So what's going on here? And the where the title comes from the myth of normal, is he's talking about it just because something seems normal, doesn't mean it's good or that it really is normal, right? Even though, you know, a dysfunction and disease is so widespread in our culture to the point where it seems normal and we put band-aids on it like medication sometimes, it's not normal. There's something rotten at the base of it. It's a toxic culture. And he's talking about the medical establishment. He's talking about the way we work, the way we raise children. Now, some fascinating stuff, you know, he talks about, he talks about his own trauma when he was in, he was, he's Canadian, but he was born in, he's a Hungarian Jew. And he's actually a Holocaust survivor because he was like a baby when the Holocaust is going on. And his mom handed him off as an infant to a neighbor, Christian neighbor actually, who took him for like two months when he was a baby. And he, he believes that a lot of the, he's had some, I think, alcoholism, depression problems and just wanting to be like heard and seen more than normal is rooted in that trauma of feeling like, of course, he didn't know what's going on. He didn't know his mom's trying to save his life from the Nazis, but he was given away as a young baby. And the message that you receive is that you've been abandoned, that you're not wanted. And so he talks about how so many people have that kind of trauma rooted in their past. And it may not be the kind of trauma we think of like, okay, Vietnam or you went to war, but it can be something that maybe didn't seem like a big deal, but will haunt you for the rest of your life. And if you don't get to the bottom of it, it's very damaging. So yeah. Okay,

so if I can poke at that for a second, not that I like, like, it

feels a little bit like you could, how

do I say this? If you investigate any person's background, you're gonna find trauma. Right. Right. So to find it very broadly, right? Yeah. Okay. I am going to self-diagnose myself right now and say that I am not an addict. I don't believe I'm an addict.

Powerful thing.

It's not just wrong. I don't believe I'm an addict. And yet I can go back and look at some things in my childhood that were very, very traumatic. Right. Now, if I were an addict, I could go back and point to those very same things and go, Oh, that's why I'm an addict. Yeah. You know what I mean? So is it a case where it's a self-fulfilling kind of diagnosis because every single human being has some trauma, some pain in their life or in their childhood, and a certain percentage of human beings are going to be addicted to something. So of course we can all look back and go, well, it's because there's a

trauma there. Right. Yeah. And trauma is one of those words that's fallen prey to what some people have called word inflation, right? Where it's like someone disagreed with me on Facebook. I've been traumatized. Like, no, no, you just got your feelings hurt. And that's a little different, right? So, and he talks a little bit about that. And here's another important thing about trauma. It's not actually how dramatic the initial event was. It's how you perceive it. Right. Because people can go to war. Some come home fine. They experience the exact same thing as their, their, their buddy. And the buddy is traumatized for life. So it depends on your sensitivity and that kind of thing. Sure. But I mean, he had, he makes a pretty compelling case, especially for the zero to three. And what I get after reading his book, both of them actually is my goodness. If people understood how important and how formative zero to three were for children, you would drop everything you could to make sure that your kids are loved, nurtured. He's even a critic of like the, you know, cry it out harsh kind of method of parenting because he's like, look at the animal kingdom. You take a calf away from a cow, a baby rat away from its mother. And you see maternal rage, right? And yet, and I, I got this growing up, I remember, you know, them saying, okay, you just put the kids in a room, you go for a walk and ignore them and stuff. And he said, whenever you're kind of disobeying those maternal or paternal instincts, it's bad news. And he makes a pretty compelling case about that. So yeah, exactly. Not everything is trauma. And he does qualify that. But in his extensive work with addicts and oh my goodness, you should read the stories. It's it's not an easy thing to read. These people that are hopelessly addicted to drugs, almost without exception, have brutal trauma in their their childhoods. So it's it's a pretty compelling case not to say, of course, if you start taking drugs and you persist for a while, you're going to get addicted, probably like anyone else, right? But that propensity, that perclivity to seek them out and abuse them is something that you're predisposed with if you are imprinted with that trauma early

in life. Right. Well, like I said earlier, trauma, you want comfort, you want soothing. And sometimes a chemical will help do that, whether it's alcohol or hard drug or something else. And so you it's hard to fault somebody who's in pain for seeking an immediate release from that pain. The problem is we find that release that the temporary release becomes more destructive than the pain itself. So right. And then we've had guests on the show before talking about legalization of drugs and other things. And the overall message of we need to stop treating this as primarily a criminal problem and treat it more as a health problem. And that means viewing the roots of this in trauma and pain rather than just criminal activity because of nefarious character, which is a misdiagnosis of the issue.

That's precisely what he says. He says, we shouldn't ask why the addiction, we should ask why the pain, right? And get to the bottom of it. And of course, there's also be consequences. And, and I don't, I think where I live out in the Pacific Northwest, we've seen some of the bad consequences of unintended consequences of saying, Hey, let's legalize every drug and say that being homeless is fine. Right. So yeah, there's another side to this. But basically, he says that we ignore trauma at our own peril. And his big thing is, this is some fascinating stuff. He talks about psychosomatic illnesses, which are way more common than we think.