary kid in many ways that my wife, whom I'm now divorced from, she was really great. Also in terms of exploring what might be helpful, but they're really good to also be aware of is the issue of privilege, that I made enough money that we could spend a lot of time trying to find things that would help my son. If we had lived in a housing project, my son would have been a terrible misfit. But because we were able to give him so much support and care by exploration that he Actually found a way of rearranging his mental state.
- [29:02]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I mean, just on that point, there's a stat I read that children from low income families are four times more likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines.
- [29:11]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's right. That's. That's true.
- [29:16]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
400 more likely to receive antipsychotic medications.
- [29:20]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
If you're right, that's a very big issue. No, it's not really my area of expertise. But you know, giving drugs to kids is potentially very dangerous because you interfere with natural processes of brain growth.
- [29:34]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Brain growth, yeah.
- [29:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
So if you give people medication that changes certain chemicals in their brain at the development of phase, it may actually change the way that your brain gets formed and may not allow, as happened with my son, who was able to compensate for many things and his brain was able to learn how to react differently. If you suppress all of that, your brain may not learn these new adaptations.
- [30:02]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You think we should be looking at social conditions before we look at social.
- [30:06]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Conditions, physical conditions, movement, touch, synchrony, music. So in our world, we got stuck in Western. People are allowed to do things they can do. One thing is they can what I call take a swig. If you feel bad, you take alcohol and that makes you feel better. So that's part of our respective tradition, is taking a chemical to change the way you feel. And anybody who says you should take that chemical, nobody ever say you're crazy. And the other thing that Western people are very good at is yakking. So let's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and understand things. And then I'd like to tell people a story that the first time we went to Beijing in 1992, and China was still very poor and deprived and miserable and coming back from this cultural revolution, and nobody could talk about anything. No, nothing happened on. Nothing happened. No, Tiananmen Square didn't happen. It didn't happen. And China was filled. Every park then, as now, is filled with people doing qigong and tai chi. And I go down into the park and do qigong with the Chinese. What's that qigong? Is it the Chinese dancing, Chinese movement stuff? And I do that and I go like, oh my God. That's how they survive by making these qigong tai chi movements, which if you do it in Boston, people say you're crazy. But in China, you cannot talk. You can calm that body down by the way you move. And I became very interested in how cultures around the world actually have very different ways of helping people to regulate their physiology and their synchronicity I want.
- [31:58]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
To talk about all of that, specifically this idea of movement and the role it plays in healing. Just to close off on the part about childhood trauma.
- [32:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [32:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why is it so important for a child to grow up with a secure attachment to a caregiver?
- [32:12]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
You become how people see you.
- [32:16]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You become how people see you.
- [32:17]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. So if you're a kid and most people, most kids, their parents find being cute, or you have at least a grandparent, they say, oh, you're so cute. You're lovely, you're so sweet. And no kid is able to say, I'm just average. Look at just building kids in the world. And I'm not any cuter than anybody else. No. When a kid gets told you're really cute, that is your reality. And if a kid gets told you're really ugly and nasty and mean, that becomes their identity. So you really become how people treat you early on in your life. And that's a very big legacy that I, as a therapist deal with is these imprints of early experience, which are very difficult to change.
- [33:03]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Imprints of early experience, are they changeable?
- [33:07]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yes. That is the great news and also the amazing news that even though we know how to do some of that, we're not going there.
- [33:16]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So you can heal from your childhood trauma. Absolutely everyone.
- [33:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's my assumption.
- [33:23]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When I see people in your experience. You've dealt with patients your whole life, your whole professional life. How many of those patients do you think were healable?
- [33:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I really think that if given a chance and given the resources, you can pretty much do something for everybody.
- [33:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
One of the other.
- [33:44]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But the problem is, again, we go back to where you started before the microphone was on. Is that our focus these days is on productivity and behavioral change and not in how do we find out how to help you? All the things that I describe in my book, almost most of the things that I describe in my book as being helpful, and that was 10 years ago. I know some other things since that time are unconventional methods that do not get practiced in mainstream psychology and psychiatry because they need to be productive and they need to be cheap. And whether you get better or not doesn't matter, but you're cheap is the main motivation. I think the profit motive is killing good practice.
- [34:39]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Your book was very interesting because when I read the COVID and then I watched a video you'd made talking about the sort of six sort of treatments and stuff that exist within the body, things like yoga. You talk about theater and acting and how that helps you to get out of your trauma, etc. The body keeps the score. This was a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma, and it became a.
- [35:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Meme, which is an interesting thing to see.
- [35:07]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Well, I use it in my everyday language with my partner, and I've had other people say, the body keeps the score. The body keeps the score. When we're talking about how our body is holding onto those traumatic memories, traumatic things that have happened to us. For someone who has never read your book and doesn't even understand the base premise here, what is the base premise of the title there?
- [35:33]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It's really that trauma is a visceral experience.
- [35:38]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What does visceral mean?
- [35:39]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It's healing in your body. Heartbreaking. Gut wrench. You stiffen up, you surrender, you lose your power, you tighten up. That's really where trauma is lived.
- [35:53]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I kind of see it as two approaches. You can either go, let's try and change the mind, which will then change the body downstream, or you can say, let's change the body, which will then change the mind. That could.
- [36:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But I do a lot of CBT with my wife. Let's say, yeah, I point out her irrational behavior and that she should really see things from a different angle and really see things correctly. And I barely have much success with that. And I'm a bit surprised that psychology does things that most spouses have failed in using very well.
- [36:31]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
This somatic approach. I've only recently heard this term from my partner, and she says it's amazing. And she told me to speak to you on this podcast because she says you'll really help to change her opinion on this. What is this somatic approach to healing?
- [36:43]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Somatic approach is to really experience what your body feels and also allowing your body to do things that it has been afraid to do and to explore how your body moves through the world.
- [36:58]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
In some ways, why women justice seem to be so much better than at this stuff, than men. Because they're doing like Pilates.
- [37:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Sure.
- [37:05]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Pilates, yoga. These are all things dancing. These are things typically women do more than men.
- [37:10]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:11]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And it seems women are just more in touch with it.
- [37:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, I think it's an intriguing question because it's not exclusively women, of course. Men have always done it in armies and basic training and the military. And what's intriguing to me is that, you know, when people join the military, oftentimes they're not very well put together people, and they go through basic training and they really march together, they sing with people and they climb barricades and they go through composite physical experience. With other people at the end of 12 weeks, they feel competent and they feel connected, and they have found a band of brothers. How do they do it? Not by yakking, but by having very deep, shared physical experiences.
- [37:59]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
One of the interesting things that you write about, which I found particularly interesting because I saw little flashes of myself in the words is you said, I found that the more traumas your patients have in their background, the more creative and successful they often become.
- [38:15]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Often, often. And we don't know how often that is, but I get to meet quite a few. Yeah, yeah.
- [38:22]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's the people who have had to struggle, who often see new possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options.
- [38:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's true. That's true. Yeah. But, you know, but those are the people who manage to get into my practice are the people who don't find those solutions, don't have the wherewithal and the capacity to make it into therapy.
- [38:46]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
With me, they might be outside with.
- [38:49]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
A drug addiction, getting drugs lying on the streets, etc. Etc. And to a large degree, I see that as an issue of accident, you know, this past year, I visited a program in Los Angeles called Homeboy Industries. It's a program for formerly incarcerated, largely Latin men who had no fathers, who had been criminals. And it's a spectacular program where they honor. They say, what do you need? How can we take care of you? How can we make safe place for you? And I saw real treatment there. St. Quentin Hospital. St. Quentin Prison, famous prison in California, is now trauma based. They used my book as a vortex there. And they're transforming people's lives by acknowledging the reality of what they dealt with, helping people to be part of the healing system, working in groups, working with movement like it's in quinton. They have hula dancing classes. I go like, yeah, Moving together with other people gives you a sense of connection, sense of pleasure. They're really beginning to understand you can do it at Harvard Hospital. You wouldn't do the hula with people. You wouldn't dance with people.
- [40:10]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment community that says you'll get better returns if you invest in someone, an entrepreneur or a founder, that is a little bit traumatized. And I actually think. I don't want to misquote her, but Barbara Cochrane, who's a shark on Shark Tank in the USA here on the show, and one of the things she said to me was, with all of her investments, the ones that tend to do the best are those that have a little bit of A trauma in their past. And she says, because when they call me with a problem, they call me with the solution attached versus people who have never had trauma. They call me and just tell me the problem. So they'll call me and say, listen, Barbara, this has happened and this is what we're going to do about it. And that was her. You know, she said it in a slightly humorous way, but I wondered if you thought there was any truth in this idea that.
- [40:57]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, I think that's, again, a selection bias of people she works with. I know certainly plenty of people have had plenty of people work for me who really get paralyzed in the face of challenges and who don't have a solution and become very dependent on getting the vaccine. So I think she has a bit of an unusual sample, actually, because I.
- [41:21]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Wondered, if you've had an anomalous early upbringing, does that make you an anomalous adult? Does it increase the probability that you become an anomalous, slightly different adult?
- [41:31]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Absolutely.
- [41:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And that can go everywhere.
- [41:34]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
You develop a mind and brain to fit with that particular situation. And if that particular situation doesn't help, you need to find new solutions. And so trauma and abuse really forces you to try to find other solutions, but many of them are not successful.
- [41:52]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is trauma a story in your brain?
- [41:54]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No. Trauma is a perception in your brain a perception.
- [41:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What's the difference?
- [41:58]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
So the issue is, something happens and your brain and mind takes it in and then makes an adaptation to that particular event. That depends on how old you are in the circumstances. And it's very different for different people.
- [42:12]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Give me an example of a perception.
- [42:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
If you would beat me up right now, I'd go, this guy is crazy. And I can call people and ruin your reputation, et cetera. If you're three, if I'm three years old and you start hitting me as a kid, I don't know what the hell to do about it. And I'll likely think it's probably I did something wrong, that I caused the guy to beat me up, and I'm a terrible person. And no wonder that he beat me up, because I'm a horrible creature. And that's what almost everybody who I know who was beaten as a child has the internal understanding of it. Not when you're 8 years old or 15 years old, but when you're very young. That becomes your experience because you're still.
- [42:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Forming your perception of the world.
- [42:58]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. Your brain creates a map of the world in very deep ways. And so your experiences form an internal wasps of the world that makes you expect Certain things at certain times. So if I walk into a room and I see a person who looks like my old uncle who he has to play with, I start sidling up to you because you, on deep level might be of that very nice uncle that I once had. I don't know that. But my brain is set to interpret the world in a particular way. So one of the things most profound research experiences I had was purely accidental. We started to do Rorschach tests on people.
- [43:43]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What's that?
- [43:44]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Inkblot tests. So you show some formless ink picture, and we showed it to people, and we saw that people had completely different interpretations of what they projected on that ink blood test. And that really brought home to me that we all are living in different worlds. And that, like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those carts. People who had never been in combat didn't see that. Rape victims saw torn vaginas and torn bodies. Other people didn't see this. So once that becomes lodged into your perceptual system, you continue to interpret the world in that particular way, having to do with what you have gone through in the past.
- [44:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And an inkblot test, for anyone that doesn't know, is basically just a piece of paper with random.
- [44:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's all it is. Yeah, but it's been analyzed on about 100,000 people over the years, so there's certain patterns you can detect in it.
- [44:45]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I've never done an inkblot test. I feel like I should do one.
- [44:48]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I learned as much from my inkblot test as I learned from my brain imaging. But the brain imaging is respectable and the mind has sort of disappeared. But, for example, in our psychedelic research, I still very much hope to do inkblot tests because, as Michael Pollan says, how to change your minds. But we know, measuring how people change their minds.
- [45:11]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
How many people do you think? I mean, this is maybe a ridiculous question, but how many people, what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form? How you define it, you know, the.
- [45:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Figures are a quarter of people get physically abused. One out of five people get sexually abused. One of eight kids witnesses violence, being their parents, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, if I sit in a room, you know, it's not a binary issue. It's not either. You were traumatized, you didn't get traumatized. But when I talk to a room of professionals, which I do a lot, I assume that at least half of the group viscerally knows what trauma means.
- [45:56]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans. If I was traumatized and you scanned my brain, is there something you could see?
- [46:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Not necessarily. I can see how your brain may be different from other people's brains. I may take a particular population, you can average it out and you can say, oh, there's a little more activation of the bariac to gray a little bit less of the white insulin. So you see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, you know, I think we learn a lot about the brain, but we don't know much about the brain. And I think people tend to overstate how much the brain pictures can teach us. I love the Hubble's telescope or the Webb telescope. Our brain is like a universe and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably complex connections the brain. But we have learned a few things in the last 20 years.
- [46:58]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So how does trauma affect the brain?
- [47:00]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It affects the brain that you tend to. There's one part of your brain that I call the cockroach center of your brain, the periacular gray that lights up. It's underneath the amygdala. Everybody knows the word amygdala these days. So the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger when you're traumatized, you're likely that that little part of your brain, way back in the your brainstem is firing all the time. All the time. You go like, I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm in danger. And that's where it starts. In a very elementary sensory level, you don't know what the danger is, but you just feel that you should be scared. And then there's certain parts, other parts of your brain, for example, your insula, which makes the connection between physical sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down because trauma, basically the experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gut wrench. And if you have a lot of that, you can learn to shut that part of your brain down. So you don't feel your body so much anymore, or you don't feel your body so much. You don't feel very alive either. You don't feel so scared all the time, but it's likely that you will want to take some drugs to make yourself feel alive sometimes. Stuff like that. Yeah.
- [48:30]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So the part of my brain you said just under the. Around the amygdala, below them, below the amygdala. People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that.
- [48:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Typically, dysfunction is that it keeps firing, keeps firing. And how does that feel? And then the amygdala. So there's a constant sense of. Of subliminal dread.
- [48:48]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is that anxiety?
- [48:51]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Anxiety is already too high mental functioning.
- [48:55]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay.
- [48:55]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It's more elementary. It's like your dog shaking, like, yeah, my daughter has adopted a dog. Three years and two years later, the dog still walks to my house.
- [49:08]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You've adopted a dog and it shakes in your house still?
- [49:10]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, yeah. But still never quite comfortable. And that's how many traumas you meet are never quite comfortable.
- [49:18]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So when someone says they're triggered.
- [49:20]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Now, trigger isn't a higher level thing. Okay, so then the next level is indeed the trigger that is in part mediated by the amygdala is your amygdala. If you smoke detector, that tends to become hypersensitive so that minor things get blown up. And a minor thing that you may say to me I take as the most insulting thing in the world. And so you're constantly triggered by things, and that makes. Makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me. And it's not like I'm hypersensitive. And when you have an off day, that is your issue and not my issue. No, when you have an off day, I feel you off day, and we start getting into trouble together.
- [50:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector goes off. Is that what it looks like on the brain when it's.
- [50:13]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That is one particular guy and nobody is exactly the same as everybody else.
- [50:18]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Can you explain this to me?
- [50:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But basically, what you see here is this is a guy who is reliving a terrible car accident he was involved with. What you see here is that the right posterior part of the brain, temporal parietal junction on the right side of the brain fires, and that's the feeding part of your brain. So you go, oh, my God. Oh, my God, I'm terrified. But there's no cognition, and basically the left side of the brain shuts down. So when you're in your trauma, you don't become. You're not a reasonable person. You actually become a little bit of a blubbering idiot. All of us, when we really are angry, upset, and not very articulate, but we have a lot of feelings. And then the piece that I showed us is that as this guy is reliving his trauma, these two parts of your brain go offline. This is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that's the part of the brain that's the timekeeper of your brain. So if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say I'll go, oh, it's not a half hour, and I'll be okay. So let me just put up with this. But when you get traumatized, the timekeeper disappears, and this is all there is. You lose your sense of perspective. And that is what happens when you're in your trauma. You don't know the difference between the past and the present because the timekeeper of your brain goes offline, and whatever is you're feeling is real, as opposed to being. Feeling like a memory.
- [51:53]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So, yeah. So people that can't see it. In this brain scan, what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated. The left side looks like it's off.
- [52:02]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Off? Yeah.
- [52:03]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And then there's these two blank, empty spaces that aren't activated, called the doors.
- [52:08]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So there's dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's part of the system in the brain that gives you a sense of time.
- [52:15]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay.
- [52:16]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And as long as you have a sense, it's like little babies don't have a sense of time either. Whatever happens, happens. Totally do. You see a child slowly grow and they get a sense of perspective. It's happening right now, but tomorrow it will be different.
- [52:31]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay, so that's when. I mean, presumably that's when you get anxiety, right? When you start thinking about the future.
- [52:35]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It is about having the perspective of this is happening right now. Right now. I'm really scared. But the moment I go home, the moment I call my friend, I'll feel better. So that you need to have that capacity for perspective. And that perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma and you become a traumatized person.
- [52:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So this particular person, this brain scan that I have here, this guy was in a car accident. And the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in an FMRI scanner and he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain.
- [53:15]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Exactly.
- [53:15]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So he was shown maybe a car accident or something.
- [53:17]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No, no, specifically his car accident.
- [53:19]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Oh, you showed him a picture of his.
- [53:20]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
What did you see? What did you hear? What did you smell? What were you thinking? Very specific sensory details.
- [53:27]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay, so you asked.
- [53:28]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Not somebody else's sensory. Your sensory details.
- [53:30]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And the right side of his brain was illuminated.
- [53:33]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. Lights of the brain became very active. But what got inactivated was the timekeeper of his brain, so he could not lie there and Say, oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday. He's reliving what happened yesterday.
- [53:52]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Instantly.
- [53:53]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
You feel like it's happening right now. And that's the nature of trauma. Trauma is not a memory. It's a reliving.
- [54:01]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Are you consciously reliving it or is your subconscious reliving it?
- [54:04]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I feel like it's happening right now.
- [54:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
With all forms of trauma, but not.
- [54:09]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It'S happening right now, but my feeling is happening right now in my body. You don't know that the feelings actually belong to the time that your dad used to beat you. It is now. I feel the same way because I disagree with you.
- [54:24]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So I've been triggered in the past and I felt that sort of instant fight or flight response because something's happened or whatever, and it's instantaneous. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's right there.
- [54:37]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And so people are confused about it. They say, oh, you relive the past. No, actually, you're not aware that you relive the past because the past is the present. So you don't think, oh, this reminds me about the time that my dad used to be beat me when I was four years old. No, it feels like you are beating me right now.
- [54:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash, to ever stop this triggering?
- [55:03]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, he's done quite well.
- [55:05]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
He's done quite well.
- [55:06]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
He did emdr, actually. Eye movement desensitization.
- [55:11]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And what was his results?
- [55:12]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
He is an all right guy. He's functioning. He's fine. He's no longer traumatized person.
- [55:19]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice?
- [55:25]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Oh, really? People really coming to life? People just saying, it's over.
- [55:28]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Give me the most.
- [55:31]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
The best example, good example, is the videotape I showed you people yesterday of a woman, again, terrible car accident, freezing, upset, freaked out. And then three sessions later, we go talk about it. She says, yep, this shitty thing happened to me. I was in this car accident and I jolted for it, and my head was swollen, and, boy, that was terrible back then. But I now have a granddaughter, and I drive my car to my granddaughter and I'm fine.
- [56:00]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Three sessions.
- [56:01]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It took three sessions. Yeah, and we saw it in psychedelic therapy all the time.
- [56:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What did you do in those three sessions?
- [56:08]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Wiggle your fingers in front of people's eyes? For me, EMDR was really the gateway drug. I've written three books about ptsd. Actually wrote the Very first book in which the word PTSD exists in 84 or something, but they didn't know how to treat it. I'm a world renowned expert, but I have no idea how to treat it because people keep reliving their trauma and they don't know how to stop that. And then somebody starts telling me about emdr, and I don't believe a word of it. And they say, just, you move your fingers in front of people's eyes. I mean, you move your eye from side to side as you relive the trauma. And I go, that's crazy. Everybody who hears it, that's crazy. And then people start doing it, and they showed me how it works. I go like, wow. And people indeed had a certain subsample of people we studied indeed, after a few sessions of emdr go like, yeah, that really sucked. But it's over. It belongs to the past. It's not happening right now.
- [57:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal their trauma?
- [57:20]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, and then of course, we had to do a little research, which took us 15 years to get enough funding to do it, to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth. And then we discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you recall traumatic experiences, you activate certain pathways between the temporal practical junction, which is your sense of self, and your insulin, which sense your body. So your brain is able to say, oh, yeah, this is what happened to me, but it happened to me in the past. So these are pathways that makes it possible for your brain to make that distinction.
- [57:59]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And in the research that's been done on this, what did the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy?
- [58:08]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
In our research, 78% of the people who had adult onset trauma, so being assaulted or raped by a stranger, 78% of them were completely cured. But that's not the majority of people. We see it because most people we see have early childhood trauma, which is much more complicated.
- [58:34]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment.
- [58:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, because your early childhood experiences create who you are. So if you go to a fancy College when you're 18, you do become identified with that college, but it doesn't radically change you into a new person. It becomes part of your identity. But if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life, you actually become that. The imprint is very deep early on.
- [59:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So it's called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing treatment. I was just looking up some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions with PTSD. A 2020, 2014 meta analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size depression. A 2024 systemic review and meta analysis encompassing 25 studies and more than 1000 participants reported that it alleviated depressive symptoms. The same 2014 meta analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect. And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data meta analysis concluded that EMDR is as effective as other psychological treatments for ptsd, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates. So can you show me how it works? Can you do it on me?
- [60:11]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I could. Can I move my chair?
- [60:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Of course you can. You're going to come closer.
- [60:20]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
So can you bring to mind and really sort of rather unpleasant experience you have had not too long ago?
- [60:27]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [60:28]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And can you bring to mind what you saw at that point?
- [60:35]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [60:35]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Can you remember what the voice sounded like at that point or whatever it was? Any sounds come to mind?
- [60:46]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [60:47]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Do you remember what your body felt like back then?
- [60:53]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [60:54]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Can you remember what you were thinking or bring to mind what you were thinking?
- [61:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [61:06]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Okay, so how vivid is your feeling right now of recollecting it?
- [61:13]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Like a six, seven out of ten.
- [61:15]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Okay, so stay there. Now follow my finger with your eyes. So look at me right now. Take a deep breath. So what comes to your mind right now as we're doing this?
- [61:51]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I feel calm. Yeah. I just don't. I feel calm.
- [61:56]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Okay, so when you go back to what you were just feeling, what's it like now?
- [62:10]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's hard to recall why I was bothered. That's the best way to describe it.
- [62:15]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
See, that is the weird stuff, you know.
- [62:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why is that? Is that just because. Why is that?
- [62:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No, See, that is what's so great about his work. We don't know the linearity and we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint is gone now, but it is. And you know, of course, if we bring up something much worse than what you had gone to, it takes it much longer and a lot of other stuff comes up, but somehow EMDR seems to do it creates new associative processes in the brain. So let's say for some people, did EMDR me, something really very, very nasty has happened to me. And I started off being very upset. And then during the emdr, I don't know if this happened to you, I had images of sitting in my dining room table as a kid and had images of playing in a playground in primary school. Sounds orange don't come in my mind. And then we stopped it and indeed. So, yeah, that really sucked. Time to go on. An important part is you did not tell me what you were going through because I'm suspicious of language, because language is always an interactive process. And if I would ask you to tell me what happened, you will filter yourself because certain things may be embarrassing or you don't want me to know about it. And so we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it, and we organize some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this. So you saw a little bit of this very minor way. For me, when I first saw this, I was blown away by it and thought, I need to study this. So when they quoted studies, the main study was done by me. NIH funded it, but that was also the last time that somebody got funded for nih, for emdr.
- [64:18]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Breathwork.
- [64:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [64:21]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What role did breathworks become a really big topic? My partner runs a business called Barley Breathwork, hashtag ad. And she takes women away. She does these breath work retreats all around the world, has a studio, et cetera. What do you think of breathwork as a way to really.
- [64:35]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It makes perfect sense.
- [64:36]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why?
- [64:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
For one thing, it has been used since time immemorial in certain cultures. And people say people always discover it. No, in India, people know it. Northern Europe, nobody knows about breathwork. So these are culturally dependent things. I think the closest may know it. I don't know. Go out there and see if people do it. And so people are so conformist to be approved of by their teachers and their peers. Then when people do something innovative, they tend to very quickly be cookie. They're crazy. I really got into bodywork and I've not done breath work myself, but I hear about it from people and I. So it's perfectly legitimate to me. But when you do something new, like I was the first person who studied yoga for ptsd. And people go like, putting your butt in the air and twisting your spine pedal for trauma. Like I said, well, let's find out. And so we did a study and it turned out that yoga was very effective for treatment of ptsd. But the overwhelming reaction of my academic colleagues was, oh, there he goes again. He's gone off the deep end. And now yoga is sort of pretty well accepted as it.
- [66:00]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So you can, yeah, you can use yoga to treat trauma.
- [66:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No, you don't treat trauma. Yoga to treat your relationship to your body. It's not the same thing, but trauma really distorts your relationship to your body. And what our research also shows is that when you start doing yoga, certain brain areas that tend to get so dampened by trauma come to life.
- [66:29]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What did you find in those studies? I've got one particular sort of screenshot here.
- [66:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, that's a little study.
- [66:34]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So what's explain here what's going on.
- [66:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
This is a tiny study. So what you see here is that after doing yoga, your insula gets more activated. Your insula gets, is the place in your brain that makes you know what your body feels like when it rains and you have no raincoat on and you go, I better get an umbrella. So that you need to know what your body experiences, needs and anticipated. And that dimension of self experience tends to get very damaged by trauma. The reason for that is it's an adaptive thing because trauma is. So we lived in visceral. Visceral experiences. As Darwin said, heartbreaking. Gut wrench is the visual sensations. And so if you're constantly heartbroken, gut wrenched, you charge it, pull it down and so you lose contact with your body as a defensive maneuver of feeling overwhelmed by these physical sensations.
- [67:35]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So I want to make sure I understand this. So the insular part of the brain is the part that links how we're, what we do with how we feel.
- [67:43]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
How we viscerally feel. Yeah, what's happening in our bodies.
- [67:46]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay. So it links how we're feeling in our bodies to.
- [67:51]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
To what we know about ourselves.
- [67:53]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah, the stories we have in our head about ourselves. So that's what the insular does. And trauma interrupts that which causes what kind of dysfunction on a day to day basis?
- [68:02]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Like you are out of sacrificing, you feel numbed out or disconnected, you don't feel alive, you don't feel connected, you.
- [68:09]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Can'T feel pleasure or you feel hypersensitive.
- [68:13]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And you feel hypersensitive because you talk.
- [68:15]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
About the two sort of responses being disconnection or hypersensitivity.
- [68:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
There's always these two contradictory things that coexist. Remembering too much and remembering too little, feeling too much and feeling too little. There is no happy medium. You go from one extreme to another. You're agitated and numbed out at the same time. And I bet you know what it's like because we all have been there, that we feel agitated and at the same time we feel completely nothing at all. And there's almost no mind there And I think it's a very uncommon human experience.
- [68:52]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And the insula is playing a role that insulin.
- [68:54]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Insulin plays a big role in that and many other brain structures.
- [68:58]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So if I start doing yoga, what is that then doing to that? Hypersensitivity, disconnection.
- [69:03]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yoga makes it possible for you to reconnect your senses in a way to feel what you feel and to make it safe what you feel. So that is where you go to a yoga studio with a teacher with a nice voice who really helps you to. Now take a deep breath, stretch out your arms, feel that Warrior 3 pose, and then you start feeling it. And for many people, doing yoga can be actually quite agitating, Scary, actually, in a way, for traumatized people, we see it all the time, is that something gets triggered and you start getting upset. Just doing a simple down dog, let's say. Or certainly the yoga pose that all sexual abuse victims have great trouble with is the happy baby pose. Happy baby pose is when you put your feet in the air, you lie on your back, you hold your toes and you spread your legs wide so your pelvis is up against the air. For most of us, that's a very pleasant pose, makes you relaxed. If you're a sexual abuse survivor, that's going to trigger a lot of stuff.
- [70:13]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Really?
- [70:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. And you have to be very careful.
- [70:16]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Doing that because it's, it's triggering.
- [70:21]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And so because these positions may be triggering, you may hold your body in a frozen position in order not to trigger those feelings of sexual abuse.
- [70:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I was just thinking, as you're speaking about a friend of mine who tends to go through life with a sort of crumpled up body and they're low self esteem, they're quite low confidence. I don't know if they're traumatized in any way, can't pass judgment on that, but they started doing yoga and it really has helped their mental health in a profound way. And I'm just wondering what you think the link is between someone who I'm just telling you on the surface is like crumpled up through their life, but.
- [70:57]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Then goes, absolutely, I told you I was a sickly child. I was really sickly until I had Asthma. I was 13. And I think the most helpful thing I ever did was Rolfing. Rolfing is a very intense form of massage where they sort of tear your muscles from your fascia. And I came to live in a new body. I no longer live frozen in that body of this little child who almost died. Had a profound effect to me as much as anything I've ever done.
- [71:31]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why and how.
- [71:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Because you get stuck in habits, in a way, trauma becomes a habit. My habit is that when I see a strong guy in a room, I get scared. Hypothetical situation. And so you have habitual responses. And part of what you do therapy for is to get to realize your habitual responses and become curious about it. Like, you know, whenever a person like that comes to the room, I freeze and I sound like an idiot. And your therapist says, so what happens in your body? And how long have you felt this way? You feel this way when you were 6 or 3 or 8. And then at some point, people get a narrative that may begin to explain it. And that narrative may say, oh, I was bullied by somebody. And that feeling comes back when I meet somebody who reminds me of my bully. And then you go like, have you ever tried martial arts? And see what it would be like for you to actually learn to use your body to fight somebody? And that's, for example, treatment that I have never studied. But I was amazed how many of my close colleagues who are very much into trauma tell me at some point, oh, no, I have to go to my martial arts class. And nobody sees that as a legitimate way of dealing with what they're dealing with. But I think people are doing their martial arts because they have memories of being victimized. And it gives me a visceral experience of my body can defend itself, my body. I can use my body to take care of myself. And that's not the intellectual process. That's a visceral experience.
- [73:21]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
People often describe meeting somebody and their body just being off. So they say, I met this person and my body was just. I just felt something in my body that they can't consciously articulate, but they just feel it in their body. This person's a bit off. What do you think they're describing there?
- [73:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I think they're describing two things. We pick up each other's energy. There's such a thing as the mirror neuron system, which hasn't received much attention the past few years. But I think it's a very important invention that I pick up your energy. And if, let's say you're depressed, but you have a job to do, so to talk with me today, it's very likely that I, on some level, will pick up your depression and it will affect our conversation. I'm not saying that I do. That's a hypothetical thing. But we pick up each other's energy. And so we may be somebody who is very angry, but who's trying to behave themselves and be very well, but you may pick up that anger, and that's really very complicated stuff in psychotherapy. Am I picking up your energy, or am I picking up my energy? So if I feel uncomfortable in your presence, is that because you're triggering something in me about my past, or am I picking something up about you? And that is the complexity of our interactions.
- [74:48]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And from an evolutionary standpoint, as you were speaking, I was thinking, where has this come from, this ability to subconsciously just get a read for someone and then form a pattern of, okay, this type of person hurt me in the past, and 20 years later, I meet someone in the street and I immediately feel the same. Is that just a survival thing, what you said?
- [75:09]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I think that makes perfect sense to me because we are primates. It's something that came up in your interview with Trevor, the deep degree to which we're interconnected creatures, that we really don't exist as individuals. So we are meant to live troops. We're meant to be with other people. And so what is safe with other people becomes a critical issue of our survival. The reason that humans have survived, it's not because of your individual gifts of mine. It's because we can band together and build buildings and airplanes and all sorts of stuff. It's all communal, communal things. So it's not central in our science anywhere today. But it's at the core, if you understand human beings, we are a collective bunch of creatures who collectively create something. And so knowing how to do that and how to adjust to each other is at the core of who we are. Yeah.
- [76:07]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Are we losing that a little bit? You know, people are getting lonelier and lonelier and more individual.
- [76:11]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Huge, huge issue. Screens as virtual realities is our biggest challenge, I think. Yeah.
- [76:20]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Why?
- [76:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Because screens give you a virtual reality of pleasure, etc. Etc. But it's not real, and it is not a product of your efforts of doing something. You get a cheap reward, but ordinarily takes a lot of activity. And so you get your little dopamine rush, and it feels like you had experience, but you don't learn how to get along with other people. You don't learn that visceral reaction of pleasure, of we are friends.
- [76:54]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What role does community and social connection play in trauma?
- [76:58]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Everything critical. And there's another thing that is troublesome about the development of our field, namely in our generation, traumas who started with experiences like mine worked with combat veterans. I'm not a combat veteran. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. I don't know anything about the U.S. marine Corps. And so I couldn't have told people what it was like, but I ran groups, they talked to each other, and they learned about what it's like to be a combat veteran from each other. And the moment they made this connection with each other, they were becoming a band of brothers. And that's how people survive trauma, by bonding with other people.
- [77:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It seems that women are better at forming those connections than men.
- [77:45]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, I think so. Although, no, that's not entirely true. I learned a lot about love for my combat veterans. To some degree. I think most human beings don't know what love is until you know what it's like to be in combat together with other people. Creates an enormously deep, deep bond between people. So I know something about male love more from working with combat veterans than anything else. When you're in great danger, guys are there for each other. They really protect each other. They really look after each other.
- [78:25]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What is it about that environment that forms what you're describing there as real love? And how do we.
- [78:31]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It's danger, the natural instinct. When you are in danger, you know, you and I become much better friends than we are. If something bad happened to us right now, we start clinging to each other.
- [78:44]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is that because we would probably need each other.
- [78:46]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
You need each other. Yeah. You need each other and you count on each other and you have each other's back. And you're saying to me, I have your back. Us making commitment to each other is a very profound human experience. You don't get that from a screen.
- [79:00]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Well, also, in an individualistic society, you're almost trained to not need anyone else but yourself.
- [79:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, but, you know, I have friends who went to Eton, actually. So the definition for me of many Englishmen is, your mother hates you and sends you off the boarding school when you're six years old. They ripped looks after you anymore. And what helped my friends who went to the public schools in England was sports. Enormously powerful. People felt really close to each other, moving together, throwing balls together, fighting in the field. That traditionally has been the way that guys get close together.
- [79:40]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [79:40]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That may ring a bell with you somewhere.
- [79:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Of course. Yeah. I was thinking back to playing football growing up and just you. You're one unit, effectively. And if there's a problem in this part of the pitch, then it's my problem, too. If you're in trouble, I'm there to help you.
- [79:54]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And I bet you still make easy contact with your friends who you played football with 20 years ago. No, 30 years ago.
- [80:01]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's really interesting, because as you were talking, I was wondering how we can bring that back into our lives in the modern world, in a modern world where we live on screens and.
- [80:09]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Exactly.
- [80:10]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
White walls alone. You know, the studies say that the average. I think it said something like, the average American has an average of 0 people that they feel they could turn to at a time of crisis, which is down from like three, I think, two decades ago.
- [80:22]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Right.
- [80:23]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I'll have a look. I'll have a look at the stats. I'll pull up the stats. But the general idea of, like, us being lonelier than ever before and how do we, in a society that's, like, designed to be lonely, how do I, on an individual level, fix that?
- [80:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I think that's the big challenge, actually. We have a foundation now, and the main thing that we're interested in is in finding funding for projects like that of how do you help people to connect to each other, be in sync with each other? We're very much into people making music together, making theater together, creating projects together. That is who we are. That is our glory as human beings is this collaborative, active, physical creation of things that has not been part of mental health. We talk and we give pills, but we don't really connect people on a very deep level.
- [81:20]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Are you optimistic about this?
- [81:23]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Not after the last election, no.
- [81:26]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Really?
- [81:27]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I'm very desperate after the election.
- [81:31]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You were very desperate after the last election. Why?
- [81:34]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Because the last election was based on othering. You are different projection. You're evil. These immigrants come and kill us and they project their own discomfort themselves on people from different religions and different skin colors, etc. Etc. It's all projection of people's own discomfort for themselves. And there's no honesty about. The problem is inside of me and not you. Yeah.
- [82:03]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So I think you're not a fan of Trump.
- [82:09]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's. Let's leave it at that. Yeah. No, I think no obvious psychopath who doesn't give a shit about anybody else.
- [82:18]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Are you able to point to anything good about him? And when I've had people on this show that are pro Trump, I ask them the same questions. I say, can you point about anything bad about him? Because he's got family.
- [82:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Anybody who goes to China and says, I've been received better than anybody else in Chinese history is a fool. The guy's gone bankrupt any number of times. He says terrible things to other people. He insults other people all the time. I'm sure there's something good about him. Ivanka seems to have loved him at some point. He's a terrible person.
- [82:59]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Going back to this point of trauma, you say that there's three broad ways to reverse the damage of trauma.
- [83:04]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [83:05]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So if I came to you and I was a traumatized person, whatever that trauma might be, what would step one be? If I came to you for support with my trauma?
- [83:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Step one is tell me about yourself. Who are you? Okay, what do you value? What is working, what you want to work, and what gets in the way. So at start of really, language is terribly important. I don't make a list of how screwed up you are. I help to create a DSM at some point in a very minor role. But the DSM is not a good way of starting off, namely, how sick are you? I want to know who you are, what is working, what isn't working, what has helped you, what hasn't helped you, what gets in the way. And so we create a map together of who you are and to some degree, who you are in relationship with me. And I would check a lot with people about, is this helping you? So I don't prescribe. At some point, I may say, well, have you thought about doing some martial arts? Which would be interesting to go to yoga studio? But by and large, I give very little advice. But I help people to discover what is going on and where that leads them, in a way.
- [84:34]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And then once you've done that, so you find out that I had some early traumatic experience. How do you know? What treatment would you give me?
- [84:42]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That is another tricky thing. And that is something in my book, I tried to do that and I failed. And in my new book, I'm not doing very much better, I would see how agitated you get, how much you stay in focus. And if I would see that whenever a particular subject comes up, I see you getting agitated or shut down, I would focus on that particular experience. And if I would see that you are sort of chronically agitated, unable to focus, I would say, let's just do something. You should do some things that help to calm your body, your brain down. And I'd say when you're sort of overall overwhelmed, let's start with yoga or qigong or whatever makes sense to you in terms of how to move your body. And I'd probably do neurofeedback.
- [85:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What's neurofeedback?
- [85:33]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Neurofeedback is you hook your skull up to electrodes that can harvest underlying brain waves. So you can project your brain activity on a computer screen, and then you can play computer games with your own brain waves to organize your brainwaves in a way that you can be more focused and pay more attention.
- [85:58]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So I've got a graph I'll put on the screen for anybody watching. And it shows five different types of brainwaves. Gamma brainwaves, which are very close brainwaves. Beta, less close, alpha, less close, theta, less close. And then delta, which is when you're sort of sleep and dreaming. The waves are very, very far apart, almost flat. So looking at these different types of brainwaves, if we just categorize them from one being, when the brainwaves are really tight and close to five, which is delta, when they're really far apart, is one gamma. Is that like anxiety or something?
- [86:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No, no. Anxiety is very focused thinking.
- [86:35]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Okay, fine.
- [86:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But it depends on where it is. So the back of your brain is supposed to have these slow waves because your back of the brain is dealing with the housekeeping of your body. The back of your brain tells you you have to breathe a little bit more, you have to go to the bathroom, you have to eat, you have to. Bodily regulation. Very large part of your brain is about your body regulation, which gets messed up in a major way by trauma. So, for example, when you close your eyes, the back of your brain is supposed to develop nice slow waves to tell you, I'm feeling peaceful when you're traumatized. When they ask you to close your eyes, it is very likely that the back of your brain will get agitated and create much faster waves than you should. And so you get a sense of agitation the moment you close your eyes, which of course very detrimental to your health. So my job then becomes how to train your brain so that when you close your eyes, your back of your brain becomes very calm. For example. Again, this is not about trauma. It's about brain organization. So trauma leads to brain organization, but you don't treat the trauma, you treat it when disorganization.
- [87:54]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So for the average person that comes to you, what do you typically end up telling them to do that the average person?
- [88:01]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Some people these days, I say, I think it would be very good for you to have a psychedelic experience.
- [88:07]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
A psychedelic experience. And you found yourself telling people that more than more and more recently.
- [88:12]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, because I have done the research now and our results were really quite stunning. Much better than I ever expected, actually. But I may tell you, no, you're not ready for psychedelics. I think you should really do some neurofeedback and some body practices to live more in your body before we start blowing your mind open.
- [88:32]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When you say body practices, we'll get on to psychedelics. But body practices, these are the things you're talking about, like the yoga, the martial arts, massages. Massages. Any massage.
- [88:43]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, I happen to know some very good body people who, if you have been beaten up or molested, human touch tends to become very complicated. And so you may not feel comforted by human touch and other humans may not have a calming effect in your body, which is really what we're supposed to have in each other. So learning to live in a body that can be touched is quite important.
- [89:13]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is touch healing?
- [89:15]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Oh, absolutely. You don't have kids yet.
- [89:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
No.
- [89:18]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, you have a girlfriend, you know.
- [89:22]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah, it's true.
- [89:24]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Touch is an elemental human comfort thing.
- [89:26]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You described these three broad ways of reversing trauma. The top down approach, which is, I guess talk therapy.
- [89:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, yeah. Doctrine is understanding inside, etc.
- [89:35]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Are you a fan of that?
- [89:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No. Basically, I'm such a cerebral person, so I'm very suspicious of that piece. That's, you know, explaining things, understanding things is not my greatest handicap. So. So I tend to downplay that the importance of that.
- [89:52]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Number two is taking medications.
- [89:54]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [89:55]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Which is to shut down the body's alarms signals, essentially. Are you a fan of that?
- [90:01]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, that's how I started life off as a psychopharmacologist. I did the first studies ever on Prozac and Zoro for ptsd. And so they're not bad. They can be helpful to people.
- [90:13]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And the third approach, the bottom up approach, is allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the helplessness or rage or trauma. And this is really what you focus on, which are called somatic therapies which target the body rather than the mind.
- [90:26]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, well, it's a very important piece and I very much think that's a very big missing piece in the therapy, mental health and medical field in general to give people experiences of connection and pleasure. That is terribly important. But when I wrote this book, before I got into psychedelic therapies, I would add another dimension of experiences that really blow your mind, that really allow you to have an alternate reality experience.
- [90:59]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Also, in terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I'm a big Matcha fan, if you don't already know by now. And so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading matcha company called Perfect Ted. And one of my favorite Perfect Ted products is these delicious Matcha pouches that come in every flavor from salted caramel to peach flavor to mint flavor to berry flavor. One of my favorites is this vanilla flavor, which I'm going to make in just two seconds. You just take this mixer here, get a little bit of the powder, pop it on top of the shaker like that. Put the lid on, shake, shake, shake. Delicious. If you haven't tried this yet, you can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores or online where you can get 40% off. With my code diary40, head to perfecthead.com and put in code diary40 to try this delicious multi flavored matcha now. Highly recommend. And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online. Can the gym help?
- [92:01]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, but that tends to become a very solitary experience. Also, you're sitting in a little treadmill. Watching Fox News is not my ideal traumatrophone.
- [92:14]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Because I go to the gym, I lift weights and so I'm wondering if that's, if that's going to help me.
- [92:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
But that's interesting. Like one of my close colleagues former friend is a weightlifter and she really is very committed that lifting weights can be extremely helpful for trauma. And when she says that, I'm sure that's true for her and I wonder for how many other people it's true. The trouble is that in their current system you're not going to get the money to study weightlifting for trauma. Even though you say it's helpful for you. My friend Mariah says it's helpful. I go like, interesting. Let's see for how many people it's helpful.
- [92:54]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah. One of the ways I think about it is actually a lot of the people that I've interviewed that are weightlifters are bullied kids. I think about Mike who I had on the show, Chrissy Cello who I had on the show. Both of them speak to even Lane Norton, actually I think he speaks to some early trauma as they're kids that were bullied in some form or had a traumatic early upbringing and they are just massive now. And I wonder, some people on the surface go, or even liver king, actually you're that way because you're learning to defend yourself and to build your self esteem. But there's some.
- [93:26]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, but that gesture is not the right gesture. Like, oh, you're just doing that because as if you're being dismissive instead of saying good for you, you're doing that because you felt so helpless and you want to build up your bulk. Interesting. My association is that I testified on behalf of many people who were abused by Catholic priests and almost to a person they had become weightlifters and bodybuilders really clearly for the reason that you also mentioned they were Just trying to bulk up, to feel a sense of agency and power and it didn't work well enough for them. So that alone wasn't enough. I think you also needed to make the connection with the helplessness.
- [94:11]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Psychedelic therapy.
- [94:12]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [94:14]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What's your view on psychedelic therapy?
- [94:16]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It turns my own personal background, of course. I'm a child of the 60s, so I knew about LSD and I think LSD for me at that time. I became a good medical student and came with the culture, stopped taking drugs. But my memory of taking LSD was very positive in that at that time I got to see that I'm a very small part of a very large universe and that whatever constructs I make in my mind are just very small constructs of a much larger reality. And over time I've had quite a few of my friends have become very, very good scientists and they say the same thing about her. Early LSD experiences of really, truly having opened up their minds to many possibilities. But then the culture changed and they became illegal, criminalized, and people stopped doing that. And then Rick Doblin and Michael Mithoefer started to open up the world of psychedelics and they asked me about it 15 years ago or something and I said, I think it's a great idea because when you are traumatized, you live in a very constricted world. Basically the trauma dominates your perceptions and regularly sort of interferes with your exploring larger realities. And I think in theory having a psychedelic experience, an open mind, opening experience experience would be very helpful. But I discouraged them from doing it because they thought it was too. They'll never get by the regulatory practices. And then they raised enough money and asked me if I wanted to run the Boston side of a very large study, which was eager to do, where we compared very good psychotherapy by people who I largely had trained with psychotherapy plus mdma. And the results were stunning. You described stunning that people I saw this therapy would be very helpful in many regards. And it turned out the therapy didn't make that much of a difference a little bit. But the MDMA vastly changed the situation. And I wrote up the paper, but actually astounded by how little that paper gets quoted. I mainly focus on the so called secondary data of the study which was how trauma changed your experience of yourself. And what we saw is that people became much more aware of themselves, people had compassion for themselves. So people oftentimes went into that traumatic experience and had this sense of time, of oh my God, this happened to me, that was so awful, happened to me personally also Actually on psychedelics of things coming up that you were unaware of were so vivid deep down inside. And I think, oh, this poor kid, look what they went through. He was so little, he was so small he couldn't defend himself. And so you get this very deep sense of self compassion instead of the usual response of self hatred and self blame. And then the next thing that we saw happen all the time is and I was such a beautiful kid and I had this alcoholic, violent father, not talking about myself, but could. And my poor dad, he never got to really enjoy this beautiful kid that he had. And he had compassion for the perpetrators. Like it's an astounding compassion opening drug, which is what we have been looking for in so many areas in life.
- [98:06]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You call psychedelics a true revolution.
- [98:09]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, it is. Yeah.
- [98:11]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And you say it's particularly revolution because we don't know how it works. And I was looking at some stats.
- [98:14]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, we don't know how anything works.
- [98:16]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
No, we just have a bunch of hypotheses. Yeah, I was looking at some stats that say MDMA therapy assisted, which is important.
- [98:25]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's what we did. Yeah.
- [98:26]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Assisted with a therapist there or someone who's a practitioner there. A phase three clinical trial reported that 67% of participants who received MDMA assisted therapy no longer met the PTSD criteria compared to 30 odd percent in the placebo group, which is a pretty drastic change.
- [98:49]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That is the main paper on which I'm also an author. It gets quoted. But what I think is more important, not whether the PTSD did so well, but people's relationship to themselves changed. And my other paper describes that actually, but it doesn't get quoted as much. People can focus on the ptsd. The real issue is do you love yourself? Is your heart open? Are you open to new experiences, you know, not do we have this little list of symptoms in the PTSD scale? But are you a human being who embraces himself as a human being?
- [99:30]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Some really interesting studies around treatment resistant depression as well. One with psilocybin, which is what people know as magic mushrooms. A treatment resistant depression study in 2021 showed that a single dose of psilocybin led to a significant reduction in depression with effects lasting up to six weeks for many participants. 30% of participants were in remission after three weeks. And a study by Johns Hopkins University showed that 71% of participants experienced a more than 50% reduction in symptoms after two psilocybin sessions with 54% achieving remission four weeks after the treatment. And the last study that I'll share is a follow up study found that nearly 60% of participants maintained reductions in depression symptoms one year after treatment. But these compounds aren't even legal in America and the UK yet.
- [100:21]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
That's right. But ketamine is.
- [100:23]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Ketamine is, and we do a fair.
- [100:25]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Amount of ketamine as a therapy these days. And I'm intrigued that ketamine seems to have similar effects to psilocybin and mdma, even though they're completely different chemical substances.
- [100:38]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Have you ever done a psychedelic drug?
- [100:40]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, of course. As part of my being PI of this MDMA study, I had to do mdma. But for example, I thought MDMA was ecstasy and put you in a place of pleasure. As part of my job, I had to take MDMA myself and I was ready for my magical experience. I'd never done it before and instead I had always poo pooed the issue of vicarious trauma. No, it didn't really hurt me all that much to see all this trauma in the world. And while I was having my MDMA experiences, all the trauma test people's pain that I had experienced over them came back. I lied there for eight hours in agony going, oh, my God, oh my God. And I got in touch with that. Hearing all these trauma stories did have had a profound effect on me and so I was really changed by that MDMA experience. I became a much sadder but somewhat wiser man.
- [101:36]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
You became a sad man?
- [101:38]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Absolutely. I really felt all the pain much more deeply. Yeah, I was able to sort of ball it off onto that point and the ball came down and it was quite painful. But what helped me is that my guide, Michael Mithofer, when I told him how I felt like a failure having had such painful experience, he said, yeah, I know. I used to be an emergency room physician and one of my psychedelic experiences, all the patients who died in my hands came to visit me. So that was helpful for me because it made me feel like I had a connection with another human being. And so that context is terribly important and that's really what much of the issues are about right now. And I, I think we may very well lose that. And that is that clearly you need to do psychedelics in very safe conditions with a lot of support. And that the set and setting of psychedelics, which Johns Hopkins study, also took very good care of all the studies you mentioned did. It is that the context is terribly important. And while you're in these experiences, the environment needs to be completely supportive and safe and be there for you and what our world profit driven world is looking for is to give people psychedelics. Give them one pill and go off by yourself and then deal with it. The majority of the people in our study said to us the study was over. I couldn't have done this if you guys hadn't been here with me.
- [103:17]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Did that experience with psychedelics, the MDMA experience you had change you?
- [103:21]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, I think it did. It made me a much more humble person and much more compassionate to people in general. Yeah.
- [103:29]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Just one dose.
- [103:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, I've had some other experiences also. I've had a number of other really painful experiences on psychedelics. And it made me much more so. You know, people say, oh, how's your life gone? I became much more aware to what degree my quest for understanding trauma had to do with me. And I learned more after age 70, actually.
- [103:54]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Really?
- [103:54]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [103:56]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Earlier on I asked if people could heal from their trauma.
- [103:59]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [103:59]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Have you healed from yours?
- [104:02]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
No. Healing is a complex word. I would say yes, I'm doing well, as do many people I've worked with. That's what I think the real power of my book is that it's a very hopeful book. Every chapter tells stories about people who are better. And as much science as I've been able to do, I've proven how helpful EMDR can be. I've proven how well yoga can be. I've proven how well neurofeedback can do. That really has been my mission is to not only be an advocate, but really say, let's do the science and see how well it works and for whom. Yeah.
- [104:42]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
What is the. Of all the things that you've tried in your life to help you with your own personal trauma, what are the things that have personally helped you the most?
- [104:51]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
There's another thing that's really helped me and that got me into theater is the issue of psychodrama.
- [104:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Psychodrama?
- [104:58]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. The chapter in the book. And I've never done the science behind it, but I still love doing it. And that is when you act out things in three dimensional space, it becomes a completely different phenomenon. If I tell you, let's put your family in this room, and I say, when you choose somebody to play the role of your dad, where would you put your dad? You know where you'll put your dad?
- [105:27]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
I'd put my dad in this room right now. I'd put him there.
- [105:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Right there?
- [105:31]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [105:32]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Not there, but there. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what the hell's happening here. You know precisely where you want him. And if somebody would play that role for you, the feelings towards your dad would come up, maybe even in your imagination to some degree. Right now, if you imagine your dad there, what's the first thing that comes to your mind?
- [105:51]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Well, I put my dad at the head of the table that we're at because he was always at the head of the table in my household. He was always the one when we're at a table. He was in charge of us eating.
- [106:03]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
What sort of reaction would you have as you see him here?
- [106:09]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's complicated because.
- [106:11]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Exactly.
- [106:12]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's complicated because one of the reactions is like. One of the reactions I had is when he sits there, he's in charge. But now as an adult, I have this other feeling which is like, no, I'm in charge now because I'm at the head of the table. I'm the head of my household. So it's just this authority thing of like.
- [106:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Right, yeah, that would come up. It doesn't come up abstractly, but concretely, when you sit there, it comes up and you may say, dad, I'm the boss now, or I hate that you're being the boss or something. Some feeling comes up, my freedom. And what is striking is that for everybody, when they put that virtual person in the room, the feelings towards that person become very vivid. And the overlap is quite different from what the story that people tell, actually, that brings up the three dimensional. And oftentimes people have had harsh and neglectful fathers. And then. But I say, at some point, after you sort of do things with him, I may even say you want to hate your dad, possibly. I might actually do that, actually have you hit your dad, put a pillow in front of you, but to feel it, oh, my God, if I could have done that, would it be so great? Or how guilty I feel? So you do something virtually that you could never do in your words. And then I would say, would you like to pick somebody in this room to play the role of the dad.
- [107:40]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
That you always wanted, the dad you always wanted?
- [107:43]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And then you choose somebody, and I encourage you to see how you would like that person to hold you. And when you have that, you usually have a very deep emotional release and say, oh, my God, if my dad would have helped me like that when I was 3 years old or 5 years old or 8 years old, and I needed this, my life would have been completely different. And so you make a virtual new reality that is physical and visceral with other people. And the memory of what it feels like can be very profound.
- [108:23]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And you're doing this with a group of people.
- [108:25]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I do this about four times a year with a group of people. It's my favorite clinical activity because I'm always just so astounded by what comes out of it.
- [108:38]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Almost role playing your past and role.
- [108:40]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Playing, but you really, because you work in three dimensional space, it feels much more real.
- [108:46]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah.
- [108:46]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And so, but therapists usually they have this hope that if I'm respectful and caring towards you, I'll give you a reparative emotional experience that will give you the feeling of what it would have been like if you had gotten that the past. And what my old teacher about it said about it's a mismatch. I as an 18 year old guy cannot give you as a 30 something year old guy the feeling of what it be like if your mom would have loved you at age 3. We cannot do that. But in these theatrical enterprises, in three dimensional space, very physical, you do get an imprint of, oh, that is what it felt like, that's what I was missing. So it's a very powerful way of creating a virtual reality.
- [109:38]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So the subject matter of ADHD has become very popular in culture. In 2022, approximately 11% of children aged 3 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD, up from 9% roughly in 2016. And in the UK between 2000 and 2018, ADHD diagnosis in adults rose 20 fold, what with a 20 fold increase in medication prescriptions among men aged 18 to 29. And that's from the NHR. And in Australia over the past decade, ADHD medication has surged nearly 300% with more than a 450% increase among adults and a significant rise among women. What is going on here?
- [110:20]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
See, I really see that somewhat differently from the way you guys talked about it before. And that is all these things are on a continuum. You don't have PTSD or you have PTSD or you don't have ADHD or you don't have adhd. These are no binary issues. So this capacity to focus, to pay attention, to be flexible in your attention is a dimensional issue. So some people have better more than others. Some people cannot sit still at all. And other people can sit still under certain conditions, other people can. So it's not like you have ADHD or not. You may have some issues staying focused or staying still or paying attention. That may be very many underlying issues. Maybe that your mom took some toxins while you were pregnant with you. It's possible that it is in your genesis. Just about every traumatized kid I've ever seen met criteria for adhd, because trauma really messes up Your capacity to focus and concentrate. So this is not an entity, it is a fictitious entity. It's not like cancer of the gallbladder. It's not having astrocytoma in your brain. These mental phenomena are networks of complicated ways of organizing your mind. And our diagnostic system just sucks.
- [111:51]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
When I spoke to Gabor Mate, he. Do you know Gabor Mate?
- [111:53]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, sure.
- [111:54]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah. He. He was describing what ADHD was to me and he said he views it as a response to early childhood stress and trauma rather than purely genetic or neurological.
- [112:05]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, but I wouldn't say that. I'd say it could be genetic, it could be toxic, it could be trauma. This, the surface behavior of not being able to focus and concentrate. Like, my son, certainly had met criteria with adhd. My son, other than that he disappointed me, was not a particularly traumatized kid. No, he really had real issues, organically based, but that he outgrew also at some point. So these things are not stable. These are configurations that you can grow with over time. And they're not multi. They're multifactorial. They're surface phenomena.
- [112:47]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Because I was. I was diagnosed with adhd, but the way other people that have ADHD have just like drastically different.
- [112:56]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah.
- [112:57]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Symptoms to me, like drastically different. Like we're not the same people at all. When I'm close to the same ballpark, like, for example, I'm really good at focusing on something for quite a long time if I'm interested. Whereas I often hear people with certain types of ADHD be very unfocused.
- [113:10]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Absolutely.
- [113:11]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
On things. And so I have struggled with understanding what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD when there can be so many types.
- [113:19]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, that's right.
- [113:20]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
So almost makes me feel that the label, the singular label, which we share, although there's all these subtypes, isn't necessarily helping me to understand myself in any way.
- [113:30]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, I would really. Everybody who is serious about this stuff knows that our diagnostic system totally sucks.
- [113:39]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Really?
- [113:39]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. Just is it total artifacts of us sitting in a room 40 years ago making up little list of diagnoses? There's no scientific validity to this. Actually. PTSD is one of the more scientifically reliable diagnosis of all the diagnosis. They're just very primitive ways of categorizing human mind. And we know so much more and we should move beyond that. And everybody who knows something about science knows that we should move beyond it. But we are not. Why I think we're not doing it because our focus is not on helping people. Our focus is on bonding successfully or financial Organizations. You know, I teach neurofeedback, and there's a chapter on neurofeedback there and serious research in neurofeedback. And we do neurofeedback trainings. And so the head of an insurance company took training with me in neurofeedback, and he pulled me aside and said, bessel, of course, you know that as head of insurance company, I'm not interested in getting people better. I'm interested in having as many subscribers to my band as I can. You know, if we really went back to being real doctors, you say, how do I get you better? What is wrong with you? We know so much about neuroscience these days, about how the brain organizes information, that it's time to actually update ourselves to 2024 and start thinking about networks in the brain and what part of the brain is connected with but mental functioning at different ages and what kids understand at age 3, which is different than age 5. Think in terms of how well is your brain able to filter out irrelevant information? How well is your brain able to be still and quiet, and how well are you able to take on a task and complete it?
- [115:27]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
How do I not raise a traumatized kid? That's all. Because I'm going to have kids probably quite soon, hopefully, and I don't want to raise traumatized kids.
- [115:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Be sure to listen to people in your environment. Don't raise them by yourself. I think raising a kid by yourself, you'll give the full brunt of your own pathology. So it's very important for a kid to be raised by a number of people. So the kid gets to see, oh, my dad is a little bit reactive, but my neighbor across the street is much calmer. And so the kid gets to see multiple perspectives, as all of us idealize African villages as people having many different parents who look after you.
- [116:07]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It takes a village.
- [116:08]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
It takes a village. I say kids need to be. Be the part of a large environment where they can see their parents as safe people, but also flawed people. And the more nuclear you get, the harder it gets to keep your pathology out of your kid's life, actually. So community is everything. Also, in terms of raising a child.
- [116:30]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Is there anything that you think is healing towards trauma, childhood trauma, all forms of trauma that we haven't talked about?
- [116:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Well, the critical issue is that trauma is about being helpless and not nobody coming to your rescue. And so it's very important to have the experience that if you really cannot do something or you're scared, that somebody comes to your help at this point and you get an imprint that even when I feel really bad, somebody will come and be there for me. And that is what many people miss when you have a drunken parent. We see this all the time in our practice. People have a violent parent, usually the father, but not always. And then mom or dad, in my case, mom or dad or my mom turns a blind eye and doesn't say, I'll take care of you, even though the other parent is hurting you. And the betrayal of a parent to let the other parent do terrible things to them and not really say, no, you cannot do this to my kid, is a huge thing for many people.
- [117:46]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It's interesting.
- [117:47]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. Having bystanders who do not come to your help. Very big deal.
- [117:56]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
And the way to recover from that is to counteract it with adult information.
- [118:00]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah. Have live experiences where people come to your help. And I think being part of a sports team, being part of a theater group, being part of a musical group, where people really feel. Now it's your turn. Come in. And, you know, I think the. The issue of rhythmicity and synchronicity is really at the core of our internal sense of safety and belonging.
- [118:26]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Vessel. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is, what do you believe is the question that the audience had just heard this conversation, are screaming down the camera.
- [118:42]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
The question is, where do I get the help I need? I think that's really the big thing, because it is so hard. It is such an exploration. Almost everybody who I know who have found a way of getting better has been an explorer and quite an accidental explorer. And then I found this karate teacher, and then I found this yoga teacher, and then I found this psychodramatist. But it's very largely accidental that I think the mainstream is not on the right road. So you have to discover what works for you. And that's a very tough one because you'll feel stupid and ignorant, and if something is not helping you, it is very hard for you, for yourself. This is not helping me because this person is not helping me. Rather than blaming yourself, there must be something wrong with me that is not helpful for you. And making that distinction is a very tough one. I know it from my experience. I've been in treatments for long periods of time, despite all my qualifications, where it took me a long time to go, like, I'm wasting my time and my money. And if you don't have my Education and background. It's even harder to say I'm wasting my time and money. My money.
- [120:08]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
It was interesting, as you're speaking, I was reflecting on the things that I was thinking a lot about this idea of community. And you're talking about how being in sports teams helps. And I was thinking about, in my adult life, in some of my most difficult times, when things were difficult and I went and played football or some kind of sports with a group of people, I just felt radically better. And I think, actually I put it down to, oh, well, because, you know, I did some exercise. But actually, I think there's something deeper.
- [120:35]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Oh, no, it's that connection. Passing that ball, somebody catching it. You know, I made a difference playing music. My little piece of music that I made made it better place. Being in a theater group, being a cook. You know, there's many dimensions along which you can do that.
- [120:54]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Many of us especially, I think, adult men, don't have these kind of things. I mean, we go to watch Manchester United play or something like that. We go to football ground. But maybe we need to fill our lives with more of these things.
- [121:04]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, we do, I think. And we should say to ourselves, because I need to do more of that also.
- [121:09]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Yeah, well, we kind of just assume that society is designed in such a way where it'll give us what we need.
- [121:13]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yeah, yeah.
- [121:14]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
But in fact, if you think about the loneliness stats and the way things even like the pub is, less pubs on the high street shutting down across the UK and less community centres, the.
- [121:23]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Church is a good example, is I grew up singing all the time and people around me when we sang in schools and now then we got ipods. Aren't we lucky? We get ipods and then before too long, you stop singing and you start listening to your ipod. And so technology has. Has been an unbelievable blessing and what a curse it has been for us. Yeah. Yeah.
- [121:48]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, thank you so much for the work that you do. As I said to you before we started recording, you have so many extremely passionate followers, advocates, fans, because your work has made them completely rethink and understand their lived experience and also given them a much more optimistic, hopeful cure or treatment for their lived experience. One of which is my partner, who, when she's been telling me for three years to get you on this show and was so extremely excited. I think it's the happiest I've made her in the last three years when I said that you'd agreed to come on genuinely. But that for me is such a personal and sort of local sign of evidence of the impact you have on people. It is tremendous. So thank you on behalf of all of those people for the work that you do. And please do keep on doing it because it's opening all of our eyes.
- [122:35]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
And you too.
- [122:36]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Thank you.
- [122:36]
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I love your show.
- [122:37]
Host (possibly Steven Bartlett)
Appreciate you. Thank you. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a Sea, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guests to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version 2 updated Conversation cards are out right now at the conversationcards.com They've sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly. Quick one want to say a few words from our sponsor, netsuite. One of the most overwhelming parts of running your own business, as many of you entrepreneurs will be able to attest to, is staying on top of your operations and finances. Whether you're just starting out or whether you're managing a fast growing company, the complexities only increase. So having the right systems in place is crucial. One which has helped me is one called NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. And NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform. With this single source of truth, you'll have the visibility and control to make fast, informed decisions, which is crucial in business. I remember the chaos of scaling my first business and trying to keep everything in order. It was an absolute nightmare. And it's tools like NetSuite that make this easier. So if you're feeling the pressure, let NetSuite lighten the load. Head to NetSuite.com Bartlett and you can get a free download of the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. That's NetSuite.com Bartlett.