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i’m recording already i wonder if i need to dump my trash turn off my do not disturbs let’s see i admitted him but his his box is showing here but it’s not eric can you hear us up here he comes hi hey how are you guys or ladies i’m sorry that was very patriarchal of me um i am doing well trying to get us all centered here and um we are recording already guys just so you are aware okay i’m good are you there i’m good i mean i feel like we always say good right but i’m good yeah i’m getting ready to die in a

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couple of weeks so yeah oh yeah you’re going back with ayahuasca yeah i saw your post you’re off social media right now yup feels great yeah i bet i’m doing 5meo next week with kyle and aubry so i’m excited for that if there are levels of dying you’re going to die more than me yeah i did us uh like a skit where i was in a coffin um because of the experience that kyle related on our podcast of 5mu oh yeah i think that was what he was on yeah was that no that he was on mushrooms no this most recent time

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uh was almost like a replay of that but yeah mercedes he did it again like a week and a half ago and then he’ll do it again next week yeah he had a very challenging trip ago he basically went to the same place he went when he had the 30 gram mushroom experience where he was essentially in hell for eternity city tell you about when um because everything he was saying that he was saying in his head is what i was saying when i was on ketamine with him did he tell you about that time yes that i thought he was god and i was

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sticking my hand in his mouth oh no he did not mention that yeah i was like i had my hand in his mouth and i was like god you look just like kyle like like i was saying the weirdest i don’t remember any of this he told me that i said it i was just thinking that i was dead and uh it was it was terrifying but when he describes it it sounds funny so fascinating i love to watch y’all eric how much time do you have um i have like two hours okay we’ll try to cram in as much as possible that’s what we don’t know like yeah no i didn’t mean

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it like that but go ahead with that eric um no i just meant we’re like two hours we’ll try to cram in as much as possible like most people say one hour and we’re like okay good i’m like uh two hours [ __ ] let me take out the first the first five questions [Music] okay amazing all right ready we’re i’m recording so we’re good to go oh yeah um remind me tomorrow um can you um eric we’re gonna record the whole intro because we haven’t done that yet cool okay but it’s short all right

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greetings boys and babes it’s the magic hour a place where we navigate through life’s peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of world-class guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our highest potential i’m your host mercedes terrell along with my partner in shine jade bryce hi you guys today we are having someone on that was one of our very first guests and we loved him so much that we have had him on every year since the work

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that he does has been nothing short of transformative in our lives since i first met him i was drawn to how his presence alone is healing medicine he has a way of making people feel seen heard and held and that’s what people are looking for that’s healing after sharing with him some of my darkest and most vulnerable truths i can still say the same while adding that he has a way of also helping remove the shame and the most grief graceful and empathetic way when i was being called to heal some deep trauma from my early years of life

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my soul said his name and after sitting with him while processing that trauma it is so obvious why my soul said his name he is so incredible at trauma work and his understanding of the psyche is mind-blowing i will truly never be the same after that session but outside of that his post podcast and weekly blogs adds so much growth and magic to my life and by just knowing that this king exists it inspires me and makes me feel more able to step fully into my queen yes there’s a reason why we call him our podcast husband guys

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seeking other episodes really literally um by the way i don’t think i’ve ever known a man who more women come to me about saying that they that he’s their brain crush i guess then today’s guest you can hear laughing in the background already he knows all this um so guys if you’re listening to this please take notes today on what women are actually looking for which is a man who has done his shadow work integrated his demons and embodied his inner king i have been on his podcast a couple times jade’s been on his podcast a

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couple times and i think in both of our cases we both felt more held and nurtured than in any conversation we’ve had elsewhere i know i can say that for myself at least so you can’t already tell i truly believe in the work this guy’s doing and the teaching he is relating it is such a gift to sit at his feet this guy’s magic is profound and palpable jade what more can i say let’s get him i like that you said brain crush and while i have been called a sapiosexual by many people it is a person’s

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transparent truth that is flowing from a heart-centered soul that i think is overwhelmingly attractive so those people may think that they have a brain crush and are a sapiosexual but i like to call it cardio-sexual partial workout yeah but yeah yeah a workout but yes let’s get them on the show our guest today is a podcaster jungian enthusiast enthusiast storyteller myth weaver dream interpreter extraordinaire student of plant medicine healer and medicine man himself long time supporter of our show and one of our greatest teachers using cognitive

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evolutionary and union psychology he helps people discover articulate and change the stories that rule their lives he is a way shower and trailblazer in what it means to be human and we genuinely believe that this guy is doing work that will be a part of history forever and is changing the landscape of psychotherapy he reminds us that it’s our work to do what we can to remember the soul to remember the love that’s at the heart of how and why we heal please help me welcome our favorite magician and love warrior king to the

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magic hour yeah wow no pressure let’s see if i can live up to that wow thank you too so much we’re so grateful for you being here so we have a ton to dive into dive in with on how we want to say that dive in with you anyway all the things and we’ve got scuba gear on yeah we’ve got our scuba gear on something that you have been really going deep on especially this year it seems with all the book records that i’ve been seeing flying through the the social medias um is studying trauma and mental health uh

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you’ve always been you know a psychonaut and into psychology of all the types but what is it specifically that initially called you to do this deep dive into trauma and and mental health um studies yeah so uh this past year aubry um asked me to be the research writer for his book and his book is all about mental health and it was a interesting full circle because after i graduated i got a degree in cognitive psychology a bachelor’s and i spent like two years debating about whether or not i wanted to go get a phd

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in clinical psychology and then i read a book called sapiens that essentially laid out that to go get a phd you essentially become beholden to getting research grants from either the government or from large companies and once i realized that i would be kind of you know a servant to where i could get the money i was like you know what i’m gonna go learn how to run a company create a company that provides you my own revenue and so i could do my own research and once i started working with aubrey at on it once he started to write the book he

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asked me to be the research writer and once i started doing that research i realized oh this is me getting to write my phd dissertation but instead of paying a university a hundred thousand dollars to get to write it i’m actually being paid to write it it was like this really amazing opportunity and the first chapter was supposed to be on depression and so and depression has been one of the things that i’ve been the most interested in studying but this was the first time that i actually went and researched it like a

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researcher and i very quickly found some pretty shocking um facts which is the chemical imbalance theory of depression is a lie there is um [Music] and i could get into it but i know that we have a lot of questions but once i found that and then i started looking at the evidence of the effectiveness of placebo drugs when compared to antidepressant drugs i went down this rabbit hole looked into some researchers and this whole landscape blossomed of the documented historical corruption by pharmaceutical companies of the american

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psychiatric association and of our government to sell us this story that was not backed by science and there’s a book called the anatomy of an epidemic by robert whitaker that has over 800 citations that just lays it all out in a way that completely transformed my understanding of our current attempt to heal mental illness primarily through pharmacology and how it’s not working and that was a huge thing that happened for me probably around april and um i know that it’s something that i will be talking about for the rest of my life

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and why it’s so important is it is the current attempt that our culture is doing to heal mental illness and it’s not working and then one of the chapters that i started to work on was about addiction and once i started going down the rabbit hole of addiction it became very clear that the people who are experts on this all agree that the root of addiction is trauma and i’d never done any formal research on trauma so i basically bought all the best books that i could find most of them were by peter levine

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and i started going deep on trauma and what i realized was trauma seems to be one of the core actual roots of the mental health epidemic in our culture because the pharmacological model it says that the reason like that the source of mental illness is essentially a chemical imbalance it’s your genes um it’s it’s more nuanced than that but the way it’s sold to the average person in the public if you asked a hundred people what causes depression 99 people are going to say a chemical imbalance and you might find one person who might say

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something like god or something and then once i started to really get into trauma the thing that really blossomed for me was all of the research in the different areas of my life for the last 10 years that i’ve been most attracted to all of it was a part of understanding trauma and um i just felt super called to write what is now the longest thing that i’ve ever written um a blog post called what is trauma and i worked on it for like two and a half months and then i turned it into a podcast and it is the thing

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that i have done that has gotten the most feedback of anything that i’ve done so far and it revolutionized my understanding of the psyche so like my big dream is to essentially create a new type of healing system that is more effective than all of the conventional models that we have for healing mental disorders and i thought that the way that you did that before i did the research on trauma was all about people’s stories like helping people change right and that’s why my podcast is called the myths that make us and i’m obsessed with

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stories and i thought it could all be done in the mind but what i learned about trauma is that we essentially have two parts of us there’s the storyteller but then there’s the animal and if the animal is traumatized it almost imprisons the storyteller to tell fearful constrictive stories and no matter how much work you do on someone’s storytelling if their animal is still in a state of fight or flight all the time it’s going to be probably impossible but at best extremely difficult to heal people’s

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stories and so doing the research on trauma has actually it showed me that i was wrong for the last 10 years i’ve been wrong and that it starts with helping the animal heal and then once the animal can get to a place of peace it’s much easier to help people upgrade their stories yeah i know we’re going to get into what healing looks like and how how we do that during this this podcast but in your uh blog you talk about the the polar bear and you talk about the is it a gazelle um your impala aaron paul yeah these

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animals that we can literally see on youtube you know shaking out the trauma what is that response mechanism like what’s happening there because you’re talking about like the somatic healing work right how do we what does that look like i guess so those videos i think are some of the most important videos that anyone who has the symptoms of trauma could possibly watch because it shows you how animals intuitively know how to process trauma and one of the things that’s really important to understand

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about trauma is that we have a body that has evolved over millions of years to react to specific stimuluses in the environment in a adaptive way that has been honed by evolution and that those instincts you don’t have conscious control of and we’ll get into it but one of the reasons why humans become traumatized is their storytelling about how they responded in the traumatic situation and they think that it makes them weak or that they somehow are like that there’s shame or guilt around how they’ve responded and one of the things

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that’s really important for people to understand is these instincts are not your fault if you’ve acted this way but so to kind of set the stage in our evolutionary history we were both prey animals and predator animals and we have a set of instincts for dealing with danger that both predators and prey animals have and the first way that we’ve evolved to react to danger is the fight-or-flight response and everyone’s familiar with the fight-or-flight response and you either think that you can run and escape

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it or you think that you can fight it but prey animals have an extra instinct and it’s the freeze response and it’s the freeze response that tends to be the reaction that most people will have in the face of trauma that then leads to them having traumatic symptoms and the video of the impala is super important to watch for people who think that they have trauma because what happens is a lion catches the impala and has it by the neck and the freeze response is the last ditch effort of the organism to attempt

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to survive when there’s no other option and so this powerful instinct seizes the body and paralyzes the animal and the animal looks dead and there are evolutionary adaptive reasons why this would happen and some of them would be predators require movement in order for their attack and eat response to be triggered and so if you’re paralyzed if you appear dead you don’t trigger that instinct in the predator the other one is if predators aren’t super hungry they won’t eat dead meat because dead meat from an evolutionary

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standpoint will tend to be bad meat or like sick meat and so if they if they freeze themselves they’re less likely to be eaten but the most important one is the freeze response numbs the prey animal it reduces the pain that it experiences if it’s [ __ ] being eaten alive and one of the symptoms of that freeze response is disassociation and that’s one of the major symptoms of people who have incurred trauma is they will disassociate from their body or they’ll disassociate from their memories and that’s why you can have repressed

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memories but what animals do intuitively what the impala does intuitively is that if the predator either gets chased off by somebody else or just loses its focus and like like wanders away the impala will bolt up and run to safety and as soon as it’s safe it will start to seize and the seizuring is the muscles like excreting out the instinctual impulse to become to look like they have rigor mortis and humans because of our storytelling ability and our ability to repress what we feel most people who go through a traumatic

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experience don’t do that last part and that last part is what tells the organism you’re no longer in danger and so if you don’t do that a part of your animal body will live every day as if the predator is still in your environment and so you have this chronic stress response that destroys your sleep your sleep is where you do most of your rebuilding of your body and over the course of weeks and months and years if that’s never processed clearly or fully it destroys your health and there’s this

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whole symptom or a whole spread of symptoms that two western doctors who haven’t studied trauma it seems like eight or ten different things are wrong with you and they’ll give you four to five different medications to deal with all these things but if you process that the trauma held in the body what researchers like peter levine have found is all of these symptoms go away because they’re all the result of a chronic stress response that is destroying the immune system over the course of months or years

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yeah so when we’re looking at sorry jay good i just wanted to say something real quick about the freeze response i know that um with my sexual trauma uh the mother of the the person who did the sexual trauma or did the sexual act to me her first response was well why why didn’t you walk away why didn’t you stop him and i was only like 12 13 when i was asked that so i remember up until just here recently when i read mary magdalene revealed and then when i did work with eric feeling shame for my freeze response i

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felt um like i didn’t fight back and now i feel thankful for my freeze response i feel thankful to my body for using that survival tactic because that was how it fought back and that was how i survived so now i that shame is now gratitude so i just if anyone’s listening and that freeze response felt familiar to them i wanted to offer that perspective yeah i think this is one of the most important aspects for people who have gone through traumatic experiences is if you understand that this is an instinct

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that has been programmed into you by the intelligence of evolution because it’s been honed in the environments that we’ve evolved from for millions of years you didn’t do anything wrong a force that is akin to a god which i would say are what instincts are gripped you and did the best it could and you are not at fault and one of the things that traps trauma in the body is this felt sense of shame and so helping people let go of their shame is one of the most important parts of why i feel so inspired to teach this

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yeah i think that leads us to the idea of ptsd and what is happening um in our psyche when that’s coming up what’s happening in our body when that’s coming up for us or is trying to what exactly is ptsd because a lot of people hear ptsd not so much now but a lot of people hear pst ptsd and think of war veterans right so right so uh in doing the research on trauma what i have found is so ptsd is a specific type of trauma and it’s what’s technically called shock trauma and shock trauma can it’s like

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the most common ways that it happens are war sexual assaults and surgery and this is something that most people don’t know but one of the most common ways people accrue ptsd is actually to go and get surgery and what causes ptsd which is called shock trauma is essentially either the fight or flight response is biologically or physically inhibited so like if you’re held down or if you’re drugged and then um or if you chose the freeze response but you didn’t ever clear the energy out completely and this is shock trauma but there’s

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also a thing called developmental trauma and this is something that has not been or maybe within the last year has started to become officially recognized as an actual type of trauma but all the experts on trauma agree this is absolutely a different type of trauma and developmental trauma is essentially there’s a couple of ways to come at it but i think the best way to understand it is at any point in your developmental life and it is it will almost always be in the presence of caretakers if you felt any genuine

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call to express and you didn’t either because you were shamed or you were taught that you weren’t supposed to or you were physically stopped you start to accrue almost like emotional gunk in your body so for men anytime that you felt the urge to cry growing up if you were taught that it wasn’t acceptable to cry every time that you felt the urge you start to you can almost imagine like there’s a well in your body of how much stress your body can hold before it starts to cause damage and every time

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that you had the urge to cry and you didn’t some water gets added to that well and for women the most common one when i talk to therapists that work in this field is anytime that you felt the urge to express anger or to maintain boundaries and you don’t there’s this slow accretion of water in this well and we all on some level have developmental trauma like i haven’t met anyone who is fully uninhibited in their expression of their genuine emotions i’ve met people that say they aren’t [Laughter]

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okay and then in doing the research in conjunction with everything that i’ve done for the last 10 years i propose that there’s a third type and i would call it like storyteller trauma and it’s where something happens in your life where the truth of it is so disruptive to the story of who you believe you are that your entire story of who you are breaks and the most common example is if you’re married for 10 years and you come home one day and your spouse has left you and they left a note saying

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that they’ve been cheating on you with somebody else for six years and that they’re divorcing you that piece of truth it doesn’t cause shock trauma and it’s not the result of developmental trauma but it destroys people and the results of it will often either be depression or mania or psychosis if they can’t integrate the truth into restructuring who they believe that they are and so i think that that’s a third type but there’s no you know there’s no one that i know who is making

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the claim for that being a type of trauma but i think that’s one of the roots of depression um but to get back to the original question ptsd is shock trauma and that’s when one of those primary instincts fight flight or freeze is inhibited and you’re not able to discharge or complete the act and that causes ptsd [Music] that makes a lot of sense and so i mean i guess that’s kind of categorizing ptsd as something that most people are dealing with to some regard or another um or to some level or another

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is that what you notice so ptsd seems to be less common than developmental trauma ptsd most people know if they’ve incurred ptsd because there there was some significant event like a car accident or a rape or you went to war and and there was some really powerful experience that happened where you weren’t able to complete the act and we can get into like how the symptoms play out but what’s super interesting is one of the things that’s really important to understand about trauma is that no wild animals hold on to trauma

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it’s only humans and domesticated animals and there’s some specific examples about why that happens but what that shows is that to incur trauma is natural for an or for a organism that is complex in its structure enough to be a social animal and that it’s also natural to heal it there is a innate healing intelligence inside of us that if we don’t get in the way of knows exactly what to do to heal this and the video of the polar bear is the perfect [ __ ] example so to give people that story there’s a video in the blog article that

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i wrote that peter levine uses as a teaching tool and he’s regarded as one of the greatest experts on healing trauma that is alive right now and these biologists are in a helicopter and they’re they have to dart this polar bear to tag it for some science and they’re in a helicopter and the polar bear is running and they eventually hit it with a dart that tranquilizes it and then they tag it and they do everything that they need to do and as the polar bear is coming out of the tranquilization the first thing that happens is it

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starts taking these huge deep breaths while it’s still unconscious and as it takes these huge deep breaths after a couple of these breaths it starts convulsing it looks like it’s having a seizure and the biologist is explaining this is completely normal this is actually a part of him healing what just happened to him and peter levine breaks this down and this is one of the really interesting insights it’s not random convulsants they’re actually micro movements of what the polar bear needed to do in the

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moment when it was tranquilized in order to escape and so it’s small twitches of its paws and its legs to represent the running and so like what people will experience as they start if they get to a place where their body feels safe enough to process trauma is whatever the shaking is it tends to be the symbolic acts that the animal needed to do in the moment of trauma one of the stories that peter levine talks about and this is such a crazy story but you know he studied trauma for like 30 years and then when he was an

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older man um he was riding his bike one day and he got hit by a car and all of the knowledge that he has accrued about how to heal trauma was like watching his meat suit go through what happened so he gets hit by a car he’s lying in the middle of the road he can’t move he’s in shock and people start to crowd around and this man comes up to him and the man is really abrasive he thinks he’s trying to help but he’s just super abrasive and peter levine can feel like the force of this man is actually making

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him not feel safe and he starts to get angry and agitated but he’s not able to move because he’s still in shock and eventually a woman comes up and kind of quiet down the man and puts her hand on levine and just kind of like holds space and doesn’t try to do anything but just kind of emanates this like i’m with your suffering i see you the ambulance is coming and isn’t trying to do anything and that and peter levine could feel that that was healing the ambulance event eventually comes and like it’s

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it’s it’s it’s tragic to feel into but what the ambulance or what the first responders do is they strap him down to a bed and they put him in the ambulance and peter levine can see oh this is going to trap the trauma in my body and so he actually starts to talk to the first responders and explains who he is and what his research is and convinces them to to unstrap him and then he starts to do like this body check-in where he basically gives his body permission to do whatever it wants and his right shoulder starts to twitch

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and his arm starts to like come up towards his face and his body is symbolically doing what it should have done to protect himself from the car but that he didn’t have time to do and he was able to let his body complete the symbolic act of protecting itself and then by the time he got to the hospital he could feel that he had let the trauma go and he didn’t incur traumatic symptoms but this is an example of like the way our medical system is set up because they don’t understand trauma it actually can trap trauma in the body and then

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people later will have to do the work to get into a safe space where they allow their body to essentially seize so you’re saying that that animals don’t have this the same effect necessarily they don’t store trauma in the body the same way if they’re able to shake it out or whatever they need to do in order to move it through their body right animals don’t wild animals don’t become traumatized but they experience trauma and then they release it so what about like like i have a cat that was feral and you know i got him

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and he definitely is a lot different than my other cat that’s very social and all that and he’s constantly kind of twitchy and hyper-sensitive and seems like he’s traumatized if you you know look at it from a human sense um and he you know if he hears any voices coming towards the house he doesn’t know he can’t you’ll never find him for like a day you know what i mean so there’s some sort of now is that like a because he was a feral cat is that maybe a genetically stored trauma in a sense

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so when i bring this up i’ve gotten questions like this from people who have dogs or have cats that they feel are traumatized and the way that i understand it is they technically do not have ptsd in the sense that they have a chronic stress response that when they feel safe they act like that when they are not in the presence of a trigger that they’re just at baseline that they’re not at a heightened state of stress in the same way that a human can be in a room where there is no trigger of a threat

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but if they’re traumatized they will still feel like they are stressed out but what animals that have been through traumatic experience will do is they learn and so in the presence of a trigger like a car horn or people talking they have a set of reflexes that are more extreme than a domesticated cat that’s protective but once they get wherever they need to get where they feel safe they return completely to baseline there’s a book by robert sapolsky and he’s a famous biologist and it’s called zebra or why zebras

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don’t get ulcers and the whole idea is that they don’t hold a chronic stress response when they are not in the immediate environment of a trigger and so your feral cat has a more intense set of reflexes in the presence of triggers that reminded of threats that it’s been exposed to in the past but when it go fine when it goes and finds its safe place in some corner of un under a bed in one of your rooms it goes back to baseline and it’s not in a chronic stress response so i think we touched on this a bit but the

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four symptoms of response or responses to trauma um maybe you can just delineate those again and see if we take off so these symptoms of trauma is one of the most interesting parts of all this because it shows us at least to me how we are holistic beings and the mind and the body are not as separate as we believe that they are but the four primary symptoms of trauma and peter levine calls these the core four they are perfectly adaptive in the immediate moment of the threat but if they continue in the absence of the

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threat you will begin to get a whole host of symptoms that will get progressively worse as time goes on because your chronic stress response will continue to degrade your physical health but the core four the first one is hyper vigilance and hyper vigilance is essentially what we’ve evolved to be like when we perceive threat in our environment and the hallmark of this are the wide eyes like lots of women that i know who um like one of the ways that you can feel into whether or not someone has unprocessed trauma is if their eyes always look like

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they’re on edge or they’re surprised because their nervous system is priming their body to detect threat and so hyper vigilance is essentially the body mobilizing its tools to anticipate a threat the second one is constriction you have biological and psychological constriction in the presence of a threat and so your eyes will dilate your breathing will constrict your blood vessels will actually constrict your muscles will constrict and a lot of people will have chronic muscular pain as one of the symptoms of

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trauma because there’s this chronic constriction because you’re anticipating having to run or fight and so there’s this constriction the third one is disassociation and this is one of the most complex and interesting ones but um you will disassociate from the from being fully connected to your body because you’re anticipating pain and there’s this part of you that thinks that it’s actually protecting you from pain but chronic disassociation can lead to uh repressed memories it can lead to

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blackouts it can lead to you not being connected to your body so you’re prone to injuries there might be aspects of your body that feel completely unconscious to you and um if that goes on for a long time it can cause a lot of issues and the fourth one is a felt sense of helplessness and this is probably the most detrimental one but many people who have gone through trauma their felt sense of agency in the world the belief that their actions can actually improve their life is destroyed and agency is is one of the fundamental

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psychological traits that one needs to be resilient to stress and to also thrive and so one of the really important things in healing trauma is to help people reclaim agency and there’s a couple of stories that i can share when we start to talk about how you heal trauma that will represent that clearly but those are the core four and if those continue beyond the immediate exposure to threat they lead to a chronic elevated stress response that leads to a chronic elevation of inflammation which tends to be the bedrock of what

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causes a lot of the chronic mental and biological diseases quote unquote that we see in western culture yeah fascinating stuff it brings up for me um a question about i don’t even know if it’s a question but the hyper vigilance piece for me i think and maybe you tell me if i’m mistaken here but i get like super hearing sense and um i think that comes from my childhood where i would literally listen at my door to see when my stepmom would not be in the kitchen so that i could like go out there and get food or crossover

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to get to my car or whatever i was doing that you know i was trying to avoid um confrontation with her and that hyper vigilance i think in an interesting way translated into a fetish for me which i think most fetishes well all fetishes i think come from needing to heal things in our psyche um so for me it turned into this like being hyper sensitive to my the voice of my lover so like hearing my lover’s voice or um hearing him talk or even just breathing or any of those sound sounds that you could hear especially in a really intimate setting

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are like a fetish for me you know what i mean i think that’s a really normal fetish for a lot of people but um i have other non-normal fetishes okay guys i’m just a freak no i’m just kidding um but so that for me is interesting and i just thought maybe you have some words for how we sometimes translate trauma or something that come comes up you know in our young childhood into fetish and then how we because we’re going to go into this healing work i think next is our question is going to go that way so

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maybe that can help us enter in there yeah yeah so that’s a great insight and there’s a few things that come up when i hear uh the first thing is it’s actually more common to experience what’s called post-traumatic growth than to have post-traumatic stress disorder it’s something like 80 percent of people who go through a traumatic situation once they’ve done the work will report it as one of the most like useful things that have happened to them because it helped them create or become

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some new thing and uh most people who go through trauma they actually incur superpowers if they can liberate themselves from the trauma of whatever the adaptive actions were that they had to learn in the response of the traumatic experience when they were younger like a lot of people who would call themselves empaths very likely and there have been psychological studies on this that have shown this to be true that if you had a parent who was emotionally volatile as a child to protect yourself you had to learn how to anticipate their emotional state

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before they even spoke and probably all three of us here have this deeper sense of intuition into other people’s emotional states because we had an emotional volatile parent and while that is traumatic on one level it also causes us to adapt in a way that makes us more capable growing up so that’s one thing to articulate is that trauma can actually be the the quote that i really like is our traumas are the wound or the wounds that become the wounds that birth our medicine and that’s kind of a poetic way to look at

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like if you do the work the trauma that you incurred actually produces superpowers so that’s one thing another is i don’t know if i’m ready to claim that i believe that all fetishes are the result of trauma but the people that i’ve studied and a lot of really smart people they actually do believe that that that that is the case and the really interesting thing about a fetish is that it allows you to claim agency it allows you to consciously enter into reenacting the traumatic experience in a way where you get control over it and

43:04

that is actually one of the ways that you heal trauma and so a part of what this has unfolded in me is like what bdsm and what like that entire community allows is it creates a really clear container where you talk about what you are comfortable with before there’s a clear delineation between talking about it and then entering into the scene and it gives you the opportunity if you want to to to go back into the traumatic experience that happened in the past but you now have a safe word and you also get to choose how

43:38

it unfolds and there can be a lot of trauma healing that can happen within that container i don’t think that our medical model or our society is advanced enough to let that ever be in the next 100 years a healing modality that’s actually done because the amount of training that it would take for the therapist to hold that container is beyond what we seem to be able to create in people but people can play it out in their personal romantic lives and it actually is a very powerful way to do healing yeah we actually go deeper

44:12

into that with river warring yes river warring i have a hard time with that river roaring it is it’s really tough to say uh it sounds like a porn name it it’s not a real name you know but um she’s a she’s a surrogate yeah she’s a sexual surrogate that actually works as a therapist to help people venture through it’s really cool yeah our episode with her uh we go pretty deep into that so yeah i guess um well let’s talk about the tools to heal the trauma and maybe you can share with us some of the things that you’ve seen

44:48

while you sat for others while they healed some trauma and i’m completely comfortable with you talking about our experience of what you observed as i process my trauma if that’s helpful because there’s nothing i wouldn’t share with our audience especially if it would aid in their own healing so um yeah let’s get into that yeah so um because there’s three different types of trauma what i’m going to focus on is the one where the most research has been done that allows for the healing and that’s

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ptsd that’s shock trauma and but what helps people heal shock trauma will very likely help people also integrate storytelling trauma and then developmental trauma but developmental trauma is notoriously harder to heal because the trauma likely happened with caretakers and that creates a whole warping of how you relate to people how you trust people and that’s fundamentally harder to heal but we can get into that but i’ll start with shock trauma so shock trauma is essentially healed through cultivating awareness

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reclaiming agency and then you know potentially if you feel ready to share your story and so what that looks like is peter levine has made famous this term called the felt sense and the felt sense is to teach people how to non-judgmental feel what is in their body what’s really interesting is if you ask someone how they feel like we did it at the very beginning of this podcast people intuitively say a judgment as opposed to articulating what they are actually feeling and so you say you feel good or bad that’s not the felt sense

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that’s the mind judging a configuration of body sensations and most people don’t even have access to the raw body sensations that’s happening in their body like if someone says that they’re angry angry is a label for a body sensation and anger might manifest differently in all three of us like anger might be heat in the head or a constriction in the chest or a constriction in the throat or like a throbbing in your gut and how anger feels to you is actually a portal into whether or not you might

47:07

have stored trauma there and so peter levine has a whole bunch of techniques that you can go find in his very short book called healing trauma to teach people how to cultivate the felt sense but the practice that he offers that i find is the is the easiest bridge for people is he has a meditative practice where you take a shower that’s my magic trick today go ahead where you turn it slightly above warm and then you direct the stream onto each part of your body and you can start at your feet and you just feel the pulsing of the hot

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water on your right foot and you say this is my right foot i welcome you home and you feel what it feels like to have sensations in your right foot and then you move up to your shin and then your knee and then your thigh and your left foot etc etc and you almost all of us have some have some trauma stored in us and you will get to a part of your body that you can’t feel and you just keep it there like it might be your pelvis it might be your right butt cheek it might be your right shoulder like i got surgery on my right

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shoulder and there’s inhibited sensation there and you st and you can do this also through meditation like any type of meditation that helps you bring awareness to each part of your body and invites you to like allow it to relax more and more that starts to cultivate this feeling of the felt sense and then what will happen is if you feel something somewhere and what somatic experiencing therapists do and this is the type of therapy that peter levine created they’re super good at reading someone’s body and they can see where there’s some

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type of like lockedness happening and then they will ask the person to do some what might seem like a random movement like one of the most common ones they do is a lot of us will clench our jaw when we when we are repressing wanting to feel something so one of the things that a lot of um somatic experiencers will do is they’ll tell the patient slowly open and close your jaw and say ah and so you just go [Music] and if you’re in that space where they feel safe that will make people start to cry almost always because

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it it tricks the biology where you can’t constrict your jaw anymore and if you can’t constrict your jaw it reduces your ability to repress the emotion and then something will start to come up and then what he teaches with the felt sense is can you non-judgmentally just hold your awareness on whatever is happening in your body and then once you do that can you ask it what do you want to tell me or what are you here to teach me or what do you want to do next and then when you’re in the presence of a really experienced worker here and i’m

50:10

an amateur at this but like it’s something that i want to cultivate my understanding in is that an experience will happen in the body that will eventually lead to some type of tremoring some type of somatic release that afterwards will actually give you of a deeper felt sense of integration in your body and sometimes but not all of the time memories will start to come back as this part of the body starts to come alive and what’s interesting is that the memories that can come up in this experience are not always what actually happened

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this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about trauma and repressed memories and peter levine has a whole book called trauma and memory where he really tries to drive this home you will sometimes have visions that are actually symbolic representations akin to dreams or visions on plant medicine that represents the energy that is being healed and is not an actual memory of what happened and as the memory comes up it’s it’s the body almost trying to symbolically give you an opportunity to act in the vision that’s coming up in a

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symbolic way that can heal you and i’ll give a story to really cement this peter levine has this famous story where he was doing this research on trauma and he had someone come into his office who had had panic attacks for like 20 years and she had gone to dozens of doctors have taken all sorts of meds but they couldn’t get rid of these panic attacks and the panic attacks were so bad that she couldn’t leave the house so when she came into peter’s office he put her through some relaxation techniques to like

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help her let her guard down and what he saw was her heart rate dropped almost to the point of her like passing out and he was getting really worried and behind him because he had been studying animals in order to understand trauma he had a vision of there was a stalking tiger in the room and he just intuitively yelled at her a tiger is in the room you need to run and she screamed and her legs started to tremor and she started like her legs were doing the symbolic action of running and she’s screaming and it was such a

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loud commotion that a police officer was outside in the office and came into the room and was like what the [ __ ] is going on and peter levine’s assistant was able to kind of explain to the cop what was happening this was like 20 years ago so the fact that his assistant was able to explain what the [ __ ] was going on to not interrupt it is a miracle yeah but he started to coach her through this running and then he was like here’s a tree run up in the tree and get away from the tiger and she crawled up this

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tree and her arm started to seize and then she reclaimed a memory and she remembered that when she was four or six she got a tonsillectomy and she could remember that she was terrified as she was being given the ether and she wanted to run but she couldn’t complete the action because she got sedated and so that running that needing to run had been trapped in her body and so she was hyper vigilant and so all sorts of things would trigger this need to run but she didn’t understand what she needed to do and

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after that first meeting with levine uh she basically screamed and shook for an hour she never had a panic attack again when she came back for a couple more sessions he put her through a couple of more experiences where she had more tremoring to the point where she was able to go get a phd and she was able to get off most of the meds that she was on and that’s an example of she reclaimed agency through a vision she never in her life was actually chased by a tiger but the vision of the tiger allowed her to symbolically act

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out what needed to be done in the presence of the actual trauma that healed her and one of the things that is most misunderstood is people will think that anything that arises in their psyche is an actual memory and sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not and peter levine’s big takeaway here is it doesn’t matter if you can’t know for sure whether or not it happened it’s not important about whether or not it’s real it’s what is the symbolic or physical act that needs to be done that the vision is

54:49

trying to prompt you to do that will help you reclaim agency and so the first part is cultivating awareness and that is fundamentally learning how to do this felt sense technique and then number two is to reclaim agency and reclaiming agency is you either symbolically or physically act out what needed to be done in that moment and that is almost always intuitively taken care of by how the tremoring happens and then the third one is can you articulate the story to yourself in a way where you can integrate gratitude and meaning from it like jade

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mentioned that at the beginning of the podcast that she was able to cultivate gratitude for how she had acted and the ultimate last stage of this healing is if you feel comfortable can you share it with people that you care about because there’s a bunch of research that shows if something has happened to you and you don’t share it that it feels like a secret and that the reason it’s a secret is because you either feel ashamed or guilty or afraid to share it that actually creates a chronic stress response a part of your psyche is always

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trying to protect that thing and it eats up energy and that if you share it even if you articulate it only to yourself you actually heal that chronic stress trigger there’s a researcher named james pennebaker who has overseen over 300 studies on a type of journaling that’s called expressive writing and these are people that heal trauma by articulating the story to themselves they don’t even have to share it with other people but if you can articulate how the story fits into the story of your life in a way that gives you a felt

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sense of agency or gratitude it heals that too so i’m curious i know i asked you this yesterday but i feel like a lot of parents listening when you talked about her being sick and having a surgery um are wondering what they can do for their children that may have um this type of trap trauma in their bodies like i mentioned yesterday um my son being circumcised they literally strap boys down you know little boys down at only a day or two old and cut the most sensitive part of their body so we talked about peter levine being strapped

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in the thing we’ve talked about the six-year-old girl i’m curious um what parents listening can do for their children to help maybe help process that through their bodies yeah so the first thing here and i shared this with jade yesterday is for the parent not to shame themselves for the choice that they made there because most people just don’t know that this is truly traumatic and it is like uh our understanding of trauma is such that i cannot possibly imagine a situation where that wouldn’t cause trauma

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um and so the first thing is to forgive yourself because it’s not like you were given this information before you made that choice and you did what you thought was best in that moment for your children like one of the best things that you can do is encourage them to do any type of activity that will help them connect to their body and so i i’m pretty sure that your son does jujitsu right that is one of the greatest possible things that you could let your children do is it will connect them to their body

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and any so like yoga jujitsu kickboxing any type of sport where they’re really trained in the fundamentals it will allow them to start to feel a sense of competence in their own body and the activity will force them to be in their own body and once they’re of an old enough age where you feel like you can start to teach them the felt sense like this is something that you could do with them where you could like tap on their body and you could explain this is an exercise to help you understand your body more and you could say this is

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my foot this is my shin and you just tap along their body um and i think you can start there i haven’t done it you know i don’t have children yet and i intuitively don’t know at what age you could start to consciously do trauma work but you can do a lot of healing by helping them get into activities that allow them to a connect to their body but then also connect to a community through the shared activity and that’s why like youth sports jiu jitsu and things like that are incredibly powerful i’m also oh god i was just going to say

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something that came up for me while we were talking about peter living’s method and that nothing that comes up is irrelevant first of all and it doesn’t really matter if it’s a real memory or not whatever that means um because you you really uh invited us to the work of carl jung and dream journaling dream psychology um you were where we entered that work and we spent a lot of time now on this podcast talking about dreams and dream journaling um with you and and on your podcast and then also just with other you know people we’ve

1:00:14

had on the show and that idea of dreams being this distant um reference you know this distant analogies to what’s something you need to heal in your own life or psyche makes me think of the way that that peter levine’s relating that idea of whatever comes up it doesn’t matter if it’s you know you’re trying to intellectualize it into something well is this real did this really happen to me this event of this tiger chasing me really happened to me it’s not the focus the focus is what is this showing you

1:00:46

what comes up when i go through the motions here i don’t know if that leads you to any thoughts yes spot on so one of the reasons why the trauma research was so invigorating for me is that the healing is the same thing that is done when when you understand how to interpret dreams and just like a really interesting side note is one of the techniques that’s used for helping people process trauma is called um oh it’s escaping me right now but it’s where you move your eyes back emdr emdr what emdr does is it tricks the biology

1:01:28

to go into the same psychological state that you are in when you dream it’s rapid eye movement and what we’re doing when we’re dreaming on some sense is we are processing symbolic images that represent emotions into like our body and on one level that’s what dreams are is there’s a part of your mind that can only speak in images and it’s speaking in images to represent energies in the body and it creates this felt sense of disjointed imagery but it’s really processing how you move through different emotional

1:02:04

states to ass to essentially help heal you and emdr will force that in the waking state and it helps people process trauma and like that’s just it’s so fascinating to me that what is organically done in dreams if biologically manipulated to happen in conscious awareness heals it’s just an insight that like dreaming is healing you and also and you know i’ve done some dream interpretation for both of you that you cannot hide from your dreams and your dreams will show you if you learn how to how to interpret them

1:02:46

where you have unprocessed [ __ ] and it will show you like what your cycles are how you avoid like if you want to have the most intimate possible relationship with your partner share your dreams with each other you can’t hide [ __ ] like if if you if you’re entertaining text from someone that you know that you’re attracted to and it’s starting to create an energetic experience inside of you it’s going to come up in your [ __ ] dream you know if you’re running from an argument with your partner because you’re upset

1:03:19

with how they did x y and z it’s going to come up in your [ __ ] dreams and [Music] to me what that is a sign of is there is this innate healing intelligence inside of us that wants us to confront wherever we are blocked and to alchemize it and it’s true in dreams and it’s also true in this trauma work yeah that’s so beautiful and and just because we’re here in this circle and this setting with these people from you and jade for me you know held this little container for me for now several years which is pretty cool to say

1:03:53

um and jade knows that during quarantine i like really decided to take construction from covet and go inward and have a therapy session every week for the like seven months straight and then and i’m still doing it but um i also dream journaled every single morning which is a lot of dreams um and now it’s funny now i i actually analyze my dreams in my dreams which has turned into a little weird it’s like a whole weird thing and then i always spend the first hour like i don’t even have to journal i journal them if

1:04:28

they’re i can tell they need to be journaled now but otherwise it’s like i just spend an hour with my eyes closed basically after i wake up and i just sort through it you know and i kind of give it amazing that’s amazing it’s amazing it’s amazing that this healing is available for anyone at any time but i wanted to offer something here because it’s coming up for me um that when we talked about you talked about constriction in the body um you know for me i had so much constipation growing up literally

1:04:59

chronic constipation because i was so like i said hyper vigilant in fear of you know of confrontation i was constricted i was always in that like ready to hide mode basically flight mode um and you talked about uh that idea of where we disassociate you know where we leave our feelings or our felt sense behind and i think that was definitely me as well i i left it behind in a lot of ways but one thing i noticed through talking about um dreams with you and and the work we’ve done on this podcast and things you know

1:05:36

doing my own soul searching and seeking of myself um was that the thing i could really say i had or was it like felt like could be a gift or something that most people don’t have is vivid dreams i always have had never push them away because i realized early on that they were a gift in the sense that i could experience um like i always every ovulation essentially i would experience cheating on whatever boyfriend i was with at the time and going through what that would be like and playing it all the way out the

1:06:11

consequence you know what the fun part was then the consequence of it was it worth it all the detriment that happens afterward and i could wake up and be like okay i don’t want to do that made me a very loyal partner you know and and there was a lot of other things that i didn’t know at the time were coming through with those messages and now i can sort them out but because i realized that for me it was dreams but for anyone listening it might be something else for you but that was somewhere that i was still had a very

1:06:41

thorough channel with myself i had a thorough connection that was stable enough for i i could see that it’s enough that i was like okay yeah i dream extremely vividly where sometimes i’m not sure what’s real life and what’s a dream and we’ve talked we talked on another show about that being potentially schizophrenic but anyway so just the offering to who’s listening is that wherever maybe start wherever you already know you do feel a connection to yourself whatever that means and it’s

1:07:12

something that feels oh well that seems a little more powerful than then maybe most have you know like for me the dreams were vivid enough where i knew that was something that could be a gift because it was so strong i could i could feel it so strongly and then it did bring me back you know in this last you know seven now it’s been almost a year being in covet of course for everybody um but this this time has been me reconnecting with myself through my dreams is what started that inception but led to other ways i could experience

1:07:44

felt sense and letting off the constriction and letting go you know and so i don’t know that just as an offering for really anyone listening yeah so there’s a couple of things that come up one is that’s [ __ ] incredible congratulations on getting to the point where you can intuitively interpret most of your dreams i’m at that point too where i can wake up and like [ __ ] i know what that means and uh it’s only every so often well i have a complex enough one where i have to write it out but it’s one of those

1:08:14

things that’s at the point that where if i write it out i’m like oh [ __ ] i know what that means yeah it deepens it 100 and so there’s a couple of things that i want to touch on one is one of the gifts of being traumatized is that the psychic force inside of you gets stronger because it has to deal with larger obstacles and then one of the byproducts of that tends to be very vivid dreams and i think that’s one of the greatest gifts that you can it’s one of the greatest superpowers that you could

1:08:46

possibly incur is to have vivid dreams so congratulations there the other one is like for me i think most men are more disconnected from their emotions than women on average and the practice that first helped me connect to myself was journaling because i’m highly linguistic and i’m very with the symbols it was actually journaling that gave me the first bridge to really connect to myself that then unlocked dreams for me and like so for some people like if you’re highly like if your art is to do things with your

1:09:23

body maybe your way of connecting with yourself would be like yoga yeah or maybe it’s running maybe it’s dancing maybe it’s writing maybe it’s dream interpretation but i completely agree start with where you are called that allows you to begin to build that bridge with yourself because fundamentally it comes down to can you be completely honest with yourself and if that’s through movement or writing or confronting your dreams like that’s where it starts and once you’re honest with yourself it gives you the option

1:09:58

to begin to be honest with other people and fundamentally what seems to be one of the most healing things that you could possibly do in this world is to cultivate truth and that starts with yourself and then you learn how to be vulnerable and honest and authentic with the closest people around you and as soon as you find that one person outside of you that you can be fully in truth with something in us like unlocks and relaxes like we are social animals we have not evolved to be alone and the really interesting research on

1:10:34

loneliness is that the felt sense of loneliness has is not correlated at all with the amount of people in your life it is correlated with how many people you genuinely feel seen by and so you could be in a crowd of people every day and still feel the felt sense of loneliness but what allows you to feel seen is if you’re vulnerable you are responsible for whether or not you have the opportunity to be seen it doesn’t mean that you will be seen by the people around you but the first step to quote-unquote curing loneliness

1:11:08

which by the way people who report feeling lonely are more likely to die early than people who are obese people who are alcoholics people who smoke a pack a day or people who live in a area with heavy air pollution like it’s because we are not meant to be isolated individual things we are meant to be in community but the thing that allows for for loneliness to be alchemized is to feel seen and to do that you have to learn how to see yourself and i think that’s why the journaling or the dream interpretation is such a

1:11:44

powerful invitation and then it gives you the opportunity to actually show your true self to people around you is there also something about like writing it with your hand that is effective or because what is it about that compared to like speaking it what is it about writing it so this is an interesting thing um when writing was first introduced into ancient greece socrates actually lamented that it would make people dumber and um you know because it’s it’s the same idea with like google now you know

1:12:18

that we’re outsourcing a part of our cognition and we won’t have to remember it blah blah blah but the thing about writing is that it engages more than one sense so like if you’re thinking it’s just happening in your head but if you write it you’re actually integrating it into your body i think speaking is an even higher way of integrating because when you speak you’re not only thinking but you’re also creating a vibration in your body and so you’re and you’re also integrating sound and when you speak to

1:12:51

someone else you’re also integrating sight because they’re being an active reflection in the moment and i think you know first like if you’re new to this the place to start is can you admit true things that are scary simply in your mind and then the step after that would be can you write it like can you see it on paper like it’s now slightly more made manifest in the world but the ultimate like step of articulating your truth is to speak it and what’s interesting is you can begin speaking your truth alone

1:13:28

and your body will give you feedback like one of the most powerful things about mdma is that it’s almost impossible if you’re alone to say something out loud that’s not true and feel okay like at least for me the like felt sense of tuning in my body i can be alone on mdma and do this type of work and say something out loud and instantly know whether or not it’s true and then to be received by somebody else from speaking your truth is like the fourth level yeah um they’ve done studies and you could critique the scientific method

1:14:06

for maybe not understanding this but they have found that there is not a difference between typing and writing with your hand um when it comes to healing trauma so that’s just an interesting side note to like plant but did that answer your question jade yeah no that that did i just didn’t know if there was something about it specifically like that but that makes i wanted to also just because and we’re kind of like going back and forth i guess here on on all these topics but they all play together um

1:14:39

when we talked about figuring out a way to to tap in with yourself and and and journaling is such a big piece of that um whether it’s dream journaling or just you know just what is it called train of thought journaling i don’t know the the you know what i’m talking about being a stream of consciousness thank you i know you guys know this um but then when you talk about having community and having a person that one person even if it just starts with that that you can finally relay this information to and

1:15:14

get it outside of you so that you have a kind of a sounding board or reflecting board of someone without who’s not going to hold you know judgment over i mean i guess we’re all judging to some degree but who’s not going to shame you in any regard uh don’t be afraid to pay for it like a therapist or or come to jade or my only fans and dm with us and we do that literally all the time for people not just men women are over there we’re talking to people holding space for their darkest secrets and their

1:15:47

deepest truths because that’s what we want to do you know like that’s what it’s for so don’t be afraid i’m saying don’t be afraid to pay for it because for me that has been one of the most powerful ways that i find i show up i paid a therapist for every single week to to be accountable to you know so that i would show up for the work and she was a beautiful mirror for me you know so find whoever that person is it doesn’t have to be someone who just pops into your life because then you get back

1:16:14

into that cycle of loneliness and you’re literally repelling people because you think no one’s ever gonna pop in your life who can hold that space for you you can bring them in by paying for it i mean that’s a beautiful relationship i completely agree and to reinforce that there’s a couple of reasons why that is sometimes the best option one is you might simply not have someone who has enough emotional intelligence in your life to hold the space for the [ __ ] that is true for you and it would be the best option to get

1:16:45

someone who is a professional but also and i’m sure that a lot of the people who listen to this podcast and you guys are going to resonate with us too but there’s lots of people who identify as helpers or healers who aren’t ready and who want your truth they want to hold space for you but then you can see how their behavior will unfold later where it’s like oh you weren’t able to hold that and also even if you’re around competent people maybe the truth is about them and that you need to get someone outside

1:17:22

of your tribe to fully release what the truth is without dealing with the implications the repercussions and then you develop that safety and then you’re able to bring these hard truths to people who are close to you so i completely agree one of the greatest options is to find someone that you resonate with and then to pay for it yeah can when we talk about that can we also um because i think this could be common i don’t know if it’s only common when people are doing mdma assisted therapy but can we talk about

1:17:56

like transference and how um for some people while healing it can be very confusing for someone to feel safe with someone of the opposite sex while they help them work through sexual trauma or any type of trauma from someone else with the opposite sex that wasn’t making them feel safe and what that what they can do with what comes up around that um you mentioned when i i brought this up to you uh that it is pretty common but i don’t know that many people have heard of it i had right yeah so this is a great question okay

1:18:27

so fundamentally um your core relationship to your soul or to that inner voice inside of you that everybody knows what i’m talking about when i say it um it’s first molding will happen with your caretaker of the opposite gender most of the time and if that relationship is not held by a conscious beautiful king or queen which most of us weren’t fortunate enough to have that your connection to your soul will be warped by your relationship to the primary caretaker of the opposite gender and then every relationship that you get in

1:19:08

like romantic relationship when you fall in love it allows for that warping to either correct or to twist further and when you go get a therapist if they are of the opposite gender if you have the trust with them where they’re able to really get and begin to heal that bridge between the ego and the soul it can often feel like you are falling in love with them and this was so common that freud created a term for it and it’s called transference and it’s almost required for the healing to happen because it’s what allows that bridge to

1:19:49

begin to be remolded but if you’re not aware of it it will feel like you are falling in love with them and then there’s a thing called counter transference where if the therapist is not trained enough they will feel like they’re falling in love too because they’re receiving the love beam from the other person and it’s really tricky because it’s almost required for the bridge to begin to heal itself but the ultimate goal of the therapist is to reconnect it’s it’s almost like you can imagine

1:20:21

they’re there to hold the projection of the loved one to allow the bridge to self-correct and then if they’re really talented it’s to pass the bridge back off to the individual so they can connect it to their soul and like the fundamental healing that happens is when the individual reconnects cleanly to that whisper inside of them and then that’s the ultimate psychotherapist that you will ever find is that still inner whisper that will guide you through your intuition and your integrity in every

1:20:54

situation this may sound silly but does that mean that there is more more healing takes place when you are speaking to someone of the opposite sex and that’s what i was gonna ask so this is so any answer that i give is not backed by research here would just be me kind of going off of my intuition but it depends where the most damage is so the parent of the same gender will be your connection to how you show up in the world which is what we would call the ego or the persona and the most if both of those are broken the one that

1:21:33

needs to be or that is most important for healing would be the one with the opposite gender because in a jungian standpoint that’s how you relate to your inner guide which he called the soul but it’s not the same way that most people currently use soul if that one’s not really warped you can do a lot of healing if the damage came from you know the caretaker of the same gender because that will often represent how you show up in the world externally and so both are are important the harder one to heal is the one with

1:22:07

the opposite gender um but if that one’s broken that is the one that if that’s not fixed it’s like trying to build a house on a broken foundation yeah and i imagine not just on a healing level but like within but when you’re with the the same sex and it reprograms that story that you have that you choose uh different types of girlfriends or different types of boyfriends of friendship and then when it’s of the opposite sex that just that alone that that reprogramming of that story between that gender

1:22:44

not just with the inner healing um causes you to change how you choose your partners as well 100 but i’m curious to um when people are i know for me the last couple months through ketamine and mdma therapy i was having different visions of different sexual trauma and like you said it doesn’t matter what was real or what was not but the moment i started to have those my body felt closed off to sex and that so like first like for maybe three four months i haven’t been sexually active because of everything that i’ve been processing and

1:23:19

so i’m curious how when sexual trauma starts to come up and how we uh when we start to work through it how that affects our sex drive uh and is that different for everybody or does everybody’s body kind of close off in that way yeah so that’s a great question um what i’ve understand or what i’ve understood so far is that it depends on how you’ve coped in the past that you will activate whatever is the safe whatever is the felt sense of safety and for some people that’s hyper yeah and i was a very prude teenager so

1:23:55

that makes sense right and so because that was your default coping pattern to feel safe that will likely be the way that it will manifest in you um as you go through the healing because your psyche is like we have to protect um and yeah so it depends on how you coped with it in the past will likely determine what comes up as you start to do this work [Music] okay um did you touch on all the ways to heal trauma that you wanted to touch on um i touched on what is healing for ptsd uh i’ll move to like cognitive trauma or

1:24:33

storytelling trauma because it’s it seems to be of the three that’s the one that easy s is not the right word but it’s the one that requires um the least amount of technical interference or assistance and what i have found for cognitive trauma is uh james pennebaker’s expressive writing technique which is essentially and i have a blog post on my website that people can check out if you just google eric gatsy expressive writing but essentially what you do is you follow the protocol that he wrote

1:25:09

out and it’s on the blog post and for four days in a row you set a timer for 20 minutes and you write stream of consciousness about the traumatic experience and what intuitively happens is as you rewrite that with the prompts that he gives for four days by the end of the fourth day the innate and healing intelligence inside of you will intuitively understand the story from different perspectives to a degree where you have a felt sense of understanding of why did this happen what was actually good about it and how

1:25:47

is my life better for it because when it comes to cognitive trauma a part of what your psyche is doing is it’s asking or it’s basically saying something hurtful happened to us in the past and the way that we responded to it wasn’t adaptive if it happened again we have to come up with a new strategy and you almost intuitively work through it by simply bringing your awareness to it every day for four days and what is common is the the act of doing it you might feel sadder than you have for a long time

1:26:23

while you’re doing it because you’re essentially reopening the wounds so you can fully clean it but the act of reopening the wound is can be painful but what the research has shown and it’s [ __ ] incredible is for the next year you will go to the doctor half as often if you have any pain conditions your felt sense of pain will be reduced if you have chronic biological illnesses their symptoms will reduce if you have ptsd or depression their symptoms will reduce they’ve even found that you’ll score higher on any type of

1:26:57

cognitive test you’re more likely to get hired i don’t know how the [ __ ] that plays out but they’ve done that study and it’s essentially it’s because you’re allowing your brain to put down something from the past that it thinks it has to think about all the time and so that is the most effective technique i have found so far for healing cognitive trauma developmental trauma if i’m just being honest i haven’t done enough research on that yet to feel comfortable giving like advice for what to do but my

1:27:28

understanding of it is to find a therapist who is trained in complex ptsd or developmental trauma and then they’ll work with you through the modalities that they’ve been trained in because the thing about developmental ptsd is it destroys our our attachment bonds and our attachment styles are how we bond with people it’s how we trust people and most people who have a lot of developmental ptsd fundamentally don’t even trust humans and so the complex ptsd therapist has to really understand like the work that is before them

1:28:07

um and so that is what i would offer there is to find a trained therapist who specializes in complex ptsd the complex ptsd is also really helpful yes i haven’t read it yet but it’s on my stack i’ve i’m i’ve just started it but it’s already helpful so and just listen back to eric’s uh podcast and or read his vlog on what is trauma is it called what is drama it’s so good yeah yeah it gives you all the book references in there as well okay so i’m going to pivot us to keeping up with eric godsey

1:28:48

[Laughter] so the first time we had you on you were at a place in your life where you’re in open relationships um that was what was more appealing to you at the time the second time we had you on you told us that you know the growth you desired in open relationships you discovered you could have in closed relationship you’re experimenting there you’ve gone through some ups and downs um we’re trying to just keep up with you man where do you stand right now on on all of it what’s your perspective at

1:29:24

this point on relationships closed open etc wow uh a lot has happened this year uh hopefully we have two more hours okay um we have two sub questions think that’s perfect perfect um the so the big thing that happened about two and a half years ago is i went to peru and i did watchuma and vilka and wachuma is a type of san pedro and then vilka is the most potent type of dmt that lasts for an hour and it just it blew me open and my big prayer when i was coming home was i’m ready to do the work to remove the

1:30:05

walls around my heart and when i first came back with my mind i was like i’ll do open relationship because that’s the best way to break down the walls around my heart and what i found for about six months is that um [Music] i was saying yes to what i thought was scary but i wasn’t allowing myself to actually be vulnerable with any of these women because i was starting at open and it wasn’t challenging me at all and i did an mdma ceremony alone and i really realized oh you’re you’re [ __ ] playing yourself you

1:30:38

aren’t doing any of the work and then organically in the next three days all of the relationships that i was in organically ended themselves by the other partners like choice and i was like all right universe heard so i was single for a while and then i got into a relationship and this is the first like monogamous relationship i had gotten into since i had like really made the vow to you know open my heart and uh we were together for a couple of months and then she ended up cheating on me and it was the first time that i’d

1:31:11

ever been cheated on and my big fear since i was a child was what if they cheat on me and so i had to confront that wall and it was incredibly painful it was the first time i had ever felt depressed in my life because this was the first relationship where i had started the story oh maybe this is the one and we have babies and all that stuff and um the way that i alchemized that is basically whenever anyone asked me how i was doing i told them the truth and i just retold the story of what happened to the point where i didn’t cry anymore

1:31:47

like it took like nine retellings of the story to people close to me where i was like oh okay like i almost intuitively did the expressive writing exercise verbally by telling the truth to my close friends and then i ended up this is going to be so funny once i get through the whole arc of what’s been unfolding but while we were together we made the choice to go to ayahuasca together like while we were dating and then the fallout happened and we still chose like let’s go do ayahuasca together and it was beautiful

1:32:19

everyone who knew me was like don’t do that that’s not a good idea you shouldn’t bring that energy into the space but what’s interesting is nothing about her and our relationship came up in the ayahuasca space but by the time that i finished the four nights of ayahuasca i had this epiphany where i realized the larger purpose of me being called to this relationship was that it was my love for her that brought me to actually do ayahuasca because how i am when i’m single is it’s all about the work i’m sitting at my

1:32:51

desk every day i’m not [ __ ] traveling like no it took her wanting to go to bring me out of my like work monk mode and brought me to ayahuasca which was the was the single most transformative experience of my life and it felt like i fully energetically closed and understood why this relationship played out the way that it played out i was single again for a while and then probably six weeks after that i entered into a relationship with someone that i had been best friends with for a couple of years and i’d never

1:33:28

done that before and uh it it has sparked a whole [ __ ] thing that has unfolded for the last 11 months and i want to protect her privacy but also be in truth with you guys the core of it was she had a lot of trauma that she had ran from through coping behaviors for a very long time and by entering into a relationship with me she was forced to confront these traumas and the first couple of months of the year her response was basically like i know i’m in love with you but i’m going to run away and so there is this

1:34:09

i’ve never been anxiously attached so the three attachment styles they’re securely attached there’s ancients there’s anxious and there’s avoidant before i started doing the work my attachment style was avoidant because i didn’t want to hurt myself so it’s like i don’t care and then but whenever i enter into a relationship my intuitive way of relating is to securely relate this was the first time i ever felt what it felt like to feel anxious because i could feel that she was in love with me but i could

1:34:36

see that her coping behaviors from her traumas were so powerful that she kept running i eventually put that relationship down because i was like this isn’t going anywhere and then i entered into a really beautiful relationship with that was completely clean um but because of in hindsight i was still attached to that best friend and the truth sharing with my partner at the time in the middle of the year eventually led to her being like i’m out like i love you but you’re not and this isn’t so we’re done

1:35:15

and then a bunch of really powerful personal things happened where i eventually entered into you know a monogamous relationship with this woman for a couple of months but you could just i could just feel that like her coping avoidant behaviors were so strong that i could feel that she had never really fully shown up to the relationship and after like two and a half months she had the consciousness to be like i can’t hold this container anymore so i’m going to step out the way that she stepped out was in such

1:35:50

a way where directly afterwards she was having sex with someone else and you know it felt like i got abandoned and got cheated on but i didn’t and for like a week i had to hold this feeling of like my entire nervous system is responding as if the love of my life is having sex with someone else all the time and it was completely destabilizing because we’re best friends we’re still in each other’s lives and about two months after that she finally got to the point where she felt safe enough to reveal that at the very beginning of the

1:36:25

relationship when we were monogamous she had gotten drunk and cheated with her ex and that she had been intertwined with her ex the entire year but hadn’t been upfront with me about it and it just completely like broke the trust like i couldn’t trust her at all while we were dating we made the plans to go to ayahuasca together so we’re still going to go [ __ ] do ayahuasca together in a couple of weeks and it is absolutely not lost on me that i am clearly in a cycle that i have not healed and just like five days ago

1:37:05

i had a really clear dream that was super [ __ ] confronting and the dream was i was in a store it felt like target and i was in this aisle and there was this dude in like all black that felt super douchey and he was bragging about how he only dates women who are traumatized because it makes him feel safe because he can see their entire trauma cycle and i was like this dude is a [ __ ] dick i like i i was so repulsed by him and then i go into the next aisle and uh do you guys know who christine hassler and steph stefanos are

1:37:44

the relationship coaches that i know and they’re married and they’re super like i respect them so much they told me you wait until you feel safe and then you escalate relationships quickly because you’re afraid of rejection and then i woke up and i was like [ __ ] i know what this means and i don’t want to i don’t want this to be true but clearly the first part of the dream was my shadow and my psyche was showing me that my shadow is i’m attracted to women who are traumatized because it

1:38:15

lets me feel safe and then one of the symbols for the higher self are divine couples and the fact that it was a couple and they’re both relationship coaches and they told me directly to my face essentially why i feel safe with traumatized women is because it allows me to feel like i’m in control and so i’m i’m my heart is being eviscerated because of this unconscious drive to choose women that make me feel safe but then the tragicness of it is that the thing that feels safe leads to coping patterns that lead to me

1:38:57

being cheated on and um my intuition is that as i go into ayahuasca this is going to be something that’s going to come up and that it’s not about the women it’s it’s about my [ __ ] and uh i’m gonna go show up to that fully um and this is the first point in my life since doing wachuma where i have no romantic relationship in my life and there’s this part of me that is just [ __ ] exhausted with relationship right now but i recognize that um trying to date one of my best friends uh has eviscerated all the walls around

1:39:42

my heart and the way that i thought open relationship would and i can see the beauty and the like cliche be careful what you wish for like i [ __ ] wished for something powerful two and a half years ago when my heart was wide open coming out of this medicine and the universe was like i got you and it like it’s been the most brutal emotional like heart year of my life and i can feel that i’m like crawling to ayahuasca like [ __ ] um so that’s what’s been unfolding for me uh to answer the question about where do

1:40:22

i stand on like open relationship and monogamy is where i currently stand is that my intuition is that open relationship is a very powerful training ground but that i truly believe every soul wants a sacred union and a sacred union can have aspects of open to it but i think everyone wants to be chosen and so whoever is like the third in an open relationship my intuition is that they’re at the point in their life where they’re learning but that that’s not a stable configuration for them if they claim

1:41:02

their full power of what it is that their soul wants i think everybody wants a sacred union and a sacred union can have any type of rules that the two agree but they each know you’re my king you’re my queen and there’s no like trying to have two queens or trying to have two kings i haven’t seen it done by anyone that i know in person where it’s stable so open feels like a really powerful training ground but that ultimately i think everyone when they claim fully what they desire and if they feel that they’re worthy of claiming

1:41:39

what they desire it’s to be in a sacred union and that’s kind of where i’m at right now i guess the one caveat that i would offer is a lot of people think they’re saying yes to a sacred union when they go into a monogamous or a menage miss relationship but really what it is is they’re running and they’re trying to find some place to hide and then they go get fat and they stop pursuing their dreams and they almost chain their partner to their i’m kind of i just want to be comfortable

1:42:10

so i don’t think that monogamy is essentially a sacred union i think a sacred union is this higher thing that’s like a spiritual commitment i will take responsibility for being whole and i want to be whole with you so we can make a third thing that’s doper than what each of us can be individually and that we serve the third thing that’s kind of where i’m at i like it i it’s fascinating that our evolution has not come to the point where we can we have to get there before we create the third thing you know what i’m saying

1:42:43

like a lot of kids would have a lot less trauma if we could we’d also have a lot less children generally if that’s the case or maybe it would be the motivating factor for us to do our work right i mean i don’t know um i wanted to ask you specifically about the book we by robert johnson that i know you’re a huge fan of and the gold that it is brought into your life so i haven’t read it yet it’s on the top of my to read list so maybe you can just give us some reasons why we need to dig

1:43:11

in there yeah so the book we really touches on the thing that i was talking about earlier with transference and we is one it’s probably the most important relationship book that i’ve ever read and every time that i explain it to people i see people’s eyes light up because they’re like oh my god that’s me i [ __ ] totally get it and the main idea is so that book is written by a jungian and uh the argument that he makes is that one of our fundamental needs is to feel a connection to the divine and religion a hundred years ago or two

1:43:45

or three hundred years ago served as the symbol that could hold the projection of that need to connect to the divine that we have to have something to project that onto to know it and that the highest order is to finally reclaim it and know that that divinity is within us when science came along and kind of destroyed the conventional container of religion that didn’t get rid of the need to have to project the divine onto something to understand it it just had to find something new to project it onto the argument in we is that western

1:44:20

culture used romantic love as the new thing to project the inner divinity onto romantic love is unique to the west it’s not like in other cultures there isn’t this idea of like if you fall in love with someone you abandon your family if it’s your true love and you give up every all your responsibilities and you just go merge with this thing and just be drunk in love and then if if it’s gone you go to someone else because that’s where the passionate love is what robert johnson talks about in we

1:44:56

is that if you don’t understand that this is happening in your psyche it’s going to create a lot of destruction and pain and it looks like this you meet someone you don’t know anything about them but you’re like oh my god i am in love with them you are projecting your inner ideal other that serves as a construct for the divine onto this person because one of the things to connect to is you’ve lived with you your entire life and you barely know who the [ __ ] you are so when you meet someone and you haven’t

1:45:29

even really spoken to them but you feel this like oh my god you’re projecting your god onto them and one of the ways to understand this is it’s almost like a person’s body is like the frame of a 4k tv and you can only project onto a certain type of frame because they fit like your idea of the inner other but the vision that you see when you look at them is entirely your projection you are illuminating all 4 000 pixels he talks about it takes about 12 to 16 months to interact with that human enough

1:46:04

where like one-fourth of the pixels are actually what they are as the pros to your projection and what people will tend to do of their own conscious is as soon as they start to see the glimmer of the actual person behind their projection they’re like i fell out of love but you’re not who i thought you were it’s the wizard in wizard of oz right not the magic curtain man and the thing that robert johnson talks about is that if you’re unconscious of this process you think you’ve fallen out of love and so you unconsciously begin

1:46:37

to look for a new tv frame to project your fantasy of the thing that you want to merge with which is really your inner other what he talks about is if you become conscious of this you will actually recognize that after the 12 to 16 months that is actually your first opportunity to actually love the person and to reclaim the projection and to put it where it’s supposed to be which is inside of you but most people will run from relationship to relationship because they want to [ __ ] themselves because they want to [ __ ] the inner

1:47:14

projection of their ideal other and that what he talks about is the way through this is to cultivate a felt connection to your soul and to recognize that your inner ideal other is your soul and you can do that through ritual meditation plant medicines he doesn’t talk about plant medicines but i’m going to put that in there but anything that helps you connect to the divinity inside of you and then to recognize at times my partner can consciously hold the projection and we can do freaky [ __ ] you know like

1:47:50

that’s fun but that they are their own being and that it’s actually a disservice to them if you unconsciously are seeking them to be your god because they can’t hold that and it denies them the opportunity of really being seen by you and vice versa i love i love we i just got she next i’ll get he but um i’m curious like does that win your fault because typically i feel like in the beginning is like the falling in love feelings and it’s really fun and it’s heated does that make that free do you feel like now for you having

1:48:32

that knowledge you feel like i’m not really in love and like you’re like my mind’s just tricking me and then do you have to wait like 12 to 16 months to really know if you’re in love with somebody and if you don’t even like them anymore then all your larvae your phone are going you take that opportunity right no so you take that opportunity at 12 to 16 months you take that opportunity when you don’t even seem to like that person to see if you can love that person or do you realize oh well this whole time i’ve been

1:49:01

projecting and there’s nothing actually there so this is a great question because i think that most people who hear this that’s one of the first things that they think and the first thing that comes up is if you’re conscious of it you can appreciate the beauty of what is happening and like this is an instinct you can’t stop this but you can consciously deeply enjoy it that this human has come into my life and if you believe in soul contracts this human has chosen to be one of the frames of the projection of my god

1:49:35

and we both have a deep opportunity to explore divinity through each other and like enjoy that but also recognize like maybe don’t make life decisions in the first six months like maybe deeply enjoy the [ __ ] dance drink it fully like one of the ideas is that the gods envied humans because humans got to be in bodies we get to taste coffee we get to kiss we get to know what orgasms are we get to eat great food we get to appreciate the wind coming through a tree and making that rustling sound like we get to be in bodies

1:50:16

enjoy what the [ __ ] is going on but also understand like i don’t know who they are and get and get to know them and then when you get to that point where you start to feel like oh they brush their teeth in a way that’s kind of annoying or like i don’t like the way that they make coffee like you can recognize okay i am now at the opportunity that if i want to i can get to really see them and then you get to choose in that moment but if for sure like don’t overthink it don’t have a [ __ ] alarm clock in your calendar like oh

1:50:51

it’s december 20th it’s [ __ ] it’s been 12 months like you can appreciate that this is a beautiful part of the love dance that we have in our culture and then also you know just have a quiet sobriety alongside the passionate drunkness to recognize like i don’t need to make any rash decisions about how i’m going to move forward in my life until i really get to know them you know it’s the same idea that if you have a vision on mdma wait a week before you act on whatever your big insights are to like

1:51:26

come back to a baseline it’s the same thing with ayahuasca or mushrooms or anything like that or even a dream 100 like allow yourself to settle and then um like there’s really great writers and poets that like don’t know they’re talking about this stuff but do talk about this stuff in a really clear and honest way where like there’s that great line in goodwill hunting where um the robin williams character is talking to the main character and he’s like i love the way that she farts like all the little idiosyncratic things that

1:52:05

are uniquely hers are the things that i love most and to me like that’s capital l love but you can only get to that point after 6 12 18 months of just being drunk on god to recognize like oh they take shits too many enchiladas and they burp you know and like that’s the opportunity to really start to appreciate like the meat suit that has willingly taken on your projection of god yeah firstly i just want to just express gratitude for knowing someone like you who’s vulnerable enough and open enough to to traverse all this with us and share

1:52:53

your experience that openly and i and i know the last time we talked about this specific topic you know you were going through a place that was about being blisteringly honest with your partner and how important that is and i love this balance that it seems you’ve come to of yes and you know instead of scrambling for the truth because i think that’s what i feel like uh like a pressure when you talk about okay well you’re gonna have some time where you’re not gonna know this person’s truth you’re not gonna know the truth is what

1:53:24

that sounds like to my psyche and i’m like wait but i need to know you know the truth what am i wasting time for and then we have this biological clock that’s ticking especially if you’re females all the stuff that starts possibly if you have kids yeah and that’s my narrative trauma i guess so the thing that i want to offer there is you can’t project this inner ideal other on everybody you can’t even project it on most people there’s a certain type of person that will catch it and you can

1:53:52

like i have faith that if it gets caught on someone it’s meant to be caught here you know and so it’s it’s not just this like blind thing like there’s an inner intelligence in you that’s like that tv is a tv to go yeah for sure and and i think that’s the the beauty of it is that you’ve found a way to balance it is balanced you know balance the idea of yes we’re here to look for the truth at the end of the day that’s what we’re seeking but it’s also important to witness the truth

1:54:28

that is being right now you know in this moment and it’s the experience of this section of love that also looks like [ __ ] yourself or be you know being with god to that degree or however you want to call it um which is beautiful and it’s an amazing part of life and it’s also the truth of why we’re here a big part of it and then to witness it unfold into the next layer right of of what the the real person you’re being with also is so i just love the way that you’re articulating it you know we’re we’re

1:55:00

getting to witness on this podcast like the progression and i think it’s so cool to see it unfold in each layer we’ve been along with you on this ride like in more ways than one you know um i am going to do ayahuasca with someone who cheated on me next year you guys need to [ __ ] have an intervention with me oh my god we will we’ll bring this podcast and the last one up and be like look dude this is a cycle we need to talk about it um again on our annual talk yeah so we have our our short questions that we

1:55:35

asked everybody we’re gonna wrap up the show here i was gonna say we have so much more to to discuss um and we know where to find you but i would love to talk to you about he’s going to change his number yeah say bye but i know you you’ve dived so deeply into things that i know our listeners deal with a lot like depression and antidepressants which is huge you know topic in itself so leave that for another time um but i want to do a whole two hours on that for sure i want to invite people to go find you and your

1:56:05

work as well on that specifically and i know you’re going to even unfold more of that in the years to come so we’ll be watching we’ll be sharing i’m sure with our listeners all about it so for now let’s close out today’s episode with the questions we ask you every year um so first off if you could hug your younger self right now eric what would you say it’s going to hurt but you’re going to do it and i’m proud of you [Music] you know who how old were you this time five five i love that

1:56:46

i would tell my five-year-old self that if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be this year probably um peter levine’s book on trauma uh i think it’s called uh waking the tiger yeah waking the tiger that’s really good if you could whisper one phrase to everyone on the planet what would you say hmm you chose to come here to fulfill a sacred task you don’t have to find it you only have to remember it and you have a still inner whisper that if you had the courage to hear it is waiting for you

1:57:45

and it will guide you to your sacred task and if you said yes to it it would heal everything that you feel needs to be healed and would give you the most beautiful fulfilling life that you could imagine that’s beautiful and if you say no to it what’s going to happen is that dolores cannon video i sent you earlier yeah well then the trauma begins again i suppose they’re re-experiencing all right before we let you go where can people find you online uh my website erigatzy.

1:58:18

com i have a weekly newsletter you can sign up for and have a journaling course that you can dive into uh my podcast is the myths that make us and then my instagram is eric gotzi but i won’t be on that for a couple of weeks as i prepare to go be judged by alaska [Music] all right beautiful stuff eric we always as you know appreciate your work um and just you generally as a human for showing up for us in so many ways too and supporting us whether it be on your show or in person and uh this has been a uh unexpected but beautiful relationship

1:58:55

so thank you thank you two so much for seeing me and for being a part of this journey and for asking the good questions yeah thank you man all right