Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman,

and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, my guest is Dr. Paul Conte.

Dr. Conte is a psychiatrist who did his training

at Stanford School of Medicine,

and then went on to be chief resident

at Harvard Medical School.

He now runs the Pacific Premier Group,

which is a collection of psychiatrists and therapists

focusing on solving complex human problems,

including trauma, addiction, personality,

and psychiatric disorders.

Today, we discuss trauma in detail

and the therapeutic process in detail.

For instance, we discuss what is trauma?

How do you know if you have trauma?

Dr. Conte shares with us, for instance,

that not every experience that we think is traumatic

is necessarily traumatic,

and yet many people might have trauma

without even realizing it.

We also talk about the therapeutic process generally,

for instance, how to pick a therapist,

how to best approach and go through therapy,

and how to evaluate whether or not therapy

and your relationship to the therapist is working or not.

We also talk about self-therapies

because we acknowledge that not everyone has access to

or can afford therapy.

And we talk about drug therapies,

for instance, antidepressants, antipsychotics.

We talk about alcohol, cannabis, ketamine,

and the psychedelics, including psilocybin, LSD,

and we talk about the clinical use of MDMA

and what the future of that looks like.

The reason for bringing Dr. Conte onto this podcast

is because I see him as the person who has the greatest

and most holistic view of therapy, trauma,

drug therapies, talk therapies,

and how self-therapy and work with others can be integrated

for both healing and growing from difficult circumstances.

Dr. Conte is also the author of an exceptional book

entitled, Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic,

How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It.

That book describes trauma and its many features

and many tools, some of which we discuss

on the podcast today.

So whether or not you have trauma or not,

by the end of today's episode,

you will have a much deeper understanding

about what trauma is.

In fact, I'm confident that you will gain insight

into whether or not you have trauma or not,

whether or not people close to you have trauma or not,

and the various paths to recovering

and indeed growing from trauma that we can all take.

As you will soon learn, Dr. Conte

is an exceptional communicator and has a unique window

into the trauma and therapeutic process

that I know that all of us can benefit from.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort

to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

and science-related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme,

I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Paul Conte.

Paul, thank you so much for being here today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

I've been looking forward to this

and I've received a ton of questions about trauma,

about therapy, about how to assess where one is

in their own arc of problems

and addressing familial issues

and relationship issues and so forth.

We could just start off very basic

and just get everyone oriented.

Sure.

How should we define trauma?

We all have hard experiences.

Some of them we might ruminate on more than others,

but what is trauma?

To make the definition relevant,

I think we have to look at trauma

as not anything negative that happens to us, right,

but something that overwhelms our coping skills

and then leaves us different as we move forward.

So it changes the way that our brains function, right,

and then that change is evident in us

as we move forward through life.

So how do we know if we have trauma or not?

I've heard before everyone has trauma.

For instance, I've heard that if we are a child

or when we are a child and we request love from a parent

or attention from a parent,

if they dismiss us, that that's a microtrauma.

Is that overstating or unfair to the real issue of trauma?

Do we all have trauma?

What are microtraumas?

What are macrotraumas?

Right.

I think traumas that we might categorize

as disappointments, right,

or things that are negative but not deeply impactful,

I think is not a helpful definition, right?

I think the helpful definition is something

that rises to the magnitude of really changing us

and something that we can see both in how we behave,

we can see it in mood, anxiety, behavior,

sleep, physical health, so we can identify it

and we can also see it in brain changes.

So the fact that we become, say, more hypervigilant, right,

more vigilant and then we can see

that different parts of the brain are more active.

So that definition, that definition captures how trauma,

if it rises to a certain level,

like what we would say trauma

that makes a post-trauma syndrome, right,

leaves us different, I think is the helpful definition

of trauma because it's a clinical definition, right?

It's changes in us as people and we can map those changes

to identifiable shifts in our brain function.

So how do we know if we've been changed by something?

I mean, I can think back to childhood events

where some kid on the playground or in the classroom

said something I didn't like, something negative about me.

I think most people can do that.

We have a great memory for the kid that said something awful

or the parent or teacher that said something awful

that really felt like it hurt us

or at least it stuck with us.

So clearly one's brain, my brain in this example,

has been changed by that event such that I remember it.

But how do we know if something

has actually changed the way that we are

because of course we don't know how we would be otherwise?

Right, that's difficult, right?

It's doable, but it's difficult because the response.

So if the trauma rises to the level of changing our brains,

and I don't just mean like we have a new memory, right?

So we can have memories of something that was negative.

And in that sense, it changes the brain

because now there's something we can call to mind,

but it doesn't change the functioning of the brain.

If trauma rises to the level of changing the functioning

of our brains, then there's almost always a reflex

of guilt and shame around the trauma that can lead us

and often leads us to bury it, to avoid it,

to feel that now there's something negative inside of me

and it feels shameful or it feels

like no one else would accept it, right?

So what happens is people tend to avoid looking

at the change in them, which is exactly the opposite

of what needs to be done, right?

The idea of in a viral pandemic, right?

We wanna stay away from one another and isolate, right?

But with the trauma epidemic,

we need to communicate with other people.

We need to communicate and put words

to what's gone on inside of us.

And very often a person knows, I mean,

I've done so much clinical work over about 20 years

that has focused on trauma.

And a lot of the times the person knows, right?

But they're not admitting it to themselves

because they're afraid of it, right?

They don't know what to do.

But if they start talking,

then they'll talk about the event or the situation.

It could be something acute or it could be something chronic

that really has been harmful to them, right?

And then they feel different afterwards.

Like, oh, after that, I started thinking differently,

feeling differently, but that doesn't always happen.

Sometimes it's a process of exploration through dialogue,

right, whether it's written or whether it's spoken

of the person sort of exploring the changes

inside of themselves,

maybe changes to their self-talk inside,

changes to their thoughts about the world

and whether they can navigate safely and readily in it.

And it anchors, as I talk about this,

the example I'll use at times

is the example of my own life,

where when I was much younger, in my early 20s,

my younger brother took his life by suicide.

And the response of guilt and shame

and hiding all of it inside of me was,

it's just very dramatic, but I wasn't acknowledging it,

right, because I didn't know what to do about it.

And I felt guilty and I felt responsible

and I felt ashamed.

So there was an avoidance inside of me.

And then I wasn't saying to myself,

hey, before this, you thought that you could be effective

and you could make your way in the world.

And if you were a good person and you worked hard,

you could make a difference, right?

And then afterwards I thought, I can't get anywhere.

The world's against me.

And I felt like, oh, my options are all gone.

And I was like 24 years old, right?

So I didn't see that the change was in me,

but I was taking care of myself poorly.

Like there was enough going on that was unhealthy

that I couldn't avoid the realization that like,

hey, I'm different now.

And in these ways that are automatic,

my reflex to, can I make my way in the world?

Can I have a good life?

Can I be happy?

My reflexes to that were all different.

And they were coming through the lens of heightened anxiety,

heightened vigilance, a sense of guilt, a sense of shame,

and a sense of non-belonging in the world.

And was ultimately good and helpful people around me

and my own realization.

And hey, things are not going well, right?

That led me to then get some help

and to be able to talk about it and realize like,

oh my gosh, I need to face these things

that are going on inside of me.

From a psychoanalytic, psychological,

and maybe even a neuroscience perspective, two questions.

Why do you think that when we experience trauma,

these things that we call guilt and shame surface,

you know, everything you're telling me is that

in the end, that's not adaptive.

Why would we be built that way?

So that's the first question.

And then the second question is,

you know, how should we conceptualize,

you know, guilt and shame?

You know, I think that we hear guilt, we hear shame.

You know, how should we think about it?

I mean, those emotions must exist in us for some reason.

But in this case, it seems like they don't serve us well.

So maybe in that order or in reverse order,

you know, what is guilt really?

What is shame really?

And why is it that we seem to be reflexively wired

to feel guilty and feel ashamed when that's the exact

opposite of what we need to do in the case of trauma?

Right, right.

No, I think these are great questions.

And I mean, I don't think anyone knows the answers for sure.

But my read of all of that is that there's something

adaptive that has happened in us through evolution

that now becomes maladaptive in the way we live

in the modern world, right?

So if you think of through most of human development,

you know, people weren't living that long, right?

And the idea was to survive and reproduce.

So traumatic things that happened to us,

it would make sense for them to stay with us, right?

So, you know, if you ate a new food and got really,

really sick, it's like, you better remember that, right?

You know, if you see someone from the group of people,

you know, a couple miles away, right?

And one of those people attacks you, right?

It's like, you better remember that.

So the traumatic things that are sort of emblazoned

in our brain are built to last, right?

Things that are positive will generate some emotion

inside of us, but things that are profoundly negative

are much more likely to stay with us.

And I think that that was adaptive, right?

When all of that was about survival, right?

And I think the same thing is true with, say, shame, right?

So I think here it makes sense to talk a little bit,

and actually I'm interested in your thoughts about this,

right, that the limbic system, right,

so the system often is called the emotion system, right,

in our brains has actually, of course, varying function,

right, and one aspect is affect, right?

So affect is aroused in us, which I think the meaning

then is it's created in us without our choice, right?

So if we're walking down the road and someone jumps

in front of us or pushes us, right,

then there's a response of fear, anger, right?

Heart starts beating faster, more blood to the muscles,

we're getting ready to fight, right, or run, right?

And then we become aware of it, right?

So the aroused affect in us is also about survival,

and it has a very deep impact upon us,

and shame is an aroused affect.

So it can be raised in us without our choice,

and it's very powerful, which if you think about that,

is an extremely strong deterrent, right?

So if you had, you know, imagine a tribe or a group

of people, right, that are sheltered together,

and, you know, someone eats half the food at night

or something, right?

And like, there's a very negative response, right,

and that person feels shame because shame is so powerful

to control behavior, right?

So the way that trauma can change our brains

and stay with us in a way that says, be more vigilant,

look at the world in a different way,

act more defensively, right, and how that links

to shame and to guilt, and then guilt becomes

what gets called feeling, technically,

where we relate the aroused affect to ourselves, right?

So shame, the aroused affect, and guilt, the next step,

right, when the shame gets related to self,

are such profound behavioral interventions

and deterrents, right, that you can see, I think,

how evolutionarily kind of all makes sense.

If we're fighting for survival, you know,

and we're an elder statesman, if we make it to 20, right,

this makes sense, but it doesn't make sense

in a world where we live much longer, right,

we navigate in all sorts of different ways,

and there's so much coming at us that can be traumatizing.

I mean, if you think about the news, right,

I mean, how many times have I written a prescription

for someone that says, no more news, right?

Or like-

You've actually written those prescriptions?

Oh, yeah, yes, so glance at the news,

like look at the news for news.

Anything going on, I need to know, right,

but what are people doing is they're looking at it

and they're clicking and they're clicking,

and there's a sense of being like enthralled

in a very frightening way with the horrors

that are in front of us, and it shows how, yes,

trauma can come through acute things that happen to us.

Trauma can come through chronic things,

chronic denigration, whether it's based upon

socioeconomic status, immigration status,

race, religion, sexuality, gender identity,

these chronic traumas, right, of being denigrated

by the society around us or treated as less than

can change the brain, but vicarious experiences

can too, right, and we know this, it's not theoretical.

We know that the changes in the brain can come

from vicarious experiences too, which is why

people who are glued to the news and then feeling like,

oh my goodness, like what is happening?

The mothers in the Ukraine who've lost babies in the war,

like there are things that are so terrifying

that if we spend so much time with that,

it has a similar effect.

So our brains are built to change from trauma,

but not in the way we experience trauma

and not in the way that we live life in terms of

the nature of living life and the duration of life

in the modern world where these traumas that happen to us

are often so bad for us because they change

how our brain is functioning and then our entire orientation

to the world is different and that could be for

years and years and decades and decades.

It brings so much misery and suffering

and at times it brings death.

If you think about 100,000 overdose deaths

in this country in a year, 100,000.

Where is so much of that arising from?

As a person who's treated addiction very intensively

over many years, I think that, well, I feel sure

that the majority of addiction that I see and treat

arises ultimately, the roots of it are in trauma

and are in trying to soothe something that's stuck inside

that the person isn't letting outside

because of the guilt and shame but it's running around

in their head and it's tormented by it

and now there's a pull for these drugs

or sometimes medicines to soothe.

So the opiates that were given after a minor surgery

are like, okay, yeah, they help the pain

from the minor surgery but what they're really helping

is the pain inside, right?

But that very quickly turns into addiction, danger, risk

and we see that over and over again

and not in a theoretical way.

Like I see that in people who have been in my practice

with addiction arising from trauma

who have subsequently died.

So it's sort of writ large in our existence

in the modern world.

Incredible to me that this is the way it works.

What I mean by that is this idea

that I've heard about before,

I think it was a Freudian concept

of a repetition compulsion.

That this is what boggles my mind

as I'm hearing this.

Something happens to us or we observe something traumatic

and instead of acknowledging that

and trying to distance from it,

there seems to be a reflex of shame and guilt in many cases

and stuffing it away and then a repetition of behaviors

to continue to try and to stuff it away.

Like you're trying to pack, I don't know,

recently I was packing a home

and trying to get a sleeping bag back into the bag.

It seems like it's always trying to mushroom out the top.

This kind of thing, it takes a lot of ongoing effort.

And at the same time that if this thing really exists,

this repetition compulsion,

people will return over and over again

to the kinds of scenarios

or at least the kinds of emotional states

that look just like the trauma or resemble it in some way.

So the question I have for you is,

is the repetition compulsion a real thing?

And why would we be wired that way?

My understanding of this concept

of the repetition compulsion

is that we all want to solve our traumas

and it allows us to put ourselves into micro

or again, macro versions of that over and over again.

We get to run the experiment again and again

in an attempt to solve it.

In the case of taking a drug that it's clear,

certain drugs like opioids,

it's clear how that would not allow us to deal with it.

It's just masking the emotional state.

But why is it, for instance, that somebody

who experiences sexual trauma

then places themselves into circumstances

of more sexual trauma?

Why is it that somebody who is in an abusive relationship

goes on to have a second and third

or fourth verbally or physically abusive relationship?

Yeah, I mean, on the face of it,

you just go, that makes no sense.

And yet we see this over and over and over again.

Yes, the first thing I would say

about the validity of the repetition compulsion concept

is a strong yes.

Like yes, we see that over and over.

It's not necessarily in everyone,

but boy, it is in a lot of people who have suffered trauma.

And I think there's a very good reason.

On the surface of it, it's like, it makes no sense.

But then if we think, well,

how does our brains actually function, right?

We're sort of trained, at least in Western society,

I think, to think of ourselves as logical creatures, right?

That like, oh, we're logical

and ultimately everything in us can just boil down to logic.

And if we think about it enough,

we're gonna understand how to make the right decisions,

which is completely not true, right?

That the limbic system, right?

The emotion system, so to speak, inside of us

always trumps logic, right?

If you think about, does it ever make sense

to run into a burning building?

I mean, logic says no, right?

But if someone you love is in the burning building,

people run right in, right?

Because the limbic system says yes.

So when logic and emotion come head to head,

emotion wins all the time.

If emotion is powerful enough, it will always win.

And so the limbic system is so important

and the limbic system does not care

about the clock or the calendar, right?

And that's the answer.

And I'll sort of say why to the repetition compulsion.

So the limbic system doesn't know like,

oh, it's now, it's today, it's May, it's 2022.

It just doesn't care at all, right?

So how I would relate that to the repetition compulsion

is when people are repeating, what they're trying to do

is to make things right, right?

With the idea that if we can repeat the situation

and make it right, it will fix everything, right?

Which makes perfect sense if we think,

well, where is that concept coming from, right?

It's coming from the emotional part of the brain

that wants relief from suffering of the trauma

and does not understand the clock or the calendar.

So if I can solve something now,

I will also solve something in the past, right?

Which is why I can't tell you how many times

I've sat with someone and say,

we're starting to do therapy, right?

And the person will say, oh, gosh, like, I know,

look, you just can't help me, right?

I mean, my last seven relationships have been abusive,

right, and I'll say back something sometimes like,

well, look, if you tell me

that you've had seven relationships

that have been abusive in different ways,

I'll agree with you.

Like, I only say that

because that's never what someone says, right?

But I think what you're gonna tell me is

you've kind of had the same relationship seven times.

It's not seven things, it's one, right?

And that's always, I don't think one time yet

that has failed to be the case.

And that's how, so if you think about it,

that's how we start to elucidate what's going on.

So the light bulb that goes off,

like I have not had seven different abusive relationships.

I have had one that I have repeated seven times.

And now we start getting to what's really going on

and what needs to happen.

That person needs to face what happened

in that original abusive relationship.

And it always comes down to the same sort of concepts

of the person feeling terrified

while the abuse was going on,

feeling guilty, feeling ashamed,

feeling like, oh, they brought it on themselves,

they deserve it, they don't deserve anything better, right?

Because the brain is trying to make sense of it, right?

Or I thought I could make that okay, but I couldn't, right?

And then there's more guilt and more shame.

And if that's stuck inside of someone,

like that's bundled up inside of someone,

like a medical abscess inside a person,

a walled off infection inside the body,

this is the same concept in the brain,

then of course the limbic system is gonna wanna fix that

and it fixes it by trying to let's recreate that situation

and make it right this time.

And that's, I mean, it's I think one of the best examples

of how the right approach of how like, let's look at that,

let's talk about that, right?

What's really going on there?

Wait, who should feel guilty and ashamed?

Is it the person who was abused

or the person who was abusing, right?

And we can get at what's going on inside the person

and that's what changes that.

And then the eighth relationship can be entirely different

than the first seven, right?

And I see that all the time.

I mean, this isn't esoteric or soft.

Like I see that play out clinically over and over again

and why do things get better?

Because we go to the trauma and we unlock it.

It's not hidden inside where it can control things, right?

We bring it to the surface

and then we can take away its power.

I keep hearing in this narrative

that so much of our reflexive response to trauma,

both emotional and the repetition compulsion

in terms of behaviors is about some very deep attempt

to change the past.

Yes.

And in fact, in an offline conversation,

I recall you saying something about this,

that the number of behaviors and thoughts

and avoidance of behaviors and avoidance of thoughts

that human beings put in to try and change the past

is remarkable and eerie and maladaptive, it sounds like.

And that really stuck with me

because I think we all want to feel like we're in control

of our future and how we feel in the moment.

And to some extent, it works for a brief while.

There's this thing that happened

and it just evokes some internal arousal.

And then you have to know what to do with that arousal.

And I think for many people, including myself,

there's this fundamental question, okay,

the thought about the thing, the event,

or events, plural, evokes this arousal, this internal state,

makes some people feel sleepy and exhausted.

Other people feel really anxious.

Other people feel angry.

I mean, the arousal has all these different dimensions

as you know.

And then there's this question about what to do with it.

And I'd love to hear maybe even just a top contour

prescriptive of what does one do?

I'll even just put myself in it.

What do I do?

So I'm feeling upset.

Should I feel like my options are healthy catharsis?

I could tell the story, feel it.

I could pack it down.

We hear that it's bad to pack it down,

but of course one has to be functional in life

and deal with things.

And we have responsibilities at work

and relational responsibilities, et cetera.

We need to sleep at night.

So catharsis, healthy catharsis, packing it down

at the end of the day,

packing it down at the other extreme, telling the story.

And yet I think a lot of people are afraid to tell the story

because in that telling,

there's perhaps a re-emergence of the arousal.

The arousal can become greater.

I mean, is that what people mean when they say things

are going to get worse before they get better?

I mean, so I guess the simple version

of this long-winded question is it's clear

we need to confront these things.

We can't change the past by a reflexive response

isn't going to do that efficiently.

And so how do we deal with arousal?

How does one take what they feel inside

about something shameful?

What do you do with it in a moment?

And does that have to be done in the presence

of a skilled trained therapist?

Or as I'm driving to work in the morning

and something comes up,

I can't deal with this right now, comes to mind.

What do I do?

Do I deal with it right then?

I know this is a big multidimensional question,

but I think it's the one that a lot of people grapple with.

We want to deal with things.

How do we deal with that internal arousal?

Yeah, yeah.

We so often try and change the trauma of the past

in order to control the future.

And what that really adds up to is the trauma of the past

dominates our present, right?

And it doesn't have to be that way.

And remember, we're talking about traumas

that rise to the level of changing the brain.

So as you're saying, that involves re-experience.

It involves hyper-vigilance, increased arousal,

changes in mood states, changes in anxiety,

changes in sleep, changes in behavior.

So these are all changes that, in a sense,

push towards dominating our present, right?

And then we're not really living in the present, right,

as we're trying to control the future.

We're not going to do a great job of controlling our future

if we're not really living in the present, right?

And so the way to come at that,

again, in the moment, if we're saying,

okay, at the moment, if I need to fall asleep, right,

I might say, okay, let me try and put that out of my mind.

Let me try and thought redirect.

So there are short-term strategies

that can let us be functional in the context of these changes.

But the answer is to go look directly at that thing, right?

Look at that trauma, explore that trauma.

And sure, that can be done with a professional.

And sometimes that's what makes sense.

But not always, right?

Sometimes it can be done by talking to another person,

right, writing it down, right?

Look at what's going on inside of me

that my mind is so stuck to this.

Let's explore that.

Because it's almost as if we're so afraid so often

of looking at the trauma that has changed us

that we'll look anywhere but at that, right?

So it's like it's hidden in a closet

and we'll shine the light everywhere else,

but we're not going to open that door.

And that's where people will say the same

as I've heard over and over.

And I myself have thought this at times,

like, oh, if I talk about that,

I'm going to start crying and never stop, right?

Or I'm going to just fall apart, right?

Which is never what happens.

No one ever starts crying and never stops, right?

What ends up happening is when the person puts words to it,

right, it could be in writing,

it could be talking to a trusted other or with a therapist,

right, things start to change.

I mean, just the fact that you can talk about it,

you can put words to it and other people don't recoil, right?

I mean, how many times has someone said something

for the first time, right?

And when they're telling me about the trauma,

there's such an anxious like,

looking like as if I'm going to recoil from it, right?

Meaning I'm going to recoil from them, right?

And then there's a sense of surprise.

If the person says, well, you know,

I was abused by this coach when I was a kid, right?

And there's not, okay, there's not a response of recoiling.

You can see the change and people will say a lot like,

wow, like, I can't believe like,

you can like hear me say that and be okay with it, right?

I mean, so you think about what's going on inside of them,

like how, what a sense of shame, a sense of, you know,

this is something awful about me for people to recoil from.

And it's just not true, but here's where trauma is,

it's insidious, right?

And it's pervasive, right?

Because if that convinces us to continually hide it away,

then how do we explore it?

Like that, you know, that example of the person who says,

okay, I was abused by a coach when I was a child.

I mean, I'm thinking of a couple of very real cases, right?

People that I've taken care of.

And once they start talking about it,

then they start talking about how, you know,

they were just innocent kids, right?

And like, they didn't know.

And like, they really wanted to be on the team

where this coach was treating them as special.

And now they can look at themselves from the outside, right?

They can look at themselves like they would look

at someone else, right?

You think it's so easy for us to see what's real and true

if it's someone else, right?

If you ask someone, you know,

what do you think of someone who's 10, 11 years old,

who's abused and manipulated and abused by an adult?

We say, oh my goodness,

I feel compassion for that person, right?

But if it's us, right?

Then, oh no, it's guilt and shame

and we have to hide it away.

And when the person starts looking at it,

they can sort of see it from the outside

and it starts to take the energy out of it, right?

Then, well, who should feel guilty about that?

Who's done something wrong?

And like, so now the conceptions come together,

which is often a reflexive, that was my fault.

Oh, I did it.

I went back to it.

I still stayed on the team.

I went back next season, right?

I let it happen again, right?

All the guilt and shame inside the person gets juxtaposed

to like, what really happened there?

And then they say, right, I was a terrified child, right?

I didn't understand at all.

And they can come to a place of compassion.

And now we are working against the guilt and shame.

And if the person cries about it, that's great, right?

I mean, crying is one of the best

coping mechanisms we have.

It doesn't hurt us and it lets us grieve things.

We can't grieve if there's guilt and shame inside of us.

It just blocks grief, right?

We have to, it has to be a clean slate in a sense,

in order to feel sadness.

And then you see that it shifts from anxiety,

anger and frustration, usually directed towards the self,

guilt and shame, towards being able to process it

and being able to bring to bear some compassion

and being able to direct the negative emotion,

so to speak, where they're warranted.

And my goodness, the changes that happen.

I mean, it's not like people are miraculously cured, right?

But it's remarkable how just getting it out there

and having like one hour of talking like that,

like what we're talking about now can leave a person

feeling immensely better.

It seems to me in hearing this that there's this

weird wiring that we have.

Because what I'm hearing is when traumas happen to us

or we observe them, what we need to do most

is to confront those and the emotions around that directly.

But instead our system defaults to guilt, shame,

and trying to hide it.

And this repetition compulsion of placing us back

into things similar to those traumas,

or even maybe even worse traumas in an attempt to resolve it.

It's like the most maladaptive wiring diagram

I could possibly think of.

Emotional and presumably physiological wiring diagram.

And this notion of trying to change the past

by doing things now when the exact opposite

is what's going to be beneficial,

also seems like the whole system seems completely backwards.

And I'm chuckling as I said, it's not because I'm amused,

it's because I'm just baffled once again

at how our wiring can often not serve us well.

But it raises what I think is an important

and interesting question, which is earlier you were talking

about how people will seek out media

that's really disturbing.

They'll traumatize and re-traumatize themselves

on a daily basis.

So that could be viewed as the repetition compulsion

where the person will have the same relationship

with seven different, same abusive relationship

with seven different partners in sequence.

Seems terrible.

And yet, as I say this, it also is becoming clear to me

how this almost seems like a poor but desperate attempt

to resolve it in some way.

And so the fork in the road, if I understand correctly,

is to really get to the seed incident,

really get to the thing that started it all,

as opposed to repeating it all.

Yes.

Does that have to be done in the presence of a therapist?

Is there benefit to taking a walk

and thinking about these things, breaking down

and crying if that's what's necessary,

or feeling angry if that's what comes up?

The reason I ask it this way is because I worry,

I'll just speak to my own experience,

I worry that in reactivating or touching into the emotion

around something, that that is itself a form

of the repetition compulsion,

because you're feeling it all over again.

You're not seeking out something to evoke that feeling.

So I realize this is a little bit of a circular argument

or question, but I think it's one that I really struggle

with in trying to parse all the outcome-based therapies

that I hear about and the recommendations

that people make.

I mean, how should we conceptualize this?

Something happens.

It sounds like we need to deal with that thing directly.

Do we need to do that with somebody else?

Can we do that on our own?

If we don't have resources and we have to do it on our own,

can't hire someone, can't pay someone to work with us,

how do we do that in a way that isn't retraumatizing

ourself in a major way or in a minor way?

How do we know where we are in that landscape?

Right.

Again, those are, I think, great questions.

And I think it starts with real introspection.

When things are bouncing around in our minds,

often it's very non-productive, right?

It's the same thing over and over again.

And that's not helpful for us, right?

So there's an idea which sometimes gets called

an observing ego, right?

The ability to stop and look at what's going on

inside of ourselves.

And so if we're just thinking about it

and we're thinking in the same way we sort of, in a sense,

always think about it, then all we're doing

is reinforcing the trauma, right?

But if we can distance enough to be like,

huh, I'm interested in what's going on inside of me, right?

Like, I think of a certain person who really loves music.

And then at some point in our therapy work,

I learned, like, she was taking long drives,

but the radio wasn't on.

And I was like, well, what's going on, right?

And I asked, and what was going on?

And she was running over and over again in her head like,

I'm a loser, I'm a loser, right?

And she didn't want the music on because the music

would drown out what she felt she had to say to herself,

right?

And it was that like, wow, that's interesting, right?

And then her ability to observe that and to think,

why am I doing that when it comes into her mind?

Like, what is that trace to?

When did I start doing that?

Like I said, I'm saying it for a point of exaggeration.

Like, nobody comes out of the womb

programmed to think I'm a loser, right?

So we don't think that when we're born, right?

So where does that come from?

Then we can think in ways that allow us to have new thoughts,

right, that we weren't having.

It's not just bouncing around in our minds.

And if we speak or write, there are even more mechanisms

that come online in our brains, right,

that are then sort of monitoring mechanisms.

We think in a different way if we're using words, right?

And we are better able often to bring in that observing ego,

like what's going on inside of me?

So it can be very helpful to think.

It can be helpful to talk to someone, to a trusted other,

you know, friend, family, clergy, to write.

I mean, these are things that can be done

without expending any resources, right?

And sometimes it can make really a big difference, right?

There's a way, when did I start thinking that?

And like interestingly in this case,

okay, we did it in therapy,

but it became very clear what that was rooted to, right?

And then in the therapy, which was still relatively young,

but we'd done several sessions

and we weren't talking at all about what we needed to talk about, right?

But that's what got us to what we needed to talk about.

And when did that start?

And now we're in that same place of exploring that

and what was the reflex to it

and the sense of guilt and sense of shame.

And it's where all of that came from

that just got boiled down to I'm a loser, right?

Which this person didn't even have in their mind,

like I didn't think about myself that way, right?

And it's so interesting, right,

that our memories don't in and of themselves have meaning.

It's like they're flat or colorless, right?

And they're colored in by the emotions that we attach to them, right?

So the idea that certain memories now before the trauma

were changed, right, by the trauma.

So I tell the story sometimes of a person who like won an award

when they were in high school that they thought was,

oh my gosh, like it shows, like I can do it, right?

And get out there that after trauma,

they saw the award with a negative emotion attached to it

that was like, oh, it was given to me and I didn't deserve it.

And almost it was mocking,

like there's going to be the greatest achievement of my life

and I was 17 or so.

And to have someone think like that's not

how they felt about that at the time.

It's the trauma that changed the self-talk,

the internal state going forward.

And talking about miraculous in a negative way,

also changed that going backward, right?

And when we can really look at like where did that come from

and we can start unraveling it, it changes.

So in those cases, you know, often it's helpful

to have a good therapist.

It's not always necessary and it certainly,

it's not always possible, right?

So we need other strategies.

And some of those, I write about some of those in the book

of how can we sort of get at trauma

without those formalized mechanisms.

And sometimes if the symptoms are significant enough,

like we really do need to talk to somebody professional

who can help us get to the root of the trauma.

And there's so many times that's the answer

to what's going on with people.

You know, people I've seen have had five residential stays,

I'm not exaggerating this, for mental health reasons,

for substance reasons,

and no one's ever taken a trauma history, right?

And then when you take a trauma history, you say,

well, that's obviously where this is all coming from, right?

Like that's when the drug use started truly thereafter,

the negative self-talk and the negative feelings

that led to the drug use.

Then you go after the trauma and you can change things,

whereas trying to change things without looking,

introspecting, talking about the trauma,

I think of course was futile.

Do you think that people can start to have negative fantasies?

I mean, you mentioned this woman

who would take these long drives to berate herself.

I'm not familiar with that,

but I'll give a little bit of personal disclosure here.

I've felt several times in my life

that I will start to create a narrative

about something that truly hasn't happened,

about something terrible that somebody is going to do

that's going to upset me.

And for the longest time, I would wonder,

why am I doing this?

And I have a couple ideas about why.

One is that I was attempting to just avoid

thinking about other things.

It's just anger is such an attractive emotional force

and it's an attractant.

It's not attractive.

We don't like it.

And yet oftentimes anger is a great way

to replace feeling something else,

feeling sad or having to come up or to do work

or to do something useful.

So it has this kind of gravitational force to it.

That was one idea.

The other idea was in imagining kind of worst outcomes,

then actually that relationship

could actually seem a lot better in reality.

It's almost like creating this negative contrast.

It's like, oh, well then it's not that bad.

And then the third possibility is I have no idea why,

but it seemed like a reflex

and I spent some time thinking about it.

I can't say I've resolved it completely,

but why would somebody have a narrative

or a default narrative when driving or when walking of,

I'm just going to spend some time

and think about how terrible this thing is going to turn out

or how someone's going to upset me or harm me

or how terrible I am.

It seems, again, like maladaptive thinking,

maladaptive wiring,

and yet I have to assume that it serves some purpose.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think there are three factors there

and they're all bad.

And I think you spoke to at least two of them, right?

They, I think, speak so powerfully

to how insidious trauma is

and how these are real brain changes inside of us.

So I would say the three factors, punishment,

punishment, avoidance, and control, right?

So the trauma inside of us that makes a guilt and shame

so often, so often,

leads to a desire to punish oneself, right?

And the idea that,

oh, that was my fault or I deserve that.

Well, what do we do if something is someone's fault

and someone now deserves punishment, right?

I mean, we punish them, right?

We send them to jail.

We give them a fine, right?

We punish them.

And so what we do is punish ourselves, right?

And if we tell ourselves we're a loser

or this awful thing is gonna happen, right?

Then part of what we're doing is saying to ourselves,

see, right, you deserve that.

You're not gonna have anything better, right?

It's a negative, it's a very negative way

that the brain tries to make us, in a sense, do better

by hurting us more for the things that we couldn't

and shouldn't have been able to,

weren't expected to control in the first place, right?

The second is distraction.

As you said, anger, that kind of fantasy

can distract us from affect, feeling, and emotion

that can be much more negative.

You know, anger, it can be more gratifying

certainly than guilt or shame,

although guilt and shame can serve a punishment purpose.

But if anger is directed also towards ourselves, right,

then it can serve punishment too.

So punishment, avoidance, and the sense of control

that if you think ahead to something awful

that you're imagining is going to happen,

well, maybe that will let you avoid it, right?

I mean, you can see the brain here,

in a sense, really confused.

I mean, part of the brain wants to punish,

part of the brain doesn't want to think about it at all,

and part of the brain wants to make it better.

And then how all of that resolves

if we're not aware that, hey, this is in the context

of our brains being deeply impacted by trauma,

so what's going on here is all maladaptive, right?

Because these negative fantasies of the future,

they may help us feel better about something in the present,

but they don't help us make anything better, right?

They don't help us make anything better.

So this is the kind of the sequelae.

This is where trauma and all this reflexive stuff

that happens after trauma ultimately lead us.

And you can see how we get lost,

how I've seen over and over again in my own life,

in the lives of other people, how, man,

we get stuck in those situations.

That's why I see people sometimes,

this has been going on for 30 years, 40 years, right?

And it's just been going on over and over and over again

because there's no natural end to any of this, right?

Unless we look at it in a different way,

that we have knowledge and information like,

whoa, this isn't the way it has to be.

Let me bring a novel perspective to this.

It doesn't change on its own.

I'm struck by your statement that these thoughts

or behaviors can make us feel better,

but they don't actually make anything better.

In that way, this mode of imagining terrible outcomes

starts to immediately seem like taking opioids.

You feel better in the moment,

but it doesn't actually make anything better

and it probably makes things worse.

And just this question of how much worse

and in what direction.

And so I just want to just pause on that concept

because I think that concept of makes us feel better,

but doesn't make anything better.

I think it answers an earlier question about

this what seems to be a totally maladaptive wiring diagram.

We need to confront the thing,

but we don't want to go into the repetition and compulsion.

So it's a knife edge there to navigate through trauma.

Working with a very skilled clinician like yourself,

I think is the ideal circumstance for people.

And of course there are people who can't access support

from somebody for whatever reason.

You've talked about journaling as a useful tool.

Could you, maybe you highlight some of the other things

that people can do on their own.

And then I'd also like to talk about

what makes for a good therapist.

What should people look for,

for those that are seeking therapy,

especially nowadays when a lot of therapy

is being done remotely.

But let's just start with the,

let's just call them self-generated or zero cost

sorts of things.

Journaling being the first,

and then what are some of the others?

And what kind of structure

would you recommend someone put around journaling?

Carry a journal around all day

and jot things down as they come up,

or sit down and spend an hour

writing in complete sentences, for instance.

Yeah.

If I could add something to what you had just said

before the question,

I thought that we have these short-term coping mechanisms

in us, right?

And in a way it makes sense, right?

If we find ourselves in just terrible situations,

then a short-term coping mechanism

can get us through them, right?

So our brains are built that way,

and that's part of survival too, right?

And whether now in the modern world,

whether it's food, it's drugs, it's sex,

it's alcohol, right?

Or it's negative thoughts, right?

This is short-term soothing.

Even the negative thoughts and anger

is short-term soothing at the expense of long-term change,

right?

And that's where, you know,

addictive pathways can come into play.

And that's where, again,

how we're built evolutionarily for survival

doesn't help us, you know,

in the way humans have evolved.

Like we haven't lived this way throughout, you know,

99.9 something percent of human history, right?

So we're not adapted to this.

So I want to just make a point of saying that

about the short-term soothing at the expense

of long-term change, you know?

And then the question you had asked about,

say, journaling or what can we do

that's outside of a professional,

I think the hallmark of it has to be

bringing new eyes to it, right?

Like thinking about self with a curiosity

instead of just a simple automaticity or repetition, right?

Like, why am I thinking about this?

When did this start?

Why is this in me, right?

It's that whether it's words or whether we're writing,

that's so important.

So I think for journaling, it depends on the person.

I mean, we don't want somebody carrying around

a journal all day if then there's a compulsion

to I need to write about everything

that's going on in my mind, right?

Like that might be good to,

okay, write a little bit at night, right?

Or someone who might think, you know,

sometimes this really comes into my mind in a strong way

and it could be unpredictable, right?

I want to have the journal with me.

So, ah, that thing is back in my mind now.

You know, let me write about it, right?

Because then putting words to it

and then being able to read those words, right?

And when people read, even do a little bit of journaling

and they read like, oh, I thought again

about how I'm a terrible person who can't have a good life

because I was in such a bad car accident

or because that person attacked me

or because when I was in school, I was bullied

because I look different than everyone else, right?

Or I acted different for everyone else.

Wow, you know, to actually see that written out,

it's, you know, it's a little bit of that,

it's a little bit of that,

like when you're saying it to someone

as if it were someone else, right?

Because now there's enough distance from it.

Like I'm looking at the words I wrote, right?

That we get some distance

and we can start to integrate some of the,

not just the compassion,

but integrating compassion and logic, right?

Of like, okay, I feel a sense of compassion.

Oh, wait, what does this mean?

What really happened here, right?

And gosh, I did start thinking differently after that.

I started, that's where this came from, right?

That's why I'm saying this.

It's those kinds of revelations that we can have

through, again, the written or spoken word.

And I think, again, that involves a trusted other

or writing, right?

And I think that those are ways we can do this

where we bring some de novo perspective

to something that often has been bouncing around inside of us.

And it's amazing to me that, you know,

I can see such intelligent and pathically attuned people

who've had the same thing running over and over again

in their mind for years.

And it just points out that our brains

don't automatically say, hey, wait a second.

You know, I've been spinning wheels here

for a long, long time.

Like, was there another way to look at this?

We need something from the outside,

which can just be knowledge, right?

Which is why I think what we're doing here

or the reason I wrote the book that I wrote

was like apprehending this like amazing surprise to me,

right, which is like, wow, like some huge percentage

of everything I'm treating is rooted in trauma

and the opacity of trauma, right?

Which is why we don't see that, oh, the depression,

the panic attacks, the life change, the addiction,

the, you know, the maladaptive choices,

like, oh, this is all coming from trauma

because it hides itself in that opacity.

So we need a de novo perspective

if we're doing it on our own.

And we need that if we're doing it in therapy,

which might link to like finding the right therapist,

right, which is also part of your question.

Yeah, I definitely want to know about how to assess

and find the right therapist.

Before we cover that, however, something came up

in the course of your answer.

I can immediately relate to this idea that, you know,

certain behaviors are really maladaptive

and our stuffing things down or avoiding the topic

is problematic and bringing a curiosity

and an introspection and almost a third personing

of the experience that we've had in order to try

and address it truly from a new perspective.

It occurred to me as we were discussing this, however,

that some people, and yes, maybe I'm talking a little bit

about my own experience, we have a sense of our own identity

and how people view us and our ability to be functional

in the world in ways that we like.

Effective at work or a good brother or a good mother

or father or human being in the world.

We have relationships.

And I think that one thing that I have heard

and maybe I've experienced is that sometimes

those maladaptive thoughts or behaviors,

the things that generate a kind of a repetition of anger

or of arousal or activation or sadness that we have

some internal process where we funnel that

into a functionality in the world.

So I'll give a more concrete example.

So in thinking about things that have upset me in the past

and in imagining bad outcomes in the future,

there's a certain internal state of arousal

that comes about.

And for many years, I was able to use that not to feel angry,

but rather to work an extra three hours a day

or to pack my schedule with work and social engagement

so I could show up in a way that I hopefully

was a very good brother to my sister, for instance.

So in a way, it was a transformation of something negative

inside of me into a functionality in the world

that was actually very rewarding and beneficial.

And yet in describing it, I can immediately see how

it would be wonderful if I could source from something else.

And yet I, you can imagine, and I can imagine

how one would be reluctant, maybe even terrified

of giving up that source.

It's a fuel.

And I think in knowing some of the traumas of other people

and their reluctance to work through those,

obviously I'm not a therapist, I sense this over and over again

that one's positive identity can often be linked

to something difficult in their past.

And so people are reluctant to give up this fuel.

Yes.

Because it's, in that sense, it's functional.

The only thing that allowed me to kind of start to address this

and why I'm still so curious about this,

because I don't think I've worked through this process completely,

again, a little more self-disclosure there,

is that I was told that these words,

just imagine how much better it would be

if you could source from a different fuel,

a fuel that felt better.

Maybe it was on this sentence.

It was maybe you could actually be much more effective.

Yes.

Maybe you could be 10 times the better brother.

Yes.

Maybe you could have 10 times more insider work capacity, et cetera.

So it's on that hint of a promise that I,

at least I was inspired to start looking into these things

and reading about trauma in your book and elsewhere

and start to think about this.

So again, I realize this is a long-winded question

and a somewhat complex idea,

but I think, or I hope that people will be able to resonate with this idea

that sometimes we want to stay attached to this short-term soothing,

that the punishment, distraction, or control

because it evokes this arousal and then we can apply that arousal.

Yes.

I think what you're describing maps, I think clinically,

to what gets called sublimation.

So there's something negative inside of us,

but we sort of transfer that energy,

we transfer that into something that is adaptive or that is positive.

So the idea of anger, right?

When I think of that thing and it makes anger in me,

I channel that into harder work, right?

Or I channel that into like,

I'm going to go be nicer to my brother, something like that.

And there's validity to that, right?

But it can become like self-justifying.

If a person thinks,

well, look at what this is doing for me, right?

I wouldn't work as hard without it, right?

Now we start to become attached to the trauma.

Whereas I think what you had said is absolutely true

that just because we can sublimate some of the negative affect,

feeling, emotion that comes from trauma into something productive

doesn't mean that that's best, right?

I mean, you know, we can get to our destination

by taking a very circuitous route, right?

We might waste an hour getting there, but we get there.

That doesn't mean that that's best.

And it also doesn't look at all the negative, right?

In this example, the wasted fuel, the wasted time, right?

We get somewhere, but we are not optimizing.

And I have yet to see one person who has addressed the trauma

and become less functional, right?

It's always either they're just as functional,

but they're happier, right?

Or more functional because, as you said,

like just because we may be able to sublimate,

well, maybe what's going on will be 10 times better, right?

If we weren't sublimating because the sublimation limits us, right?

It limits our perspective to only what we can see and do

through the lens of the trauma.

And that is never better than the alternative.

Thank you for that.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Yeah.

Let's discuss how one could or should go about

finding a really good therapist.

Typically, in my experience, this is done by word of mouth.

You know, there's this person.

You might want to work with them.

They're really great.

But what are some of the characteristics

that one should look for?

And should we take into account whether or not

we are a person who, you know, for instance,

I've heard this from listeners,

although I'm definitely not talking about myself here

in cloaking something.

Some people will say, you know,

I want to work with a somatic therapist

because I've actually heard someone say,

I think in feels.

You know, I feel stuff in my body,

so I want to work with someone who can really acknowledge that.

Or someone else will say, you know,

I want to work with somebody who has this orientation or that orientation

or is open to my particular lifestyle

or isn't going to tell me that I have to leave my relationship.

You know, I feel like people already show up

to the question of who to work with,

with all these, you know, things internally,

some of which are voiced and some of which aren't.

So I'd love for you to talk about maybe

some of the core features of a really good therapist

and then how to look for a therapist

and also how to think about oneself

in looking for a therapist.

Because of these kind of predispositions.

Right, right.

Well, there's a lot of data about this over the years

that if you look at what are the top 10 important factors

to find in a therapist, just repeat rapport 10 times, right?

I mean, that's the key.

And if you think about that, it's pretty amazing, right?

Because therapeutic modalities can be so different, right?

And I think what that's telling us is,

in a way, something very obvious, right?

Like, what does rapport mean?

Like, you know, somebody's paying attention, right?

It's trust.

It's a back and forth.

It's like, yeah, even I'm doing something difficult.

I'm doing it with someone who's really helping me,

someone who's in it with me, right?

Someone who's really paying attention,

wants me to be better.

That's indispensable.

I mean, it's just indispensable.

And I write in the book,

is someone, a therapist is not making eye contact

or this is the way they do it, right?

And you know, you gotta fit into the box

of the way they do it.

That is not going to be helpful.

And then what I think about that is the different modalities.

It doesn't actually tell us that,

oh, the modality is irrelevant.

I think that's not true.

I think that good therapists are not pigeonholed

by a certain modality.

They may come at the world largely through a psychodynamic

or a CBT or a DBT lens.

There's lots of different ways to do therapy.

But when you really talk to those people,

really good, experienced therapists,

it's all coming through the vehicle of the rapport,

but they're practically shifting to what the person needs.

You know, I don't understand the idea that like,

oh, I just do this, right?

I don't do that.

And when people are pigeonholed that way,

I don't think they help their patients very well, right?

We have to be diverse enough to say,

hey, I want all the arrows in the quiver, right?

And even though there might be one that I favor

and that's the lens I see things through,

no, I can be versatile.

I can shift.

I can adapt to what this person needs.

And I think if you have that, you've got a winning combination.

Great.

So people should perhaps try a few therapists

and maybe have a session or two or three

to see if the rapport feels like it's taking root.

Do you have that right?

Yeah.

And I think that's why word of mouth is important, right?

If someone you trust tells you, hey, this is a good person,

that says a lot, right?

It already makes the pretest probability quite high.

But yes, it's interesting to see when people have a therapist

or they call their insurance and they're assigned a therapist,

this thought that like, oh, that's the person I have to have now.

And it's like, no, you should look at that like anyone.

You know, you would be interviewing, right, for a job, right?

But you got to bring again the right set of thoughts to that to be helped, right?

Which is like, I want someone who has rapport with me.

I don't want someone who's going to make it easy, right?

Who's like, well, gosh, it's kind of pleasant

because then that means they're not talking about the difficult things, right?

So if one brings like, I know this isn't going to be easy.

I got to talk about difficult things, right?

Even if one doesn't recognize, oh, I got to talk about the trauma in me, right?

But to go to therapy thinking, no, it's, I mean, sometimes it's enjoyable,

but a lot of times, right, it's not, right?

It's hard work.

It can be excruciating.

We can cry doing it.

But to say, right, that that's how I'm going to be helped.

And I want someone who's going to do that with me, you know,

who's really looking at what's going on inside of me.

How do we help me?

And I can feel sort of the robustness of that.

If one brings that approach and then looks at the therapist through that lens,

you're very likely to then move on from someone who's not a good choice, right?

And really stick with someone who is,

even though that doesn't mean it's always like pleasant and enjoyable.

I mean, it has to not be that sometimes.

Right.

Maybe we could drill a little deeper into the mechanics of therapy.

I put out a few questions to audience asking what they want to know about therapy.

And it was amazing.

I got hundreds, if not thousands of responses saying,

how should I show up to therapy?

So for instance, should people take a five-minute meditative drop-in before

or should they just show up cold and let it emerge?

During therapy, is it a good idea to take notes or to not take notes?

And then post-therapy, how should clients, patients, as they're sometimes called,

one or the other, I never know which, how should they process that information?

Should they take some designated time afterwards and in an ideal world,

take a 30-minute walk afterwards and think about the material

or should they set it aside and come back to it?

Of course, there are constraints, work and family, et cetera.

But there's a lot of knowledge out there about how to best show up to a workout,

warm up for five, 10 minutes, then do this, et cetera, and then the cool down.

I mean, here we're talking about hard psychological work aimed at bettering oneself.

So to my knowledge, I've not ever seen this information anywhere.

It'd be very useful to hear your thoughts on this.

Yeah.

Well, I'm not trying to duck the question, but I think it varies so much by person.

So if you think about the first part of your question,

I think was how to show up to therapy, right?

And I think the answer would be whatever lets you be fully present when you're in therapy.

Now, for some people, there's going to be, I show up early, you know, I sit, I calm myself,

I meditate a little bit, I mean, that's how then they're present, right?

For other people, you know, they just show up, walk into the room,

they can stop another present, right?

Because whatever works for that person so that they're really there,