August 9, 2025 • 18 mins
Guest host Lisa Garr and psychiatrist Dr. Reef Karim explore his efforts to help patients overcome traumatic experiences that can sabotage their behavior, how parents can impart their own fears onto their children, and how the brain can be predisposed to addiction and substance abuse.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
I am Lisagar and my fabulous guest is doctor Reef
Kharim and where he is a humanistic psychiatrist. After a
great story of how he basically got into and interested
in these psychology Reef, I'm just so curious because you
were obviously.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Voluntold that you needed to go to medical school.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
But where did you find You had to find an
interest in it within yourself in order to keep going on.
So you were talking about these why people do the
things they do corrective experiences? Why do we go after
this same bad relationship or the sabotaging patterns and these things?
What part of our brain keeps us in those toxic
(00:54):
expressions of ourselves?
Speaker 4 (00:57):
What that so when we look at how we become us?
So we come into this world with some level, like
you know, I've got a little four year old, right
and I look at him and he's so cute, and
you know, he's so they're so cute at that age,
but they he comes in and I'm a big energy believer. Yeah,
(01:17):
I believe that when you're when you're assessing somebody, you
look at them from. In my world, it's biological, psychological, social,
and spiritual. Those are the four elements in which how
you view somebody. And you can look at you can
look at anybody that way. Like let's say you're on
a date with somebody, maybe not a first date, but
as you get to know somebody over time, uh, you
(01:40):
can see what you know, what what's their makeup on
a biological perspective of psychological, as social, and a spiritual.
And when we look at how we become us, we
come in with some kind of generational or ancestral history
that could be a trauma history, that could be you know,
there's there's some there's some cultures that are more erotic,
(02:00):
there's some cultures that are more likely to potentially have
some level of personality issues or more genetic predispositions in
that ethnicity or in that community or that culture for
certain psychological issues or medical issues. There's some you know,
ancestral carryover that comes in. Then you're going to have
your that's mixed in with your own kind of persona
(02:23):
energetic persona of you as a little.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
As a little baby.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
And and that's what makes like my son or little kids.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
It's what makes them who they are.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
They have their own personality, and they also have that
that genetic that genetic history, and that ancestral history, and
it's like a mixture of all of that. And so
that's who they would potentially be if they in my mind,
if they if they grew up to be whoever they
were destined to be. There's going to be some innate
(02:55):
skills that they have. They can just do certain things
better than others. There's going to be this innate curiosity
that they have. There's going to be all this kind
of innate energy call it, call it a soulful expression
that they will carry with them, this kind of energetic
I call it like your soulful madness. It's your it's
(03:17):
your energetic expression. The problem is parents and caregivers they
don't know what that energy is.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
They can't.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
It's not like a kid comes with an instruction manual
and says, oh, well, this kid's destined to be the president. Well,
this kid's maybe going to do this, or this kid's
really interested in that.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
The parents and caregivers don't know.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
So some of them do their best and raise the
kid with what they think that kid should have some
of them impart their own dreams, their own views of
the world and good or bad, their own self limitations
that parents may have they put on the kid, their
(04:02):
own fear. And you know, we have this whole field
called attachment attachment science, and it's whether you might have
had an insecure attachment attachment with your caregivers, but it's
also what the caregivers are passing on to you. They
might be passing on confidence and an openness, they might
(04:22):
be passing on fear, they might be passing on all
sorts of things. And you know, I feel like my
job as a parent now is have some hard boundaries
that hey, I don't want you to do this.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
I don't want you to jump off the roof because
you're four.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
I don't I don't want you to, you know, do
do anything crazy here. But I do want to help
you explore what you're good at, what you're curious about.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
I don't want to negate that.
Speaker 4 (04:49):
I want to kind of roll with it, but at
the same time have some heart outs when things are
getting like really out of control.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
So then so well, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I want to ask you a little bit about that
generational history, the cultural I'm just going to back up
for a second because that's fascinating to me. So you
come in with and I mean, can you come in
with hereditary trauma.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Oh yeah, if you look up, if you look up
some research on generational trauma, it's legit. Wow, Like there
are some cultures that Okay, let's say something happened to
your community, Like you know, I know some people that
they are Native American and they've had some really rough
times as Native Americans in the past, and there's this
(05:33):
a culturation aspect to it. Maybe there's a mental health
thing that came from it, Maybe there was an addiction
history that comes from it. Maybe there's a trauma in
some other way history. You look at some people that
are survivors of the Holocaust, you look at people that
have survived lavery.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yes, I mean about.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Slavery exactly, really challenging times.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
That doesn't get erased from the DNA.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Like to to the DNA scientifically.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Well, what happens is like there's there's something called neuroadaptation.
And you see neuroadaptation with trauma, you see neuroadaptation with addiction,
you see it with obesity.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
There's there's I don't want them.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
You know, there's dinorphan, There's there's a number of other
like peptides that change and what ends up happening like
in the in the in addiction, for instance, what you
feel as a bad day is way more dysphoric after
you've had some level of neuroadaptation. So let's say I'll
(06:41):
use addiction first, then I'll get into trauma. Like let's
say somebody is pre wired. There's a genetic vulnerability. There's
two two having an addiction problem. They get exposed to
the stimulus, they get exposed to the drug, whatever that
drug is, and the method or delivery system that happens
(07:02):
and they start to you know, have a disorganized use
where that you starts to either build or they have
some level of tolerance, or they start they start getting
into trouble with it at some point. If they were
not specifically vulnerable from an ancestral perspective or genetic perspective
growing up, perhaps it would just be a drug problem
(07:27):
that would be hard to kick, but more able, more
tolerable to kick. Because dysphoria feels like dysphoria, negativity feels
like negativity, and the good feels like the good. They
have like a normative level of what feels bad and
what feels good. If you have a neuroadaptation, that then
(07:48):
occurs and you've shifted something in your brain. What was
normally like an average day feels like a bad day.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Makes more times worse for probably one hundred yes, and.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
What becomes a bad day feels like your worst day ever.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Huh huh.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
So this genetic vulnerability really exacerbates. So you get exposures
the first thing which everyone's going to get. I mean,
it could be cigarettes, it could be eating disorders, it
could be exposure to.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
All of it. It's all out there.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
And then there's a disorganized use where it's an uncontrolled,
vulnerable use and then the normal brain can kick it
with some intervention, but you can't, and it's a thousand
times magnified. If you have this genetic vulnerability, what then,
what do you do then?
Speaker 5 (08:43):
So and again I'll talk about addiction. Now I'll talk
about trauma.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
In the the world where there's been neuroadaptation, it is
much much harder to kick a drug habit, an alcohol habit,
a behavioral habit like a gam disorder disorder gambling, or
or sex, you know, sex addiction. I used to run
a treatment center and we had many people that had
behavioral issues that came in, you know, behavioral disorders, and
(09:10):
it just becomes so much harder because think about it,
for a person that doesn't have an addiction at all,
you get hooked on alcohol, or you get hooked on
gambling or on shopping, or on sex or whatever, and
it's really hard because you have a psychological connection to it.
You have a physiological connection to it. But as you said,
(09:31):
with the right intervention, with the right help, with the
right mindset, with the right whatever, it takes the right
spiritual shift, because you might feel spiritually bankrupt and you
want to shift that. With that right shift, you can
and the right help, you can kick that. But how
much harder is it to kick it when you don't
have an absence of that behavior, and absence of that
(09:54):
drug and absence of that alcohol creates your worst day ever.
You're gonna go back to it, and they're gonna be like,
I can't do this. You go, you go fifteen minutes
feeling your worstayever and you're like, hell, no, I'm not
doing this anymore nowhere, no way, I'm going back to it.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
I'm gonna take it.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
I'm gonna do what I'm gonna engage in this thing,
and it's so much harder now. Now take it from
the perspective of trauma. There's been some trauma that you've
had in your childhood, that you had with your parents,
that you had growing up, that you had in college,
or that was carried over to you where you're you're.
Speaker 5 (10:29):
Fearful of something, of something happening.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
It's just it's almost like implanted early on from just
your culture, and it's just like a culture thing. Now
you you start going through life and you develop some
type of neuroadaptation because of it, and you you have
more fear in your adult life. You're more neurotic in
your adult life. You limit yourself in your adult life. No,
(10:53):
I'm not gonna take that job. I'm not I'm not
gonna take that risk. You become risk averse. There's things
you really want but you don't go for it. There's
and you start to look at your as I mentioned
the term self concept, you start looking at your self concept,
especially with unprocessed trauma, unhealed trauma, you start looking at
your life and you're like, yeah, that's not for me
(11:16):
that dream's not going to happen.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
I'm not able to do that.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I don't feel deserving to write.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Yeah, it plays deservedness, It plays into your self worth,
it plays into all of it, right.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
I mean, it's interesting as a treatment center that you
break it down like that because you have so much
more compassion, because you understand that this person is predisposed
that they almost cannot help it genetically to reverse or
what is it called when you revert back to relapse,
and that they really literally cannot help themselves. And if
(11:51):
somebody was concerned enough to get them to the treatment center,
or that they were aware enough to get to a
treatment center, that's great that you actually had that distinction
and that awareness. I mean, did did that ever occur
to people like you know that, like a Robin Williams
or like a Michael Jackson that had access to so
(12:14):
much out there? Did they ever have this level of
understanding that you would get from just going to a
treatment center they had such concierge style medicine.
Speaker 5 (12:26):
Well, it really depends who you spoke to.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
I've worked and not just in addiction, like in mental health,
in personal development, in optimizing the mind and the brain, in.
You know, I use a quote I could, I could,
I could prescribe you a medication, but expanding your mind
is way more effective.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
I mean, that's the quote that I live by.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And I live by that because I want to expand
your mind. I want you to be able to see
beyond your current circumstances.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
You know, we get stuck in this state.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
I'll get neuroscience is for a second, but we get
stuck in the state of cognitive rigidity, and we're not
able to, you know, form new neuronal communication networks and
spontaneous ideas and think of ways out of our current
problems are old problems, let alone our future problems, because
we're just not able to.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
We're on shutdown. We're unstuck. We're stuck.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
So when you know, I had this big epiphany where
I was running this really high end treatment center. I
was treating everybody from celebrities to scholarship people where they
were almost basically homeless, and I was working with all
different types of people because their brains are similar let alone.
You know, their outfits might be different, but their brains
(13:45):
are similar.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
And I was helping a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
But I'm like, I really saw something that was missing
from traditional treatment and from just traditional just the people
look at mental health the way they were framing mental health.
Speaker 5 (14:03):
And it really started to bother me.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
And I started to see all these people that maybe
they didn't have a full on mental health diagnosis, they
weren't diagnosable, but there was like this undercurrent of feeling uninspired, unexpressed,
and unrealized, and it was like a large, large amount
of people.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
And it was growing.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
And the more that our technology was expanding our ability,
you know, just everything from cell phones to social media
comparison to AI to you just name the next thing, robotics,
blah blah blah, our minds are not able to keep up.
And what ends up happening is we're getting more and
more overstimulated. And that overstimulation is one of the reasons
(14:50):
we're landing in this level of cognitive rigidity and validation
seeking and conformity seeking and like group think and anger
and fear and polarizing. All of that stuff is not random.
It's not like we're just oh, it's twenty twenty five.
We're more people are feeling more victimized, people are more angry,
(15:11):
people are more polarized.
Speaker 5 (15:13):
Look at our politics. No, it's not just because of that.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
It's it's because of the nature of our minds and
what's happening to our minds with this current.
Speaker 5 (15:23):
Culture we're in.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Our current culture is toxic to our ability to find
meaning and be more cognitively flexible. And I saw that,
and I saw it coming, and I said, I am
going to leave.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
This was my big epiphany.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
I'm going to leave everything that was keeping me seeing
people one on one, the academic life that I was leading,
and the you know, one on one treatment center. We
would have like multiple people there, but it was a
smaller number.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
And I'm going to go, you know, shout from the
roofline on meds, pocess.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Yeah, talk about what's happening to our culture in a
much bigger way.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yes, because especially, I mean, people are just getting more angry.
They snap easier because of the pressures on people these days,
with of course the overstimulation, like you're talking about, there's
never a downtime. There's an addiction to media, to social media.
Talk about addictions. That is a dopamine addiction. I mean
(16:32):
it's a straight up chemical addiction, and people get overwhelmed
completely and of course then you add in not enough
and not worthy and then familial pressure like you had,
and it just makes people absolutely lose it these days.
Try to go out in a freeway. I mean, I
know you live in a Los Angeles right, Yeah, hasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
It got in insane?
Speaker 3 (16:55):
The freeway is not like I mean, they're bad enough,
but then you have these random people going hundreds of
miles an hour in weaving in and out of traffic,
And it's happening more and more and more on our
freeways that you can barely even move on right now.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And I know it's happening across the country too.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
So this I love that you're doing this one on
many approach because there's a bigger epidemic happening right now
and it's called mental health. I wouldn't call it mental
illness because I want to call it something positive. It's
got to be mental health, and we're seeing it. Talk
therapy isn't necessarily the solution in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I think it's. Well, I'd love to know what you think.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
Yeah, I'm curious, what's your take?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
If you don't think it's necessarily talk therapy, what do
you think? What do you think is your experience as
your friends or people you've seen in perstural healing.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
I think it goes back to that cultural trauma that
you were talking about earlier. I mean, things like plant
medicine can get you to those places where you access
parts of the the psyche that can get you underneath
the cultural trauma.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
I am Lisagar and my fabulous guest is doctor Reef
Kharim and where he is a humanistic psychiatrist. After a
great story of how he basically got into and interested
in these psychology Reef, I'm just so curious because you
were obviously.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Voluntold that you needed to go to medical school.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
But where did you find You had to find an
interest in it within yourself in order to keep going on.
So you were talking about these why people do the
things they do corrective experiences? Why do we go after
this same bad relationship or the sabotaging patterns and these things?
What part of our brain keeps us in those toxic
(00:54):
expressions of ourselves?
Speaker 4 (00:57):
What that so when we look at how we become us?
So we come into this world with some level, like
you know, I've got a little four year old, right
and I look at him and he's so cute, and
you know, he's so they're so cute at that age,
but they he comes in and I'm a big energy believer. Yeah,
(01:17):
I believe that when you're when you're assessing somebody, you
look at them from. In my world, it's biological, psychological, social,
and spiritual. Those are the four elements in which how
you view somebody. And you can look at you can
look at anybody that way. Like let's say you're on
a date with somebody, maybe not a first date, but
as you get to know somebody over time, uh, you
(01:40):
can see what you know, what what's their makeup on
a biological perspective of psychological, as social, and a spiritual.
And when we look at how we become us, we
come in with some kind of generational or ancestral history
that could be a trauma history, that could be you know,
there's there's some there's some cultures that are more erotic,
(02:00):
there's some cultures that are more likely to potentially have
some level of personality issues or more genetic predispositions in
that ethnicity or in that community or that culture for
certain psychological issues or medical issues. There's some you know,
ancestral carryover that comes in. Then you're going to have
your that's mixed in with your own kind of persona
(02:23):
energetic persona of you as a little.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
As a little baby.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
And and that's what makes like my son or little kids.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
It's what makes them who they are.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
They have their own personality, and they also have that
that genetic that genetic history, and that ancestral history, and
it's like a mixture of all of that. And so
that's who they would potentially be if they in my mind,
if they if they grew up to be whoever they
were destined to be. There's going to be some innate
(02:55):
skills that they have. They can just do certain things
better than others. There's going to be this innate curiosity
that they have. There's going to be all this kind
of innate energy call it, call it a soulful expression
that they will carry with them, this kind of energetic
I call it like your soulful madness. It's your it's
(03:17):
your energetic expression. The problem is parents and caregivers they
don't know what that energy is.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
They can't.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
It's not like a kid comes with an instruction manual
and says, oh, well, this kid's destined to be the president. Well,
this kid's maybe going to do this, or this kid's
really interested in that.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
The parents and caregivers don't know.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
So some of them do their best and raise the
kid with what they think that kid should have some
of them impart their own dreams, their own views of
the world and good or bad, their own self limitations
that parents may have they put on the kid, their
(04:02):
own fear. And you know, we have this whole field
called attachment attachment science, and it's whether you might have
had an insecure attachment attachment with your caregivers, but it's
also what the caregivers are passing on to you. They
might be passing on confidence and an openness, they might
(04:22):
be passing on fear, they might be passing on all
sorts of things. And you know, I feel like my
job as a parent now is have some hard boundaries
that hey, I don't want you to do this.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
I don't want you to jump off the roof because
you're four.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
I don't I don't want you to, you know, do
do anything crazy here. But I do want to help
you explore what you're good at, what you're curious about.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
I don't want to negate that.
Speaker 4 (04:49):
I want to kind of roll with it, but at
the same time have some heart outs when things are
getting like really out of control.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
So then so well, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I want to ask you a little bit about that
generational history, the cultural I'm just going to back up
for a second because that's fascinating to me. So you
come in with and I mean, can you come in
with hereditary trauma.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Oh yeah, if you look up, if you look up
some research on generational trauma, it's legit. Wow, Like there
are some cultures that Okay, let's say something happened to
your community, Like you know, I know some people that
they are Native American and they've had some really rough
times as Native Americans in the past, and there's this
(05:33):
a culturation aspect to it. Maybe there's a mental health
thing that came from it, Maybe there was an addiction
history that comes from it. Maybe there's a trauma in
some other way history. You look at some people that
are survivors of the Holocaust, you look at people that
have survived lavery.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yes, I mean about.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Slavery exactly, really challenging times.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
That doesn't get erased from the DNA.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Like to to the DNA scientifically.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Well, what happens is like there's there's something called neuroadaptation.
And you see neuroadaptation with trauma, you see neuroadaptation with addiction,
you see it with obesity.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
There's there's I don't want them.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
You know, there's dinorphan, There's there's a number of other
like peptides that change and what ends up happening like
in the in the in addiction, for instance, what you
feel as a bad day is way more dysphoric after
you've had some level of neuroadaptation. So let's say I'll
(06:41):
use addiction first, then I'll get into trauma. Like let's
say somebody is pre wired. There's a genetic vulnerability. There's
two two having an addiction problem. They get exposed to
the stimulus, they get exposed to the drug, whatever that
drug is, and the method or delivery system that happens
(07:02):
and they start to you know, have a disorganized use
where that you starts to either build or they have
some level of tolerance, or they start they start getting
into trouble with it at some point. If they were
not specifically vulnerable from an ancestral perspective or genetic perspective
growing up, perhaps it would just be a drug problem
(07:27):
that would be hard to kick, but more able, more
tolerable to kick. Because dysphoria feels like dysphoria, negativity feels
like negativity, and the good feels like the good. They
have like a normative level of what feels bad and
what feels good. If you have a neuroadaptation, that then
(07:48):
occurs and you've shifted something in your brain. What was
normally like an average day feels like a bad day.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Makes more times worse for probably one hundred yes, and.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
What becomes a bad day feels like your worst day ever.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Huh huh.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
So this genetic vulnerability really exacerbates. So you get exposures
the first thing which everyone's going to get. I mean,
it could be cigarettes, it could be eating disorders, it
could be exposure to.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
All of it. It's all out there.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
And then there's a disorganized use where it's an uncontrolled,
vulnerable use and then the normal brain can kick it
with some intervention, but you can't, and it's a thousand
times magnified. If you have this genetic vulnerability, what then,
what do you do then?
Speaker 5 (08:43):
So and again I'll talk about addiction. Now I'll talk
about trauma.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
In the the world where there's been neuroadaptation, it is
much much harder to kick a drug habit, an alcohol habit,
a behavioral habit like a gam disorder disorder gambling, or
or sex, you know, sex addiction. I used to run
a treatment center and we had many people that had
behavioral issues that came in, you know, behavioral disorders, and
(09:10):
it just becomes so much harder because think about it,
for a person that doesn't have an addiction at all,
you get hooked on alcohol, or you get hooked on
gambling or on shopping, or on sex or whatever, and
it's really hard because you have a psychological connection to it.
You have a physiological connection to it. But as you said,
(09:31):
with the right intervention, with the right help, with the
right mindset, with the right whatever, it takes the right
spiritual shift, because you might feel spiritually bankrupt and you
want to shift that. With that right shift, you can
and the right help, you can kick that. But how
much harder is it to kick it when you don't
have an absence of that behavior, and absence of that
(09:54):
drug and absence of that alcohol creates your worst day ever.
You're gonna go back to it, and they're gonna be like,
I can't do this. You go, you go fifteen minutes
feeling your worstayever and you're like, hell, no, I'm not
doing this anymore nowhere, no way, I'm going back to it.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
I'm gonna take it.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
I'm gonna do what I'm gonna engage in this thing,
and it's so much harder now. Now take it from
the perspective of trauma. There's been some trauma that you've
had in your childhood, that you had with your parents,
that you had growing up, that you had in college,
or that was carried over to you where you're you're.
Speaker 5 (10:29):
Fearful of something, of something happening.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
It's just it's almost like implanted early on from just
your culture, and it's just like a culture thing. Now
you you start going through life and you develop some
type of neuroadaptation because of it, and you you have
more fear in your adult life. You're more neurotic in
your adult life. You limit yourself in your adult life. No,
(10:53):
I'm not gonna take that job. I'm not I'm not
gonna take that risk. You become risk averse. There's things
you really want but you don't go for it. There's
and you start to look at your as I mentioned
the term self concept, you start looking at your self concept,
especially with unprocessed trauma, unhealed trauma, you start looking at
your life and you're like, yeah, that's not for me
(11:16):
that dream's not going to happen.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
I'm not able to do that.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I don't feel deserving to write.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Yeah, it plays deservedness, It plays into your self worth,
it plays into all of it, right.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
I mean, it's interesting as a treatment center that you
break it down like that because you have so much
more compassion, because you understand that this person is predisposed
that they almost cannot help it genetically to reverse or
what is it called when you revert back to relapse,
and that they really literally cannot help themselves. And if
(11:51):
somebody was concerned enough to get them to the treatment center,
or that they were aware enough to get to a
treatment center, that's great that you actually had that distinction
and that awareness. I mean, did did that ever occur
to people like you know that, like a Robin Williams
or like a Michael Jackson that had access to so
(12:14):
much out there? Did they ever have this level of
understanding that you would get from just going to a
treatment center they had such concierge style medicine.
Speaker 5 (12:26):
Well, it really depends who you spoke to.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
I've worked and not just in addiction, like in mental health,
in personal development, in optimizing the mind and the brain, in.
You know, I use a quote I could, I could,
I could prescribe you a medication, but expanding your mind
is way more effective.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
I mean, that's the quote that I live by.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And I live by that because I want to expand
your mind. I want you to be able to see
beyond your current circumstances.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
You know, we get stuck in this state.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
I'll get neuroscience is for a second, but we get
stuck in the state of cognitive rigidity, and we're not
able to, you know, form new neuronal communication networks and
spontaneous ideas and think of ways out of our current
problems are old problems, let alone our future problems, because
we're just not able to.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
We're on shutdown. We're unstuck. We're stuck.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
So when you know, I had this big epiphany where
I was running this really high end treatment center. I
was treating everybody from celebrities to scholarship people where they
were almost basically homeless, and I was working with all
different types of people because their brains are similar let alone.
You know, their outfits might be different, but their brains
(13:45):
are similar.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
And I was helping a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
But I'm like, I really saw something that was missing
from traditional treatment and from just traditional just the people
look at mental health the way they were framing mental health.
Speaker 5 (14:03):
And it really started to bother me.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
And I started to see all these people that maybe
they didn't have a full on mental health diagnosis, they
weren't diagnosable, but there was like this undercurrent of feeling uninspired, unexpressed,
and unrealized, and it was like a large, large amount
of people.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
And it was growing.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
And the more that our technology was expanding our ability,
you know, just everything from cell phones to social media
comparison to AI to you just name the next thing, robotics,
blah blah blah, our minds are not able to keep up.
And what ends up happening is we're getting more and
more overstimulated. And that overstimulation is one of the reasons
(14:50):
we're landing in this level of cognitive rigidity and validation
seeking and conformity seeking and like group think and anger
and fear and polarizing. All of that stuff is not random.
It's not like we're just oh, it's twenty twenty five.
We're more people are feeling more victimized, people are more angry,
(15:11):
people are more polarized.
Speaker 5 (15:13):
Look at our politics. No, it's not just because of that.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
It's it's because of the nature of our minds and
what's happening to our minds with this current.
Speaker 5 (15:23):
Culture we're in.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Our current culture is toxic to our ability to find
meaning and be more cognitively flexible. And I saw that,
and I saw it coming, and I said, I am
going to leave.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
This was my big epiphany.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
I'm going to leave everything that was keeping me seeing
people one on one, the academic life that I was leading,
and the you know, one on one treatment center. We
would have like multiple people there, but it was a
smaller number.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
And I'm going to go, you know, shout from the
roofline on meds, pocess.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Yeah, talk about what's happening to our culture in a
much bigger way.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yes, because especially, I mean, people are just getting more angry.
They snap easier because of the pressures on people these days,
with of course the overstimulation, like you're talking about, there's
never a downtime. There's an addiction to media, to social media.
Talk about addictions. That is a dopamine addiction. I mean
(16:32):
it's a straight up chemical addiction, and people get overwhelmed
completely and of course then you add in not enough
and not worthy and then familial pressure like you had,
and it just makes people absolutely lose it these days.
Try to go out in a freeway. I mean, I
know you live in a Los Angeles right, Yeah, hasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
It got in insane?
Speaker 3 (16:55):
The freeway is not like I mean, they're bad enough,
but then you have these random people going hundreds of
miles an hour in weaving in and out of traffic,
And it's happening more and more and more on our
freeways that you can barely even move on right now.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And I know it's happening across the country too.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
So this I love that you're doing this one on
many approach because there's a bigger epidemic happening right now
and it's called mental health. I wouldn't call it mental
illness because I want to call it something positive. It's
got to be mental health, and we're seeing it. Talk
therapy isn't necessarily the solution in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I think it's. Well, I'd love to know what you think.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
Yeah, I'm curious, what's your take?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
If you don't think it's necessarily talk therapy, what do
you think? What do you think is your experience as
your friends or people you've seen in perstural healing.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
I think it goes back to that cultural trauma that
you were talking about earlier. I mean, things like plant
medicine can get you to those places where you access
parts of the the psyche that can get you underneath
the cultural trauma.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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George Noory
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