Daniel Maté on co-authoring THE MYTH OF NORMAL (Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture) with his father: Dr Gabor Maté

Transcript

Josh Snyman 0:04
Looks like we are live. So Daniel, thanks for coming on, brother. I really appreciate it. My appreciation to you for having me.

Daniel Maté 0:11
It's a real pleasure to join you from so far away. Yeah, yeah, awesome technology. I love it. I love that software. Before we dive into the main topic of today's discussion, which which is the book, which I'm very excited to dig my heels into a bit with you.

Josh Snyman 0:30
How do you describe yourself in the world professionally, personally, however you want to tackle that just to give some people a bit of a context? Sure, well, it

Unknown Speaker 0:39
depends on the day. I do a bunch of different things. And some days I'm more comfortable with not having a rigid definition of myself. You know, sometimes I'm jealous of my friends who can say I'm an academic, or I'm a doctor. But, you know, on the other hand, I think it's it's also in some ways, a blessing. So I usually I start with I'm a musical theatre writer, because that's what I put the most time into I guess. 15 years ago now. I graduated from NYU with a degree in musical theatre writing. I did the graduate programme here in New York. So I'm a composer and a lyricist. For the stage. I write songs that tell stories that move the plot forward in a musical. You know, you think of your favourite Disney musical, Little Mermaid. Those songs were written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman Ashman wrote the lyrics make and wrote the music. I sometimes do both. I sometimes do one or the other. And I often work with other people. I've written five or six shows now. And that's a career that comes in fits and starts it takes forever to get a musical made, if it ever gets made a lot of developmental steps. It's a very collaborative profession, meaning that you're really it's a beautiful thing. But unlike being an author, where you just get a book contract and you're lucky and you know, it's going to come out into the world. You toil away on a musical then you have to find a director, a music director, choreographer, you have to have a theatre pony up and say we want to produce this thing. And that takes a lot of money to produce music, because there's so many different moving parts. There's the arranger, the orchestrator, the band, the cast, the stagehands, the crew builds the set and the advertising I mean, so it's just such a collaborative art. Form. That, at least in my experience, I mean, they say on Broadway, you can make a killing but you can't make a living. And so a lot of it is is working in and around the industry. I've done a lot of different things. I've been a transcriptionist on Broadway shows meaning that I I helped prepare the sheet music basically by ear I listened to demos of the material and I read out the sheet music and I've got my MIDI keyboard here and I do that kind of work. Pot. I've done a lot of different things in that area. And that's been very rewarding and artistically fulfilling. I am a mental chiropractor, which is something I made up I was once there was a time when I was apprenticing with my father and the sort of Iosco space the the psychedelic healing world, and I was at a no longer doing that. But I I was at a retreat in Peru and a participant said to me, you know, you're not a therapist, like your dad and I said, thank you very much because I'm, I'm not pretending to be one. I have a degree in psychology, but I never did anything with it. He said you're a mental chiropractor. I said, Wow, that's a great term. I really am flattered by that because mental chiropractic, what it says it is what it sounds like is that you know, I get in there with people and make a quick adjustment to the alignment of the mind. The mind just like a spine is made up of different components that are meant to interlock and work together and it works best if it's in a particular alignment and if something is out of alignment, you're going to have problems either pain or nerve damage or some compromise functioning completely elsewhere in the body. So you can have a lower kind of at a joint you have a headache, or a pain in your foot. So in the mind, I think of it as there is your intentions. Which often we're not conscious of, you know, we often operate from default, hidden intentions, they're actually hidden to ourselves. You have conscious beliefs, you have assumptions, working theories, you have values, moral values, ethical values, you have prejudices you have the imprints of trauma. You have, you know, the emotions that come and go. And it all creates a certain system and what I do with people, I don't work on the big ticket issues that you'd go into with with a therapist, for instance. So if someone comes to me, so for instance, I did a consultation with someone in the Maldives yesterday of all places. And this person said to me, I'm dealing with addiction. And I'm dealing with attention deficit deficit disorder, which obviously are two topics that my father has written about extensively.

Unknown Speaker 5:39
And I said, Well, look I have experienced personal experience with both of them in my own life. But those are very large, broad life issues that one would need to engage in a course of therapy to get into as well as the traumatic imprints that underlie that makes you you know, if you give credence to my father's approach to these things, which I think is pretty sound, you know. I said, Is there a specific situation in your life right now, where these things are showing up? You know, is there did you relapse recently? Are you having a hard time forgiving that in terms of Attention Deficit Disorder, is there is there a conversation you need to have with somebody about that to make different arrangements for yourself? And what I was getting at is that I work on specific situations with people. There's a stuck point. The issue is obviously in the background, the trauma is in the background. I take that for granted. We're all carrying stuff. But where I tend to shine is when someone is struggling with this one particular thing. So if you come to me and say I have daddy issues, I'd say go see a therapist. If you come to me and say I'm going to see my father next week and I just know it's gonna go this particular way. And it always goes this way. And I want it to go some different way. But no matter which way I look at it up, down, sideways, inside out, upside down. I just know that I can't see it going any other way. Well, that's something we can work on. It's specific. So in a way, I coached people to have a small victory, and which is the title of one of my favourite faith, no more songs, a small victory, and the band might be before your time but having a small victory in a very difficult area can sometimes radiate outwards, because what it indicates to the whole system is oh, it's not set in stone. And if I can have a flexibility, suppleness, malleability and this one thing that seemed to set in stone, maybe the whole thing isn't so set in stone. So I in some ways I dealing with it from the outside in, rather than what a therapist would do, which is like getting right to the bottom of the issue and all that but that takes a lot of time. I don't have the patience for that. And I'm, I get kind of result on like, what's the outcome? So I spend an hour and a half with someone saying we take a walk together. I call it a mental walking mental chiropractic service called Walk with Daniel, which is that walk with daniel.com And actually, I have them walk wherever they are, and I walk where I am and we're on the phone. Or if we happen to be in the same city then I do it in person and over the course of that hour and a half or whatever it ends up being. We both set the intention that we're going to get you unstuck from this thing in the next hour and a half. So it's not I don't treat it like a process. I don't want to get people in the mindset of oh, you know, slowly over time, that's cool. You can do that work, but not with me. With me. It's like what are you stuck with? Are you determined? Do you intend to get unstuck like this? Are you ready to be unstuck? And there's a part of the mind. I feel like I'm answering six questions at once that you haven't asked but you know, when I say when I say mental chiropractor, no one knows what I'm talking about at first blush. So this is what it is. And then yeah, the idea is that with a high degree of intentionality, and basically the person is giving me permission to get in there and make an adjustment. So it's a little more it's more forceful. We make that adjustment and people come out of it with a different perspective and something settles ideally the the alignment finally settles into place and all of a sudden, it's just much simpler. And the person feels empowered to go ahead and deal with it from a different perspective. So that's the mental chiropractor thing. I've been doing that for about four years now. And I really enjoy that. I enjoy doing that with people. And now I'm an author too. You know, I co wrote this book, The Myth of normal with my father and I am now all of a sudden, a published author. And we have a second book coming out in a few years based on a workshop that we currently lead and have been for about six years, called Hello again, a fresh start for parents and their adult children. Which I can talk about if you like but so you know, I do all those things. I probably do some other things that I'm not even thinking of, but that those three things I would say are how I would describe what I'm up to in the world currently.

Josh Snyman 10:25
Not small and that's it. I can I can go 100 different ways with that so that that always helps Yeah, I connected I think would connected with me with your story was obviously listen to the Joe Rogan episode and I've heard I've heard your father speak many times, but he mentioned the situation maybe you can extrapolate it of you growing up with him. And I've had similar not similar I wouldn't call it similar but but let's just call them daddy issues. But how has that impacted you and how is this coming together? It seems to write the book, forged this new path going forward. Hope that makes sense. But I feel like that's what resonated with me and that's why I wanted to reach out with you as that was the entry point. But then the more I dug into some of your work, the more stuff I found and the more interested I was. So that's what led me to this discussion, but maybe you can talk to to the process of writing the book with your father and the impact has had but also maybe just giving context as to what it was like growing up and how that Sure, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 11:39
yeah, well, it's been a powerful process. I would say that independent of working with them. I've been on a journey to excavate What the heck happened in my childhood and what not just what happened, but what was it like for me, because that's the point. It's not so much the events. It's the experience that the child has and what happens inside the child that leaves the input. I mean, we say are one of the ways I like to frame it. I don't know. Probably hockey is not the biggest sport in South Africa. But what I say is that trauma is the concussion, not the cross check. You know, it's the head injury, not the illegal tackle. The tackle is traumatic, but the it's the imprint that it leaves and that comes from the experience. And often, once we grow up, we get out we lose touch, even if we know the facts about our childhood. We had to forget at some point what it was actually like and that's why it comes back in flashbacks or nightmares or in in foreign Trump trauma triggering moments with somebody completely else you know, with a girlfriend or a spouse or a boyfriend or a husband or a boss. Or your kids. And you have that outsized, disproportionate reaction to something and if you know how to look at it, right, you say, well, that's a clue to what it was like for me. That's an echo, you know, so I'd say that my entire adult life and I'm turning 47 A week today, and has been in some ways a kind of mystery story, a detective story of trying to figure out why do I struggle, the struggle you know, starting in university, I started having depressive episodes. And loads of continued throughout my adult life, and all kinds of struggles with motivation, self definition, anger, difficulty in relationships. It shows up in all kinds of ways. Now, I'm in the unique position of having a father, who is has been increasingly renowned at this point. He's internationally renowned for his work on popularising the view that childhood trauma is what results, what leads to the results, the outcomes of difficulty in adulthood, which for me is extra confusing, because, I mean, on the one hand, it's a real plus because I you know, there is a language to talk about it. On the other hand, there's a language to talk about it a lot. And so it's like getting the information about my childhood secondhand. I remember when I was 11. Maybe I was having social problems at school and we were in Chinatown in Vancouver, just having come from lunch and I was telling my dad about, you know, what it was like for me to be bullied or excluded by people I thought were friends. And he said, Well, Daniel, you know, when you were very young my mother, your mother and I were having difficulties and you know, you. You were a very sensitive child, and there was an impact on you and you always you always had difficulty reading social cues. So basically, I'm getting my trauma explained to me by an expert. And that's not what you actually want from your father. You want guidance, you want compassion, you want listening, you want an example? So having to climb my way out from underneath the mountain of information, secondhand information and figure out well what was it like for me and so I'd say in the past five or six or seven years that started to become more. I've had started to have more of an autonomous view of my childhood. My father was a rage, filled, pain filled Holocaust survivor, who had very little emotional control. I'm talking about in my early childhood, his voice booming out, yelling, stomping around when he was frustrated. is something I remember. He was always very articulate about it so he would scream. I'm so frustrated that you know that was his that was his version of positive healthy anger expression, and he might have gotten it from a book on I don't know Primal Scream therapy. I don't know what he was into at the time. He's always been into something.

Unknown Speaker 16:05
Yet he you know, there were parenting books all along the walls. And I remember as a kid going to the his bookshelf, and like, kicking down his parenting books, and like leafing through them so I could learn his tricks. Learn him, like I learned what techniques they were going to use them because I didn't want to be manipulated by these two powerful, really smart people. And I developed a really, really quick, clever, big brain as a way of surviving. So that was my coping mechanism. My parents were both very intense, very loving. I mean, they they felt a lot of love towards their children. They had difficulty getting it across in a calm way that I won't speak for my siblings, but that I could really absorb because one of the child's fundamental needs is security. Knowing that they're both you know, not just physically and emotionally safe, but that the you come into the world and it's complete chaos. And you don't even have a sensor, really, you don't have a sense of you being a separate person. You know, and then slowly, you're, you get sort of long distance vision and you real and depth perception, you realise, oh, that's Mommy and I mean that's Daddy and Me. That's a chair, that I'm living in a world of things and objects and laws, like things the world works a certain way. And depending on the environment that a child is born into, they're going to absorb a different view of the world and my view of the world is that it's very chaotic, very tenuous. That the mood in the house can switch at any moment, from loving and humour filled and playful, to dark dark, dark clouds and a punitive atmosphere. One where I'm being blamed one where my emotions are reacted to or my words are reacted to, in an extreme way. So it's not safe to to fully just relax and be made. Now, unlike some kids, who learn to be nice and good, and suppress their anger, which is you know, a type of personality dynamic that my father writes about a lot. That wasn't my coping mechanism, my coping mechanism was to raise up and get more quote unquote mature and pseudo sophisticated in my intellect and in my language so I can out talk my parents at age, you know, five or six and I think my father has said he was intimidated by my intelligence, my sensitivity, the fact that I could see through him and that sounds like a superpower. But every superhero has a tragic origin story, every you know, you fall into the vat of toxic waste. You come out able to bend steel, or whatever it is. You get bitten by a radioactive spider and you're all of a sudden you can swing from webs. And it looks cool, but it's there's pain underneath it. So my big brain became a way of coping with a, you know, it was my navigation system to try and get some sense of agency and safety in the environment. And it almost sometimes worked. And that's the thing about these personality dynamics, they kind of work they work better than the alternative. And so we do them over and over again and they become they become habituated and then I get cool. Just around kids who like to hang out and chill and play, and I had zero job. So then I'm ostracised, and feeling pain about that. And now I'm in this tension between my home life and my school life and, you know, wishing that I could fit in there and feeling like my home life is so weird. So you know, it was that whole dynamic and you know, I'm certainly not alone in that. I'm sure a lot of people listening will will relate to at least parts of that. Even if they didn't have a famous trauma therapist for that, who wasn't even a trauma therapist back then he was just a GP, a family doctor. So anyway, that's the background of my childhood and in my adulthood. The process has been trying to reconnect with what was it actually, like for me and who is underneath all of that superpower, I like to reconnect with the part of me that was terrified or that was furious, or that was really sad and grieving and desperate for love. And because knowing about it intellectually, see my intellect can only get me so far. In terms of healing because it it came along to protect me from the other stuff, the vulnerability, so as life goes on, getting deeper and deeper into Oh wow.

Unknown Speaker 20:59
This is what I started to have been going through, and then having compassion for that. And then taking my focus off of the externals and the whole narrative and the story, and it's a good story. But the Freedom doesn't lie in figuring out exactly what happened. The freedom lies in reconnecting with remembering, you know, the word remember sounds like it's just about recall that but actually to an undesired member, the self. We quote in the book says that I think it's a great formulation. So then, to go back to the first part of your question, what was it like and what role did writing this book with my father play in that whole process? Well, we had gotten to the point where we could work together and where I knew that he respected that I provided some value for him. You know that my skills as a musician, a lyricist, a wordsmith, and a thinker, someone who could see his work from the outside and think how can I make this more lighthearted, if possible, humorous and accessible, but also more convincing for people who are already aboard what I call the trauma train. You know, there's a lot of people out there who haven't thought about their lives in this way. And I want it to be inviting to them, not just people who go to personal development workshops, or have been in therapy for decades, or do Ayahuasca or whatever, like. So many of those perspectives, those productive differences between my father and I, and my mental chiropractic inclination, which is to make things really clear just through how you express it in this moment and how you frame it. I'm bringing that to the writing. He basically asked me to join him on the project. He tried to write this book for at that point six years, maybe even longer, and having a hell of a time of it. He compiled 25,000 articles categorised all that topic on this computer. It's pretty good, you know, feet of like, librarian ism. He was he was it was very organised. And he you know, he was very passionate about this, but he didn't quite know how to frame the topic. And then at a certain point, he sort of reframed it, he realised Okay, the myth of normal. He was going to write a book called toxic culture have capitalism makes us sick, which sounds like a hoot you know, like, that's, that's a real that's a real fun read. But then he came up with this more positive, interesting, provocative title, I think. And at that point, he got an agent, and he tried to write a book proposal. And, you know, my mom read it and she was like, oh, Gabor, this is really heavy. And, and it's slog, and he sent it to me, because I had done editing work for him before on the realm of hungry ghosts, his previous book, I had done some light editing, some slight, you know, writing some things in there, but it was definitely, you know, it was more of an editing position than CO writing position. And I looked at this book proposal and I said, Dad, I can help you with this, but I'm going to need to be credited, because you need help. I'd have to really, and not just in terms of the execution, but the structure of it. How do you form the argument? How do you make this interesting and compelling? What's the story we're telling? And as a dramatist, as someone who writes musicals and thinking, What is the story arc? What's the beginning the middle in the end? What's going to make it exciting, so I can't afford and there's a challenge. There's a power struggle at times and there was a number of dynamics going on. My desire to be seen and appreciated by him to have my unique contribution, appreciate it. And at the beginning, he was kind of territorial. It was his book. After all, understandably, he's been working on it forever. And I would send him versions of the chapters like I would, he would the basis of the processes, he'd write something, he'd send me the chapter, I'd rework it, sometimes heavily, and send it back to him. And early in the process. Sometimes when I would send him my version, he immediately call me right back and be like very in a very serious way. It's usually late in the day after we've been working on it forever. He's like, Daniel,

Unknown Speaker 25:36
you know, your writing is very fine. And this is how it went. I'm like, Oh, shit, here it comes. He's like, but this is not my voice and it's overwritten, and it's this and it's that, you know, and I was like, we had to set up a new rule, which is like that sleep on it when I said, do something and look it in the morning because often what would happen is he email me at 11am The next day, he'd be like, I woke up and read it. It's actually pretty good. I can work with this and I said, I don't need you to like sign off on my version, take my version, and do your thing to it. And then we'll pass it back and forth, which is what collaborators do, which as I said, in the musical theatre world is a big thing. I'm used to I'm quite good at I think I wasn't good at it at the beginning, but my ego has gotten some cross training in that. So we had to learn how to work together and I had to learn how to not take it personally. When that would happen, and that what started to happen is that I started to see his vulnerability in a way that I'd never seen before. That underneath it all he was just anxious and insecure, as a creator. And I was like, Oh, I can relate to that. And it's not personal to me. And so then I would, I would be more gentle in my approach. I could I could stop doing my automatic thing of trying to convince him or be right or whatever. And you know, I failed, I'm sure 60% of the time at first but 40% is pretty good, you know, a success rate. And and, you know, simulated for him. There was a there was a growing curve. And by the end of it. It was interesting. By the time we were writing the final chapters and then doing a rewrite of the whole thing. We were both writing in a call in a voice that sounded very much like a mix of the two of us. And when one of us would take the other's work and rework it. Often it was like Yes, thank you. That's exactly what I meant to say. So by the end, there was a huge lane for me to contribute to write entire sections, with his ideas, but me expressing them in the way that the most people would be able to grasp it and get the most out of it. And he would say thank you, that's great. And similarly, when I would go off on some tangent, he would take what I'm saying and say it you know, you can tell I'm a long winded dude. Something I'd say in four paragraphs, he'd say in a couple of sentences, and we'd be just as good. So really starting to appreciate each other's gifts. And if I had to sum all of that up, you can hear the interpersonal dynamics underneath the professional work right? mutual appreciation means not taking things personally seeing him as a human being him seeing me as his equal, but different. You know, seeing me as a grown up, respect thing. My feelings and my work taking responsibility for his own emotions and not dumping onto me the way he had throughout my entire childhood. So in a sense, the professional relationship, the book contract the the mutual project of putting this thing out into the world was like scaffolding for repairing some of the broken dynamics between us. If we had just tried to do that in our ordinary lives, it would have been a lot harder because A, we wouldn't have needed to be talking all the time. We could just avoid each other, avoid the tough stuff. And number two, why it's hard. We were comfortable in it. In this case, we have an outside reason to do it because if we don't work this out, then this thing this book is not going to be sorry, I just performed again. This book is not going to be the the singular. Successful and I say successful, I mean creatively successful, like the satisfying product that we both want it to be, and it won't make the difference we want it to make so we had to get off it quickly. We don't have the luxury of of indulging the hurt feelings and whatever. We had to look for solutions we had to chiropractors situations. So that taught me something that making something more important and hopefully something external, more important than the old patterns creates a powerful intention that can then Trump the the programming went in the crunch in the moment, you know, not everyone's gonna write a book with their father. I don't recommend it to everybody. But you know, setting up some architecture to support moving in the direction that one or two people want the relationship to grow in.

Unknown Speaker 30:28
It was a powerful experience, you know, and we've come out of it. Feeling very much like a team now. Not always, there were still times when we take out our stuff on each other. I've been finding I've been doing that quite a lot in the past month, which I'm not proud of. I'm curious about it. I'm not, you know, try not to be hard on myself. Like why is that happening? And I think with the release of the book, I've been feeling insecure, because he's getting all the attention, which he should. This book is his work. Our next book is going to be very much a 5050 collaboration. On the parent child group relationship. Neither of us is more of an expert than the other. Well, he's put in decades. of work as a health professional healer, a speaker and a teacher. But there's this little boy in me that once that's afraid that I'm going to be ignored or that he's going to take you know, that that yeah, that I won't be seen and appreciated and that'll be taken for granted. And when that little boy takes over all of a sudden I'm in a nightmare. And the world looks very dark and it looks very unfriendly, and he looks like a villain. It's incredible how inside that framework, he can actually take on the bad guy contours that I used to frame him in as a child. He was really, I loved him. I worked it shipped him but also he was he was the monster. I would have nightmares about the Big Bad Wolf and it was him. So those things at least so far, and maybe in my next steps of therapy or whatever, I'll get to the place where those I can finally put those nightmares to bed so to speak, and they don't come back. I'm not at that point yet. I'm at the point where I have to manage them and I have to be responsible for them as an adult and watch for them and see the signs of them. And when I can't trust the people around me to see it. And then take the note when they give it to me like Hey, Daniel, you're slipping into that. And, you know, that's humbling for all the things I know there's a difference between being intelligent about emotions, and being emotionally intelligent. That's what I've learned in the past few months.

Josh Snyman 32:48
Well, I suppose they thank you so much for opening up that and that level of vulnerability. I certainly I certainly connect with that in a very deep level. And obviously it's not I'm not writing I'm not co authoring book with my father but everything you everything you pay there, I can I can relate to a similar experience. And so I just wanna say thank you because that's that's beautiful and to hear it from your side, I think adds just that residue of realness that I that I crave, that I crave. And I think a large part of my work and the things that I do and the things I'm interested in is, is that remembering it's that being a self and not having my father present most of my life. He's alive, just not present, but is being very much a self taught human. And I think a lot of things I've had to teach myself and a lot of that has been going back. Paradoxically, it's not the forgetting it's the remembering and, and forgiving my father for a lot of things and some of that a lot of that forgiveness. I had a recent guest Nathan main god was a beautiful conversation. I've just released it today actually. And I spoke about a San Pedro ceremony that I had. And it was the most profound thing and my intention. You've mentioned intention a lot. And I think that's so important. And my intention going into that ceremony was to was to forgive my father and I and I remember taking the San Pedro and just witnessing me my father came together and we locked we locked heads. And I saw my ancestors dancing around us and they all came together and I saw my dad's pain as a kid. I saw the exact same pain that was passed down onto me. And it was the most one of the most profound experiences I've ever had. So but again, I just want to say thank you because that your story I can connect with and I love that it's beautiful.

Unknown Speaker 35:04
Oh, you're welcome. And I love that image of that that you had in that ceremony. What I love about that is it instantly confers nobility, like an archetypical like the ancestors are dancing around you and they're, they're celebrating in a way this battle between father and son. It's not inherently pathological. It goes back, you know, forever. Jesus had a lot of issues with his father. You know. It's a question of how do we do that wrestling match and what is it for? And, you know, you talk to people you know, you talked about it's not about forgetting, it's about remembering. When people say put it behind you. What they actually mean is forget it. Or don't often what they mean is, you know, overcome it or treat it as if it's, you know, sort of change your attitude towards it. Another way to think I mean, that's cool if you can do that. My hat's off to you. For me, what put it behind you means is, first of all, recognise that it's not behind you. It's in your lap. It's still here with you and you have to take a real look at it first. You have to face it, and then gently realise that it actually is behind you. It's not happening anymore. You know? So it's like put it in its place recognise where it is. Take whatever you know in your carry on bag you want to take with you about it because you don't have to reject all of it. There are gifts in it. But don't just try to I mean, I'm not a I'm not a stoic. Like I don't really have a stoic temperament. I have to fully see something for what it is I have to really excavate this is maybe the artist temperament and me You know, I have to go all the way into it and and transform my view of it. And then I don't have to let go of it. It lets go of me. It wants something from me and it has it's asking something of me. It's, it's bringing me some kind of gift. But it's often, you know, wrapped in a turd

Unknown Speaker 37:24
you know, or maybe or maybe a turd shape. Birthday cake. So I have to do that digging to find the skeleton key inside of it.

Unknown Speaker 37:35
So yeah, I mean, but again, all we just did with the example of you and your you just it's not like you saw a vision of peace and love and flowers and your father and you you know soaring through the air holding hands. You saw a wrestling match you saw it battle, but a battle for what a battle between his trauma and your trauma. I battled to understand each other and immediately becomes beautiful on some level. Tragic sad, difficult, absolutely painful. Sometimes brutal, but you know, there can be there can be beauty in MMA there can be beauty and not that I'm a fan of that particularly but a lot of people find a lot of this a kind of you know, to worthy opponents locking horns. You don't have to have positive thinking about it. The question is, can you see it fully and then can you see it from multiple points of view? I think that's it's the it's one antithesis of trauma because trauma is it limits response flexibility. If you're reacting not responding, meaning you had an all you have only one go ahead interpretation. And and that's that's your go to and it's just the automatic way you see it and when you unfastened that you can see it from that point of view. Like I can see my dad as a villain. That's one story. Yeah. It's not a bad story. I might write it that way sometime in a graphic novel or in a in a nightmare sequence in the musical like, it's valid. That was how I experienced it. That was my subjective reality. But it's not the only view. The other you know, I mean, other view is his tragic childhood and the Holocaust and in being in the grips of a curse, or or some kind of demon possession, you know, as another kind of fantastical, but still metaphorically resonate with Darth Vader for instance, right? That's another kind of way of rendering the Father Son. wrestling matches that you have this creature that's become more machine now that man as Obi Wan says, But Luke believes there's still his original essence in him. And he's holding space for his father to transform any in the end by witnessing his son's suffering at the hands of the Emperor at the very, very, very last minute. The human being in Darth Vader awakens. The compassion awakens the courage, the ability to see it differently to be disillusioned to let go. So that's another story. Another story is that we're just two dudes, you know, just arguing, like is meaningless. So, the more this is why I love theatre is it gives us as as Stephen Sondheim said in one of his great musical theatre songs give us more to see. And, and learning to see things from multiple points of view at once. To me, is the essence of freedom because that's where choice comes in, and that's where flexibility and humour and I can just relax when I can see that, to quote another classic musical theatre song from showboat from the 1920s it ain't necessarily so.

Josh Snyman 41:02
Yeah, that would awaken for me is beautiful. often think about it and I like to imagine you know, this, this the last few years for me have been this discovery of like awakening this inner shaman inside of me. And I know these these psuedo shamans and people that but there truly is and and and I guess that goes back to the archetypal view of it, but there is this God inside I believe everyone and then you sort of lose touch to that. And I suppose that's the authenticity part of maybe what your father speaks of and his work and what you may be used to what role can you see the role and maybe some psychedelics I don't know if you've dabbled and what maybe role they've played in healing and obviously, of course, cautionary tales to be to get onto that as well, but I'm very interested in the role that they've played in your healing process. And thank you for and I just wanna say thank you for outlining the fact that you still have work because that that really entails it entails a lot to say that and I find that vulnerability, very essential to the to the conversation itself. So thank you.

Unknown Speaker 42:16
Yeah, thanks for that. acknowledgement. I mean, given that my dad are embarking, Dan and I are embarking on we've already embarked on a project of guiding other people through these parent child relationships. We'd better be working on our stuff. I'd better be working on my stuff, because to pretend that we had it figured out and have some kind of like, you know, Gabor Daniels five easy steps to bullshit like that. That would be the most dishonest thing we could do. What we're trying to do is in some ways model for you know, maybe provide explore wonder about a new language for talking about it, but also model an intestinal fortitude to stick with it, if it's worth it to you. You know, you don't need to have a relationship with your parents when you're an adult. But if you choose to and you're going to have a relationship with them, whether they're in your life or not. That's the good news and the bad news, they could die. They could be on the other side of the world. It could be extremes from them then they are still right there with you. Psychedelics I am not currently engaged with any psychedelic work. Marijuana is sometimes has psychedelic properties for me, but it's very unreliable. It's it's a real trickster. You know, marijuana makes you think that your every thought is the most genius thing in the world and next day you're like, but but I have but I have found that. If I don't take literally the thoughts I have, then it's interesting to observe what comes up and I get hunches, I get I get I get a little hint or a clue sometimes with that medicine slash drug and it's very very tricky because it can be such an escape from life and this is the and also I don't do it medicinally I don't do it ceremonially. There's no guide. And so then it can easily become this pleasurable escape that numbs you from your pain. In the past, though, I definitely did plant ceremonies. I've done San Pedro once in Peru and it was a it was a powerful experience. I'd have to say I have a fraught relationship with it because I was married to somebody who was deep in that world. And who was actually an apprentice of my father. And I was very mesmerised by this person's connection to plants. And in some ways, I tried to immerse myself in it more than I would have as a way of staying close to her. But what that what that tells you is that I didn't feel that I was enough. And she ended up you know, she ended up with a shaman in Peru like it was the most cliched thing. So essentially, I got I got left for that world, but in a sense. I never really fully had her. And I was I'm not blaming her, you know. So Iosco was a world in which I both found myself and I kind of lost myself for a while. You know, I'm saying and this can happen in many different ways for people in spiritual communities or psychedelic communities that on the one hand, it's a refuge. You know, the the Sangha part of the Buddha's triad of the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, the community. And on the other hand, in some ways, I did lose myself in it. Now while I had lost myself in it, for it's never just one thing. I got to connect with deep experiences of love, of connection to everything. I'd say the biggest thing that the plant medicine world gave me was a sense of wonder and sense of awe and wonder, and if it did anything for me, it didn't instil any new beliefs in me. Like, my then were divorced them. My wife at the time was, I think, had some literal beliefs in the plant spirit world and many of the people in that community and my dad was a part of that community, which made it even more complicated. You know, the fact that she was learning from it, and it was, it was kind of incestuous. But also, very interestingly, in some ways, a microcosm of my childhood, in a sense in ways I won't get into but

Unknown Speaker 47:06
not that there was literal incense to my shelter. That's not what I mean, but emotionally Yeah, you know, just too much overlap, not knowing enough who I am. But it's not so much that it instilled new spiritual beliefs in me, but it did, unfasten many of my my unbelief, my my, my fundamentalist scepticism, my cerebral supremacy. It showed me that there are aspects to reality and consciousness that are far beyond the everyday mind can achieve. That the natural world is the only thing I can. The only piece of art that I've ever seen that really captures this, oddly enough, is avatar, where you just have this sense that you're opening into a world of a much deeper intelligence of a people who are who understand that they are not separate from something much larger. Now that didn't cure me in my sense of separateness at all, but it gave me experiences that I can never unsee now they are reference points, and if I bring them back, they're the right there with me. That's my choice to integrate them or to just forget them. It also taught me something about letting go when you do Ayahuasca you have to be willing to purge. You're not always going to vomit, but it happens or you purge in different ways various bodily excretions you have no control over and learning to encourage caress, hold my mind in a way that it can feel safe enough to give up the ghost and just like go for a second and trust something else. That's that's a tenderising experience. That's that's on on the court training you know, which again, hopefully it makes the muscles around that the rigid control muscles or at our emotions, a little more soft, a little more subtle. So it opened me up but I would say that for me, at a certain point, once my marriage was complete, once the divorce was over, I realised this isn't really me. And that I'm not called to this in the way that some people are. It's a helpful tool and I would recommend it to anyone dealing with serious addiction or serious illness or wants to really, as a friend of mine says go to the basement like really get down there and see what's in there. I got to see what's in there. I got to see some some really vivid visual metaphors and embodiments of what I'm carrying in me. But for me, I developed a kind of hunger for real time integration. To have insights in my everyday state of mind that I can instantly integrate and I don't have to make any sort of metaphorical bridge between a difference a different state of consciousness. And this one, like to me that's that's where the action is because that's where I feel I can most reliably integrate it and and learn from it and where something actually changes where my ordinary state of mind learns that it can give up control where my ordinary everyday brain learns. Oh, I don't have to see it just one way you know, rather than developing a kind of fixation on you know, a kind of Reverend like a sort of a idealisation of romanticization of the psychedelic state which Allah quite frankly, a lot of white people not just white people, but people in the West or as wide, privileged people from the global north and colonial enclaves of the global south like where you are. We're consumers we consume, no matter what, you know, we were we were raised in a consumer culture. That's not to say people don't develop genuine, humble, indigenous, informed relationship with plants. But it definitely goes against the grain of our upbringing. And so I just am wary of that for myself, but I don't

Unknown Speaker 51:54
I still consider it. Like many modalities that I've done in the past, not psychedelic, but different, you know, personal development styles that I'm no longer doing. I have the highest esteem for it. I'm just at a place in my process where that's not going. That's not what's going to forward things for me. You know, yeah.

Josh Snyman 52:14
And that takes Yeah, that takes it takes a lot and I just want to what you mentioned is finding yourself to use yourself that that was that that is so there he

Unknown Speaker 52:28
is called the MNL. That's, that's called the m&m doctrine. Now, you got to lose yourself.

Josh Snyman 52:33
Exactly. If I came to the world and I want to be respectful of your time. We'll wrap up soon, but I came into the world of psychedelics the exact same I found myself and then I thought this was it and obviously young and free and and then sort of lost it. And now there's this again, going back to now there's this remembering coming back and there San Pedro assuming he wasn't was an intention to do it ceremonially for the first time because I wanted to respect the medicine and not do it in a poor area important. Exactly. And not do it in a party setting. And I tell everyone now I tell friends and family and stuff is that I had that I had the San Pedro and I've done a mushroom. The mushrooms according me to do it in the ceremonial setting to respect to medicine, and that had a huge impact on me the last few years so

Unknown Speaker 53:29
I might go back to I and I might go back to mushrooms. I think mushrooms are sort of low impact, high yield. I resonate with mushrooms somehow you know and I've never done them ceremonially. And I think that could be interesting. So I'm not done with psychedelics by any means. But just being keeping it you know, keeping it real, be honest with yourself. Who am I being how am I using this? And yeah, I can't stress enough that the ceremonial traditions I mean these are that these are vast, deep networks of intelligence, these Indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous the word literally means originating from a place. So it comes from you know, a people a culture that is rooted in a sense of home, which means they're connected with their surroundings, and they understand the ways of this ecosystem and this biosphere. And we've lost that we're totally denatured and it takes a lot of humility and and unlearning a lot of things to open oneself to that but ceremonial context provide a container in which there is meaning built into it. It's not just some random drug experience. It's you know, and that can include synthetic substances like MDMA or LSD in a therapeutic setting. That's not exactly ceremonial, but it's intentional. That's what it has in common. And that you're you're not alone. You're you have a guide. And but, you know, people find their own way to do things and I'd say, you know, I'm not here to prescribe or judge, prescribe or prescribe any any one approach. You have to kind of you have to find your way and often that's trial and error certainly has been for me yeah.

Josh Snyman 55:28
Well, Daniel, this was absolutely phenomenal. I connected with so much. So I really appreciate your time. And like I said, I'm sure you're very busy man. So it means a lot to me. Is there anything else you would like to end off with or can we?

Unknown Speaker 55:46
Well, can I can I plug my website go for

Josh Snyman 55:48
it, and I'll put all the links. Yeah, so yeah,

Unknown Speaker 55:51
sure. Yeah. So I mean, if this mental chiropractic thing resonates to anyone listening, you can go to www dot walk with daniel.com. And just you can read up a little bit more on what it is and I do like a free 15 minute call. With anyone who wants to ask questions about it. To see if it's a fit, and yeah, it's something I really enjoyed doing and it's not for everybody and it's not for every situation but I found it to be a pretty topically effective you know, like care, like specifically applied. I've helped a lot of people get unstuck and I enjoy doing that and it's a very nice compliment or counterbalance to my self absorbed artists Life Where I'm alone at the piano and you know, trying to write a song like I'm there with somebody else applying my my language skills and my my intuition to someone else's situation and I love it I love I love the moment when someone gets free and clear, or something that seemed just like a fucking slog. And just I love that moment where it's like, oh, oh,

Josh Snyman 57:02
since that's fine. It's that satisfying click that happens that you like,

Unknown Speaker 57:06
exactly, exactly. It's like, you know, it's like that's something that something snaps into place. So, yeah, so just invite anyone to check it out if they're so inclined. Let's end the myth of normal available now from Amazon. I assume you can order it from the South African version of Amazon.

Josh Snyman 57:30
I've just started diving into it. I'm really excited to to dig my heels into it for sure.

Unknown Speaker 57:35
Right.

Josh Snyman 57:38
Read it in good health. Awesome. Thanks, Daniel.