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Life, Health & The Universe
Life, health and the universe are all connected. In a world where we are more connected than ever, we have become disconnected from ourselves. In this podcast, along with guests, I discuss ideas in a celebration of life, an exploration of health and some wonderment of the universe.
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Life, Health & The Universe
Unlocking Mental Health: Dual-Brain Therapy and Innovative Healing Techniques
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Unlock the mysteries of your mind with Dr. Frederick Schiffer, a leading psychiatrist and Harvard professor, as we explore the groundbreaking concept of dual-brain psychology. Imagine having two distinct minds within your brain—one impulsive and the other rational. We dive into how these two hemispheres can be engaged to transform mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
Our discussion takes a deep look into the complexities of trauma and recovery, highlighting the varied manifestations of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Through compelling real-life examples, such as a woman's struggle with agoraphobia rooted in childhood trauma, we uncover the hurdles of accurate mental health diagnosis and the intricate triggers individuals face. Dr. Schiffer emphasises the necessity of personalised therapeutic strategies, exploring how different approaches are needed for current versus past traumas and the coping mechanisms people develop in urgent conditions.
Delve into innovative treatment methods like dual-brain therapy and cutting-edge light treatments. Learn how these approaches are being tested in clinical trials for their potential to heal addiction, depression, and anxiety. We discuss the exciting possibilities these therapies hold, including practical self-help tools and narratives from Dr. Schiffer's book that challenge traditional mental health paradigms. This episode promises to equip you with fresh insights and methodologies for enhancing your mental and emotional well-being.
Find Dr Fred Schiffer's full profile, including all links, in our Guest Directory
https://lifehealththeuniverse.podcastpage.io/person/fredric-schiffer-md
Welcome to Life, health and the Universe, bringing you stories that connect us, preventative and holistic health practices to empower us and esoteric wisdom to enlighten us. We invite you to visit our website, where you can access the podcast, watch on YouTube and find all of our guests in the guest directory. Visit lifehealththeuniversepodcastpageio. Now let's get stuck into this week's episode. One of the roles of this podcast is to empower you, the listeners, with information and knowledge which might open up the possibilities that are available to us when it comes to our health, both physical and mental.
Speaker 1:This week's guest promises to share valuable insights and exciting research for understanding anxiety, addiction and trauma, and offers a proven method to improve well-being. We're welcoming Dr Frederick Schiffer, a sought-after speaker, best-selling author, psychiatrist and part-time assistant professor at Harvard. Dr Schiffer has a wealth of experience in psychiatry and has been studying the relationship between past traumas, cerebral laterality and depression and anxiety. He has tremendous knowledge of dual brain psychology techniques, which is what we'll be hearing about today. And, as Dr Schiffer just said to me before we started recording, it's kind of a little bit like what did you? What did you refer to it as?
Speaker 2:Offbeat yeah, it's often. It's not the usual thing.
Speaker 1:So we, yeah, which is what I love, so welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Love, so welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really looking forward to our conversation and hearing all about what you're doing in the world of psychology.
Speaker 2:Do you want?
Speaker 1:to tell us a brief history of Dr Shiva. Can I call you Fred? Absolutely, we'll call you Fred from now on. So a brief history of how you got to where you are today with the work that you're doing.
Speaker 2:Well, that's maybe a long story.
Speaker 1:A long story. Okay, let's try and do the abridged.
Speaker 2:I'll try and compress it. The abridged I'll try and compress it. I started as a Freudian psychiatrist. I wasn't an analyst, but I was of that ilk of talking and trying to understand the unconscious and sort of in-depth psychology, and I noticed that I wasn't really seeing super egos in my office, clearly, but what I was seeing was two minds that people seem to have, and that one mind was sort of like an id. It was regressed and primitive and impulsive and had made bad choices. And this really very much is like the Freudian id, except that the Freudian id is supposedly unconscious and the ego rides on it and tries to restrain it. And what I came to find is that in each brain hemisphere there's a different mind, and one of them is this neurotic, id-like mind, and the other is pretty healthy, it's more like an ego, and that they can dominate each other, and so somebody can go through life with their id-like mind dominating and leading to depression and anxiety and addiction, all of the psychological problems that we're familiar with. And so what I've found is that it's easy to stimulate one brain hemisphere or the other and you can get a different person depending on how you're stimulating, and that the eyes are connected to the brain in an interesting way. So there's something that's shown over here to sure my okay. So something's shown to the left lateral visual field. It's only seen in my right brain initially, and something shown to my right side is only seen by my left brain initially. And so I discovered that if I covered one, that by the connections between the eyes and the brain hemispheres would stimulate the opposite brain, which in this case would be my right brain, if I went like this, like this, and conversely, if I go like this, I'm going to stimulate my right brain. So the first time I tried it I was following a German scientist who had a very complicated million-dollar machine and so I figured I could do the same thing with my hands. And I didn't respond to it initially. Later I did and I still do. It's interesting, but for years I didn't.
Speaker 2:But I went to the office and I asked my first patient to try it and he was a Vietnam veteran who had four tours of duty, had a Purple Heart and came to me for combat PTSD and he was doing quite well. But I asked him to just put his hands up and he was looking out his right visual field, which would simulate his left brain, which we commonly think of as the good brain. But it turns out that he got very upset and he said that plant behind you looks like the jungle. And I knew he was having a flashback. And I knew he was having a flashback. So I quickly said, well, look out the other side. And had him cover this eye and look out here. No, I cut it backwards and so he looks like this and he says he smiles, his whole demeanor changes and he says no, that's a nice looking plant. And I repeated this many times that first day and have for decades.
Speaker 2:And about 55% of patients in my practice have extreme responses like this Vietnam veteran. So it's not like a rare phenomenon. And about 15% don't respond at all. They may later, like me, respond, and about 30% will have a difference, but on a 10-point scale it's like a two-point difference or a three-point difference which is enough to work with the person on.
Speaker 2:And so the idea of dual-brain psychology is that we've got two minds in each of us and that I actually can talk to two people in one person, and so I'll say I want to talk to the little girl. So hi, little girl, this is Dr Schiffer, and I think that what happened to you when you were four years old is really, really sad and I'm sorry to hear that, but you have to stop tormenting your other side. You know you've got to behave and work together. And then I'll talk to the other side and I'll say now listen, you have to be a little firmer with her, like a good parent, and you have to tell her to stop torturing you. And sometimes you have to say now, get in the back, just like you'd say to your child You're not hurting them, but you're using some discipline that you can't write on the walls.
Speaker 2:So what I'm doing is treating the injured, traumatized mind that happens to be more immature, more childlike, and you could call it the inner child. But I don't like that because inner child is so overused and where I'm really talking about somebody, I can talk to them and the person, the patient, will say to me oh, she heard you and oh, she feels better now, or she's angry with you or whatever. And sometimes it'll be the person talking to me and the person might say you look angry with me, you know, and I don't feel angry, you know, and we sort of follow that feeling and we might trace it back to their mother, who was angry and who was traumatizing. And that brings us to another point that when I talk about trauma I talk about it in a very wide breath, so it's anything that hurts us or harms us or deviates our performance. So if our parents are fighting and it upsets us and we go to school the next day and we can't pay attention, that then becomes a trauma. And if we don't do well in school, then the teacher gets angry with us and gives us poor grades, we don't go on to the next level and then we get in with other people who are having problems and they're using drugs and they're smoking, dope or drinking. But generally the immature minds usually don't think of great solutions. Occasionally they'll wind up at the library or somebody will take an interest in them and steer them in a positive direction. But usually the solutions that the immature mind selects are childish and their intention is good.
Speaker 2:And Freud came up with a term that he observed and he called it the repetition compulsion. And what he was observing was that his patients were repeating their trauma and setting up circumstances in which the same trauma was going to be repeated, and from the child's perspective they're sort of like a boxer who got knocked down and he says where is he? I want him. You know, I want another shot at him and they want another try with the trauma and they'll conquer it this time. And of course they don't, and of course they're children.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's interesting is that the immature mind thinks like a child, and children overgeneralize and they have a certainty. You know the boogeyman's coming and you can't talk them out of that easily. And so when I treat somebody I have to be like a parent and be patient. So it actually is just like being a parent, but I'm also teaching the person why they're in pain and that when their parents fought it was unbearable and they really screamed at each other.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of a patient I saw yesterday and it was a new patient. I was trying to feel around where the trauma was and he was addicted to fentanyl, which is a deadly drug, and he had no idea why he was addicted, except that he was an addict, and what we learned was that he was using fentanyl as a medicine for the pain of his trauma, which was not just his parents fighting, but that's what led to the school problems and then the whole cascade of bad decisions and then he becomes an addict, and then an addict is very traumatizing I want you to call that and it's humiliating. And as human beings, we're very sensitive to appreciation and very sensitive to disrespect. Disrespect and whether it's bullying, which is an overpowering, or sexual abuse, or that it often becomes something that is injurious to our self-esteem, and that's very painful.
Speaker 2:That's where a lot of the great pain comes from, and then there's a lot of anxiety, depending on the type of trauma.
Speaker 1:You've given us a few topic points.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing. These are all normal feelings. If I were in Gaza now, if I weren't depressed, I wouldn't be normal.
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:If I weren't having anxiety attacks, I wouldn't be normal, and the people who come to see me are suffering from a cause and when you get to depression there's a sense of defeat. Anxiety is a sense that there's an impending danger and if that danger comes and it defeats you, then you get depressed.
Speaker 1:With your thank you for that amazing introduction, and I was like had these little questions popping up and I'm like, oh, I hope I remember everything.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to look away to write them down. Remember everything I didn't want to look away to write them down, um. So one thing I would love for you to determine like there's a whole bunch of things that I would love to hear more about, but one thing I'd love for you to determine is, like, when you talk about depression and anxiety, um, there, there seem to be so met, like, uh, such a wide realm of what that can mean. Like you can have someone who's anxious about, uh, you know, a certain just doing a certain thing, um one day, a certain thing one day, and then there's people that are afraid to leave their house right, and it's just like, is it a buildup? Does your treatment work in the same way for everyone? Or are there certain types of depression and anxiety, like you know, bipolar compared to, um, any other? Like, are they all the same? Is everything the same or is it in?
Speaker 2:my, in my view, uh, it's all the same, okay, and there may be exceptions I don't see the whole world uh, but it's all the same, and and and that. What? If you drill down why the person's anxious, then you come to an answer and and one, one patient had agoraphobia, so she couldn't leave her house and she needed to be accompanied by someone to come to my office and she just had agoraphobia. That was the explanation, for reasons of her trauma, which we don't have access to, which she's no longer alive, would say to her as a small child come right home, because men can abduct you.
Speaker 2:And they lived in Newton, massachusetts, where my office is, and it's a very subdued, safe, suburban Boston suburb. They're very affluent and her mother's concern was not realistic, but her grandmother rather. But her grandmother was persistent every day oh, my God, did you come straight home? Are you safe? She developed a terror of being abducted and her mother, who was also traumatized by the mother, had her abducted when she was 15 to go to some kind of camp to deprogram you and cure your anxiety. And so they actually put her in handcuffs, oh my goodness, and had no idea who they were or where they were taking her, and so there are real reasons for her agoraphobia. So to just say, well, she's got agoraphobia. It was inadequate and incomplete.
Speaker 1:Wow, wow. I mean, when you tell that story, it's like, well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it, that that's going to cause some kind of trauma. No clue about it Does it seem to come out of, does it seemingly, for some people, come out of nowhere, or is it something that builds over time? So, because when we're talking about you know, something that you may have experienced when you were four or five years old, for example, or something that you, you, you know, you held on to from an experience, but then it doesn't present until you're in your adulthood, is it because of something that's happened that's triggered it, or is it a gradual buildup of experiences over time, like that? Affirm that belief.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's more of a build-up and that, if you look before the breakdown, that there were feelings of insecurity, that they were sort of vague and that they weren't enough to sort of you know call medical attention to.
Speaker 2:I think that there's a buildup and then I think most often people kind of have a breakdown of sorts in their late adolescence, early adulthood, because that's a real challenge, that now you have to kind of leave the nest and go out on your own and you know, see how you're going to do in the world, and if you don't have the right training and your wings aren't, you know, muscles aren't all developed, you're not going to be able to fly, and then that becomes terrifying. And so that's why a lot of you know college students, you know, smoke out and have breakdowns early and why a lot of people turn to alcohol late in high school and that turns into hard drug use. Yeah, issues and the person who is depressed might have started earlier, when they felt left out and had a sense of hopelessness and a sense that they were inadequate.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I think that the idea of bipolar is a problem, because you have someone who's been suffering a sense of inadequacy and then you tell them well, actually you really are inadequate and in fact you're genetically inadequate and there's nothing you can do about it, except you can take these six medicines and be half normal. And I don't think bipolar is any different from any of these other things. In other words, the symptoms that one develops are somewhat different. They're all similar in that they're painful. They're all things that we would normally feel, feel in Gaza. The problem with Gaza is that it's actually happening. It's not PTSD, it's not past trauma, it's present trauma. You need a political solution or an army or some actual solution, whereas a woman who has post-traumatic stress, she needs to be taught that she's not in danger walking down the street, or the Vietnam vet that he has to learn that he's not in danger, he's not in the war zone anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wow, it's pretty. I guess there are so many levels and realms of like what's going on, isn't there? Because when someone's experiencing something right now like you've referenced the war in Gaza there's also that kind of need to kind of put the hard exterior on as a coping mechanism to being in one of those in that kind of environment and so like you almost don't allow yourself to have the experience because like it could be pretty intense. And I guess people who have post traumatic stress, that's what's going on, right, it's like all of that buildup where they've had to just kind of put the blinkers on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what you're describing is, in other words, initially like with this woman who had agoraphobia the little girl in her was dominating and so in her life the world looked dangerous and that abductions even though she wasn't consciously thinking of abductions there was danger all around and that her little girl was dominating. You're describing someone whose adult side is dominating and suppressing the child.
Speaker 2:The child is probably screaming. You know, get me the hell out of here. And the adult has to. You know kind of. You know keep the lid on Right. And then the doctor. Sometimes you have to do that. You know that of you know. Keep the lid on Right, and as a doctor, sometimes you have to do that. You know that if you have someone you know who's suffering cancer, or if you're a surgeon and you're operating, you have to, you know, have a separation and be able to cope, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think it's really important that you've expressed that all traumas are relevant to someone's experience. Right, it doesn't matter if it's not being in a war zone or like have being in real danger, but if, for any reason, someone in their younger years has experienced, uh, something that's made them feel what unsafe or less than um.
Speaker 2:It's often covert in words. It's seen as normal.
Speaker 2:It could be sexual abuse you know it can be seen as normal and but it could be like a father's ridicule. And that's well, I deserved it. You know, I didn't say something clever, and so the child always blames themselves. And if the parents get divorced, the child thinks that I caused the divorce. The cause is divorce and that children always see themselves as the cause for any problem, and there's a reason for that. If they're not the cause, then it's hopeless. If they're the cause, they can become a good boy or a good girl.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so it's kind of important for all of us, isn't it, yeah, to have that sort of healing. When did you, at what point did you come to that kind of conclusion where it wasn't just your army veteran, but that you saw these kind of smaller inadequacies that people were feeling playing out and how relevant that was to the type of work that you do in someone getting better?
Speaker 2:Again, I sort of came out of a Freudian atmosphere. So it's not that different from analysis, except that it has a different concept. So, rather than being an amorphous id that you can't find, it's actually something that we've done at fMRI studies at McLean Hospital, which is the flagship mental hospital for Harvard, where it measures the activity in the brain and if you look to the left visual field, your right hemisphere actually lights up, and if you look the other way, the other hemisphere lights up. And you know this is you know, so we have, you know we've done a number of very high-tech studies. So this, in fact, this is the first theory that's come out of science that's based on Hartford science. There were the split-brain studies in the 1960s, yeah, and so this is related to my work, and we have about 30 publications from McLean and other sites where we've tested this hypothesis with high-tech equipment like EEGs and fancy equipment, and we always get great results.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's amazing. I was reading your book. I haven't got my hands on the book Of Two Minds. Yeah, Two Minds.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I was reading about the split brain studies. Well, that's pretty intense, isn't it? Do they still do that? I mean, they don't do that anymore. Well, they do many, okay, yeah, but it's amazing that your work kind of came out of that and your interest and fascination with the two parts of the brain and how they can behave quite differently. I can't remember what I was going to say, like yeah, that just blew me away.
Speaker 1:You mentioned we can talk more about what it is that you actually actually do, and then you've written a new book that's due to be released. So I'd love to hear a bit about that. But the actual process of the split brain psychology. So you've kind of given us a bit of a pretty you know solid intro and a bit of information about, like, why people might need this and what's going on when someone's traumatized or when they've got an addiction, or if they're depressed or anxious that there's these two hemispheres of the brain that aren't working it coherently, I guess right one's dominant, one's right One's dominating.
Speaker 1:So what does you also mentioned? Sorry, just go one step back. You also mentioned that it didn't work on you, so you've tried it out, but now you find that it does. What does it actually look like? Because in your book, you talk about having goggles? What does it actually look like Because in your book, you talk about having goggles? I haven't read the full book yet, so I feel like I'm missing a step, but when I was reading you had the blockage of the bite and just peripheral.
Speaker 2:Did you have an envelope? Handy an envelope possibly yes, I do for those an iPhone okay, I'm going to cover in the middle of your left eye there you go, so like this yep.
Speaker 2:Yep, just like that. Okay, what do you think is something upsetting? It doesn't have to be the most upsetting thing that you've come across, but it's something that would upset you generally and make a note from zero to ten how stressed you feel. You can keep it to yourself. You need to switch and cover your left eye and the middle of your right eye and I want you to think of the same thing that, uh, uh, that you were thinking of, and, uh, and, and.
Speaker 1:If anybody's watching, they could try this yeah, so we've just covered up most for the listeners. You can come over to youtube and watch the video of this, because it will be audio and video. Um, and watch the video of this, because it will be audio and video, and do the envelope test A little bit. Yeah, I probably wasn't specific enough about something that I was emotional about, I think, but there was definitely. On the first side it was like nothing, like completely nothing, no emotion, and on the other side it was like a little bit aggravated, but not too bad, but definitely like just like that kind of feeling on the first side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nothing, it was like I was surprised, because when I have both my eyes open and I think about it, it does it yeah, yeah and uh, so so it's important, uh, in my work, you know, to talk with both sides, yeah, and and talk to the, the, the more troubled side, and get to know it and and and and help it and let it know that that I want to help it.
Speaker 2:And one of the probably the, the the greatest problem in helping someone is is that the troubled side doesn't want to give up authority and power. And so you want this other guy who I don't know, to run the show, and I've been running this for 30 years and he won't be going disability Well, to hell with you. And so there's a lot of what we would have called resistance, where the troublesome doesn't want to change, and so it's a matter of talking with it and explaining that you know you're actually in a lot of pain and you're risky, you're taking risks and you wind up in these relationships that always wind up very painful, and so, whatever the problem is, so it's sort of a negotiation. So it's sort of a negotiation, and so most of my energy, I think, is in trying to convince the troubled side to cooperate and take a chance. And sometimes I'll say why don't you look out the other side and I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what that all means.
Speaker 2:But, the person will say oh, yeah, yeah, that feels better. And the one thing that we're doing that's interesting is I wanted a way to stimulate the brain more powerfully than with the vision, so we developed a special LED at MGH at Mass General Hospital, and we put that over the positive hemisphere. And right now we're doing a very large NIH study that's the National Institute of Health and the National Institute for Drug Abuse, and we have an FDA breakthrough designation and this is our second trial. So we got very good results in the first trial and what we're doing is we're putting this LED over one side of the forehead or the other, depending on the glasses, and I don't know who's getting active and who's getting sham, but half the people are doing remarkably well sham, but half the people are doing remarkably well and okay, okay.
Speaker 1:So is that like a um clinical trial? Yeah, okay, so you're not allowed to know who's doing what.
Speaker 2:That's right, yeah yeah, double blind study so okay, yeah, we should know, and they and only the person who administers the treatment knows, and he has a secret way of getting the information about what's on his so when you have someone that you're working with um face to face at the moment, do you use the goggles that you?
Speaker 1:yeah, and are they special? Are they like, did you?
Speaker 2:you originally made your own. Yeah, I actually. I'll use an envelope oh, you do okay, and I have sunglasses, uh that, uh, I have a, an open area, uh, on one side.
Speaker 1:They work just as well as the envelope.
Speaker 2:People like them because they can wear them. Some people who are investors within the stock market they won't invest unless they have their glasses on.
Speaker 1:So do you sell the glasses or do people make their own?
Speaker 2:Okay, so the sunglasses are discussed in my new book. Uh-huh, the sunglasses are discussed in my new book and we're actually not going to sell those because we have to go through an FDA process. It's millions ofreducing sunglasses, oh cool, and they're sunglasses that look appealing and that for just reducing stress than treating an illness. Sure.
Speaker 1:Before we talk about your book. Could you tell me so when I had my slight aggravation on the second side? Would that be the unhealed or the younger, the child?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think if we dug into it and you know, if you weren't working at the same time, you know and you'll do this on your own, you know and you can talk and see where it takes you.
Speaker 1:So could you potentially do that with any kind of issues that are coming up Like? Does it have to be specifically? I mean, most issues are probably based on some kind of past experience or trauma, aren't they Like when we can't get past an obstacle in our lives for some reason, or?
Speaker 2:other yeah yeah I think the idea is to see what you're feeling and just follow the feelings, so it's sort of like following the breadcrumbs yeah, okay, cool, yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:And before we do talk about your book, excuse me, the studies that you're doing at the moment with the light. How would that, if you're using the you're using the glasses in your own practice? How will the, the light therapy, potentially work and be rolled out into your practice?
Speaker 2:my practice in in studies. So I get irb approval. Irb is the institutional review, so they see studies and and uh and make sure they're safe and you have to report to them and so uh, so it's not fda but I can do studies with it and so I'm doing FDA study and I also can do studies in my practice as long as I have an IRB. And so I use the light in my practice and it's quite remarkable. It's quite remarkable.
Speaker 2:And one one patient came in and he wanted to gamble and and he actually was being treated for drug abuse and this was like a new issue. And he said he really wanted to gamble. And so I said well, you know, fortunately I've got a casino in the back, but unfortunately there's a cover charge, and so we had an auction and he was willing to pay $2,000 for the cover fee to go to my casino. And I said you know we extend credit and he laughed. He said that's a bad idea.
Speaker 2:And so I gave him a four-minute light treatment and I said so you want to pay to go back to my casino? And he said no. And I said what do you mean? He said I don't want to go back to my casino and he said no, and I said what do you mean? He said I don't want to go back there and I said you're not going to pay me anything and he never did gamble. I discharged him years ago, about five years ago. I discharged him years ago, about five years ago, but in the two years that he remained in my practice.
Speaker 2:After that, gambling never came up as an issue. I'm not claiming that this is a permanent cure for gambling, but in this one case I don't see a lot of gambling and I've had patients. I like auctions. So a patient came for alcoholism and he wasn't drinking at the time. But I said, if I happen to have a beer in my refrigerator, you know we had an auction, I got a five hundred dollars, uh, but for for the beer and uh. So I treated him and again, he wouldn't pay me anything and I'll give it to you, and he wouldn't take it. And I didn't have a beer in my refrigerator, of course, and and and, and I think you know he wouldn't take it, and I didn't have a beer in my refrigerator, of course, and I think you know he knew. I think both of those knew that, but it was a mind experiment and they took it seriously, and so it has really powerful effects.
Speaker 2:My first experience with it was that my wife and I were on vacation in Italy, and so we were up all night on the plane and I didn't sleep, and so we landed in Milan and it took I don't know a couple of hours to get the luggage and rent a car. And then it was a six hour drive to a place that we rented and my wife, a very good driver, usually drives, and so she's driving and about an hour goes by and I notice that I feel like we're going to crash. And after about another hour I notice that the highway is a normal highway. It's a divided highway. In fact, there was really just one direction. The other direction was in a separate place, and then later it dawned on me that maybe I should cover my eyes.
Speaker 2:This was about five years after I wrote my book, and so I go like this and all the anxiety is gone. I could feel like it's this great change. So it's this great change. So I look out the other side and I get this boom of anxiety. And when we got to the place where we're renting, I'm up, anxious, as if the cars could fly up and hit me.
Speaker 2:And out the other side it looked like a normal road and I was like wrestling with myself, like Steve Martin and Millie Tomlin in the movie that they made, and I said, listen, I don't want to be sane or crazy, I want to enjoy the vacation or not. And I had to, you know, kind of talk with myself, and of course I had a lot of experience and I was able to calm down and we had a good vacation. But then, years later, I realized I didn't realize it at the time, but it had to do with a trauma that I had experienced and that was that I had been bullied by someone who was sort of like a junkyard dog, and so they didn't hurt me so much as they scared me. And so in Italy I was associated with the mafia. With the mafia, my wife is Italian and American and we only met lovely people. That was what my unconscious, or the little boy, made the association and brought up this anxiety. Actually, to this day I use the light.
Speaker 2:They made the association and brought up this anxiety. Wow yeah, and actually to this day I use the light treatment for cognitive enhancement and actually I think it's quite effective.
Speaker 1:Great. That's amazing. When someone does come to you for treatment, or does this kind of practice well say they come to you and then they go away, does it only last for a period of time and you work through this relationship between the two parts of the brain and then that's it, they're done um, well, like any psychotherapy, you know that you have, uh, some successes and you have some failures.
Speaker 2:Usually the the failures are people drop out, they don't want to make the journey, and other people can take a long time. There's a negotiation, but I would say that the vast majority of people do well, but it's a therapy. So it's not. It isn't that you come in, get a light treatment. Your life is changed. However, interestingly, in the study that we're doing, it's for fentanyl.
Speaker 2:Now, fentanyl in the US, and probably in Australia too, is like a blizzard and people's lives get dedicated to it and they spend their whole day, you know, looking for fentanyl and holding fentanyl, and they can't work and they're bankrupt. And so these people are coming in and they're only getting the light treatment. There's no psychotherapy. Okay, and they're doing well. Half of them are getting a fake placebo and they know that. Okay, I don't know which they're getting, but I know that half aren't doing well and half are doing very well, and so probably or I hope people who are doing well are doing well because of the light treatment. So here they're just getting a light treatment, there's no therapy, and they look better, their lives are improved and they feel better generally. So it's interesting. I didn't expect that and these are fentanyl ionics.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, this is the most addicting substance so far. Well, that's pretty cool, isn't it Like you potentially have invented this amazing solution to addiction. Do you feel like you have?
Speaker 2:Well, we'll have to see what the results are.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And McLean Hospital is doing half the study and they're a little slower in the enrolment. So hopefully we'll have full enrolment by this time next year. Yeah, wow. Look at the results.
Speaker 1:Cool, we're close, getting towards the end of our conversation, but I would love to hear about your new book, which is due for release in October I believe mid October Because, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, what I love is being able to for the listeners and to know that there there are possibilities out there for us to heal ourselves and to, and there are so many different modalities that we can experience, try out, and your book is sounds like it's one of those things that, if people are interested or if they are experiencing trauma, anxiety, depression, that this is potentially a great solution to help them to manage that and to improve their well-being.
Speaker 2:Thank you. The book is. It's for people who are interested in how the mind works, how it really works, and that the important area of the brain isn't the amygdala or the hippocampus or the things you know that you read about. It's the hemisphere, and each hemisphere has a hippocampus and an amygdala, and so you know those pieces are important, but hemispheres are really important and so people who are interested in how the brain actually works will be interested. There are brain actually works will be interesting.
Speaker 2:There are cases in which I'm meeting with the patient and it's a therapy session and it's narrative fiction but it's based on reality and so there's no identifying information, but it's like a drama.
Speaker 2:So I've recreated it. But I think they're interesting and they're accurate and you'll get to see sort of what I call dual brain psychotherapy is like. And then there's a self-help. There is a self-help chapter and, by the way, when you're talking about like a simple thing to help somebody, if anybody in your audience has a cell phone, if you determine which side you feel better on, you can look out that side and a lot of times. If you're which side you feel better on, you can look out that side and a lot of times, if you're feeling very anxious, you can go like this and cut your anxiety down significantly, and so there is a simple little thing that is not therapy, but it can be. It's a tool and my patients use that. The sunglasses are helpful and uh, uh, and they'll be, uh, available from a website, uh, when the book comes out great and we'll share all of those links.
Speaker 1:so would would you say, if someone was experiencing anxiety in the moment, they're worried about something and they're getting themselves worked up, they do the cell phone or the envelope thing through it? Do you need to have the conversation with the two sides of the brain? Is it like as soon as you move the envelope again, it comes back? Or like, is there a process that that?
Speaker 2:in order to do therapy and really resolve you know, get get into, you know what the trauma was and help that part of you really heal. Yeah to, to treat the trauma, you have to do therapy.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay.
Speaker 2:It can be like taking a chronopin and it's a non-drug treatment that can really bring it down. Not everybody will respond to it and I've never had a neurologist respond to it.
Speaker 2:I've never, had anybody, that their adult side is the dominant side, but so not everybody's going to see a difference. Or maybe, like me, you won't see a difference right away, but maybe later. Maybe, like me, you won't see a difference right away, but maybe later. Uh, but a lot of people, uh, the reason I wanted to try with you is that, uh, that the chances are that you would respond and, and, uh, and so I'm willing to. You know, take it, you know, because if you don't respond to it all, it looks Lucky you.
Speaker 2:Great, so most people will probably feel a benefit from just their iPhone. Yeah, I'm definitely going to play around with it.
Speaker 1:It's just not going to cure the trauma, no but it will give you, uh, some kind of relief yeah, in the moment, great and also some kind of awareness about what might be going on, right, yeah, like when you, because I definitely, when I had the envelope on the first side, I was like nothing, like what the hell. And then there was a, as I said, there was a bit more agitation. It was. It probably wasn't like a, possibly wasn't a very strong emotion, but there was. There was definitely a couldn't care less on on the first side. So, like being able to explore that, like so simply, and get a better understanding of what might be going on for you, definitely very valuable. What's your book, your new book, called?
Speaker 2:I don't have that written down it's, it's called Goodbye Anxiety, depression, addiction and PTSD. Yeah, the life-changing science of dual-brain psychology Cool.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's a pretty major title, isn't it? To close, would you kind of give me a? Just where do you feel like you want this to go? Like? What's your motivation for this work in the world?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a small ambition. Yeah, things will work. I want to see a new paradigm, it's like. I want to see people appreciate what trauma is and how important it is and stop traumatizing people with fake diagnoses and borderline personality. You know these are insults. And there's a joke. I don't know if it's time for a worse spelt joke. A guy goes to a psychiatrist and the guy says what's so? What's my problem, doc? And the psychiatrist says well, you're crazy. And the patient gets upset and he says I demand a second opinion.
Speaker 2:And the psychiatrist says, well, you're ugly, love it and that's sort of what borderline personality or black hole you know, or even anxiety disorder, you know, say they're disorders and you're a disordered person. Or addiction is um, uh, you know, I, I'm fred, I'm an addict. I mean, it's it's, it's it's really supposed to make me feel good, but it's really an insult yeah.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that's a pretty good mission to have, I think, don't you? Yeah, and, as I said, that's kind of part of my mission with this podcast is to empower people to better understand the possibilities that we actually have for our health physical, mental, emotional and, yeah, we don't necessarily have to do things the old way. There's lots more research that's showing that, in fact, there are some better ways to approach those things. So, thank you so much for joining me today. Fred, it's been a pleasure to speak with you and I wish you the best of luck with your book. We're going to share all of your information in the show notes and in our guest directory so people can access that and find all of the things that they need if they want to find out more. Thanks, thanks, fred.
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