Dr. Peter Attia
speaker
5,258 appearances
36 recordings
6 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Peter Attia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Those adaptations have led to disconnection and maladaptive strategies. This could be things that are perceived of as quote unquote bad, like alcohol, drugs, gambling, but it could be also things that are perceived of as good, such as work or perfectionism. All of those things replace the sense of connection. So this is just an episode that I think you have to go back and listen to.
But to me, that was the most important takeaway. He spoke about implicit and explicit memories. So people can explicitly remember an event and think objectively as I think about that. It didn't really impact me, but implicitly it is impacting them through anxiety or some other type of discomfort. He had a great saying, which is if it's hysterical, it's historical.
So I think about this often when I overreact emotionally, when I calm down, I'm usually asking myself, what was that really about? Was it really about the thing that you blew up over or was there something deeper that this is reminding you of in terms of a vulnerability or something like that? Very important distinctions here between guilt and shame.
Guilt is about, as he described it, making a mistake. Shame is about being a mistake. Some people refer to this as healthy shame and unhealthy shame. Again, it's not necessarily one way to think about this. Okay, we talked about the trauma tree. I've heard so many different people talk about trauma in so many different ways. I still think this is one of the better models.
And it's a tree because it has roots and it has branches. And the roots are below the ground and the branches are above the ground. And that is a metaphor for the fact that the roots or the causes... are not necessarily visible, while the adaptations, the branches, are indeed visible. So very important to understand in this model that intention is not a requirement for the roots of a tree.
What do I mean by that? Sometimes the wounding events, i.e. the roots, are not intentional. They're not driven by people who are intending to hurt. This is, I think, a very important thing for people dealing with trauma to understand because it's very easy to minimize an event that had an impact on you as a child.
For example, if you believe that the person who was responsible for this wasn't trying to hurt you, and that's often the case. So keep that in mind. So what are these? So the five roots of
are broken down as abuse which can be physical typically that is pretty deliberate emotional sexual again obviously these are generally quite deliberate religious so there's an example where it might not be with a mal intent but of course it has bad outcomes the next would be abandonment this can be physical abandonment literally someone being abandoned by a parent but it could also be emotional
Neglect, which is obviously distinct from abandonment in that the care provider is still present but is not paying attention to the child. Enmeshment, which is basically boundary violations, emotional incest. This happens when kids have to grow up far too quickly to be emotional caregivers or peers with parents typically. And then tragic events. These are pretty obvious, typically not subtle.
We talk about war, we talk about things of that nature, violent events. Okay, so then we have the branches. And again, the branches are the adaptations here. And the important thing to remember here, and I think this is really helpful for anybody thinking through this for themselves or for others, is that adaptations typically work very well for the child that has been wounded.
And again, I use the word wounded as kind of a broad emotional term. The problem is they tend to become maladaptive later in life. He gives a great example of a father who is physically abusing the mother of his child. And whenever this happened, the child would run into his bedroom out of fear because dad is getting violent. He's hurting mom.
But one day, the child's fear that his mother was going to be hurt was so great that he ran into the bathroom and pretended that he was sick as a way to distract the father. So the father screams at the mother and says, look what you're doing. Your hysterical whining has made your son sick. And this temporary distraction actually prevented his father from injuring the mother.
So that was an amazing adaption. That child basically learned that he could be deceptive and manipulative, and it actually worked. It was a really good adaptation, and it probably will serve that child well for some time. The problem is it will not serve that child well as an adult.
He describes these adaptations as old friends that serve you well, but lose their utility and become destructive as you age. And so, again, what are these four branches? These four branches are codependency, which he calls an outer reach for inner security, addictive patterns. Again, these are the most obvious in some ways, so substances, but also work, process, obsession, things of that nature.
attachment issues where the common thread is sort of insecurity. So there's kind of an anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized attachments. He goes into these in details. And then just kind of a bucket for all other maladaptive strategies here. And I'm sure people can think of many examples.
So I think I've learned a lot over the past seven or eight years on this, but I think Jeff sums it up so well. And I've seen this over and over in myself, in my patients. When you're working through trauma, or if you're on the fence about whether or not you should work through trauma, it's worth remembering. you're either going to deal with it or it's going to deal with you.
These things cannot be buried. They're going to always, like a whack-a-mole thing, always show up at some point and you can't play whack-a-mole indefinitely. The first step, I think, is just accepting that that's the case and that there's a better way to be and that these coping strategies, while incredibly valuable, are probably not helping you.
that you may indeed be passing on maladaptive behaviors to your kids if you're a parent, and dealing with something that he describes as putting the adaptive child out of the driver's seat and into the back of the car. So those are probably some of the important things I would take from that episode. I don't think that this summary even remotely serves as a substitute for listening to that.
So if you missed that episode and anything I said even remotely piques your curiosity, I think you've got to go back to it.
to practice, we've talked about this on other podcasts, but practicing or understanding what your practice looks like to expand your distress tolerance window. I write about this quite a bit in the final chapter of Outlive, but it's sort of knowing the things that you do that give you a greater operating window.
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