Episode 1019: The Mind–Body Connection: Understanding Pain with Dr. David Clarke

0:00Hey guys, if you're not a member of the street cop community, you're missing out. It is where you can find all the ebooks and all the resources that I put out to help you do your job better. Check it out at streetcopcommunity.com or streetcop.com. Just look for the link there and we'll see you inside the community. People who had suffered for years, sometimes decades, sometimes people in the hospital with this, they could get better if I started paying attention to these issues. So today, I've been doing this for 40 years, over 7,000 patients. I'm the president of the association for the treatment of neuroplastic symptoms, which is what this category is called by my colleagues and myself. And it's tremendously rewarding work. We can turn people around who've been in despair. You guys welcome this episode of street cop training podcast, my host founder and CEO

1:01street cop training. My name is Dennis Benino and a lot of you know that already. But today I have this Dr. David Clark, who's going to talk about at least anxiety and try to help some of us fix some of this shit in our lives. But with that being said, instead of me screwing up his bio, I'm going to let him tell you about it because I want you to know the qualifications this man shows up with. But with that being said, Doc, tell us about you. Yeah. Well, I'm a very traditionally trained doctor whose career kind of went off into a different direction at least for a third of my patients because that one third had no organ disease or structural damage to account for why they had pain or illness and they could have pain or illness anywhere from head to toe. So I had to kind of dig deeper and uncover the fact that their brain was responsible for their symptoms. This is a whole other category of illness and it connects to anxiety and depression and trauma and childhood adversity.

2:03Lots of issues I never thought I'd get into as an organ and structure based doctor, but it turned out that people could get better people who had suffered for years, sometimes decades, sometimes people in the hospital with this, they could get better if I started paying attention to these issues. So today, it's, I've been doing this for 40 years, over 7,000 patients. I'm the president of the association for the treatment of neuroplastic symptoms, which is what this category is called by my colleagues and myself. And it's tremendously rewarding work. We can turn people around who've been in despair. And it certainly applies to people in professions where there's a lot of stress in trauma. Let's put it that way and those issues, the connection to what's going on in the body is not always immediately obvious. And so we need to have a conversation that makes those connections clear and then we can

3:05move forward. So that's a brief summary of what I've been up to for many decades now. So maybe the best way to approach this conversation to start is to possibly give us an example of somebody that you have treated in this manner that was a successful story and how you kind of came upon this form of treatment or this path looking at things in a different way. Yeah, well, my very first patient had a, I'm a gastroenterologist by training and she had a severe condition that had gone on for two years. She's a 37 year old woman. She had been evaluated by a university hospital. They found nothing wrong that would explain her condition. She was sent over to us at UCLA for some specialized testing. That too was normal. And I was doing her exit interview and just basically telling her she was going to have to live with this. But we kept talking and at some point she trusted me enough to share that she had been severely

4:09abused as a girl. And that was 25 years in the past. I didn't think it possibly could be connected to why she was ill in the present day. But there was a psychiatrist there at UCLA that was interested in these brain to body situations. And I thought, okay, well, maybe Dr. Kaplan, who was the psychiatrist, can help this patient live with her terrible condition a little better. So I sent her off to Dr. Kaplan, forgot all about her until three months later I ran into Dr. Kaplan in an elevator. And that was the elevator ride that changed my career because between the ground floor and the fifth floor, she told me she had cured this patient just with about 10 weeks of counseling sessions. And that shocked me that you could alleviate a serious physical condition just by talking to somebody. So I thought, okay, if I want to be a complete doctor, I should learn a little bit about this. And over the next 18 months of my training, she gave me a basic framework for how to

5:10do this. I thought, okay, it's going to come in handy for a couple patients a year. And when I find one, I'll just send it to whoever the Dr. Kaplan is in Portland, Oregon, where I was in practice. But that didn't exactly work out. I was seeing five or six patients a week like this. And there were no Dr. Kaplan's in Portland, Oregon. And when I sent them off for cognitive behavioral therapy, they came back. A lot of them and said, you know, I'm still got it. So I tried to help them. And I actually gradually got better and better at it. After about five or six years and about 1,500 patients, I had reached a decent level. And I was having a lot of success and it was, you know, as a physician, that's what we want to do. We want to cure people. And it was working. So I just kept on with it, eventually wrote a book about it, produced three documentary films. I give lectures all over North America and Europe. And people who have been, you know, literally hopeless about their physical condition have

6:12seen things turn around. One of my patients was ill, unexplained abdominal pain for 79 years, and even that patient got better. So what is it? What is the correlation that you guys have discovered in the, I don't walk in with you. I shouldn't have left the door open. I'm a dog person myself and it's no problem. So funny. Usually it sits under my feet during this time, but apparently something interesting, down here in the studio. Oh, dogs are good with stress, you know, they bring it down. Yeah. That's why they have these, these dogs that do those things that they do at, you know, in the service dogs. But what has been the correlation that you all have found, you know, in the decades of studies that you've done in practice in the field that you can really point to and say there's a significant correlation. I obviously were talking about the mental health, but maybe to go one step further into, like what is it about the brain that you're able to address and change whatever's causing

7:15this other, you know, symptom or, or, you know, I guess, disease or everyone. Yeah, we're looking for the sources of stress that are affecting a person. And, you know, life being what it is, I mean, it can be coming from almost anywhere and, you know, if you're in a profession that is usually exposed to significant levels of stress, it can be coming from that. It can be coming from just something that's in your life at the moment. One of my patients, the only time he got his pain was when he was driving to work. He didn't have any pain when he was driving home from work. And on the weekends, when he was off, no problems then either. So it was related to a significant stress at his workplace. And when we uncovered that connection and showed him, you know, just how high that stress level was, he was able to go to a supervisor and say, look, we got to make some changes.

8:17This is making me physically ill. And when they did that, the pain went away. So that's, you know, a simple example. Other people, it can be a trauma that they went through. One of my patients had been ill often on for three years, belly pain and nausea and vomiting. And when I asked her to show me where the pain was, she formed her hand into this shape and used the finger, you know, it was shaped like a gun. And pointed it at the right lower corner of her abdomen to show me where the pain was. Very unusual gesture. People don't usually do that. And when I got around to asking her about trauma in her life, it turned out she had witnessed the shooting of her brother. And he had been shot, no surprise, in exactly the same location where she was now experiencing her pain. But the shooting had taken place a full decade before she became ill. It wasn't an obvious connection. But when I have a patient like that with a, you know, an obvious, really big trauma story

9:21in their life, the next thing I'm asking them is, well, did anything connected to that trauma, a triggering event happen that was right before your symptoms started? And right away, she knew because the person who shot her brother had been arrested at the scene, convicted, served eight or nine years in prison for manslaughter, and then he was released. And nobody told her that he was out there. And she unexpectedly encountered him in a store. He didn't recognize her, but she sure as heck recognized him and very shocking for her. And the physical symptoms began just a couple of days later. So there was a clear connection. So those are the things I'm looking for, the less obvious ones are when somebody's been through adversity as a child, which can be, you know, very obvious stuff like physical or sexual abuse or violence in the home or a parent who's an alcoholic or a drug abuser.

10:25But it can also be a lot more subtle. It can be well-intended pressure on the kid to perform, where no matter how well they do, there always seems to be another level that the parents want them to get to. And they can never win. It impacts their self-esteem. It turns them into focusing on external sources of reward and affirmation. And they can't, you know, give themselves that kind of approval that we all should be able to give ourselves. And they're very critical as adults, very self-critical. They're sometimes perfectionists. They sometimes have a trigger of a temper. Those kinds of things are highly stressful. And if we can show them where it came from, where they acquired these traits and that their early experiences were much tougher than they might have appreciated, that can begin their journey to healing.

11:25This is the second time today that I've had the same person across my mind, was watching something earlier regarding some of these things that we just discussed. And it goes right to this, really, to try to keep it vague, not that I think the person lists the podcast. But, you know, I think about the baseball dads. And, you know, I'm judging on your reaction. You probably completely agree with me. You know, if you're not watching the video, you would see Dr. Clark's eyebrows just face up in this profound, like you hit that right on the head. And I'm going to tell you how I found it, at least in one occasion correlating back to an adulthood, in me a little bit. And it hasn't had to do with me because I wasn't, I had a really crazy upbringing, but one thing I didn't have was a father who was a baseball dad, like a mania. He wasn't great in a lot of things, but he wasn't that dad who would only recognize their children when they won. I had a friend who had a father like this. And he's not the only one that I've seen this happen to, but I think this system through

12:31maybe life or American upbringing and the industrial complex, how everything works, let him to believe that he should have been far more successful than me based on everything that was told to him. So, you know, it's got an MBA in business. And according to how things were described to this guy, minus the fact that I remember his father being brutal with him, and based on him getting constantly crying and upset and very emotional about these little league games, I remember his father, how serious his father took it and like there was like really no leeway to not be the best and all his bullshit. And you know, and I see him later, I actually disassociated himself when I tried to be his friend I didn't see him for years, because I think he couldn't understand how he had done everything that he was supposed to, and I didn't, but I still ended up ahead of him. And this is not a comparison thing, because I don't think I'm better than him. It's not the only person I've seen that happen to, because according to how the systems written, somebody like me should have been maybe in jail.

13:34But instead, this whole theory, and I'm sure you've heard of it, like, you know, see students, you know, or bosses of A students, this is not an uncommon thing. It's not meant to make me feel better. It's just interesting how at 44 years of age, you know, being in a professional adult environment since I'm 19, I became a cop then, watching how everything that people were sold was not the truth. And he, like, this guy couldn't handle it, he couldn't figure out in his mind how this could have possibly happened when he did everything he was supposed to do. And I'm curious about the correlation back to that, like, won't even talk to me anymore. This associated itself with me, not in anything that I did, just the fact that like I, from my guess is, I'm not heartbroken over believing my guess is like, how could this happen? How could this guy be so much more successful than me when I'm the guy who did everything I was supposed to do? What's your thoughts on something like that? And I'm not trying to make this about me. I'm just trying to use another example of something that I think about, it's a vote

14:36about the second time we're thinking about it today, anyway. Yeah, so many of my patients, they come from environments where nothing they ever do is good enough and that carries on into the adult years and creates personality traits that can be stressful and can be toxic towards other people. It can create what I sometimes refer to as a disrespect button where you are hypersensitive to anything that's even slightly disrespectful towards you and can cause you to blow up or overreact and people don't like that. People are not going to choose you to be their leader if they have to be constantly watchful about you losing it over some imagined slight that you've committed towards them. So it can limit how far they go in the world if they've got some of these characteristics that they acquired early on. And by understanding where those things came from and just how toxic the environment was

15:43that you grew up in, it's possible to make changes. You know, a lot of psychologists are kind of of the opinion that if you've got personality traits, you've got them and you're going to be stuck with them. And that's not been the case for my patients, it's not been what I've observed. You know, one of the things that I do is have people imagine their own child or a child that they care about growing up in exactly the same environment that they did. You know, imagine yourself on the wall of your childhood home, you're a butterfly there or and you're watching your own kid or a child that you care about, try to cope with that same environment for a week or 10 days. And what's that going to be like for you, how emotional are you going to get watching that kid try to deal with it? And the purpose of that exercise is, you know, not to make you upset, it's to get you a more realistic sense of how much you were coping with and enable you to take some credit for, you know, how much you had to deal with, you know, not to be thinking of yourself

16:48as, you know, the second rate person who could never measure up, but to think of yourself as somebody who showed some heroic perseverance, frankly, to come through an experience like that and begin to flip the yourself image around from a negative one to a positive one. And when you do that, that disrespect button just kind of fades away and you can take some more pride in how much you had to deal with and the fact that you overcame it. And that, you know, makes a big difference for people. You know, I, these are things that I think about a lot as, through the journey of life and to make a broad topic, conversation moving into, you know, physiological versus sociological. But I also think about there has to be a correlation in the at least physiological standpoint for that shift that you're talking about to make those changes to have enough intelligence to recognize where you are and how to make those changes.

17:51And when I see the perpetual recycling of the same people and the same environments, I often think, and I think I could be wrong, and this is not me trying to, again, sound in a, in a, in any way, like I'm more intelligent than anyone, but I, I certainly see a correlation between those who are less intelligent, and let's call it like it isn't, they're significantly more intelligent people in the world and, and significantly less intelligent people in the world. It's clear as day, you know, in society where you can see where that exists, however, there are these super intelligence or intelligent people stuck in these sociological environments. And it proves true because I always give this theory of like, you know, where I graduated high school from, when you graduated high school with us, no matter how you were sociological, I'm sorry, you know, physiologically designed in your brain and how it worked in your intelligence level. We all did one of the, one of the jobs that was pitched to us our entire lives, firemen,

18:51police, plumber, electric, and all, respectable jobs. And I always tell people, you know, if you go to a town in New Jersey, well, cults neck where the houses are 15, 25 million dollars, how many of those kids from that high school do you think are going on to work for the township, the firemen, the plumbers, and the answer is done. So we know that there's certainly a sociological correlation to who you are in life. And this is why there's so much theory behind get away from this if you're smart enough to do so and get yourself into a better environment, because the number one factor on how successful you're going to be, barring the intelligence side of it is your zip code, as wild as that may sound. So we know there's a correlation back to that of like, you know, I think what you said is like, yeah, you've got to have that recognition, but you need enough intelligence to recognize that maybe there's something from change that you've made. Yeah, I mean, if you are growing up with the idea that you can achieve whatever you aspire

19:53to achieve, you know, to have that lift to your own sense of yourself that accomplishment is possible for you, that there are, you know, no limits, but those imposed by your own work ethic and your own talent. It's, you know, a huge thing to come out of your early years with and many of my patients didn't come out with that, you know, they came out with the idea that they were not good enough and that can be compounded by anything about you that's different than the majority out there. So if you're a person of color, if you're LGBTQ, if you're neurodivergent, if you're physically obese, you know, any of those things can lead you into a situation where you're made to feel like you're not good enough. And it's an extra challenge to be able to overcome that. Still another one that, you know, affects a lot of people in first responder type positions

20:59is that there's often a culture of self-reliance that you don't necessarily ask for help, that there's an idea that you should be self-reliant in solving your own problems. But there are situations in life and especially in challenging professions where what's coming at you can overwhelm even the most prepared and strong mind. You know, we don't ask people who've suffered a fractured leg to, you know, suck it up and get on with it. You know, we know that they are going to need to have some professional help to deal with the fracture. And it's the same thing with experiences professionally or personally that just simply overwhelm the mind's capacity to adapt. One of the patients I remember in this regard was in one of the Gulf Wars and he was,

21:59you know, very well regarded by the people in his squad and platoon. He was certainly one of the stronger, tougher, more capable people in that group. But at one point, he observed a trench full of opposition soldiers getting buried by stand. They had snow plow type things on the front of the tanks and the tank simply just pushed a wall of sand into the trench and buried these opposition soldiers alive. And he witnessed this and he couldn't get it out of his head. And he had to drop out of the military, still couldn't get it out of his head. He began drinking all day long, could not get it out of his head and developed physical symptoms in his body. He wasn't seeking help for this, you know, mental image that was just dominating his thoughts

23:02and his nightmares. He wasn't looking for mental health support at all, but when it affected his physical body and produced symptoms in his body, then he went to medical physicians who found nothing wrong with him. His body was fine. But when he came to see me and I was talking to him about, you know, have you been through any trauma and he's telling me this story about these soldiers he'd witnessed being buried alive, tears are streaming down his face, his hands are shaking, and then he tells me about, you know, that he's drinking all day long. You know, there are every human being has their limit. But if you've got a culture of trying to solve these issues yourself, it's usually not going to work out. I wish people understood that and I wish there was more time spent on the fact that we have a lack of guidance about how to handle it, and it's why we have far too many police

24:03suicides, even one is too much. And you know, when you look at a big picture of why it exists because it really is a public machine. It is not designed with the intention of, you know, every so often they sprinkle in some real good leadership here and there that can kind of understand and really want to take an initiative on it because they do care, but arguably 90% don't do it. And that's where we find ourselves with this and they just, to them, arguably I would think they really just don't care. And sadly, these in these fields and I've seen it, I've seen that these people would have somebody who killed themselves and almost pretend and fake like they care, but in reality they couldn't care less. They know they got to just replace this guy at some point. And you know, there's a whole nother place to dive in to why that occurs that way, but I guess the question I have next for you and I don't want to get too much to pass it and say, and psychotherapist and probably recognizing significant ADA.

25:10But how do you treat a guy like the one you just spoke about when he comes in and he's got this significant trauma that he served the other human beings being buried alive? Yeah, it's, you know, a challenge and it's not going to happen overnight, but it starts with the recognition that every person can have experiences that overwhelm their capacity to adapt. And there are, you know, post-traumatic stress specialists that work with this and that are much more expert at it than I am. My role was mainly to identify that this issue was going on because remarkably everybody who had worked with this individual had missed this up to that point. They had, there was nothing in his medical record about his having to deal with this experience, but learning techniques for regulating your nervous system, whether it's mindfulness

26:15meditation or something else, to bring the level of activation down so that, you know, when you're having memories of witnessing this, you've now got some techniques you can use to bring the arousal level down, oftentimes gradually approaching back to dealing with the memory now that you've got techniques for regulating yourself can be very effective. So there are well-defined, well-researched ways to help people with PTSD to cope with it and he did very well, you know, it took a matter of weeks or months, but once the underlying major issue was identified and addressed, then he was finally able to turn the corner. I should add, though, that for a lot of, again, people in first responder occupations,

27:15the way that this can manifest itself is in fairly subtle changes in the workplace, you know, that you may notice that somebody that you're working with is no longer doing their job in quite the same way, and it could be in any of a variety of different ways. Maybe they're a little bit more violent with a suspect or maybe they are taking a little more risk in a dangerous situation or maybe they are handling their vehicle in a way that's not quite as safe as they did before. It can be fairly small, subtle things, but it's important to be aware that a person who's struggling, oftentimes the last thing that starts to go is their job performance, that they will hold their job performance together even when major other things are not going well

28:19for them, so that if you notice even a little bit of a consistent change in somebody's workplace behavior, you should really pay a lot of attention to that, and dig into whether somebody is struggling more than they might appear to be. We'll press it and do we set, we'll call it in the police realm, for example, it's not the only profession that you'll find this in. When agencies discard employees who may be having some kind of symptoms or experiencing stress, psychological traumas, whatever it may be. And what do we do? What can we suggest, try to inject more empathy and compassion into what people may be going through? Yeah, I start from a place of human beings are, for the most part, doing the very best they can, and if somebody's workplace performance is reached a level where you're considering

29:23dismissing them, I wouldn't leave it at just the surface workplace performance, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There is very likely a lot more going on beneath the surface that deserves to have attention paid to it. You know, here you've got somebody with, usually with training and experience that's valuable, and if their workplace performance is falling off, dig into why that's happening. It might be that they've had an accumulation of trauma that has reached a critical mass, or it might be that they had significant issues as a kid that are exacerbating or causing issues in the present day to be triggering for them, or it can be all of the above. But before you lose somebody with training and experience, you owe it to them and, you

30:28know, to everybody else in the building to find out more about what they're coping with, and try to break through that culture of self-reliance, and again, treat this like a fractured leg that, you know, a leg bone can tolerate a significant amount of force without breaking, but at some point, the force level is going to be high enough to cause it to fracture. It's the same thing with the mind. Find out where the forces are coming from, and you can turn situations around. You know, I've seen it with thousands of people who had lost all hope. One of my patients had been hospitalized at a, you know, well-known university 60 times in 15 years, and they had no idea why she was having a tax of severe dizziness and vomiting. She saw a dozen specialists, they brought a psychiatrist in, who pronounced her mentally

31:29healthy, but, you know, the answer was to dig a little deeper, and it turned out that all of her attacks were connected to encounters with her abusive mother. Her mother had been verbally and emotionally abusing her very often, since she was three or four years old. She was now 50 years old, still going on, mom was in her 70s and was still abusing her. And I was able to connect her attacks of illness with encounters with her mom, and I can still remember the moment she saw the connection. She looked up at the ceiling and she said, oh my God, I cannot believe this. And once she saw the connection and she could set some boundaries around her mother so that the impact was greatly reduced, she stopped having a tax. She called me a year later to say she'd gone the whole year without a single attack.

32:32So digging underneath the tip of the iceberg, job performance is the tip of the iceberg for a lot of people. And digging beneath that iceberg, you can restore an individual's function both in the workplace and in their life in general. Hey, if you love the Street Cop podcast, you're going to love the Street Cop community. I know I said it earlier in the podcast, but you have to check this thing out. It's so good, it's so profound, it's tax deductible, it's super cheap, and it's extremely valuable. I'm trying to get you better at this profession. Let me help you check it out at streetcopcommunity.com or streetcop.com. Just look for the community link. Let's separate you from all these other quote unquote professionals who can't figure out why when you can. Well I know to look beyond just organs and structures. And I'll say when I first started back in the 1980s, I was a rookie just like anybody

33:35else and I was making a lot of mistakes. I am really glad I nobody recorded me back then to play those tapes back for me today because I'm sure they would make me beat my head against the wall, but even as a beginner, just by asking these questions of people and listening to the answers and trying to understand what was below the tip of the iceberg, I was getting good results. People were getting better after they had not improved with the rest of the healthcare profession sometimes for years or decades and that was very rewarding. So I kept going with it and any time I'd see a patient and do the tests and not find an organ disease or structural damage, I would start asking questions. What's going on in your life right now? Is there anything that bad that happened to you right before your symptoms started? What did you go through as a kid?

34:36Would you be okay if your own kid was growing up just the way you did? Are you having symptoms of depression or anxiety? Have you been through a trauma? These are not hugely challenging questions. The answers that you'd get, oftentimes I was the only the first or second person that ever heard about these things and when the issues are addressed, people get better. So yeah, the work was so rewarding, I just had to keep going with it. How has your work been received by the medical fields and transcended on to others? Yeah, it's really been received well, especially in the last five or ten years. At first, people weren't quite sure what I was doing, but they really liked the results. So I ended up getting lots and lots of referrals.

35:38I was doing 90% of the mystery cases for my entire department of 12 people. And they began, I'm a gastroenterologist as I mentioned, but people started sending me mystery cases with symptoms from head to toe. One of the people that I saw was a nine-year-old. I didn't normally see kids younger than 13, but he had seen every other specialist in town and they were desperate because nobody could figure it out. I'm reminded of this because you talked about the baseball dad. The answer to why he was having stomach pain was that he only got it on days when he was scheduled to pitch for his little league team. And days when he was scheduled to be in the outfield, he was fine, problem solved. But yeah, today we've got a research that's been published, thank goodness, from across North America, leading centers published in top journals, gold standard science, which

36:42is called, you know, randomized controlled trials where we compare two groups, one with the old kind of treatment, one with this new psychological approach. And the outcomes are just tremendous, the Boulder back pain study, Boulder, Colorado, for example, they took groups of people who'd had back pain for an average of 10 years. And the group that got this new form of psychological treatment had a 75% drop in their pain after four weeks. And the two control groups, which, you know, hardly changed at all, just stunning improvement from this. So we can point to these research studies and people are finally paying attention. They, it's got publicity in the Washington Post and CBS news and New York Post and, you know, various other places. I've been invited to teach at graduate schools for both psychology and medicine. It's, it's really been great to see and it's only going to keep expanding.

37:46Two questions that are kind of not related, but I guess we'll start with this one because it was most recent question related to the, to have to pitch and got sick on the day of the pitch. And so the question is, is when that's the case, how do you address it with the parents? Because I'm a father of four and believe me, I see these morons try to talk to some of them. And when I see them, I don't think they're inherently bad people. I just don't think they're intelligent enough, maybe emotionally intelligent enough to understand what they're doing to the kids when, you know, they don't perform or I'm not saying there are good ones because there are good ones as well. But, you know, my kids are, I should be thoughtful in everything that I do. I'm not perfect, but I, I would argue that because I'm thoughtful, I'm much better at a lot of this stuff. You know, I tell my kids like, hey, I really don't care if you win or, you know, that cliche thing, but I really mean to them, you know, you are going to get the same reaction

38:50from me, no matter what happens in that playing field, by the mere fact that you should up here and gave it your best, that's the only variable that I care about is if you're committing to this thing, you just show up and give it your all, just don't have to ask it. That's all I have for you. I'll be here on the sides. I enjoy it. My heart doesn't break when you lose. I'm just proud that you're here and I'm proud of the way you play and nobody wins all the time. It's impossible. Might even the best people in the world win all the time. Where I see these other guys, namely men and some women who literally like, it's for this shit. Like, like, it's like, it's really, it's really string and I understand from it, you know, in a pathetic place that, yes, something's very wrong with this guy and his upbringing or his woman and her childhood of why they're acting like this at 43 years old now. Yes, you're right. And it's so hard to back off and what I would hope in those situations would be and it's

39:52not going to happen. But if the parent could spend 10 minutes inside that kid's head and feel what that kid is feeling, they'd be horrified. I mean, their intentions are often for the best. They want everybody and we all want our kids to succeed. And their view is that by putting this kind of pressure on them, that they're going to help their kids succeed, not only on the field, but in life. And they don't realize that they're doing the exact opposite, that they are going to make this kid feel like nothing they ever do is good or not. And after a while, you can burn somebody out at a very young age. If you're being asked to jump over a bar as a kid and you jump over that bar and the reaction to that is, okay, we're going to move the bar higher now. After a while, what's the point? You as a kid, why are you going to keep trying if your only reward is to have the bar

40:52move higher? And that's the situation that a lot of kids are in, you know, whether it's sports or the arts or academics or all of the above, you know, I learned this from my patients. I am eternally grateful to my patients for teaching me to be a better parent because I heard all these stories about what they had grown up with. And I realized that what I needed to do in my own home with my own two boys was to create an oasis of support for them. Because when they go out of the house, they are hearing it from their teachers, from their peers, from their fellow athletes, their coaches, you know, whatever it is, their artistic instructors, you know, their shortcomings are being made clear to them. So that when they get home, if they're just getting more of the same, then they're never escaping from it. So I tried to be somebody who would notice when they did something well. Even if they screwed up, well, you know, I'd take the attitude, they already know they screwed up.

41:52They don't need me to pile on top of them. And more often than not, my reaction was to say, Hey, that reminds me of a time when I screwed up. And they could see that, you know, even though I'm their dad and I'm somebody they admire, that I'm not free of the possibility of making mistakes. My younger son is an example I like to give here, which his room was a disaster. I mean, it was, it didn't smell, thank goodness. But in every other way, it was a total mess. I mean, you'd have to work at it to make it as messy as that room was. You could barely open the door because of the stuff that was piled up behind the door in there. My wife and I didn't say anything about that. We just, you know, that was his space. And if he wanted to live like that, you know, the rest of his life, he had in pretty good shape. He had an excellent athlete. He got good grades. We liked his friends. You know, there was, you know, nothing about him that we had any problem with.

42:57So we just said, you know, the room, that's his, we're not going to worry about it. But I think a lot of parents would have been all over their kid, you know, no matter how successful he was in the rest of his life. So that, to me, was a good example of, you know, giving your kids some space and some support. As you're talking, I think about how these parents identify through the children on their own behalf and it just goes right to the college bumper sticker, the collegiate bumper sticker or the, my son's an honor roll student thing. I took a put pressure on a kid when you put a sticker like that on your, on your car. Because the question is, what happens when the kid gets a B and he's not on the honor roll. And when I see that, I don't know. Again, I don't think I'm superior. I think I'm just a little more in tune with the world. I genuinely feel really bad for it. You know, I'm like the, if you could understand what I'm trying to explain, I'm like the leader of the pack for the children of the town that I live in, in the sense that we're almost

43:57like Sandlock kids that I'm the guy who's riding the bike in the front. And so, well, and they all respect me. It's not like it's this disrespect thing, but I am fun. They're very open with me, but a lot of things and out of 13, going into 14, so the shit they're telling me, I have to sit there and almost like just, I just listen. And I don't like, I like to know this stuff, but I just listen to it because they're going to that adult life now and other things are beginning to turn their lives and they just, they feel comfortable enough. Well, all these kids tell it to tell me everything and I'm like, oh, all right, you know, be careful. You know, don't do this. Don't be stupid with that. Somebody sends you a picture like that. I know that girl sending those pictures, don't send them is to keep it to yourself. Don't share them because you'll be on fucking Megan's law list. Don't do this. You know, it's kind of, I'm not like, let me go tell her parents that I don't get it. This is not my place and they all know that, but the pain that I feel for them, because I am one of them, essentially, because that a crazy child that, well, it's identified as 12 year old. I don't like how they're paraded around or end or not intentionally bullied by these

45:01parents. If they're happy with some of the ways that life is going for them, that's great. But now a lot of these people are really imposing themselves into their children more than they need today. Yeah. You know? Yeah. No, it's, it's especially hard, I think, for people like you and me that come from very detail-oriented professions, you know, and you take that and add it to the fact that we all want our kids to succeed in life. And all of a sudden, we can be very focused on the details and be giving our kids advice all day long about little things that we see that they could be doing better. And it's very hard to hold back from that when you're, you know, spending your work day very focused on the details. How do you switch that off when you get home and just, you know, let your kids have some space to breathe? It took me a while to learn that.

46:02That as detail-oriented as I was at work, I, that was not the right way to be raising my kids. Yeah. I'm just the opposite. I'm the guy who is just the opposite of that. And so these parents are like that, and I'm not. So, you know, I really try to, I don't want to book that changed my life, I'd be enough to ask. I guess she was in it and she handed it to me because, obviously, birds of a feather flock together beginning, but as times have changed, times have changed, it was better if you've heard of this book, I believe it's adult children of an emotional, of emotionally immature parents. All right. Similar books. Yes. So, this is a great book because, and I recommend it to a lot, as a matter of fact, a very heavy book. So, when somebody really isn't trauma, I'm magnetized. People who are in trauma, a lot to me, like, moss to a flame. And I guess they can feel the energy of empathy that I have and, you know, that the lack of judgment in 98% of things that I do, kind of think about when you should have judgment.

47:08But, you know, I tell people with children, I think you should just read this book, or at least listen, very short book, it's not a very long book. And the idea is to understand how your kids are seeing, putting yourself in their shoes through their lens of their eyes and how they're perceiving you and what they really genuinely mean to happen. And it's sad that a lot of people aren't mature enough to take a step back and want to at least open up and have the idea that they could see life through that lens because of this indoctrination of how they were raised. And I just hate this idea that, well, I was raised this way, so it's okay. Hey, hey, not, it's not, I'm not trying to make these kids whimps, it's not the point. But this shit is not okay. I don't know what you guys think is okay, why you're making it okay. You know, I have some of the most well-behaved children. You know, my kids have almost never been grounded their entire life.

48:12And I don't mean that in the sense that they didn't do stupid shit, they don't do stupid shit. It's just how I react. I don't have to impose martial law here for sure, that's to rye law, what do they call you? Get my point across. Yeah. Um, I give my kids enough respect where this, this, this thought that you have to be this maniacal psychopath with your children to get them to listen is just a reflection on how really unintelligent you are with children. Yeah, I, um, one of the points that I make sometimes to my public audiences is that when your kid leaves the house, um, especially when they're teenagers, they are going to have lots of opportunities to do things that are dangerous, stupid, illegal, or all three. And what's going to make them choose not to do that?

49:16And one of the things that's going to make them choose is if they feel like, you know, if I do this, it's really going to hurt my parents. And I really care about my parents, uh, because they care about me and they are showing that caring about me, not being because, you know, not because they're, um, all over every tiny little thing that I do that doesn't quite measure up. But because they notice when I do things well, um, and they, they pay attention to when I'm making an effort. And that, that bond, uh, that they feel, uh, is going to be the biggest defense against the peer pressure that they're going to get to do dangerous, stupid, or illegal things. Yeah, I don't remember grounding my kids, um, either. And I, I'm, I know that my audiences, when I share these stories, they're sitting there wondering, okay, your kids are all grown up now. Do they have great self-esteem while they're living under a bridge, smoking a crack

50:19bite? No, they've actually turned out very well. They, um, both felt, um, very motivated, uh, because they knew my wife and I noticed when they were doing things well. We didn't push them to do things well. They just did it themselves because, uh, they liked having it get noticed. And they're both, uh, you know, very successful professionally. Their wives are great, their kids are great, um, they're both, uh, competed at the national level as athletes, um, they're, they're turned out to be tremendous human beings. How were you raised? Uh, I was raised with a lot of support, but, um, both my parents, uh, attention was drawn elsewhere. So, um, I didn't get as much attention as I would have liked, but when I did get it, it was positive. Um, my dad was, uh, uh, uh, working long hours and was frequently out of the country. So that when he was around, you know, I had to take, you know, as much advantage as I

51:24could of the limited contact that we had. And both of my younger siblings had learning disabilities and so my mom was very occupied with them. Uh, so I didn't get as much attention from her as I would have liked. So I think it led me to learn to pay a lot of attention, uh, to them, uh, that developed my own empathy skills that I still use to this day. How do you think not bringing like that adversely affected your upbringing or your progression into adolescence and adulthood? Um, and, and I asked this question because in some way, I basically grew up motherless. And though there was a mother present, it was basically motherless and I'd same thing I have an older brother in disability, um, not that this is an excuse for her behavior. Um, it's, it's very, I think my mother at this point probably has a little bit of a munch house and by proxy, um, narcissism, she's, she's really a special one, um, and, but

52:30she would be gone for significant stretches of time with my brother into, um, you know, into like he had, he had neurological issues, he's getting brain surgeries all over the country. Um, and, and rightfully so, I don't think the munch house, but she just, she thrives on the sympathy associated with that, while she may have in some sense played the game like she was not happy that she was away. She also, at the same time, loved the attention that came with people feeling bad for her. I always tell people like the best day of her life will be her funeral for the happiest of her of her life will be the day the people show up and actually cry for her. Um, so, you know, I had to go through obviously years of therapy in my 40s, namely, to discover how all this stuff retroactively affected me as an adult and decision made, I made, and

53:30how, why were some of these behaviors that I engaged and came from? So, I guess my same question for you is, what do you think some of that experience adversely, or how do you think it adversely affected you from adolescence going into adulthood? Well, you know, I didn't go through anything like that, Dennis, I mean, that's really toxic. And, you know, my parents were very busy with the issues that I just mentioned, but they were not toxic. I mean, they were both very caring people. They just had these very time-consuming elements in their life. And my response to it was to try to be a good kid, follow the rules, be strong academically, and to think about, you know, what they were thinking, to make sure that the time that I had with them was as positive as it could be. And I think that's what developed the empathy skills that I use with my patients today.

54:34But, you know, other than that, you know, I had about every privilege that a person can have. And it made it a lot easier to achieve success in life. You know, I started with a platform, you know, it's like the governor of Texas once said about George W. Bush that he was born on third base. And in many ways, that's, you know, I was very fortunate to come from that kind of starting point. But, you know, what you went through, that's incredibly toxic. I mean, it's going to cause a person to be, you know, so focused on the problems in that household that they're going to neglect themselves, they're not going to feel good about themselves, because they're going to constantly be feeling like, I'm not fixing mom. And a kid is going to feel like they should be able to fix mom. And when they don't, they're going to feel like failures.

55:35And that can lead to, you know, all kinds of emotional pain. Many of my patients have self-treated that pain, not only with drugs and alcohol, but with other forms of addictions, sometimes with eating disorders, especially amongst women. Sometimes they have so pulled their emotions around this together and buried them that they're not feeling much of anything for a while can even lead to, in some cases, cutting behavior where people cut themselves or otherwise damage themselves as a way to feel something. So with my patients who went through these things, what I tried to emphasize is that they are all forms of self-treatment, you know, the addictions, again, substance is yes, but it can be gambling, sex, work, exercise, you know, I've just even seen shopping, gambling.

56:37All of those things are, you know, people feel ashamed of engaging in those behaviors, but I try to urge them not to, just to think of them as forms of self-treatment for an overwhelmingly toxic situation. And that if we can find a different way of treating it, the need for the addictions is going to go away. When I make decisions, namely in relationships with the obstacles, I always have to run, now I'm much, much better at discerning, but I have to run the filter of that first. And I take a step back and just say, hmm, let me make sure, you know, now I'm far advanced, but let me, let me make sure this is not a result of this basically growing up motherless or having, maybe even worse, having a mother, but not being seen ever. You know, so, yeah, there's, there's, and again, I don't want to make this about me. I have. Well, let me just talk in general terms about my patients and their relationships because

57:40they, very commonly when they're coming from a difficult environment like that where they are trying to solve the problems in the household, that's what feels like a normal relationship. So at least in their early years with their first or second or third or sometimes fourth, fifth, sixth relationships, they tend to be with people who have problems or needs or issues, you know, whatever it is that needs solving or needs support, extra support. So the tendency is for those relationships to be unbalanced where you're giving a lot more to the other person trying to solve them, their issues, then you're getting back in return. One of the ways that you can tell that a person has reached a major turning point in their recovery from all of this is when they finally have the self esteem and the self love that they

58:43can be with a person who gives back to them as much as you are giving to the other person. So the relationship is balanced. You know, some days you're giving most of the support to the other person, but on other days, they're giving it to you. And when that happens, it's evidence of a major turning point. But let me just add that in the short run, it can create two problems. One is that people have difficulty trusting it, you know, if they've never been in a relationship like that before, there can be a lot of anxiety about whether it's going to last, whether the person that they're with is going to wake up one day and say, you know what, Dennis is not really as good a person as I thought he was, I'm out of here. And there can be a certain amount of fear about that. The second thing is that once you begin to decide that this wonderful person you are with

59:44is actually right in all the things that they are saying about you. Then it highlights just how bad things were in the past. And it can be difficult to avoid a certain amount of resentment about what you had to deal with. And that resentment can manifest physically in the body. Yeah, it's a big unlock. I mean, I can't thank you enough for that gift that you gave me because, you know, it's constant puzzle that you're trying to figure out from a relatively calm place. I don't suffer with, I mean, I felt what anxiety and depression feels like an on-cent of it from the significant life events, but, you know, I don't, I don't, fortunately enough, I'm overall very calm, you know, I always tell people, like, you've hooked me up to like a heart and blood pressure machine all week, you'd be shocked at what you results with it because I don't, I don't feel it. I've been able to through life, all of life be able to function very well in the chaos

1:00:50of where I don't allow, you know, the ruminating thoughts to disrupt and create anxiety. So to practice to get there, I wasn't always like that. It just happened, you know, I had a few couple of years that were very, very difficult, it was very interesting and not only do I see that in myself and what you've described of who I would go for or how I'd end up with these people, just all the same in some sense, but other people I know who are really wonderful human beings who had very difficult childhoods, maybe fatherless childhoods or motherless childhoods, doing the same thing. And I, you know, I have a, like, I try to give the advice of, you know, we can't be out here trying to rescue every puppy on the street, you know, unfortunately, because we see ourselves in that puppy, and we know we were judged in the same way or discarded in the same way. You don't want to feel that way, but unfortunately, I had mentioned earlier, there's two places in life where I would still be able to be needed to actually use judgment in a very harsh

1:01:51way. And that's all one in business, you need to really take into account every red flag that you see when you're into business with somebody, because those red flags are, even the small ones are significant. And you should really account for it, and also personal relationships, and I mean that engaging and dating, maybe friendship as well, but certainly dating, because when you begin to, I had a friend of mine who talked on the phone, yes, he briefly said, then I found this out and I said, yeah, he goes a year after I go, yeah, but, you know, in like three weeks, you saw the red flags, right? And she's like, well, yeah, and I'm like, yeah, it sounds like, you know, you saw the red flags in three weeks. I get it. I'm sorry that it's happened to you, but, you know, like you've kind of brought it on yourself. You ignored these red flags that were originally saying people don't deserve, maybe an opportunity to try to see where the red flags are. When these things start to pop up, you know, say to yourself, this is a really bad idea. But, you know, I think that, yes, I became the parent of the household at a very young

1:02:57age. So I had parents, but I was the parent. I was the, I was the guy who was the, the ringleader of this circus, where I was trying to keep the elephants over here and the tigers need to be over there and, and the clowns come in when the clowns come in, but sometimes the clowns get out of control and the clowns need to be, I mean, I was literally like a psychotherapist for my parents growing up, trying to get them to understand how to behave as, as adults. Yeah. And what I try to help my patients do is to look at that experience and be justifiably extremely proud of it, that you were able to do that. Because if you can internalize, again, very justifiable legitimate pride in like being parachuted into the Amazon jungle as a toddler and finding your way out. And the more you can internalize pride in the heroic perseverance that was needed to

1:04:01accomplish that, the more the people that you form relationships with will also recognize that quality. If you have an internal belief that you basically suck, then those are the people that you're going to meet. But if you say, you know what? I did a really, really difficult thing, you know, you got, you know, you, you got training and handling adversity way before most of your colleagues on the forest did. If you internalize that sense of pride in that, those are the people that you're going to meet and form relationships with, the people who recognize that. And you also won't be accepting of people that don't treat you with the same level of

1:05:02full respect. One of my patients was somebody who's known to the public and she was a single child of two parents who fought with each other verbally and emotionally all day long. And so she was the peacemaker. Even when her parents got divorced, unfortunately, they kept living in the same house. They slept in separate bedrooms, but from her perspective, nothing changed until she finally aged 18. She went off to college and, you know, her self esteem because she failed over and over again to stop her parents and to make peace in the house. And she was also somebody who had learned from a very early age that it was her job to solve the problems of the people she was close to. So one relationship after another was with people who had major problems. And it was, you know, when I met her and she was, she also had five or six different

1:06:03physical symptoms from head to toe. And I asked her to imagine her beloved niece growing up in the same house that she did while she's a butterfly on the wall. I mentioned this thought experiment, I think earlier. She's watching her beloved five or six year old niece trying to cope with her parents. And she can't do anything about it. She's frozen to the wall, just watching the kid try to deal. And for a week or 10 days, and I said, imagine what that would be like for you. And she was a very verbal person. But with that idea, she just stopped and stared at me for like a couple of minutes, just processing that. And at the end, she said, at the end of a week of that, I would shoot myself. And that was the first time that she had truly understood just how bad it was. Before then, she'd said, no, you know, my parents, they were, they were a problem, but it wasn't that bad. I just dealt with it. But when I asked her to imagine the niece, completely different reaction.

1:07:06And that was the start of building herself respect that she had done a tremendously difficult thing and deserve to take pride in it. She dumped her boyfriend, who was another one of these rotten people the next day, went for a year and a half with no relationships, which for her was, you know, 10 times longer than she usually went. She happened to be very good looking and had no trouble meeting men. And then at the end of this year and a half, she meets a guy at a party, has a nice conversation. Two weeks later, he asks her out, they go to a restaurant at six o'clock. And the next thing she knows, the waiter comes over and he says, I'm very sorry. But I'm going to have to ask you to leave. And she goes, why? We just got here. And he said, no, it's 11 p.m. and we're closing out. Because the five hours had just gone by like nothing.

1:08:09And they have been happily married now for over a decade. And their Facebook posts, they're like a couple of eighth graders there. So infatuated with each other. It's a wonderful screen. I got to tell you what a gift you gave me today. Your work is profound. Holy shit. I got a call like the Arabians say you got to step again. Thank you, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to share this with your audience. I've been a terrible self promoter. Anybody who's interested, symptomatic.me is the website of my nonprofit. I don't do this for money. I donate everything I make from this work to the nonprofit. And anybody who's got physical symptoms from migraines to irritable bowel to fibromyalgia around this, they can get help there. What else would you like to promote as well? We're on this final phase of our time together. You know, my first book is called They Can't Find Anything Wrong.

1:09:10It's got a lot of these same ideas in there. And it's for anybody who's got pain or illness, not explained by organ disease or structural damage of which there are on the order of 60 million people in the United States that suffer from this. You feel like it's my last question to you is obviously the work is very important, but do you feel connected to God through the work like this was your purpose of your life? Because it's really profound. It's very impressive. You know, I feel connected to humanity through this work. My patients are my heroes and they have also been my teachers. They're my heroes because of how much they've overcome. And they're my teachers because everything I've learned about this form of illness and a lot of what I've learned about humanity in general is from them being willing to share incredible personal stories with me. I'm now able to give that back by sharing what I've learned with as many people as I can.

1:10:15This was probably one of the most wonderful experiences I've had in quite a while, and so I thank you for that. And I would love to have you back if you ever want to come back, I'm sure my audience is going to find a lot of value in this conversation. Hopefully I didn't talk to you. No, it was great. I love the back and forth. I don't get to talk to people in your profession as often as I would like. Well, Doc, thank you so much for being here. And if you'd like to come back on our doors are always open. The wonderful experience and gave me a lot. I'm going to go sit and process for about an hour now. Thank you, Dennis. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Street Cop Podcast. Definitely check out our website at streetcop.com for all your street cop needs, merch, classes, and the community. You don't want to miss out. We make these great things for you. You want to have them. You want to use them and make your life easier as a police officer.