Your Childhood Trauma Is Causing Your Autoimmune Disease | Erica Komisar | Dr. Josh Axe

Identity formation starts from the moment that you're born. The environment is critical to developing that sense of security.

I'm responsible for two things: one, helping them grow in their character, and then helping them grow in their unique gifts and skills God's given them.

And what that means is being there enough, knowing them enough.

These are eternal souls, eternal beings, and God put them in your care. And what that means in terms of the responsibility is just huge.

Depression is preoccupation with unresolved past losses. And anxiety is preoccupation with future losses that have not occurred and may never occur.

By the way, you gave the best definition of depression and anxiety I've ever heard of. So for decades now, I've focused on helping people heal with diet, natural remedies, things like exercise and advanced treatments. However, there is one type of injury or trauma that so many people are dealing with today that unfortunately diet, supplementation, and exercise don't fix. It is emotional trauma, childhood trauma from the past, and emotional stress. These things build up on our bodies, on our cells, on our organs, causing us to be sick. I can tell you from taking care of tens of thousands of patients. When I'm dealing with patients with autoimmune disease, cancer, chronic pain, hormone imbalance, and other chronic conditions, there is always an emotional root. And today I've brought on one of the world's leading experts in this. She's a psychoanalyst. She's an author of many books on the subject. It is Erica Commissar. Erica, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I'm so excited that you flew in here from New York. I know that I watched you do an episode, a couple. One was on Alice Clark's podcast. Another was on Lila Rose. Yep. And I watched those. And by the way, 'cause you had a couple clips that were just, people were, it was pretty controversial because, and it was about daycare, right? Yeah, yeah. That, that was the clip. And I thought, wow. And by the way, there was so much I agreed with. And I've got a 2-year-old at home now. I've got an almost 6-year-old. And I mean, I can tell, let me just tell you something we just went through. We had the pipes burst on our home here a few months ago and water damage, like literally half of our house was flooded. We had to move out. And I can tell you there were certain things that I never thought that this would cause such stress on my family. But like my 2-year-old has been so unsettled because we are not in a home. We've been kind of jumping around from Airbnb, staying with family, that type of thing. And she constantly tells us like, "I wanna go home, Mommy, like I wanna go home." And so it's something simple as that. It's crazy how much that, at least to me, how much that affects kids. And there are so many people today that have had this trauma in their life. It could have been somebody said something to them when they were 3 years old, and it's left an emotional scar today. They've never dealt with it. And so it actually is causing them to have things like cancer and hormone imbalance and those sort of things today. I mean, how much of that, I know I just said a lot there, but I guess my question is this, that's something that you probably work with a lot of people on. And have you noticed that connection between, or read up on this in terms of this connection between emotional trauma and physical illness?

Oh, absolutely. The mind-body connection is a very well-researched connection now. It wasn't years ago. Years ago, it was not as well-researched, but we know there's a mind-body connection. There's a connection between stress and adversity and resilience or lack of resilience and physical illness. So there are two types of trauma as I see it. There's big T trauma, and then there's little t trauma. So big T trauma might be, oh, the death of a parent or a divorce. Little t trauma has to do with, it's more nuanced. It has to do with the chronicity of a trauma. So it might not be a one-time event. I suppose you could say divorce is more little t trauma, meaning that a little t trauma affects you throughout your childhood, meaning it's about the environment that you grow up in and the chronicity of that trauma. For instance, long-time neglect or long-time physical, emotional abuse. Those are little t trauma. And I think people don't regard those as important. They see, you know, if you've been raped or in a car accident, or those are big T traumas, and that's what's important. When in fact, in terms of one's psyche and one's physical health. It's the chronicity of, of the environment that you grow up in that can cause the greatest trauma.

Yeah. You know, I, I used to— you know, this is something I still talk about patients today. We call it microtraumas, right? So sometimes it's a car accident, but sometimes it's that you've sat at a desk all day for 10, 20 years, and that's, you know, wrecked your spine or caused, you know, some sort of other issue. So I mean, that, that, that makes so much sense. I mean, I, you know, I remember— I'll tell you a story of this. I had a woman who came in my clinic. This is probably 15 years ago, and she was dealing with major autoimmune symptoms, like chronic pain, like fibromyalgia-like symptoms. And it just started about 3 years prior. And I said, hey, did anything happen in your life that, you know, what, that when this occurred? And she's like, nothing physical, nothing. She said, the only thing that happened was, you know, my daughter, I kind of had a hard time. She moved away to college and we didn't talk. Hardly at all. I felt like she just kind of like left. She was, in a way, my— not only my daughter, but the person that was closest to me in my life. And, and that was one of the first times I really thought to myself, you know what, like, that's, that's the root. It's not that you changed your diet in a bad way. It's not that you stopped exercising. It was— there was an emotional trauma even in something like that.

So I guess first you'd want to define what trauma does to you, right? Um, yeah, it can create depression and anxiety, even on a mild level, even that's undiagnosed, and that contributes to physical illness. And so to define what depression and anxiety actually are, because they're words that are thrown around, it's a diagnos— these are diagnoses that are thrown around today and tied to illness, to physical illness, but people don't really know what the definition of them really are. Yeah. Depression is preoccupation with past losses. Unresolved past losses. And anxiety is preoccupation with future losses that have not occurred and may never occur. Wow. And so if you've had past losses, then you're more likely, particularly that are unresolved, you're more likely to be afraid of future losses. So I suppose you could say the thing that ties depression and anxiety together and ties them to illness is loss. And we all face losses. We all face adversity and losses, whether it's disappointment or rejection or death of loved ones or loss of job, or the issue is how we cope with it, whether we're resilient and can cope with the adversity and the stress in our lives. And sort of that's my specialty because I talk a lot about the origin of resilience and where it comes from and how we can cope with stress and adversity in a way that it doesn't make us sick.

Sick. First off, by the way, you gave the best definition of depression and anxiety I've ever heard of, and I've been in the medical field a long time. You know, I've read everything from the, the example in the dictionary, and this ties so well into, um, you know, when I think about, you know, ancient forms of medicine, when I think about the Bible, there's so much to unpack here. You know, so in Chinese medicine, the way they view, um, they've, they believe that different emotions impact different organ systems. By the way, we know this to be true. You know, if somebody has a lot of fear, we know that your adrenal glands now start putting out more epinephrine, you know, stress hormones, right? Even cortisol. We know that if you are dealing with worry, if you're worrying constantly, it can cause stomach cramping, upset stomach. So we know this to be true, but in Chinese medicine, if they call depression, they call it a, they actually call it a lung qi deficiency, which means an immune qi deficiency. So they believe if you've had something happen in the past And it could be having the pain of regret or shame or guilt or any of those things, that's tied to your immune system. So if you're dealing with things from the past, it weakens your immune system over time. It becomes overtaxed in a way. And with anxiety, that tends to be tied to the heart or the liver, which would increase things like blood pressure over time. I think I remember seeing a stat that said something like, over 80% of what people are anxious about never happens or even occurs. Mm-hmm. And so, And so I'm curious, what are your thoughts on, if you have somebody that's dealing with a lot of depression or a lot of anxiety, what is the process you bring them through or you recommend people go through in order to overcome those, you know, those emotional states?

I mean, first, I just wanna address something that you said that I think is interesting, which is that our stress regulating system is supposed to be helpful. It's a helpful thing. Yeah. When our HPA axis gets turned on because, and puts us into survival mode or what we call fight or flight, it's meant to be an acute response, meaning the part of our brain that regulates stress turns on the response so we can either run from a predator or fight a predator. Yeah. As soon as the predator's gone, there's another part of the brain that the hippocampus turns it off. So the amygdala is the on switch and the hippocampus is the off switch. When you're exposed to stress and adversity too early, when cortisol is, when you're exposing children to cortisol at too young an age, it conditions the brain in a way so the brain cannot cope with stress later on. So, you know, the idea that stress itself is not the problem when it's acute, it's the problem is that, The stress response is not meant to be chronic. And so when someone is having, is in a chronic situation of stress, then they tend to develop physical illness.

Yeah, wow.

But the acute response is actually meant to be a helpful thing. And, you know, what I'm seeing in children today, which is why I wrote my first book, "Being There," what I'm seeing is that it's like turning a light switch on in your kitchen. You know, you always say to your kids, "Don't leave the light on in the kitchen 'cause the light bulbs will burn out." And we used to say, that when there were incandescent light bulbs. Yeah, exactly, yes. You know, and so what happens is it's like turning a light switch on that has no off switch. So kids are under such stress at such a young age that the amygdala, which is this stress-regulating part of the brain, which is not meant to be active, it's not meant to be online for the first year or two, it's only incrementally meant to be turned on. We're turning it on so early and so powerfully that by the age of 3, it actually shrivels up and ceases to be functional in the future. So think of the light switch in the kitchen being turned on without the ability to turn it off. And that's what most people are experiencing, is the inability to regulate their stress, which then becomes physical illness.

Yeah, I want to mention 2 things here that I think are— wow, I just— yeah, you know, I, I think this is so important. You know, I, I wrote about this in a book recently that You know, when people think about something like a parasite, like if you had a parasite in your body, or somebody's dealing with mold, or, uh, some sort of major pathogen, like they worry about that and they get anxious realizing, okay, and they— I think there's an understanding that this is bad for my body. A cancer cell isn't good, you know, a parasite isn't good. These things can destroy my body. In the very same way, if people are living with a high level of anxiousness, depression, loneliness, fear. Yeah. These act in a way as pathogens damaging your organs, literally causing them to age more quickly. I mean, it is making you sick and ill. Another thing I thought about with this too, and this is, you know, a big part of my, I guess, faith background in this is that, you know, when, you know, like my 2-year-old right now and my 5-year-old, They, at this age, like when we bring them places, we tend to stay there. Like if I bring my 5-year-old to gymnastics, we stay where they can see us. Like one of us is kind of always there almost all the time, you know, for the most part. Or we have a nanny that goes with the certain things and she'll be there for part of the time. And you can just see with our kids, there's such a comfort with that. They'll kind of look over at us here and there, you know, and see that they're there, we're there. But when we're not there, there's an anxiousness there. Even if I, I mean, I'll give you an example. We went on a snow ski trip. I went in to go to the bathroom and my daughter had a, you know, she had a little bit of a hard time with it. And I think that there's a right age probably to start kind of like creating that healthy separation over time, saying, hey, it's okay, we're 1 foot away. Now we're 10 feet away. Now I'm, but I also think about this for adults. If you're listening to this and if you're 40 years old or 60 or even 70, One of the cures for anxiety and depression and some of those things is if you believe that God is near you in that very same way, there is something different there. Like, I'll just share that for me. If I have— if I go into my day knowing and believing that I have a God that's for me, not against me, that he's there with me, there's less anxiousness. If I don't only have to fight by myself, if I have God there with me, also other people. If, like, you know, when you're trying to go through life And if you feel like you're doing it all on your own, that feels like such a heavy burden to bear versus knowing, no, I've got family or friends or number one, God there that are supporting me as I go through life.

Well, there's lots of studies to show that in terms of children's mental health, there was a big Harvard study that showed that when children were raised with some faith or attended faith-based services with their families, they did better in terms of their mental health for much of the reasons that you just mentioned, it makes you can internalize the feeling of not being alone when you're alone, but also it's community. I mean, there's a big part of being part of a community when you're a child that makes you feel safer. I suppose you could say that it's about safety. So, you know, my sort of, my specialty is attachment security. So I talk about where that feeling of safety and security comes from and the origins of it because we're not born born with it. We're not born resilient and we're not born feeling safe and we're not born feeling secure and we're not born trusting relationships. So we learn those things. We're, we're born with a constitution and a personality that might be a little more aggressive and a little less aggressive, a little more demanding, a little less demanding, uh, a little more introverted, a little more extroverted. That's it. The rest of it is your environment. And what you're exposed to. And so again, if you aren't physically and emotionally present enough for your children in those first 3 years, you're not conditioning that child's psyche. You're not conditioning them to feel safe and secure and to trust relationships.

By the way, this is where things, I remember on Alex's podcast, 'cause I watched the whole show, 'cause it was really good. You are, I'm so in alignment with Alex. With what you're teaching now, because here's the battle. And I just want to kind of pre-frame this, everybody, uh, about this, is that I'm a big believer in Proverbs 31. And there's a great passage in there about a Proverbs 31 woman. And when you're reading about that, you're saying she's a great mother, she is a great wife, she is very high in character, and she's working. Yeah. And there are these things— she's doing all these things. But also there's a, you know, as Solomon talks about in his next book, right, he says in everything there's a time and there's a season and there's— so, so you have to kind of look at the Bible or great advice in a full context. And I have worked with so many amazing women that have been— I'm thinking what, you know, CEOs and vice presidents, and have a lot on my team that have been able to, you know, build really successful careers. And there's this tension right now in the left and the right and kind of different, different viewpoints about, you know, about moms being at home or not being at home and things like that. But I think, I think there's just a level of consciousness that people should be aware of what the tradeoffs are, the sacrifices, or what statistically, you know, science says or the Bible says, hey, is sort of the, you know, ideal way to go about it.

So there's a term in, in Hebrew, yiserei ahava, which means the sacred obligation of love, meaning parenting is the most important work you'll ever do if you're gonna be a parent. And you don't have to be a parent to live a generative and wonderful and happy life. You cannot be a parent and build businesses and build houses and build things together, you know? And you can do both. You can work. My mom works, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But you can't do everything all at the same time if you're gonna do everything well.

Yeah.

So what I have are women coming to my practice who have not seen life as a seasonal thing. You know, we say women have more seasons to life than men do. We have more biological seasons. That's right. We just do. Yeah. That's just the fact.

Yeah.

You know, some of the things I say are common sense. I always say they're sort of the inconvenient truth, but the truth of the matter is if you wanna raise healthy children, you have to be there physically and emotionally as much as possible. Yeah. That doesn't mean that you can't have a fabulous career and then titrate it down in the years that you're raising your very young children. And then as they become less dependent on you and they become older, you know, titrate it back up.

Yeah.

You know, become fabulous and successful again. But the concept that a woman's life is linear in terms of her career is a myth if you're gonna have children. Because, yeah, because what will happen is something has to give, something gets sacrificed. And if you're gonna be fabulous in your career in the years that you're raising young children, then your children are gonna be sacrificed, not your career. 'Cause you can't be fabulous. So look, I'm a good example. I mean, um, I had a very small I would say, I don't wanna say insignificant 'cause it's a terrible word to use, but very small, not very important practice. I took quite a bit of time off when my kids were born, and then I just saw an hour and a half of patients a day. And I did that for years and years and years. And as my kids got older, it became 3 hours a day. And then when my kids were in high school, it was 4 and 5 hours a day. And now that my kids are in college and graduate school, you know, I see 8 hours of patients a day. And I write books and I travel around the world, speak. And, you know, so, um, you know, and there's so many stories of women who were not terrorized and frightened by this idea of, I don't have to live a linear career life. I can take breaks. I can slow down and pick up speed. And listen, the truth of the matter is that if you allow having a baby to be a transformative experience, which it It can be, and it is for many women, if they're healthy enough, if they have had enough in their own childhood, if they haven't been traumatized in their own childhood, having a baby is a transformative experience.

Yeah.

But we're not leaving time for women. We're terrifying them that if they take time off, if they treat life as a seasonal thing, then they're never going to gain ground again. They're going to have losses in their careers. And the way that I would describe that is, is when you have a transformative experience, you may choose to do something completely and entirely different than you did before. You may choose, you change, that's what transformative means. And when you change, you may choose a different path with your career entirely. But if you're so scared that you cannot veer off the path for even a moment, then you never know where life would have taken you.

Yeah, you know, there's of course this ancient saying, know thyself, right? Right. And I think there's so much wisdom there and just saying like, because what's happening is the world is telling you this is who you should be, this is what success is, this, this means you're—

that's where the modern world is telling you. Exactly.

Hey, it's this amount of money, it's this notoriety, it's just many followers, versus, you know, the Bible really says it's who you become, right? If you're becoming a more virtuous person, a better mom, a better dad, a better friend, more in the New Testament, more Christ-like, or just more in character, like that is successful. And also knowing yourself in terms of, again, a female, there's a cycle there, right? Women are more cyclical, to your point, men are more linear. And so knowing that, that's important. That's important. And so, but I'm glad we got to talk about this 'cause I just think that, you know, it's such an important conversation. Again, it is so, Um, uh, again, just controversial just even talking about that, but I do think it's an important thing. And, and I talk about this from a health standpoint too, because it's like, okay, like, I— this was my mom growing up. My mom tried to, you know, raise 3 young kids, work full-time, uh, volunteer at the church, make dinner every night. I mean, literally. And I, I think it's why my mom was diagnosed with cancer and then chronic fatigue syndrome.

Because why would you ever expect someone to have 3 full-time jobs?

Right.

Or even 2 full-time jobs. So raising a child that's healthy is a full-time job.

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So, I mean, I think that what we expect of women today is not realistic. Yeah. And so, and women are accepting it. And the question is, why are they accepting it? You know, why are they accepting that they have to do two full-time jobs at the same time? So, you know, my book was never, Being There was never about, about not working. It was about prioritizing children if you were going to have them in those first 3 years and throughout childhood. I'm gonna say it doesn't just stop at 3. As long as your children are home and they need you, and remember, adolescence doesn't end till 25. So as long as they need you emotionally to be their, what I would call, if we're gonna use physical terms, their emotional digestive system. Parents are their emotional digestive system. Yeah. You, digest and help them to regulate emotions and strong feelings and experiences and things that happen to them in life. And if you're not there enough to be that digestive system, it's like treating children as if they are self-cleaning ovens. And that's what we've done. And we treat women with great disrespect. This is what I'll say. We treat them with great disrespect because we expect women to do everything and be everything all at the same time. So if we said to women, you know, take time off, we're gonna give you 12 to 18 months of paid leave because every woman should have the opportunity to bond with her baby and form an attachment security. And then we're gonna let you go back to work part-time on your own terms with control and flexibility. Maybe you can work from home, maybe we can help you to start your own business. Maybe you can do it when the children are asleep and now you're working part-time. And then as your children need you less and less, less, and there, I always say, children go to work. Maria Montessori of Montessori Schools, the founder, said, "Children work, and school is work for them. It's play, but it's also work." So when children are in school 6 to 7 hours a day, that's their work. And now mothers have 6 to 7 hours a day to do work as well. So there is a natural rhythm to it. There's an organic rhythm if you allow there to be an organic rhythm, but that's not what we're telling women. We're telling them, "You should have linear careers like men." And the thing is, that is the denial that women are primarily responsible for the emotional wellbeing of children. Fathers are incredibly important, but women are still primarily responsible for the emotional wellbeing of children. And so what that means is we are not expecting men to do two full-time jobs. We are expecting women to do two full-time jobs. Yeah. The messaging in our country is different than any messaging in any other country in the world.

Yeah.

Yeah. I always call us the most barbaric, country. I love America, but we are barbaric in terms of how we treat women and children.

You know, I, as I've— I study and read the Bible a lot, and one of the things that you'll see come up is, is sort of different cultures tend to have different idols that they tend to worship. And so the idol of America is economic progression.

Of course it is. It's money. It's just money. Our idol is money.

Yeah. And in some cultures it's, it's sex, and for some it's, you know, media. I mean, so it can be different. And just as bad, but that is the, you know, that's the God.

I mean, do we wanna live by a, in a society that idolizes money and materialism and economic achievement and success? That is the country we live in. Instead of idolizing, and we don't wanna idolize, but instead of valuing relationships above all, you know, Aristotle's deathbed question, who's gonna be sitting beside you on your deathbed? Is it gonna be your boss? Your boss and your colleagues at work? No, if you're lucky, it'll be the people that you have taken care of and loved and attended to and spend time with and made to feel important. Those are the people that are gonna be sitting by your bedside, but only if you give, right? So if you don't give enough when your children are young, you know, and I love this song, "Cats in the Cradle" by Harry Chapman, but it was a song from, I think the '60s. And I, it rang in my head when I was a little girl. It was a song about, about a father who was too busy to spend time with his son when he was working. Father was working all the time, working, working. And the son just said, "Daddy, but I need you. I need you." Father said, "I'm too busy, son. I'm too busy, son." And when the son grew up and the father was old and the father said, "Son, I would love to come and have lunch," the son said, "Nope, Dad, I'm too busy for you. I'm too—" So what you model for your children, I mean, I don't wanna scare people, but what you model for your children now, how attentive you are to your children, your children, how interested you are in your children when they're little and throughout childhood, is pretty much how interested they're gonna be in you when you grow old. That's so good. So don't expect anything more than you give.

You know, one of the things we had talked about earlier is I think it's important, one of the topics I think that's so important in psychology is identity, right? And one of the things that you'll see in movies today I can see people talk about is like, I'm gonna go and find myself, right? And I'm going to do this. And most times it's, I'm going to find myself in as a— independently. Like, I'm going to go off here and here and here and here and here and find myself. And when I think about what identity really is, you know, Jordan Peterson, he's somebody I followed quite a bit. One of the things that he talks about is you don't find your identity in yourself. You tend to find your identity— you do in your uniqueness, so there's a part of it but you find your identity in your attachment to others in your community. And what role do you play there as part of a community? And I think it's so interesting because I think a lot of times, and for me, I think that's where I get a lot of my value and self-worth is knowing, okay, this is how God created me. This is where I'm unique. This is where I can add value as part of this family. And then as part of a larger community. And that gives me a great sense of self-worth and value. But I don't think a lot of people understand or even know how to, find their identity. The other thing I want to say is, you know, I think identity is so important in terms of your faith. Like, my identity of knowing that I'm a child of God, knowing that I'm built for eternity, like, what I do here is going to have eternal ramifications and rewards and all kinds of things. Like, that also impacts my identity. So, uh, have you done much work on, I guess, identity in terms of how does somebody go out and actually build a solid identity?

Well, identity formation starts from the moment that you're born. In terms of, it's basically the development of a self, right? Yeah. So we all have to develop a sense of self, and it starts really from the moment we're born, and it has everything to do with the relationships that we have, meaning our mother and father, particularly our primary attachment figure, but both our mother and father. One of the main jobs of being a parent is to help your child to develop a sense of self. And what that means is being there enough, knowing them enough to know what their strengths are. Yeah. And what their weaknesses and vulnerabilities are, and helping to foster their strengths and their interests and helping them to accept their limitations. There's a lot of narcissism today, which again, I don't think of narcissism is something that makes people bad people. Narcissism is basically a sign of a wounded person. So we call them narcissistic defenses. They are defenses to protect a very vulnerable person. And so we have a lot of very vulnerable parents who project onto their children who they want them to be rather than knowing, organically knowing their children and knowing who those children are, what their strengths are and what their vulnerabilities are. So that is one of parents' main role. And so if you're, again, I'm gonna repeat myself, I know like a broken record, but if you are not present enough in your child's life, you don't know them. You really can't know them. Yeah. If you only spend an hour and a half a day with them, there was a Pew Research study that said that American parents spend on average 90 minutes a day with their children. That is not enough time to know your child. And again, empathy is not something we're born with. It comes from the right part of the brain, the social-emotional part of the brain, what we call the prefrontal cortex. And that's not fully developed till 25. It's only conditioned by your interactions with your child, particularly in two critical periods of brain development, from 0 to 3 and 9 to 25, or adolescence. And if you don't model that behavior, if you don't model empathy, it doesn't matter what you tell your children, it doesn't matter if you tell them You can't teach your children the rules of religion or the Bible unless you model it for them. It's how you behave and how you treat your wife, how you treat your friends, how you treat strangers. That's what models empathy for them. So it doesn't matter what we say, it's really what we model for our children. And we can tell our children, by the way, that you love them. I love you, you're the most important thing in the world to me, but you don't spend time with them. You don't pay attention to them when they're in the room. You're not really that interested in playing with them or interacting with them or even listening to them about their day. You find it boring. So how can you say you love someone if you can't even be with that person? There was a guru named Ram Dass years ago. I'm old, so this was like the '60s or '70s, and he came back wrote a book called "Journey to Awakening." And he said there are 3 pillars of life. There's the doing, the having, and the being that most people just do, do, do to have, have, have, and forget about the being. And the being is the most important pillar of life. And so if you can't be with your children because it makes your skin crawl or it makes you feel bored, you know, I always say boredom is a sign of depression. And so when you say, I'm so bored, I'm bored, I'm bored being with my children, okay, if you're not in in the child business like I am. I'm not bored with babies, I love babies, but I'm in a particular field, but I don't expect people instinctually to be interested in children if that's not their thing, other people's children. But when it's your own child, it's anti-instinctual to say you're bored with your own children. You might have boring moments, but you're not pervasively bored being with your children.

Yeah, I think it's so good. You know, one of the things I found in this, I think this is true generally with almost anything in life, life that— I was trying to tell my daughter this the other day. She's like, I don't like this food. And I'm like, you know what, honey? I didn't like tomatoes either, or olives, or peas, or a number of things. But the more you eat them, the more you'll like them. And I think there's an element too of the more you do something, the more you start to like it. And so I think that one of the things, if a parent does feel that way, I think the more— I think there's two things. I think the more you do it, the more you can kind of get into that. That. I also think it's understanding the importance. I mean, you mentioned that Jewish phrase earlier. There's a pastor who says something similar. He says the most important thing you'll ever be, uh, isn't a, you know, basically it's a parent, right? I mean, the single most important job, to your point. I think if you truly understand the depths of that, these are eternal souls, eternal beings, and God put them in your care. And what that means in terms of the responsibility is just huge. You know, the way that I try and think about being a dad right now is there's really two things I'm most concerned with with my daughters. And it is, I'm responsible for two things. One, helping them grow in their character, that's gonna help them be the best they can be. And then helping them grow in their unique gifts and skills God's given them, that thing that makes them unique, right? So like my 5-year-old now, she's, I think she's gonna be a pretty good swimmer. It's like we're doing everything we can to help her be a good swimmer. You know, and then, uh, and then of course, you know, the character qualities. But I think that, you know, if you kind of think about it like that, like, hey, my goal is to take this person and help them to grow to the highest level possible, you know, maybe, maybe that's helpful for some people. Now again, that could also be unhealthy probably for some parents, because if it's not what the kids actually are good at and it's what they wanted them to be, or, you know, they had something and they never fulfilled their own dream And that's probably a problem.

So I would say parents, when it comes to health and safety, have to lead the way. So you're a health person. So I would say when it comes to, you know, how you feed your children or whether you vaccinate them or don't vaccinate them, or you lead the way with health and safety, you know, that you make sure that, you know, they don't run out in traffic or, you know, you are the leader. But when it comes to their interests and how intensely they want to engage their interests, I always say to parents, They're the leaders and you are the follower. Yeah. Don't try to be the leader in something that is uniquely theirs. Yeah. Because what you'll do is you'll take something good and make it bad. Yeah. And so swimming is a good example, or piano or anything. Yes, you wanna encourage your children if they love to do that, to do it and cheer them on and admire them. We wanna admire our children and not admire our children for their accomplishments, but admire our children for trying. So our admiration is for trying. Is really important in terms of them developing a healthy ego, right? Healthy sense of self. But you have to be careful. There's a fine line between encouraging and admiring them for them and encouraging and admiring them for you. And so you just have to make sure, you always have to check yourself as a parent. So we're always checking ourselves to make sure that we haven't crossed the line and that we're following our children and what they want. So, you know, and when your child comes in comes to you and says, you know, "Oh, swimming is so hard and I'm so tired, and, you know, I think I want to quit, Daddy." And if you say to them, "Well, you know, honey, um, do you still love it? Do you still like it when you do it?" "Yeah, but it's so hard." You know, we can talk to them about resilience and how it's important to stick with things, and— but in the end, if they still, after we've given them that talk and we've encouraged them, they want to stop. Again, we have to follow their lead.

Hey, so if you've ever thought, something is wrong with me, but I just can't prove it, then this is for you. Now, you might be eating clean, even what you feel like is perfect, working out, taking all the right supplements, but you're still exhausted, still foggy, gaining weight, and you're not sleeping. And every time you ask for help, You hear the same thing, but your labs are normal. Here's what that actually means. Standard blood work only shows what's in your blood, not whether your cells can actually access it or not. You can give your body all the right inputs, but if your cells are in danger mode, chronically stressed or inflamed, they can't absorb or use those nutrients properly. If you're finally ready to heal, go to mybloodwork.com. You'll get an at-home cellular blood work panel shipped straight to your home and reviewed on a private call with one of my senior health advisors at the Health Institute. And this will help you finally connect the dots between your symptoms at the cellular level. We'll also determine if you're a good candidate for one of our cellular healing protocols so you can finally experience lasting healing. Once again, go to mybloodwork.com to check it out. We should be attached. To parents and to people. Yeah. But you— people can create unhealthy attachments. This is something I heard you talk about, and I think people find this so fascinating. I had a patient recently I was working with, and she had a really hard breakup with— I guess a hard breakup with a boyfriend. Yeah, right. And she— I mean, you know, 4 months later, 6 months later, still absolutely just a wreck about it because she felt like this was the person for her, and now he's kind of moved on and, you know, and, um, and dating someone else. And so, but it was very— and the thing is, you know, she was, you know, a Christian, somebody who's very spiritual, uh, looks to God for a lot of things. But if you had somebody like that come in your, you know, you're working like someone like that in practice, like, what would you say about that attachment? So I know one of the things you've even trained on, I think there's multiple attachment styles, right, that people can —well, there's a healthy attac—

there's only one secure attachment style. Okay, yeah. So that's the good news is that you don't have to remember too many of them 'cause there's really only one that's what we call secure, healthy attachment style. And what does it mean? It means that, one, you look for reciprocity in connections, meaning you trust others, but you look for them to love and trust you in response. So we look for reciprocity. So in the case of this patient that you're describing, it sounds like maybe something got lost in translation with the reciprocity piece, right? To say you are madly, deeply in love with someone who has rejected you or doesn't wanna be with you. Remember, it's, we wanna teach our children that real love is when you love someone and they love you back. Mm, yeah. You want someone and they want you back. But also healthy attachment means that you feel comfortable in the presence of someone you love and you feel comfortable depending upon them. People that you love. You're not scared of dependency. Yeah. But when they aren't there, you can hold it and feel full and not empty when they're gone because you're able to lean into a secure sense of safety from early in your life. So meaning when the person is there, you can lean on them. And when the person isn't there,. It's sort of like having a backup generator for your house. You can lean on yourself. That's healthy, secure attachment. Then there's different kinds of attachment disorders, which are basically defenses that children develop in response to these traumatic attachment situations. So they can either become avoidant, they can become anxious, or they can become disorganized. So in an avoidant attachment is someone who says, right, my mommy isn't coming, my daddy's not coming, and I need them, "so I'm just not gonna need anybody and not trust anybody." And that's most closely associated with depression and inability to form connections later on. Anxious or ambivalent attachment is when a child says, "Oh my God, my mommy's here, but she's gonna leave me again. I'm gonna cling to her like life itself, and I'm not gonna let her go." And that's most correlated with anxiety later on. And then disorganized attachment is the hardest to treat, is connected to things like personality disorders. It's basically when a child doesn't have a strategy. I suppose you could say the other two are like strategies. So a child who doesn't have either their primary attachment figures are absent in those early years, or even if they're physically present, they're emotionally absent in some way, depressed, distracted, resentful, whatever. So those children who have disorganized attachment can't find a strategy. So you can think they're trying to click into a strategy, but can't find one. So first they'll avoid, then they'll cling for dear life, then they'll slap their mother 'cause they're angry, and then they'll cycle through again. And they never quite find a strategy. So they end up in this disorganized kind of attachment. And that's correlated with things like borderline personality disorder, which we're seeing a lot of in young people. Yeah. So yeah, there's really only one secure attachment style.

Yeah, let me, let me ask you about this. So, so you had mentioned, so there's an element of somebody having attachment, especially to parents, right? Over time though, as we grow up, those attachments are gonna obviously lessen to a degree in a way, right? Because there's, they're less present, or, or let's say your parents pass. How do you still have a healthy, do you, do you attach to other things? Do you just solely start relying on yourself? Do you have to have God there for that support? Like, talk to me a little bit more about the healthy attachment style and how that would work.

So in the first 3 years, you build a scaffolding in a child. They aren't able to internalize that sense of security till about 3 years of age, which is why we call 3 years of age a critical period of brain development. So by 3 years of age, 85% of a child's right brain is developed. And in that, in those years, The environment is critical to developing that sense of security. It can only be taken in and internalized and held onto. Think about pouring a glass of milk for your child. You can't pour it all at once. You pour a little by little over that 3-year period. By 3 years, the glass is full, and now they've internalized a full glass of milk. I see, okay, yeah. And so if you are not as present, then they only internalize half a glass of milk. Yeah, yeah. And what happens then is they don't know they don't have that internal experience of comfort and soothing and safety to turn back to. So you say God is that for a lot of people. And interestingly, you know, a lot of people use God and parents interchangeably. And what I mean by that is, for many people who didn't have healthy relationships with their parents, reaching out for a parental figure in God is a very positive thing. Because that's why religion exists. That's why Christianity is used in 12-step programs if we're talking about health, because there is a hole, there's an empty glass where there should be a full one inside those people who have addictions. They're reaching for to fill up that empty space inside of them with gambling and drugs and pornography and food and alcohol. And those are all things that are an attempt to fill up a space that was never filled with love. Wow. And so if you get enough love, and I don't mean pay lip service, but real attention, I always say to parents, if you want your children to feel good about themselves, then if you want them to feel as if they are valuable and interesting people, then you have to be interested in them more than you're interested in anything else.

Hey, can I share something that was such a powerful thing for my faith is I think at certain times growing up, I heard two things which Jesus teaches and the Bible talks about quite frequently is love God, love your neighbor, right? But I had this sort of thing that happened to me where when I was able to love God in the greatest way and other people, when I was finally able to reflect and understand understand how much God loved me. And it really wasn't until then, 'cause before it was kind of trying without seeing results, or it was kind of like this trying to get myself motivated to go out and do things, love people. But when I had this reflection of, wow, like, God loves me so much that he would sacrifice his own son. God loves me so much, he's constantly thinking about me. Like King David said, he knows me to the very, you know, numbered to the very hairs on my head. It's like, if meditating on that, letting that sort of penetrate me and become who I was, or understand that, that, that was such a thing. And then like now, even looking back, thinking about like my parents, like I had a dad, I was so blessed. Like my mom was like, took care of us so much. Like she, she, you know, drove the bus at school. She worked at my school, did gym teacher so we could go to a Christian school. I had a dad who never missed a single game ever. And like even thinking about that, it gives me such a sense of like just love and fullness and it makes me wanna love them them so much in return, you know. And so I think for a lot of people— but a lot of people didn't have that experience like I had and had parents that were that selfless and that interested in everything we did. And so how do people— what is some practical advice? How do people get to that place?

So that kind of unconditional love that you're describing, that hopefully you get from your parents, but unfortunately not everybody does, people find in religion, they find in a connection to God, and they find in the kind of therapy that I do. So it's not all therapy because I think there's different kinds of therapy. I think people don't know that much about the different kinds of therapy that are out there.

By the way, can I just say, there is so much bad therapy. There is. Like today, and we've heard this thing about rumination for a lot of times, people I know who've gone to counselors, I'm like, "What did you do?" And basically, basically, I mean, I'm not saying this very medically or delicately, but they wallowed in their suffering and they never learned how to maybe leave it or how to move forward from it.

I don't really love the word rumination. Okay. It's a psychiatric word. I think of it as a grief response. Yeah. That, you know, you can get stuck. Do you know Kubler-Ross and death and dying? Yeah. You can get stuck at any stage of grief. Yeah. And so people who are quote unquote ruminating, I suppose, are stuck between disbelief and sadness in terms of sometimes anger. Okay, yeah. But they get stuck sort of like you used to scratch an LP and it would skip back and skip back, you know, the records. Yeah, of course. We don't really have records much anymore.

Well, CDs, but they would do the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they would do the same thing. So actually people are using records again, but the concept is if you are, when you are not moving along in a grief process and you get stuck, you keep going back and back and back because you can't move forward in that grief process. So I'm a psychoanalyst. So what we call psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy is the best therapy because for that kind of response, I mean, there's CBT, which I, I think CBT is helpful for certain things, but it's more symptom-oriented. And from my perspective, If you're only addressing symptoms and you're not addressing the origins of symptoms, then you're just always putting out fires. As Stephen Covey said, you're always just putting out, right? So the idea is you wanna go to a therapist who really, first of all, who is an emotionally reparative experience for you. I mean, it's not a term we like to use in my field, but it's the truth. The truth is that therapy is a relationship with a kind of parental figure where there's a transference of some kind to a kind of parental figure parental figure that we call it like an as-if parental figure, where you have a different experience of somebody actually listening to you and being interested in you and being able to mirror your feelings and reflect them and be attentive to you emotionally in a way, and to be calm and not to be volatile emotionally. And so that is an emotionally reparative experience. Not a quick one, but it is. So that kind of therapy helps.

And then I also think religion helps. I've never heard— like, first off, this just makes sense. Like, when I'm thinking about the Bible right now, there's a— there's a— the shortest verse in the Bible, and it's, "Jesus wept." And there's an element there of, like, so if you're going to be a good therapist, there's an element of— you have— you used the word empathy earlier. You actually need to feel the pain, get in there, in in the deep end with the patient and actually help them work through. And it's not you're standing over here, they're standing over here. You're in with them, helping them go through it. You know, I think that, like, when my mom had cancer, that was very much— I, I learned so much because oftentimes when I have patients, they're like— and you get a serious diagnosis, it's like deer in the headlights. Like, there's so much information, there's a lot of fear, what to do. And I really kind of went down there. We went in the deep end and we walked through every moment of the part of the day for months and all that together. And I realized, I'm like, wow, that is how healing is supposed to happen, is like you are in community, locked arms with someone else getting you through. But most people today, they're lonely, they're in a corner, they're trying to do it themselves.

So, yeah, it's interesting because we say that repression is a great defense if it lasted a lifetime. So repression is is basically shoving down one's emotions and one's trauma for years and years without dealing with it, right? Shoving down conflict, shoving down pain. And unfortunately, it doesn't generally stay down. Sometimes, rarely, it comes out in various ways. It'll come out in mental illness. It'll come out in health issues. So, yeah, it's, unfortunately, we have to deal with our pain, whether it's emotional pain or physical pain. We can't just push it down because it doesn't stay down. And it is really important, particularly when you're dealing with physical illness, you know, and it's really a hard thing to talk to a lot of, you know, allopathic doctors about because they're trained just to see the body as a physical thing, not as a whole unit, not as a whole thing with one's psyche and one's emotions, although they're starting to more and more, but how many doctors, when you get a cancer treatment, talk to you about trauma and are you seeing a therapist? And not too many of them. Less than 1%.

Yeah.

It would be very low. Yeah, and even psychiatrists also, I have to say, they wanna, they're symptom relievers and there is use for that. There's use for that at moments if someone is in a very, severe state, suicidal state, or bipolar state, or schizophrenic, there's use for medication. But really what we're doing right now is we are silencing people's pain instead of helping them to get to the bottom of their pain and really resolving their conflicts and resolving their pain at its origin, right? Otherwise, you're just kind of cutting the grass and the grass grows back.

Yeah, you were referencing this as people people, in order for people to heal and move on and become their best, you talked about having, working with a counselor like yourself that's getting in the deep end with them and helping them go through that process. And then you were also about to get into there, something connected to God and faith in that process as well.

Yeah, I mean, again, it's what heals you when you're in pain, when you're in emotional pain, are relationships. That's what heals you. And so not drugs, but people and relationships. And you also have a relationship with God. God is, you know, I remember my husband went to Hebrew school when he was a little boy and his mother said, "What's the one thing you learned from Hebrew school?" And he said, "God is invisible." And I said, "I hope you learn more than that." But the concept that there is this invisible, being that is also a relationship. We have a relationship with God. Yeah. We have a relationship with our parents. We have a relationship with our spouses and our children. We have a relationship with our therapist. And so relationships are healing. Yeah. And, you know, and it's not, I don't think that we really talk about that very much. And I also think that we don't help people to understand that if the relationships that cause the greatest pain that lingers with you throughout your life are the early relationships, then you have to dedicate many years to being in therapy. Because if you think about it, it may have taken many years for that trauma to form, and it's gonna take many years to unravel it. And so people go into therapy and they say, "Right, 3 sessions, am I done? Is this it?" And I'm like, "Wait a second, how long did it take you to get here into my chair?" And they say, "Well, I'm 40, so I guess—" Well, I say, "You're not gonna be here 40 years." "but give it a little time because it is the relationship with me that's healing. It's not some pithy thing that I'm gonna say to you." I wish that I was a magician. I have a friend who's a mentalist, and I'm not a mentalist. I'm a psychoanalyst who helps people with their pain, but it is in the connection, it's in the relationship with the therapist, and it's in the relationship with God. That's what's healing. It's the relationship, not some magic bullet that comes out of, not some interpretation or some pill, or it's the relationship. And so therefore, the consistency and the care and that relationship over many months and many years is what heals people.

So you just came out with a new book, and you've written some great books and done some great interviews. Like I said, I've seen a couple of your interviews online. I was just so, so impressed. And I was so impressed because the way you think is very much root cause oriented. And this is the way I like to practice medicine. I like to do something called the 5 whys. And, you know, basically it's— and it's, it's, it's, it's Socratic, you know, and it's in its method. It's saying, okay, you've got diabetes. Why? Your blood sugar is high. Why? Insulin sensitivity. Why? Oh, you're eating too many carbohydrates. Or no, cortisol is high and that's what's driving it. And then so going to the very, very root so we know exactly what to fix in order to— how to heal. And you do that with people in their emotional states and their past traumas and all those things. And there are a lot of things that I think about, uh, that cause a lot of trauma for people when I'm looking at patients. You know, some of the top ones I just want to mention. One is just emotional trauma as a child, right? The parent wasn't there, they grew up without a parent, or there was some sort of verbally abusive or physical— I mean, there's a number of things there. So that's one big thing. Another one is losing a loved one. Like, I'm walking through this right now still. Last week was the 2-year anniversary of my father-in-law passing. He was 60 years old, had a heart— so that's my, my wife's dad and my mother-in-law. And he was 60 and I was going to the gym with him every day. I mean, really healthy, fit guy and my best friend in a way, in terms of a male figure, someone I respected, poured into me. And so, you know, that was— that's the hardest thing I've ever probably gone through is just— and they were like living with us, like we were like— they were, you know, our closest family members. And then another thing that I see that really impacts people is divorce. And divorce is so common, even in, you know, Christian households. And, um, while I don't, you know, in no way— like, one, I, I'm very much on the line of, you know, so, you know, just thinking about the way— yeah, supporting marriage and thinking about what Jesus said is 77 times 7. Like, let's, you know, let's, let's cherish and protect at all loss. But if someone has been through a divorce or is going through a divorce, that's something that can be really traumatic on people. What is the right way to go through that type of trauma of losing someone, or even more specifically a divorce, in order to, you know, protect themselves but also their kids and their other family members as they're going through that? I wanted to ask you this question because you've written an entire book on it.

Well, let's talk about why marriage is so important. Important in raising children? 'Cause that's the first step in that question is, is marriage really important in raising children? And the answer is, of course it is. Marriage, having a mother and a father is really important to raise healthy children. If they love one another, if they care for one another, if they're affectionate with one another, if they respect and admire and trust one another. It's the best environment to raise children in. I'll just say that. Yeah. So everybody understands that I support marriage as the best way to raise children. Now, some people can't raise children in that situation because someone passes away. Yeah. Or they're, you know, they have a divorce. Yeah. And so there are situations where people are stuck in terrible circumstances where they're not in these loving and healthy and supportive relationships while they're raising children. And so I'm big into prevention. So that was the first part of your question. Yeah. The reason I write books is because as a therapist, I got tired of just dealing with the fires that came to me when I knew there were so many things that people could do to prevent the fires. So you talk about prevention. Prevention, right? That's what living longer is about, prevention, preventing illness. I talk about preventing mental illness. And so with children that come out of a divorce situation, and there are going to be divorces because there just are, 50% of people in America divorce. And so that means Christian or not, there are going to be divorces where parents do not get along, where they are in constant conflict. And what the research shows is that raising children with a person who you hate and who hates you, first of all, the word hate doesn't mean what we think it means. The opposite of love is not hate, right? The opposite of love is really not caring. Indeed, hate is unrequited love. Unrequited love. So when people don't make it in a marriage, it's usually because there's such great disappointment in what they thought would be an amazing connection for life. And so hate ends up being unrequited love, right? Rather than indifference, which is really the opposite of love. When you raise children in a hateful environment, it's very bad for children. When you raise children in a conflict-filled environment that is unresolvable conflict, and chronic conflict. We know now from the research that that is not the kind of marriage that is healthy to raise children in. So there are times when we say it might be better for children to be in two harmonious, peaceful, calm environments with two parents who can work together and care for each other without living together and co-parent.

So I wrote this book, "The Parents." Can I say one thing? One thing, one, I would challenge that a little bit from this standpoint is that if you have two people that are resentful and hateful, or one of the two, you know, that that means that they're gonna have two separate homes that are both harmonious. I would challenge that that is almost never going to happen or very rare. I'm not gonna say that.

That's why I wrote the book.

Okay, okay. To give people a map.

And so in the book, it's not a perfect map, but it's a map on how you can, we know it's gonna happen. We don't promote divorce, but we know it's gonna happen. So if it does happen, how do you deal with it the best way possible? If it does happen, how do you mitigate the negative impact on children? Yeah. How do you secure their mental health for the future? Yeah. How do you make sure that they still have faith in relationships? That they can still trust in love, because many children come out of divorce not trusting in loving relationships and not having faith in the permanency of connection with another person. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this book is a roadmap for those who are going through divorce or who are thinking about going through divorce. It may scare you away from divorce to read my book. You may go back and say, I wanna give marriage marital counseling another try. But if you are gonna do it, then you have to do it in what I call a child-centered, child-healthy manner. Because if you don't, then your children are the ones who are suffering. And what I will say is that when we're in pain as adults, we share our pain with everyone around us. We can't help it. It's like when you stub your toe on the corner of your bed, you know, and you scream at your wife and you say, "Why'd you put that bed in the middle of the room?" Go to your room, right? When she didn't, right? And so we're not our best selves when we're in pain often. And so this is a book to help you, it re-centers parents to try to be their best selves for their children. Yeah, that's so good.

That's so good. Well, Erica, thanks so much for coming on today. I wanna encourage everybody to check out Erica's books. They're in bookstores nationwide. You can just go on, you can go to amazon.com and look up Erika Komisar. I'm going to show you her book here now, The Parent's Guide to Divorce. There's other books. What are your other two books?

Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, and Chicken Little: The Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.

Very creative titles, but very effective. You know, that sounds like a psychoanalyst wrote the book. Um, but Erika Komisar, uh, you can find it again bookstores nationwide, amazon.com as well. I want to encourage you to check out her books. And hey, we'd love to hear hear your comments. I, you know, on this show, I, I really am focused on bringing people on that I have an interest in learning from, and iron sharpens iron, growing from having on the show. And so I love to be able to have people, Erica, like you on the show where I can learn about, um, being a great parent, uh, learning about how to heal wounds myself. You know, nobody had— I had great parents, but nobody had a perfect childhood. And doing everything I can to overcome from depression, anxiety, uh, you know, high cortisol, living in a state of anxiousness. And so I think these are really important things, and the show here is really focused on helping you heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and taking your health and your life to the next level. So I want to say thanks so much for watching and listening to the podcast here. By the way, the number one thing you can do to support the show is subscribe. By the By the way, sometimes we have episodes that can be shadow banned because we talk about a lot of controversial things, everything from cancer to RFK Jr. to a number of things, and even some, you know, controversial things that we cover on the show today. So subscribing— if you're subscribed, you'll always get notified that we had a show here. And also sharing— there are so many people that don't know the truth about how to, uh, create a really emotionally healthy environment for themselves and for their others. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you on the next episode.