Interview Participant

When you said about your mother and the incest thing, You'd realized as an adult much of your work focused on incest. And then you turned to your mother and asked her if there was an experience she had had and she fainted. Do you believe that there's a part of you that knew?

Okay, but the indicator was that she was always uptight about sex.

Yep. How many of the people that you treated in your practice, could you trace their adult dysfunction back to an early childhood experience?

90%?

And what's the crux of what happened to them as a child, if you had to simplify it?

When you say terrible things.

What if it was just words?

But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

Intentionally and unintentionally? Automatically. Automatically? Yeah. Is that people hurting people?

What do you see?

I guess it's difficult for parents because they sometimes think, well, I've got to raise a child that's not dysfunctional, so I'm going to have to punish them and I'm going to have to discipline them as a way to make sure that they grow up to be healthy and well-rounded.

I grew up in a household where I was punished physically in pretty significant ways, ways that I probably can share because it's just quite significant. Quite horrendous. Yeah.

I was born in Africa, so I've got an African mother and an English father. Yeah. It's funny because I look back on it and I go, and this is just me rationalizing in hindsight, I go, I'm happy that I had a home where there was discipline. Because if I didn't have that home, then I wouldn't maybe have left the city.

We're one of the few families that actually left the city, the fairly small town, relatively small town to some of the towns I live in now. And went and did a lot of things with my life. And I didn't get caught up in drugs like some of my friends. I wasn't dysfunctional. And my mother couldn't read or write as well. So I feel somewhat thankful.

But I'm rationalizing in hindsight because it somewhat ended up okay in certain measures of my life. In other areas of my life, there's dysfunction.

I think that point is really interesting because although I was physically punished a lot,

We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. to Bessel van der Kolk. You've been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century by the Financial Times. What is the mission you've spent your life pursuing?

And I said, that's the end of the story. It still causes you a lot of emotion.

Why do you think so much emotion comes up when you talk about that?

It's tremendously hard to do that because it's going against your, your level.

Yeah.

There's parts of me that manifest sometimes, and I understand that this is the behavior that I learned.

And I think there's a part of me that's worried, actually, because I learned, I grew up in a home where physical discipline was the response to most kind of forms of unwanted behavior, that I'm worried that if I become a dad, that will be my natural... Probably will be. Yeah, I don't want it to be.

Yeah. Yeah.

When we see dysfunctional behavior in children, I think one of the natural reactions is to give them some kind of medication or to attach some label to them and say that they're broken in this way. How do you feel about that?

I mean, just on that point, there's a stat I read that children from low-income families are four times more likely, as the privately insured, to receive antipsychotic medicines.

That's true. That's true. 400% more likely to receive antipsychotic medications.

Brain growth.

I want to talk about all of that, specifically this idea of movement and the role it plays in healing. Just to close off on the part about childhood trauma, why is it so important for a child to grow up with a secure attachment to a caregiver?

And this word trauma seems to be central to your work. And when I looked before this conversation at the rise in the use of this word online and people searching this word, it's pretty staggering what I found. There's this graph that shows a huge jump in people using the word trauma. What is your view on the subject matter of trauma, specifically how we've misunderstood what it is

Imprints of early experience, are they changeable?

So you can heal from your childhood trauma?

Everyone?

In your experience, you've dealt with patients your whole life, your whole professional life. How many of those patients do you think were healable?

Your book was very interesting because when I read the cover and then I watched a video you'd made talking about the sort of six sort of treatments and stuff that exist within the body, things like yoga, you talk about theater and acting and how that helps you to get out of your trauma. The body keeps the score. This was a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma.

Well, I use it in my everyday language with my partner. And I've heard people say the body keeps the score, the body keeps the score. When we're talking about how our body is holding on to those traumatic memories, traumatic things that have happened to us.

For someone who has never read your book and doesn't even understand the, like, base premise here, what is the, like, base premise of your, of the title there?

I kind of see it as two approaches. You can either go, let's try and change the mind, which will then change the body downstream. Or you can say, let's change the body, which will then change the mind.

Yeah.

This somatic approach. I've only recently had this term from my partner. And she says it's amazing. And she told me to speak to you on this podcast because she says you'll really help to change her opinion on this. What is this somatic approach to healing?

Can you do it on me?

Why are women just seem to be so much better at this stuff than men? Because they're doing like Pilates, yoga. These are all things, dancing. These are things typically women do more than men. And it seems women are just more in touch with it.

One of the interesting things that you write about, which I found particularly interesting because I saw little flashes of myself in the words, is you said, I found that the more traumas your patients have in their background, the more creative and successful they often become.

Often.

Yeah, yeah. It's the people who have had to struggle, who often see new possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options.

They might be outside with a drug addiction.

I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment community that says you'll get better returns if you invest in someone, an entrepreneur or a founder that is a little bit traumatized. And I actually think, I don't want to misquote her, but I had Barbara Cochran, who's a shark on Shark Tank in the USA here on the show. And one of the things she said to me was,

with all of her investments, the ones that tend to do the best are those that have a little bit of a trauma in their past. And she says, because when they call me with a problem, they call me with the solution attached versus people who have never had trauma. They call me and just tell me the problem.

So they'll call me and say, listen, Barbara, this has happened and this is what we're going to do about it. And that was her, you know, she said it in a slightly humorous way, but I wondered if you thought there was any truth in this idea that... Yeah, I think that's, again, a selection bias of people she worked with.

Because I wondered if you've had an anomalous early upbringing, does that make you an anomalous adult? Does it increase the probability that you become an anomalous, slightly different adult? Oh, absolutely. And that can go everywhere.

Is trauma a story in your brain?

A perception.

Give me an example of a perception.

Because you're still forming your perception of the world.

And an inkblot test, for anyone that doesn't know, is basically just a piece of paper with random ink stains.

Yeah.

I've never done an inkblot test. I feel like I should do one.

How many people do you think, I mean, this is maybe a ridiculous question, but how many people, what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form, how you define it?

And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans. If I was traumatized and you scanned my brain, is there something you could see?

So how does trauma affect the brain?

When people are suffering from some kind of psychological disorder, whether it's depression, anxiety, PTSD, what is it that you disagree with, with the traditional view of how to treat them?

So the part of my brain, you said just around the amygdala? Below the amygdala. Below the amygdala. People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically?

Keeps firing.

Is that anxiety? Yes.

You've adopted a dog and it shakes in your house still?

So when someone says they're triggered...

Okay.

I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector goes off. Is that what it looks like on the brain?

Can you explain this to me?

Do you get it? Yeah. So for people that can't see it in this brain scan, what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated. The left side looks like it's off. Off, yeah. And then there's these two blank, empty spaces that aren't activated called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Okay.

Okay. So that's when, I mean, presumably that's when you get anxiety, right? When you start thinking about the future.

So this particular person, this brain scan that I have here, this guy was in a car accident. And the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in an fMRI scanner. And he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain. Exactly. So he was shown maybe a car accident or something.

Oh, you showed him a picture of his car.

Your sensory details. And the right side of his brain was illuminated.

Are you consciously reliving it or is your subconscious reliving it?

And my body?

So I've been triggered in the past and I felt that sort of instant fight or flight response because something's happened or whatever. And it's instantaneous. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's back there.

And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering?

He's done quite well.

And what was his results?

What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice?

Give me the most, the best example.

What did you do in those three sessions?

You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal their trauma.

And in the research that's been done on this, what did the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy?

early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment.

So it's called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing treatment. I was just looking up some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions. With PTSD, a 2014 meta-analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size.

A 2024 systemic review and meta-analysis encompassing 25 studies and more than 1,000 participants reported that it alleviated depressive symptoms. The same 2014 meta-analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect.

And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data meta-analysis concluded that EMDR is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates. So can you show me how it works? Can you do it on me?

Of course you can. Are you going to come closer?

Yeah.

Like a six, seven out of ten.

Okay. So if I'm traumatized, talking about my trauma doesn't necessarily fix my trauma.

I feel calm. Yeah, I just don't feel calm.

It's... It's hard to recall why I was bothered.

That's the best way to describe it.

Why is that? Is that just because, why is that?

Breathwork. Yeah. Yeah. What role did breathwork become a really big topic? My partner runs a business called Barney Breathwork, hashtag ad. And she takes women away. She does these breathwork retreats all around the world, has a studio, et cetera. What do you think of breathwork as a way to remove trauma?

So you can use yoga to treat trauma?

What did you find in those studies? I've got one particular sort of screenshot here. Yeah, that's a little story. Explain here what's going on.

Why and how?

So I want to make sure I understand this. So the insular part of the brain is the part that links what we do with how we feel? How we viscerally feel, yeah, what's happening in our bodies. Okay, so it links how we're feeling in our bodies to… To what we know about ourselves, yeah. The stories we have in our head about ourselves.

So that's what the insula does, and trauma interrupts that, which causes what kind of dysfunction on a day-to-day basis.

Or you feel hypersensitive.

Because you talk about the two responses being disconnection or hypersensitivity.

And how many of the people that you treated in your practice have childhood trauma?

And the insula is playing a role.

So if I start doing yoga, what is that then doing to that hypersensitivity disconnection?

Really?

Because it's...

I was just thinking as you were speaking about a friend of mine who tends to go through life where they sort of crumpled up, Bobby. And they're low self-esteem. They're quite low confidence. I don't know if they're traumatized in any way. Can't pass judgment on that. But they started doing yoga, and it really has helped their mental health in a profound way.

And I'm just wondering what you think the link is between someone who, I'm just telling you on the surface, is like crumpled up through their life.

Yeah.

The word trauma, as you say, has been thrown around a lot. And it's become a bit of a cultural joke to some people. When you say something happens to you, you go, oh, I feel triggered. I'm traumatized, et cetera. What actually does count as trauma?

Why and how?

People often describe meeting somebody and their body just being off. So they say, I met this person and my body was just, I just felt something in my body that they can't consciously articulate, but they just feel it in their body. This person's a bit off. What do you think they're describing there?

And from an evolutionary standpoint, as you were speaking, I was thinking, where has this come from? You know, this ability to subconsciously just get a read for someone and then form a pattern of, okay, this type of person helped me in the past. And 20 years later, I meet someone in the street and I immediately feel the same. Is that just a survival thing?

Are we losing that a little bit? You know, people are getting lonelier and lonelier and more individualistic.

People talk a lot about small T trauma and big T trauma. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. Okay. So explain why not.

Why?

What role does community and social connection play in trauma?

It seems that women are better at forming those connections than men.

Are they changeable?

What is it about that environment that forms what you're describing there as real love?

Is that because we would probably need each other?

Well, also in an individualistic society, you're almost trained to not need anyone else but yourself.

Yeah.

Of course, yeah. I was thinking back to playing football growing up and just, you know, you're one unit effectively. And if there's a problem in this part of the pitch, then it's my problem too. If you're in trouble, I'm there to help you.

It's really interesting because as you were talking, I was wondering how we can bring that back into our lives in the modern world.

In a modern world where we live on screens and white walls alone. Yeah. You know, the studies say that the average, I think it said something like the average American has an average of zero people that they feel they could turn to at a time of crisis, which is down from like three, I think two decades ago. I'll have a look. I'll have a look at the stats.

I'll pull up the stats, but the general idea of us being lonelier than ever before. And how do we, in a society that's designed to be lonely, how do I, on an individual level, fix that?

Are you optimistic about this?

Really?

You're very desperate after the last election. Why?

Yeah. So I think you're not a fan of Trump.

Are you able to point to anything good about him? And I've, when I've had people on this show that are pro-Trump, I ask them the same questions. I say, can you point about anything bad about him? Because he's got a family.

Going back to this point of trauma, you said that there's three broad ways to reverse the damage of trauma. So if I came to you and I was a traumatized person, whatever that trauma might be, what would step one be if I came to you for support with my trauma?

And then once you've done that, so you find out that I had some early traumatic experience, how do you know, what treatment would you give me?

What's neurofeedback?

So I've got a graph up on the screen for anybody watching, and it shows five different types of brainwaves. Gamma brainwaves, which are very close brainwaves. Beta, less close. Alpha, less close. Beta, less close. And then delta, which is when you're sort of sleeping, dreaming. The waves are very, very far apart, almost flat. Yeah.

So looking at these different types of brainwaves, if we just categorize them from one being when the brainwaves are really tight and close to five, which is delta when they're really far apart, Is one gamma, is that like anxiety or something?

Okay, fine.

So for the average person that comes to you, what do you typically end up telling them to do? The average person.

A psychedelic experience. And you found yourself telling people that more and more recently.

When you say body practices, we'll get on to psychedelics, but body practices, these are the things you're talking about, like the yoga, the martial arts.

Massages. Any massage?

Is touch healing?

You know. Yeah, it's true.

You described these three broad ways of reversing trauma, the top-down approach, which is, I guess, talk therapy? Yeah, yeah.

And are you a fan of that?

Number two is taking medications. Yeah. Which is to shut down the body's alarm signals, essentially. Are you a fan of that?

And the third approach, the bottom-up approach, is allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the helplessness or rage or trauma. And this is really what you focus on, which are called somatic therapies, which target the body rather than the mind.

In terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I'm a big matcha fan, if you don't already know by now. And so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading matcha company called Perfect Ted. And one of my favourite Perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavour from salted caramel to peach flavour to mint flavour to berry flavour.

One of my favourites is this vanilla flavour, which I'm going to make... in just two seconds. You just take this mixer here, get a little bit of the powder, pop it on top of the shaker like that. Put the lid on. Shake, shake, shake. Delicious. If you haven't tried this yet, you can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores or online where you can get 40% off with my code DIARY40.

Head to perfectted.com and put in code DIARY40 to try this delicious multi-flavored matcha now. Highly recommend. And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online. Can the gym help?

So if you get fired from your job and it's a traumatic event for you because you get, I don't know, you lose your friends, you lose the job, your parents are embarrassed about you. Can that become trauma, something like that?

Because I go to the gym, I lift weights. And so I'm wondering if that's going to help me.

Yeah, one of the ways I think about it is actually a lot of the people that I've interviewed that are weightlifters are bullied kids. I think about Mike who I had on the show, Chrissy Chelle who I had on the show, both of them speak to, even Lane Norton actually, I think he speaks to some early trauma as well.

They're kids that were bullied in some form or had a traumatic early upbringing and they are just massive now. And I wonder, you know, some people on the surface go, or even Liverpool actually, you're that way because you're learning to defend yourself and to build your self-esteem.

Yeah.

Psychedelic therapy.

What's your view on psychedelic therapy?

I ask this because I'm wondering if there's a lot of people listening now that I'm trying to understand if their small experience, which other people think is trivial, actually could have resulted in some kind of deeper trauma response.

You call psychedelics a true revolution.

Yeah. And you say it's a particular revolution because we don't know how it works. And I was looking at some stats.

We just have a bunch of hypotheses. I was looking at some stats that say MDMA therapy assisted, which is an important point. Yeah, that's what we did, yeah. Assisted with a therapist there or someone who's a practitioner there.

A phase three clinical trial reported that 67% of participants who received MDMA assisted therapy no longer met the PTSD criteria compared to 30 odd percent in the placebo group, which is a pretty, drastic change.

Some really interesting studies around treatment-resistant depression as well. One with psilocybin, which is what people know as magic mushrooms. A treatment-resistant depression study in 2021 showed that a single dose of psilocybin led to a significant reduction in depression with effects lasting up to six weeks for many participants. 30% of participants were in remission after three weeks. Yep.

And a study by Johns Hopkins University showed that 71% of participants experienced a more than 50% reduction in symptoms after two psilocybin sessions, with 54% achieving remission four weeks after the treatment. And the last study that I'll share is a follow-up study found that nearly 60% of participants maintained reductions in depression symptoms one year after treatment.

But these compounds aren't even legal in America and the UK yet.

Ketamine is.

Have you ever done a psychedelic drug?

Did that experience with psychedelics, the MDMA experience you had, change you?

Just one dose?

Really? Yeah. Earlier on, I asked if people could heal from their trauma.

Have you healed from yours?

And can you give me an overview of the work you've done in your life that have fed into all of the knowledge and information that you have? Just for anyone that might not know who you are, what is that sort of body of work?

Of all the things that you've tried in your life to help you with your own personal trauma, what are the things that have personally helped you the most?

I'd put my dad in this room right now. I'd put him there.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I put my dad at the head of the table that we're at because he was always at the head of the table in my household. He was always the one when we're at a table, he was in charge of us eating his thing.

complicated because exactly yeah it's complicated because one of the reactions is like one of the reactions i had is when he sits there he's in charge yeah but now as an adult i have this other feeling which is like no i'm in charge now because i'm the head of the table i'm the head of my house so it's just this authority thing of like right yeah has it that would come up

Yeah.

So the subject matter of ADHD has become very popular in culture. In 2022, approximately 11% of children aged 3 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD, up from 9% roughly in 2016. And in the UK, between 2000 and 2018, ADHD diagnosis in adults rose 20-fold. What? with a 20-fold increase in medication prescriptions among men aged 18 to 29. And that's from the NHR.

And in Australia, over the past decade, ADHD medication has surged nearly 300%, with more than a 450% increase among adults and a significant rise among women. What is going on here?

When I spoke to Gabor Mate, do you know Gabor Mate?

Yeah, he was describing what ADHD was to me. And he said he views it as a response to early childhood stress and trauma rather than purely genetic or neurological.

Because I was diagnosed with ADHD, but the way... Other people that have ADHD have just like drastically different symptoms to me. Like drastically different. Like we're not the same people at all. We're not even close to the same ballpark. Like, for example, I'm really good at focusing on something for quite a long time if I'm interested.

Whereas I often hear people with certain types of ADHD be very unfocused on things. And so I have struggled with understanding what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD when there can be so many types.

So it almost makes me feel that... the label, the singular label, which we share, although there's all these subtypes, isn't necessarily helping me to understand myself in any way.

Really?

How do I not raise a traumatized kid? Because I'm going to have kids probably quite soon, hopefully. And I don't want to raise traumatized kids.

This is central to your story, is this early experience. You said earlier that you were born in 1943.

It takes a village.

Is there anything that you think is healing towards trauma, childhood trauma, all forms of trauma that we haven't talked about

And the way to recover from that is to counteract it with adult information. Yeah.

Vessel, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is, what do you believe is the question that the audience have just heard this conversation are screaming down the camera?

It was interesting as you were speaking, I was reflecting on the things that, I was thinking a lot about this idea of community and you're talking about how being in sports teams helps. And I was thinking about in my adult life, in some of my most difficult times, when things were difficult and I went and played football or some kind of sports with a group of people, I just felt radically better.

And I think actually I put it down to, oh, well, because, you know, I did some exercise, but I actually think there's something deeper.

Many of us, especially I think adult men, don't have these kind of things. I mean, we go to watch Manchester United play or something like that. We go to a football ground. But maybe we need to fill our lives with more of these things.

Yeah, well, we kind of just assume that society is designed in such a way where it'll give us what we need. Yeah, yeah. But in fact, if you think about the loneliness stats and the way things, even like the pub is less pubs on the high street, shutting down across the UK and less community centers, the churches.

Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, thank you so much for the work that you do. As I said to you before we started recording, you have so many extremely passionate followers, advocates, fans, because your work has made them completely rethink and understand their lived experience and also given them a much more optimistic, hopeful cure.

or treatment for their lived experience one of which is my partner who when she she's been telling me for three years to get you on this show and was so extremely excited i think it's the happiest i've made her in the last three years when i said that you'd agreed to come on genuinely but that for me is such a personal and sort of local um sign of evidence of the impact you have on people it is tremendous so thank you on behalf of all of those people for the work that you do and please do keep on doing it because it's opening all of our eyes and you too thank you i love you sure i appreciate you thank you

Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home.

So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com. They've sold out twice instantaneously.

So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.

You were born in 1943 in Nazi-occupied... Netherlands. Netherlands, okay. And you're the middle children of five. That's right, yeah. You were very sick as a child. Yeah. What were your parents like in terms of love, affection, all those kinds of things?

You described your mother as being a frozen person.

And it had an impact on you.

What was that impact?

Your mother would faint whenever Bessel would ask her what her life was like when she was a little girl.

You said that child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide. That's true.

And in your book, you say that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.

People have got increasingly interested in their early childhood experiences as a lens to understand who they are as adults. Is that overblown or is it important to understand?

Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.