How to Heal Childhood Trauma | Dr. Paul Conti & Dr. Andrew Huberman

At this point in time, what do you think is the most efficient way to root out and heal childhood traumas? Bringing compassionate curiosity to ourselves where we just look at our past and we look at it without sort of having a dog in the fight, so to speak. Where like I don't have to see it a certain way, right? I don't have to look at this and sometimes people will say well they will have to make it less bad than it was because they feel otherwise they won't be okay if they see all that was bad in it. You know, others might feel they have to look at the worst of it they're trying to anchor to things in their life now that they're not happy with and why that might be, right? So what it ends up doing is it brings so much emotion into it that we can't look in a way that has equanimity, right? Because we're living in the emotion. Now we can't feel no emotion if we're thinking about difficult things that have happened to us, but to be able to have that observation of self of like what is going on inside of me? What do I feel about it? Where does my own mind want to go? Do I want to minimize it? take it and dial it up so that it'll explain why I did X or why I didn't do Y, right? So we're trying to observe our own motivations as we look at our childhood and if we can gain more equanimity that way, then we can come to understanding that this idea that we don't have to be afraid to go and do that and to say okay, I can look at this and I see this part of my childhood or this person in my childhood like that wasn't good or wasn't okay or maybe it was even abusive. It was wrong, right? We can look at that and say okay, what what am I going to do with that? Now it doesn't define who I am. It doesn't determine any one single thing about me, right? If I can look at it with a calmness of mind and I can see the realness of how it's affected me right now, I start talking about malleability kind of where we started with malleability of ourselves and how we see ourselves and I can start to make progress, but we have to be able to look at ourselves and very often we just don't want to do that because we don't bring compassion, you know, we bring fear and criticism, right? But if we can just observe ourselves, now we can get in touch with what did happen in childhood? What am I making of that now, right? And then now maybe I might want to put those words outside of me in writing or in speech or I might want to talk to a trusted other see a therapist about it. So it it's taking the strong emotion that can keep us from understanding, right? Which can get very complicated, right? If we bring fear to our past, we're going to see it through the lens of fear. If I know I can look at my past and I don't have to be afraid even if it raises difficult emotion in me, I'm much more likely to keep a calm presence of mind and then to learn some things about myself.

myself. Do you think that people look back and think about good things that happened to them often enough? No. I mean it is a clear no. Not often enough the answer then is no. We tend to have a bias in us towards the negative and we don't stop and think, hey you know, I did that really well or you know, that didn't come out the way I wanted it to, but I learned from it or I didn't come out the way I wanted to, but I really tried. We tend not to do that and this bias towards the negative means we then start making the stories of ourselves about the negative or we feel like well if I look at what I've done right, you know, what's gone right in my life or what is going right, then I'll get complacent or like what is there to be gained from that? I'm going to look at what's not the way I want it to be and really quite the opposite is true, right? If we're looking at what's gone well in our life, at our successes and even things that weren't successes maybe from the outside, but hey I I grew, I learned something. The school of hard knocks taught me something, you know, then we are bolstering ourselves. We're empowering ourselves by doing that. So no, we should all do a

lot more of that and we wouldn't become complacent, right? We would become happier, healthier, more effective in our lives. I think when we talk about looking backward, um most of us including myself just kind of reflexively go to okay, my family growing up or elementary school, middle school, high school, so on. I have a colleague from the past Larry Squire is a kind of a luminary in the field of memory and they worked out a lot of stuff about human hippocampus and um when I was visiting UC San Diego some years ago, um there were a bunch of photos on his office wall. I was like oh cool like I was looking at for meetings and things. I figured if they're on his wall, I'm allowed to look at them. So I like probing around. Oh, there's so and he said, you know, having photographs on your wall of times that were really good is very good for your adult memory and it cues up emotional states for you. And this is where it got interesting cuz he studied explicit and implicit memory, the ones that we're aware of versus the ones we're not aware of just to be clear to people. And he said even if you don't look at them deliberately each day when walking past them, if you have some you know, implicit understanding about what those are, you're surrounding yourself with positive memories. Yes. And I thought that's pretty cool and he's not just somebody saying this, right? It just wasn't some Right. you know, just thing thrown out in the world. This is arguably one of the people who knows more about human memory structure function than anybody last 200 years or so. Uh that's cool and I so I said, you know, so should we party? Should we and he just said, just things and people and experiences that you liked. Mhm. You just put them up. And I said, do you find yourself looking at them on your wall? And he goes, yeah, from time to time, but he's like I'm basically in a vessel of awesome memories and doesn't, you know, solve all my problems, but why wouldn't you? And I think that's such a cool idea and uh these days we spend a lot of time looking at other people's experiences, a lot of news coming in and things like that. I wonder if we're just doing a lot less of this and as a last point I I've always um liked, I mean who knows what's really going on behind the scenes, but I've always like you go into somebody's home and they you walk down a stairwell or up a stairwell sometimes and they've just got the wall littered with all these photos. Not necessarily [snorts] big family, sometimes yes, sometimes no and you're like, wow, like they're like posting all their experiences and I think it's kind of cool. I don't tend to do it. Um but this is a version of thinking about and exposing oneself kind of basking in the past in a positive way. I think it's

kind of cool. Maybe we should do more of it. Absolutely. I think what he's talking about and what you're talking about here is actually being able to have control over the climate within us, right? The structure of self which is foundational has at its foundation our unconscious mind and the unconscious mind sets parameters for us. It's kind of the climate in which we're living and if that climate is being predisposed, it's programmed, right? To have a bias towards the negative because we're thinking negative thoughts a lot of the time. We're thinking about what we did wrong or what we should have done differently or what's going to go wrong, then we're biasing the unconscious mind to throw to the surface the negative answer. I'm sure I'm I going to be able to do that? No, right? We're biased towards the negative. Now we don't know why. Why did I say no instead of yes, right? That arises from the climate inside of me which is my unconscious mind. So he's saying, hey, you can sort of pre-program a bias into you towards the positive and it's not a false bias. Those memories that are up on his wall are real, right? And whether he's looking at them or he's just kind of glancing and he walks by and there's a registration inside, you know, that he that he's not even aware of, right? He's he is priming the unconscious mind to see the positive side of things. If he thinks well, can I do that or yes, I I can, right? It changes things inside of him and he's then able to exercise control over his own climate and we can do that too and often what we're inadvertently doing is creating a climate of fear and a climate that is that lacks confidence, right? Inside of us because we're just looking at the negative all the time whether it's about us or the world around us and that's the reason why the title of that book is going right cuz there's way more going right in all of us than there is going wrong or we wouldn't be here. So why not prime ourselves with that the way that he was doing with the photographs on the wall. It absolutely makes sense and it's not a Pollyanna concept. It's not saying

well, just look at what's going right. It's saying no, this is consistent with what's real and true and it's good for you too. It helps you be effective in the world. It helps your mental health. Helping your mental health helps your physical health. It everything about this aligns with truth and it sets us up to be in better control of our lives and to be on the front foot as we're approaching life. —