EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 21,218 words- 0:00 – 1:32
Why this episode exists: trauma disclosure, audience warnings, and support resources
- TFTim Ferriss
Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show. This is your host, Tim Ferriss. You may notice that this intro is different from my usual intro. I'm not gonna give you the spiel on interviewing world-class performers because we aren't going to do that in this particular episode. For me personally, this is the most important podcast episode I've ever published, and I wasn't sure I was going to publish it at all. I recorded it just to record it, and that'll be obvious in the audio. This episode will describe the most life-shaping, certainly the most difficult, and, uh, certainly the most transformative journey of my 43 years on this planet. This is a journey I've never shared publicly before, and I haven't really shared it privately either. To give you an idea, most of my family and closest friends know nothing about it, so they will be hearing about this for the first time as well. I believe this episode is relevant to almost everyone, although it might not seem that way at the surface level. But let me explain. If you haven't experienced trauma yourself, you will meet people who have, certainly, and you may already know people who have been affected, including friends or family members who simply haven't told you. And I find it helpful to remember that everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Please note, before we get any further, that this episode is not suitable for children, so consider yourselves warned. My dance partner and safety net in this conversation is my friend Debbie Millman. Debbie, on Twitter @debbiemillman, has been named
- 1:32 – 5:23
Why Debbie Millman is the “safety net” for this conversation
- TFTim Ferriss
one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and is the host of Design Matters, a great podcast, one of the world's longest-running podcasts. She is also chair of the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, Editorial Director of Print magazine, and has worked on design strategy for some of the world's largest brands. You would recognize all of them. But all of that is not why I asked her if she'd join me. I asked Debbie because she's a dear friend, she's an excellent interviewer, and she's been an incredible support for me in the last few years, including some late-night emergency phone calls and things of that sort. Last but not least, she and I have experienced similar trauma, but have taken two very different paths to healing using very, very different tools, so you get a two-for-one deal in this conversation. That's the intention. This conversation was fucking hard for me, very difficult, and I could have deleted some of the stammering and struggling, but I chose not to because that would have been fakery, and I wanted to share the emotional struggle in its full rawness. This stuff isn't always easy. It's rarely easy, and it's often messy. But it is possible to get to the other side, and that's one of the morals of the story and why I'm sharing this. So please listen to the whole thing, as the lessons, tools, and resources and so on that have helped us are scattered throughout. They're all over the place, including an especially dense last 30 minutes. Just a few more notes, and we'll get right into it, but I think that these notes are important. First, to those who know me and might reach out, please note that I expect to be completely overwhelmed, emotionally and otherwise, when this is published, and I sincerely ask for your understanding if I'm not able to reply to any outreach. It'll be a really challenging week for me, and I expect it'll probably be a very challenging month, so thanks for understanding. Second, this is and we are a work in progress. Debbie and I both reserve the right to change our minds about how we think and feel about everything. Third, and this is a very important disclaimer, we are not therapists, we are not doctors, we don't play them on the Internet, so this is not intended as professional or medical advice in any capacity. This is for informational purposes only. It's just two people sharing their very personal stories and perspectives. As Debbie put it in this episode, and you'll hear this, quote, "I think it's really important for people to understand that their path to healing is very much their own path to healing in the same way that everybody has their own path to love or success or family." A few resources. There are episodes that I mention in the conversation. Debbie's first podcast with me you can find at tim.blog/debbie, D-E-B-B-I-E. You can find my conversation with Blake Mycoskie, tim.blog/blake, and with Jack Kornfield at tim.blog/jack. And everything mentioned in this episode and many more things, many more things that might help are available all in one place. We've gathered everything at tim.blog/trauma. That's tim.blog/trauma. Okay, here we go. [intro music] So Debbie, first of all, you are the sweetest of sweethearts. Thank you for doing this with me. I know that you've been a trusted companion for quite a long time with respect to many of the things that we'll be talking about, and it, uh, really means the world to me, so thank you.
- DMDebbie Millman
Oh, my, my honor, Tim, truly, truly.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I, I don't think I'm gonna bury the lead, as they say in journalism, with this conversation. I'll start with the statement, and then we can work around that.
- DMDebbie Millman
Okay.
- 5:23 – 8:57
Tim’s disclosure: early childhood sexual abuse and why he’s speaking now
- TFTim Ferriss
So the statement is, uh, and the opening is that I was routinely sexually abused from ages two to four, that seems to be accurate based on conversations with my mom about the timeline, by the son of a babysitter. So if you imagine sort of the, the most disgusting, repulsive activities that you might envision with that statement, that is, that is what happened. And I don't know if it was on a weekly basis. I don't know if it was multiple times a week, but it was frequent over a period of, of two years. And I want to speak to why I'm recording this podcast and discussing this with you now. I'll tackle the why with you first, and that is because you really inspired me when seemingly 100 years ago [laughs] on my podcast after I noted before our conversation that you seldom spoke about your childhood, you opened up and spoke about your own, your own abuse that you suffered through. And it was such a courageous act and helped so many people. And my intention has always been to talk about this chapter, I'd say over the last five or six years at least. That's been my intention, and I've wanted to put it into a book that tracks my healing journey effectively. And had a conversation with my girlfriend perhaps six months ago, and this was just as COVID was beginning to set in, so this was probably early February, mid-February, as global news. And I had fears around my mortality due to respiratory issues, comorbidities, and I'd also done work and therapy that involved asking the question prior to that, "If you were to, say, die tomorrow, what would you regret having not said or not done? Alternatively, if you knew you had a year left in perfect health and then you would die a year from now exactly, what would you do in that year?" And at the very top of the list was talking about this sexual abuse. And my girlfriend made an observation as we were talking about plans for the book, which was if the book takes three years, you know, there, there may be people who are no longer around in three years through suicide or natural causes who could benefit, might benefit from speaking about this openly. So that is why I decided to record this, and as we're recording this, I don't know if I'm gonna release it, uh, or when I will release it, but to at least have a record. You know, God forbid something were to happen to me, I would really regret not having spoken about this. And the in- the intention is hopefully to show that it is possible to find some light, actually incredible amounts of light, in the darkness and that there are tools available that really do work and help. And, you know, Debbie, it's been a roller coaster in the last, say, 36 hours as I've been appreciating the, the realness of having this conversation with you because old coping
- 8:57 – 13:43
Dissociation, memory gaps, and trauma resurfacing through ayahuasca and retreat intensity
- TFTim Ferriss
mechanisms have started to crop up. Like, I even -- Last night I was talking to my girlfriend and about this, and I started to dissociate, right?
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Like, my mind started to separate itself from my body so that my body could withstand whatever it needed to withstand. And for those people who don't know what that means, I mean, it, you can induce it with something like ketamine certainly. I don't recommend that, but it's a dissociative anesthetic, and it's a very odd experience to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it. Thankfully, most people haven't. But it's, it's almost like you, your consciousness, the locus of your awareness moves outside your body so that you're not subject to what your body will experience or suffer through. And that's been happening over the last 36 hours as I've been preparing for this conversation, and I'm just gonna keep going. Uh, for a very long time, I mean, up until age 35 or so, I felt like I had no memories before age six or five. And this type of amnesia actually showed up a lot for me, uh, in the sense that whenever I had a very stressful set of circumstances, a, a crisis of some type, a severe injury, I would experience this dissociation, and I would black out my memory for the next, let's just call it two to five hours would disappear. I would have no recollection of what happened. And I didn't have any memories I could recall or did recall about this abuse until five or six years ago when I had a number of experiences with a psychedelic combination of plants called ayahuasca. And for more on that, we can refer people to other podcasts where I've talked about this. But at the time, let's just call it five years ago for sake of simplicity, the memory came up and the, and psychedelics are well known, not necessarily in the scientific literature, although there are some recordings of this, but more anecdotally across thousands and tens of thousands and millions of users over time, uh, hypermnesia, so the opposite of amnesia, remembering things that you haven't thought of in decades, right? The color and texture of the corduroy couch you had when you were an infant, you know, that type of thing. You know, about five years ago, I would say I had these crystal clear memories of sexual abuse come to me, right? The layout of the house, the other kids who were being cared for, so to speak, at the house, what the m- mother looked like, what the son looked like, being led up the stairs to the upstairs bedroom, the floor plan of the house. I know exactly where the house is. I know the driveway. I know the names. These are all things that I know. And it came flooding back to me, and at the time I thought to myself, "Huh, that's interesting. That definitely happened." I remember that happening, and it came back to me in high resolution. But I didn't feel any suffering associated with it, and I tucked it away. I put it back in the box, locked the box, and that was that until, uh, I had my first 10-day Vipassana silent retreat and thankfully had Jack Kornfield there as one of the, the lead facilitators. And to increase the depth of the experience, I'd fasted beforehand, so I was fasting for about five days and then began to use increasing dosages of psilocybe mushrooms, which contain psilocybin. So I started at 300 milligrams, went up to 600, and ultimately landed at 900. And I want to say around day six of this silent retreat, all of this abuse came back to me like a tidal wave, and it was replaying as if I were wearing a virtual reality headset. I was immersed. I wasn't an observer. I was actually being traumatized and re-traumatized 24/7 for this period of time. Any moment that I was awake, this movie was playing, and I would sweat through my sheets at night, fall asleep for an hour or two, then wake up to go back into meditation, and the movie would start again. And I was so distraught. Uh, there was so much anguish, and I felt like I was either already having a psychotic break or certain to have a psychotic break, and that I would not be able to manage life when I left the silent retreat, that I sought out Jack
- 13:43 – 15:47
Jack Kornfield as crisis support and the pivot to trauma-informed reading and root-cause understanding
- TFTim Ferriss
as an emergency to spend time with him and speak with him. And, uh, he really saved me. Like, he was the safety net. So I, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jack, who's not just an incredibly adept mindfulness practitioner, but also a clinical psychologist, and he's worked with many, many, many different types of trauma, vets, victims of sexual abuse, you name it, very broad spectrum. So I, I really owe him huge thanks. And it was at that point after that, that Jack made a number of recommendations for resources that we'll talk about later, but included books by Peter Levine, like Waking the Tiger, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and handful of other things. It was at the tail end of that retreat that I realized, you know, these, let's just call it 17 seemingly inexplicable behaviors of mine, these vicious cycles or triggers that I had been treating like separate things, separate problems to be solved, were all downstream of this trauma, if that makes any sense. I don't know if you've had this experience, but I was like, "Oh, now that you click that puzzle piece into place, these really strange behaviors, this self-loathing, this rage that was seemingly so exaggerated and disproportionate leading to, say, the near suicide in college, which was as close as you can get to taking your life without actually doing it," all of these things fell into place as making sense. And, you know, on one hand, there was this relief that it made sense and that I wasn't broken in all these different ways. I had just sort of suffered this acute trauma and blocked it. And it was also very overwhelming because I didn't necessarily know how to work on this root cause, right, this trauma. And that's when the direct work began. I just-- I cleared everything in my calendar, and
- 15:47 – 22:26
How trauma leaked into behavior: self-harm, numbing, and fear of losing sexual vitality
- TFTim Ferriss
everything waited. Like, everything that could wait, waited. And, you know, these memories at that point started to trickle up to awareness. I'll just give another example that I've never spoken about publicly, which is in elementary school, you know, feeling numb and priding myself on pain tolerance, right, this ability to dissociate and for whatever reason really-- well, for obvious reasons, I guess, wanting to develop the ability to withstand pain and, you know, for a very short period would bring this pocket knife to school and press it into the back of my left thumb, I remember this really clearly, until my thumb would start to bleed, and then I'd move it a millimeter or two and then press it into my thumb and make it bleed and do this over and over again without changing my facial expression. I'm in class. I'm sitting in math class doing this, right, looking at the blackboard, tracking things. And fortunately for me, after a short time of doing this, scared myself by doing it and stopped. But it didn't strike me as particularly strange at the time.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, you were, you were relieving pain. You were, you were using that as a way to be able to release some of your trauma without even knowing it.
- TFTim Ferriss
I, I certainly think that could well be the case. And, you know, part of the reason that I've held off on this conversation also is that for a long time after the realization, after ayahuasca, felt like this did not affect me, that it was a bad thing that happened, but who am I to complain? I discounted it because of all the other blessings and privileges that I have in my life and assumed that I could put it under lock and key. And after the silent retreat and this, let's just call it a psychotic break, which is really what I think it was, I mean, whether it's a breakdown or a breakthrough or both, and we could debate, but I realized that whether you're dealing with it directly and putting it in front of you as the task that hinders all other tasks and prioritizing it, or you're not dealing with it, but it's creeping out through the corners and affecting you in ways that you may not even be aware of. Like, you're dealing with it whether or not you choose to deal with it.
- DMDebbie Millman
Exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
And so I began working, this is a few years ago, on compiling this, this book on healing, and I'm very fortunate in the sense that This sexual trauma never seemed to affect my sex life, right? My sort of vitality in sex. I was-- It was one of the few places actually that I felt integrated and felt, period, right? Where I actually felt deeply without dissociating. And, uh, so I started working on this book, The Healing Book, and I was writing this chapter, drafting this chapter on the abuse, and part of the reason it's taken us so long to have this phone call is because I've been afraid of it. Uh, I, I wrote this chapter, this draft, and it totally fucked me up. I didn't expect it would because I'd felt so invulnerable. But the day after I started drafting it, completely lost my sex drive, basically lost sexual function, like any interest or ability re-related to sex just disappeared, and that scared the shit out of me. Fortunately, that's not, you know, that complete paralysis hasn't continued, but I've been very concerned about taking this one oasis of feeling that I've had consistently and fucking it up by talking about this stuff.
- DMDebbie Millman
Well, that's, that's something that's more the case than I think a lot of people talk about. I think that having any kind of enjoyment sexually after long-term abuse is really rare, and it's not surprising that you would have that response, and I'm really happy to know that you're able to-- that that's improved since that experience. It's been a lifelong process for me, and one that I'm still-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... on to sort of reengage from that first disassociation, which, you know, for many people, that disassociation is really what saves a person's life. Um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... because you couldn't actually integrate that level of trauma at that young age. You'd have had that psychological break then and likely never recovered.
- TFTim Ferriss
Totally. And I was chatting with a friend of mine before this call, and I, I, I haven't spoken to many people at all about any of this, but he, he also suffered quite a lot of trauma, and he said something to me which I've also thought quite a bit in the last few years, and that is your childhood adaptive responses are perfect, right? Like, that dissociation in a way is a miracle of evolution. I mean, the fact that we develop this ability to split our psyche-
- DMDebbie Millman
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... and compartmentalize to survive is really miraculous. And there just comes a point, at least for me, where these old adaptive coping mechanisms have outlived their usefulness, and that's been a huge part of my journey. And, uh, telling my parents was also extremely difficult. I was worried about destroying them in a way, if that makes sense, right? So my intention-
- DMDebbie Millman
Sure
- TFTim Ferriss
... had been with this book to wait until they passed, to wait until they died to release this so they wouldn't blame themselves for everything. And what I realized was that that was too demanding for me as a burden, and I decided to have the conversation without any expectation of any response, but simply to give voice to it in a way that would hopefully free me from the weight of that being constantly on my mind, on my subconscious. And, you know, I figure I could probably speak to a few of the things that I've found helpful, and I'd love to hear from you as well. But, you know, perhaps you could speak to, because you've been sort of immersed in the therapy and treatment and sort of trauma mitigation side of things for much longer than I have. Could you speak to how common this type of sexual abuse is?
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, I just want to say that I love you, Tim. You know, you are such a, a good, good man, um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Thank you, Debbie
- 22:26 – 26:58
Debbie’s perspective on prevalence, shame, and her own history of abuse
- DMDebbie Millman
... with such a big heart and a big brain and just so much generosity. And, um, it's just an honor to be talking to you, really. Um, and I, I feel very privileged to be able to have this conversation with you. And if it does get released, I just am so-- I'm feeling just so grateful about the possibilities that it's going to have to help so many people that need it. I mean, sexual abuse is one of the most common traumas in the world. One in three women, um, by the time they're 18 will have been sexually assaulted in some way. Um, the numbers that we know now are one in six boys. But given how much shame is associated with boys actually disclosing, my suspicion and, and quite a lot of, um, clinical psychologists' suspicions, uh, is that it's much higher. Um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... I, I, I don't know why there would be any difference, frankly. Um, but that's a lot of people. Um, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of young people. And we as, as a species have so much shame associated with this behavior that has been socialized that somehow it is the victim's fault. I mean, just think about what rape victims go through when they report, how much they have to defend the believability of their story or what they might have done or not done to contribute. So you can only imagine how much shame there is for young people that don't know what is happening to them or why it's happening to them. So it's pervasive in our world and It is one of the most devastating behaviors that someone can enact on another at any age. If it happens before the age of 10, because we're all still developing our brains, it changes the neural pathways in our brains to such an extent that the behaviors that I know we're gonna talk about that you've struggled with and that I've struggled with are just a normal way of responding once that kind of trauma occurs. And for me, my trauma, um, began, my sexual trauma began when I was nine years old and continued until I was 12, and it was something that my stepfather did to me. This was back in the early, early '70s. We didn't have the conversation about sexual abuse that we do now, and I didn't know that it happened to anyone. I thought I was the only person in the world it was happening to. And I was told by my stepfather that if I told anybody, he would kill my brother and my mother, and because he was so much bigger and stronger than me, I mean, anybody at that age would've been bigger and stronger than me, any adult, um, I believed him, and so I didn't tell anybody. After it happened, after my, my mother and he ended up divorcing, and there's a lot of stories around that we don't need to get into, but my abuse was a part of it, but not something that was known to the degree that it, it occurred. Um, and then after that, uh, another partner of my mother's also abused me, but I didn't think that... B- because I didn't know that it had happened to anybody else when I was a little girl, I didn't know how to understand it. The only way that I ultimately found out that it was happening to anybody else was through the Ann Landers advice column in Newsday, where I was... I was living on Long Island and would read dear Ann Landers every day, and one day somebody wrote in about being abused, and I cut out the article and put it under my mattress because suddenly I felt like I, I knew somebody else that, that it was happening to. It wasn't just me. I wasn't a freak. Um, and when I got older, and, you know, talking, you know, 15, 16, 17 years old, at that point I thought, "Well, I'm not gonna let this impact me. I'm not gonna let him win my life. I'm gonna try to have the best life that I could have," not realizing at that young age, as you've mentioned, you know, the body keeps a score. You cannot outrun your own psyche. It is not possible. It is just not possible. Your psyche is too strong to just take those experiences
- 26:58 – 34:08
Debbie’s long-term therapy journey and the power of public truth-telling
- DMDebbie Millman
and sweep them under a rug and never ever look at them again. They come back. And, um, they came back to me when, in, in really sort of signif- in a significant way when a friend of mine died of AIDS, um, in 1990, and he wanted to live so badly, and I was 29 or 30 and feeling like I didn't wanna live. I knew that I couldn't kill myself, but I didn't wanna be living, and the fact that he wanted so badly to live and died really for the first time sent me into, you know, significant therapy, like everyday therapy for three years, and then I've been with that same therapist now since then, so we're going on 30 years of therapy with the same doctor. Now I go twice a week instead of five times a week, but it's been consistent for that entire three decades, and she saved my life. She saved-
- SPSpeaker
Mm
- DMDebbie Millman
... my life, and that work we did saved my life. But back to my experience with you, I still, up until 2017 or 2018 when I was first on your show, I was very, very secretive about my past. I still felt an enormous amount of shame. I still felt that it made me damaged goods. I was not really willing to discuss it with anyone at any length beyond my closest, closest friends and partners, and I hadn't even talked about it at length with my family, who didn't really seem to want to know. I had already started working with the Joyful Heart Foundation, with Mariska Hargitay, who's the star of Law & Order: SVU, and in the Q&A on my bio on the Joyful Heart website, I made a fairly innocuous statement, which was that I felt that being part of the organization made my life make sense, because I was helping to eradicate sexual violence, because I was working to, um, communicate that the rape kit backlog was something that needed to be eradicated. You found-
- SPSpeaker
What is that?
- DMDebbie Millman
... that bio. The rape kit backlog is-
- SPSpeaker
Mm
- DMDebbie Millman
... um, it... whenever anybody is raped now in this country, when they report it, they go to the hospital, and they undertake what is often a multi-hour, often up to 10 or 12 or 14 hours rape kit, which is, uh, where all the DNA evidence is collected. So under your fingernails, hair clippings, your entire body is essentially, is evidence. And so you undergo just a, a forensic, um, cleaning where everything is taken, all the fluids, all the... Ev- every bit of DNA is collected, put into a kit, tested to be able to see if any DNA is already on record for other, other rape victims.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- DMDebbie Millman
And, um, for many, many decades there's been a backlog where those rape kits aren't processed, and some of them were in storage, and there's been hundreds of thousands of rape kits that have been destroyed because they weren't in the correct storage, or they were in buildings that were unclean or unsupervised. And so the Joyful Heart Foundation is working now, right now their main function is to work to eradicate the rape kit backlog in this country. Um, Mariska Hargitay made an Emmy-winning documentary about it called I Am Evidence, which is about the backlog and eradicating that backlog. But you, Tim, when you were-- when, in preparation for our interview, you found that, that little bio of mine on Joyful Heart's website and asked me why working with the Joyful Heart Foundation made my life make sense, and in that moment, I had to decide, do I disclose to Tim's millions and millions of people that are listening audience, or do I lie? [laughs] And I just took one step into the future and told the truth, and that changed my life. Because once you tell the truth, a couple of things happen. First of all, you realize that you're not ostracized by the people that really love you. You are not shamed by speaking your truth, and people do believe you. Now, that's not the case with everyone, but it was the case for me, and I felt as a result of that experience, my life was fundamentally, irrevocably changed, where I am now someone that has this experience as part of who I am, but it's not hidden, and it's not ugly, and it's not loathed. It's just part of who I am now, part of my story. I'm still going through a lot of things, and we can talk about that too, and the reintegration and everything that goes along with it. But, but the idea of hating myself because of this happening, because of what it meant about who I was intrinsically, has fundamentally changed just by the sheer virtue of speaking about it in a public way that isn't hidden anymore. So thank you for that.
- TFTim Ferriss
[sighs] You're so welcome, Debbie, and I feel so grateful for you having done that because the ripple effect, in some ways of that for me personally, is having this conversation with you.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah. And I have to say that not a week goes by where I don't hear from somebody that's listened to that episode and said, "Thank you," that, "That episode changed my life, and I just wanna thank you," and I'm just overwhelmed by being able to do that for anybody.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- DMDebbie Millman
But it is a journey, and, you know, for me, it's been a, a 30-year journey, really more because I did have a good therapist prior to seeing the doctor that I see now, that I've been seeing for the last 30 years, but it just wasn't enough. I needed more clinical help than she was able to provide. And the doctor-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... that I've been with since has that experience. But, you know, it's-- and it's been talk therapy. It hasn't been aided by, um, various other remedies that I've actually been thinking quite a lot about. But because it's talk therapy, talk therapy is an investment. It's really slow, and maybe it's slow for a reason 'cause you can't necessarily integrate as much. Um, I still have, you know, three days ago while talking with my wife and my cousin, had a major realization, just like in the midst of a conversation, like, "Holy shit." Um, [laughs] and, and so, you know, those things happen just because of doing that work for so long, but there's no way to predict when those breakthroughs are gonna happen.
- 34:08 – 39:07
Safety nets first: individualized healing paths and Tim’s warning about intensity
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. I'd love to also take a moment just to say for people listening who either know they have suffered abuse or trauma, right? It doesn't have to be sexual abuse, but some type of trauma, capital T or little T. Number one, it's highly individualized. You can have two veterans who were in the same foxhole in wartime who respond completely differently. So there's no sort of objective scale of or descriptor of events that qualify as trauma or non-trauma. But I'll speak specifically to people who have suffered sexual trauma, and, um, I'll say a few things. The first is, and, and I feel this way about you, Debbie, that a- as someone put it to me once, you have made your trauma part of your medicine-
- DMDebbie Millman
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... meaning that you have the ability to empathize and deeply feel other people. And let's face it, I mean, that's somewhere between like one-sixth and one-quarter of the world's population, if not more.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
You have the b- the ability to empathize and resonate and potentially help people in a way that you would not possess had you not gone through what you went through, if that makes sense. Like it's-
- DMDebbie Millman
Absolutely. Absolutely.
- TFTim Ferriss
And so for me, reframing it as, to say a gift may be too strong, and I don't wanna paint it unilaterally in that way, but to-
- DMDebbie Millman
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... to be able to turn the perspective so that you can see how you can wield it for good as opposed to be contorted by it as a passive experience. It is possible to use this, I think, as a superpower of sorts to really help other people. And for me, helping other people heal has helped me heal, and working on your own healing in turn helps you to help others to heal. So it is a virtuous cycle. It has been, at least for me. And I really want to underscore for people listening that right now in my life, I have more light and joy and compassion and feeling of safety and security and optimism than I've ever had in my life. And that is, for me at least, a product of Different being blessed to find and also having discovered different tools that have been exceptionally, exceptionally helpful, and certainly having someone, in my case, Jack Kornfield, to act as a safety net. And so I wanna, before we discuss some of the things that have helped, 'cause I'd really like to, to offer people some tactical recommendations, and I will put this in the show notes. Everything will be in the show notes for the podcast, and I'll also create a short link, which is tim.blog/trauma with resources. Neither Debbie nor I are medical professionals, so I have to say that, but we can share what has worked for us and been helpful. I would say that for me, deep immersive experiences, and I can speak to different modalities, have been critical in remembering in the conventional sense what happened and also re-membering, right, piecing back together these parts of myself in a, uh, ultimately a really integrative and beautiful way. I mean, certainly more beautiful than viewing myself as a broken toy, some flawed object that was, you know, loathsome. And when you have any of these deep immersive experiences, or perhaps even if you do talk therapy, things can come up very strongly that you may or may not be ready for.
- DMDebbie Millman
Right. Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And for that reason, I was just lucky, very lucky, that I went into this 10-day silent retreat and certainly augmented it with all of these various intensifiers. And what I had done in retrospect was I got on a trapeze without checking the net first, and I was just fucking lucky that Jack happened to be there pulling out the net as I was losing my grip. So I think it's extremely important before you go into any intense, potentially intense or immersive therapy or experiences, that you have someone who is in your corner as a safety net who has experience with handling ideally the type of trauma that you suspect you've gone through, possibly went through, and who is comfortable handling crisis situations. At least that's my perspective, because if I had not had that, honestly, I don't know what would have happened.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, I agree. It's, it's absolutely critical to have people that you trust in your life that can catch you if you need to be caught.
- 39:07 – 43:22
Toolkits Tim found helpful: books, IFS/parts work, somatic approaches, and relationship communication
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. And so I'd love to just list off a few of the things that I've found particularly helpful in the toolkit, and not to imply that these will resonate for all people. But first I'll recommend books, and these were recommended by multiple people. Uh, there are a few. The Drama of the Gifted Child, which is really the drama of the sensitive child. Uh, and I discussed that with Gabor Maté in my podcast with him at one point, or rather he discusses it. Uh, Waking the Tiger, which is Peter Levine. The Body Keeps the Score. And a lot of these relate to what Peter might call somatic experiencing since at two to four, in my case, I'm not cognitively creating spreadsheets and pro and con lists and over-intellectualizing this. It's, it's like a very psycho-emotional and physical experience of trauma. And in my case, at least, tools that approach it from that angle have been very helpful, including psychedelic medicine work, which I'll, I'll touch on in a moment. On the non-psychedelic side, Internal Family Systems, something called IFS, and this is, this is one form of what might be referred to as parts work. The creator, so to speak, of this is Richard C. Schwartz. And, um, the use of IFS in combination with the, [chuckles] the performance-enhancing drugs of trauma work, which I consider psychedelics, such as, uh, psilocybin or what we might call an empathogen like MDMA, and I'll come back to that. IFS looks at the mind, and I'm simplifying here, but as a set of discrete subpersonalities. So you can, in the course of this type of talk therapy, have a conversation with anger, like the part of you that is deeply angry. You can have a conversation amongst these different parts, the part of you that is ashamed, the part of you that is resentful, the part of you that is sad, and you can recognize and fully feel these emotions in a way that was not accessible to me otherwise. And this type of parts work is actually very well implemented by an organization called MAPS, maps.org, in their use of MDMA, which is going through phase three trials right now for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. So for those of you who are familiar with my support of psychedelic science and have wondered about the missing piece, this podcast may explain one of those pieces. A few other things, non-pharmacological, that could be of help to people. Hakomi therapy, H-A-K-O-M-I. And I should say two incredible practitioners of parts work who have done incredible work with MAPS are Michael and Annie Mithoefer. I'll link to these names in the show notes. Hakomi therapy, H-A-K-O-M-I, which is something that I found very helpful for learning to feel again after a lifetime of numbing and dissociation. So as a kid who is, in retrospect, very, very, very sensitive, all of what happened was just such an utter assault on my senses that it obliterated my capacity or desire to feel anything. And it's been a process to relearn how to feel and to embrace that sensitivity as a gift and not just a liability. So Hakomi therapy. In terms of couples work, so helping my partner, my girlfriend, to better understand how this has affected me, Imago therapy, I-M- A-G-O, has been very, very helpful in, uh, effectively explaining how silence or feeling a necessity to self-censor or not speak truth leads me to feel ashamed and dirty and damaged, that I have a very strong need to be able to speak truth, and the cost is very high if I don't. Uh, so any type of self-censoring that feels like silencing, if I feel like I need to withhold or avoid giving feedback, and I don't always have the most non-violent communication style [laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
[laughs]
- 43:22 – 51:44
Bottom-up regulation: HRV training, hypervigilance, and Tim’s cautious discussion of psychedelics and breathwork
- TFTim Ferriss
So, Ima-Imago therapy has been very helpful, as has studying non-violent communication, which people can find quite easily. Just a few more things, and again, I'll put these all in the show notes. Recently, and this is just in the last few months, two things. One is HRV training, that's heart rate variability training, which I've been doing with Dr. Leah Lagos, who is an incredible practitioner, and this involves tracking your heart rate and respiration using feedback devices and working through your physiology. In my case, I'm hyperreactive to any type of stressor, so I have a panic response given my history. And, and there are other types of trauma that I've experienced. I was very badly physically bullied up until sixth grade. I mean, school was absolutely terrifying for me for a long time. That, plus sexual trauma, plus other things, have led me to be very cardiac hyperresponsive. Even a minor disagreement or a loud noise can send my heart rate to 100-plus beats per minute, where it will stay for hours.
- DMDebbie Millman
And that is a very common response, Tim. I have that as well. Um, and a lot of people that have experienced sexual trauma, um, also have that overcompensation in some ways-
- TFTim Ferriss
Totally
- DMDebbie Millman
... of responding to stress, fear, nervousness, um, the unknown. You know, all of that-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- DMDebbie Millman
... triggers a much more robust, uh, chemical response in our bodies.
- TFTim Ferriss
That certainly squares with my experience over decades, and this HRV training has been very surprisingly effective, and what I like about it is that it's turning the more common paradigm of working through words and your psychology to down-regulate your physiology. It's working on physiology first. It's saying, "Let's reverse the arrow of causality, and let's work on physiology to change your psychology." And that's been a real epiphany for me and has helped me to realize when I'm projecting, dissociating, has been a, a real revelation of sorts. So, so that's a new addition, but it's been very powerful. And in combination with advice from a podcast guest, actually, Jim Detmer, who's just incredible and part of the Conscious Leadership Group, who has helped me to utilize a, a lens that I think can be very pragmatic. And I do have part of me that's skeptical of the Enneagram, but there are many people I respect, Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, or I could go through a very long list of names people would recognize who use the Enneagram for preventing conflict and just greasing the wheels of sort of interpersonal communication. There's a book called The Complete Enneagram by Beatrice Chestnut, and I've been very skeptical of the Enneagram because it reads to me often like a, a horoscope of sorts, like astrology. And nonetheless, I was typed, this came after an interview with someone who's qualified to do this, as a what's called a self-preservation six. And there are, there are other aspects to this, but it so well captures the hypervigilance and fear-based orientation that I've had my whole life towards the world and, uh, towards myself, quite frankly, that it has been an incredible complement to the HRV training. And I would say the performance-enhancing drugs that have been layered on top of a number of these and that are also incredibly potent in and of themselves are MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. For purposes of this discussion, because ayahuasca is a very big gun and people can be knocked sideways and destabilized in a way that can last days, weeks, months, in some cases years, I've seen this, so I do speak with some confidence about this. I'm not going to discuss that as a tool. But certainly MDMA and psilocybin, MDMA, uh, which can be thought of as an empathogen, some- a compound that elicits openness, compassion, decreased fear response, self-empathy, right? Empathogen, a generator of empathy, has been given breakthrough therapy designation by the FDA, is being used very successfully to treat people with PTSD that has been unresponsive to treatments for 15 to 20 years. Uh, so anyone who's interested in that, I highly recommend looking at maps.org. And psilocybin, which is thought to be the psychoactive component, at least for our purposes, in psilocybe mushrooms, can also be synthesized, which is being studied for treatment-resistant depression and many other conditions, opiate addiction, nicotine addiction, which is being studied at places like Johns Hopkins, which I support, Imperial College London, which I support, and NYU also, many other places. But those are two tools that when used responsibly with proper facilitation have been literal lifesavers for me also. And, uh, I will say they're very, very powerful compounds not to be taken lightly and that are currently Schedule I, so that means they are, generally speaking, not available for legal consumption. Uh, there are countries in the world where that differs, but I wanna make sure that the caveat is clear. These are very powerful. And what someone might consider if they want to crack the door open to non-ordinary reality in a way that might provide insight into difficult-to-retrieve memories or simply to explore that terrain, there are different types of breathwork, like holotropic breathwork, that can be helpful without any chemical agents to begin to explore this terrain. And even without any type of compound, any type of ingestion of plant medicine or synthetics, these can bring up very powerful experiences that require the safety net I referred to earlier, having a therapist of some type. I'm still a fan of cognitive behavioral therapy. Like I mentioned, IFS, internal family systems. There are a few that I have personally found very helpful. I think somatic experiencing is, has a role to play, a la Peter Levine. And I'm gonna stop there because that's quite the list, and a- anyone who's interested in how I might sequence psychedelics, specifically breathwork, et cetera, should listen to my Blake Mycoskie interview separately. But Debbie, I would be really curious to hear what you recommend when people reach out to you, say, in a very raw place where they've realized perhaps that they have this trauma, that they need to deal with it, but they don't know what to do. What do you say?
- DMDebbie Millman
I say a lot of the things that you're saying about being able to engage with a therapist that will help you through your journey. Now, everybody has their own journey to take. Some people will want to do things that are more conventional, make them feel safer. Some people have a much higher tolerance for risk or the uncertainty of an experience's outcome and will be very comfortable engaging in more alternative paths. And I think it's really important for people to understand that their path to healing is very much their own path to healing in the same way that everybody has their own path to love or success or family. So that is something that is really personal.
- 51:44 – 1:05:42
Debbie on therapy formats, medication realities, and careful medical monitoring
- DMDebbie Millman
I think offering these types of alternatives for people to consider is a gift so that people can really investigate what they're most comfortable experiencing and undertaking. For me, when I first started my journey, I was desperate for help, and through a friend, she recommended a therapist, and for the first six years of my therapy, and that was in my 20s prior to engaging with the doctor I have now, I was doing group therapy. I was doing individual therapy. I was doing some family therapy. It wasn't as rigorous as what I ultimately went towards, but I actually don't think I would've been ready for a five-day analysis, which is what I first engaged with, um, relational therapy, had I not had that prior six years of beginning to reveal who I was and why I was who I was. So for me, that six years of less medical therapy, I guess [laughs] that would be the way to put it, um, was really beneficial to me. And then in 1991 when I started my therapy, the kind of therapy I'm on, in now, that started as five days a week, then four, then three, and now two.
- TFTim Ferriss
How long did you do the five days a week before you went to four, and how long the four days a week before you went to three? Just guesstimating.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, absolutely. Um, I did five days a week for, um, three years, and I did it on my lunch break. I actually found a therapist very, very serendipitously that was within walking distance to my office at the time and did that, walked to therapy and then walked back to work. And so it was a 45-minute session, so my lunch break was an hour and a half, and I did that for three years. It was enormously expensive. I was completely broke as a result. It took all of my resources to manage this, but it saved my life.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- DMDebbie Millman
And so when people talk about the cost of therapy, I like to think about it more as an investment in your life. And if this is going to make your life better, if it's going to make it more integrated, if it's gonna make it healthier, then why would you wanna spend your money on anything else [laughs] but that? So I did that for three years, and then I went down to four, and I think I did four times a week for, um, about another year or so and then did three times a week for the bulk of my therapy, I would say for probably 20-plus years.
- TFTim Ferriss
And in those early sessions, what did those look like? And, and I'm asking as someone who's done very little talk therapy because I've had an aversion to words in a sense, rightly or wrongly, because I know friends who have really been saved by Talk therapy. What did a, or might a session look like? What do you talk about? What's the format?
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah. I mean, I think for me, and it's so interesting, you know, the different responses people and bodies have to their trauma, I [laughs] have often joked, and maybe it's not really that funny, but I, I position it-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
... as a joke that, that I am just a head. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
And that I'm not... My head is, has, it's been a, uh, I- I don't know that my head is even still fully connected to my body. I am very cerebral. And, you know, my wife knows this, my former partner, Maria Popova, we joke about it all the time, um, that I just love to talk. I, I am a talker.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
I like to analyze everything, and being connected to my body is much, much harder for me. And so I'm very comfortable face-to-face with someone, looking at them, looking into their eyes, and engaging intellectually and verbally. Being connected to my body is still, still something I struggle with, Tim.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- DMDebbie Millman
And so initially, the therapy that I think my therapist was, was hoping I'd get to would be facing away from her on a sofa, sort of very old-fashioned in a lot of ways because then you can really engage with your subconscious in a, in a much faster way. You're not looking at someone's face to analyze their response. People like you and I, who are highly empathetic, often will organize the way that we speak, what we say based on almost imperceptible facial recognition patterns that we understand. And to disengage with that allows you to go deeper into your own self-conscious to not be assessing what the response is and how you are engaging with that response while you're responding. There's a whole set of clinical responses and engagements that happen when you're speaking body language, facial patterns that we assess really quickly, that we... You know, that gift that you were talking about before, we have that, and, and quite a lot of people that have gone through intense trauma have this ability to almost be able to calibrate the energy around someone to be able to assess how we could best respond to them for their comfort. Um, I was unable to do that. I needed to be face-to-face, and still to this day. So now I'm- I've been doing my therapy for over a decade now, probably n- maybe close to a decade online. And she, my therapist, sort of retired from her big-time practice and now has a much smaller practice, and I'm still working with her. And so we do the therapy over Skype, and we've been doing that for as long as Skype exists. And, um, that's been really helpful as well. I don't need to be in person, um, but I do need to be face-to-face, and so that's still something that is really important to me. That's also, I think, part of why my podcast has been as successful, one, because most of my... Up until COVID, all of my episodes have been face-to-face. I look deeply into a person and feel them and experience them in a way that I can't really replicate any other way. So in any case, the first, those first therapy sessions were just a matter of allowing myself to fully break down, which is why when Brian died, I was in therapy at that point, but then did go much deeper after that because at that point, I needed to go on some pharmaceutical antidepressants, or my therapist was gonna recommend that I, um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Can you just remind me and listeners of who Brian is?
- DMDebbie Millman
Oh, Brian is the friend that I mentioned that died of AIDS. He desperately wanted to live. I was perfectly healthy in my body, you know, clinically, but didn't wanna live anymore, but n- didn't feel like I could ever take my life, but did no longer wanted to be living, so b- sort of became a bit paralyzed in my ability to engage with the world. So at that point, my therapist suggested that I either begin to think about an antidepressant to help calibrate my emotions or to be admitted to a hospital. And so I decided to try, I went on an anti-anxiety medication, and then at that point, started on Prozac. Prozac takes about six weeks to really kick in, um, so that was a, a really rough six weeks, but it did help take a bit of the edge of the despair away. I think a lot of people don't fully understand what antidepressants do. They don't make you happy. [laughs] They're not in any way happy pills, but they are able to give you a sense of the bottom of your despair in a way that not being on them did for me. I'm just gonna talk about me. And so it allowed me to feel like there was a bottom to the despair, so I didn't feel like I was falling through the ether and was going to just end up crashed on the ground.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm so glad we're having this conversation, and I wanna speak to something you just mentioned, which is that onset period for many SSRIs where you, you have a period of A handful of weeks before which the effects can be felt.
- DMDebbie Millman
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
That can be a very dangerous period for people if they are suffering from suicidal ideation, fantasizing about suicide, perhaps planning suicide. And I will say in such cases, and I don't recommend this much, but ketamine can be a very effective acute treatment for stopping loops of suicidal ideation. It can be very effective, uh, intramuscularly or intravenously. There are clinics that provide this in the US. It's, uh, generally very well-tolerated. It's a very well-studied compound because it's an, it's a dissociative anesthetic that has been used for many, many years, uh, and, uh, is on the World Health Organization list of most essential medicines. So for those who are in a very acute dark place that may not allow them to last those weeks until SSRIs have their felt effects, uh, I would just mention that as a potential intermediate sort of stopgap lifeboat for people.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah. And I did have a, a medication that I took in that six weeks to help me as well, and-
- TFTim Ferriss
Great
- DMDebbie Millman
... and that did help. Now, I also wanna let people know that sometimes antidepressants can stop working. So I started taking Prozac in 1991, and then in 2003, inexplicably, it stopped working, and I went back into a place where I no longer wanted to be alive. And for me, it wasn't about, "I'm going to kill myself now," it was just a matter of being unable to exist in any real-world experience. I was in my home, in bed, unable to move, and unable to do anything. One of my dearest friends at, who, who's no longer alive, but she would come to my house and hope that I wasn't dead. I didn't want to kill myself, I just didn't want to be alive. And so at that point, I then went back into sort of an emergency situation with my psychopharmacologist, who then prescribed Zoloft. And I started taking Zoloft, and I've been on Zoloft ever since, and that works much quicker. You start to feel that within three days. Um, you actually do feel your brain being impacted by this drug. It's a very different experience than Prozac, and did feel, my brain actually felt like it was moving. And then we worked on the right dosage, and I've been on that dosage ever since. Um, but it is really important when you're engaging with any type of pharmaceutical to not only be working with your therapist and your psychologist, but also to be working with a psychopharmacologist, who is a medical doctor who is going to prescribe medicine based on your body type, your body chemistry. And then inasmuch as I'm still taking the same dosage, I have to have twice yearly appointments with him to make sure that I'm still on the right medication and the right dosage. So it's very important to be monitored by a, a medical doctor when engaging with any pharmaceutical drugs.
- TFTim Ferriss
And do not stop anything cold turkey.
- DMDebbie Millman
Absolutely. Absolutely.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's really important.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah. Having the right medication is really important. Some people work really well with Wellbutrin. I know a lot of people on Wellbutrin. The original potential drug for me was Wellbutrin, and I felt like I was going to die [laughs] on Wellbutrin. Did not work well for me at all. I actually felt like I might have a psychotic break. And so I did have to stop taking that. So there is a time where... And some people have to have a different cocktail of drugs. I know quite a number of people, because I'm open about taking antidepressants, I know I talk about it a lot with people, and there are people that have to take two or three different types of antidepressants to get the right chemistry. Mental illness is a brain problem that has to be investigated as a way to regain the right brain chemistry, and that is something that is not always easy to find.
- 1:05:42 – 1:34:41
Suicidal ideation, “ending the loop,” and being believed when someone discloses trauma
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. I'd like to speak to, to something you said earlier, which is, I think, important, at least it has been important for me to unpack as someone who almost committed suicide in 1999, and that is you said you didn't wanna die, but you didn't wanna live.
- DMDebbie Millman
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
And an observation that was drawn for me by Stanislav Grof, who's a psychotherapist, not sure he would consider himself a psychotherapist. I'm not sure what label he would apply, but very experienced psychotherapist who's supervised thousands of sessions over his 80-plus years of life involving psychotherapy and also assisted psychotherapy with compounds like LSD and other things. And I'm gonna paraphrase this, but he said that a desire to kill oneself can be thought of as a desire to destroy your physical body, but it's not a desire to destroy your, your physical body, it's a desire to kill your ego and to stop the loops that you're experiencing.
- DMDebbie Millman
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right? It's, it's, it's a desire, at least for me, d- desire for some type of relief from the relentless looping of these thought patterns that seemingly would not stop. Just like being in the impact zone in the ocean where you're getting hit by wave after wave after wave. I just wanted the waves to stop, and the only option- That I felt was available was to take my own life, which thankfully I did not do. People can hear my TED Talk for kinda how that unfolded, but the part that was left out of the TED Talk is that I had planned to kill myself. I had the exact plan laid out. I knew exactly how and when I was gonna do it, and by sheer luck, I had requested a book dealing with suicide from Firestone Library at Princeton, and I had forgotten to change my mailing address. I was away from school. I was taking a time away from school, which, surprise, surprise, was recommended by the administration because they don't want a suicide on their watch if someone seems mentally unstable. And I had forgotten to change the mailing address to where I was then living off campus, so a postcard, when the book was available, went home to my parents, and my mom got the postcard, and she called me with a very shaky voice and asked me about it, and that snapped me out of it because I had only been thinking about really myself and the impact that it would have on me. I was so stuck in my own loops that I had not thought about the impact it would have on other people, and as someone later put to me, you know, killing yourself is like taking your pain times 10 and inflicting it on the people who love you the most. So that snapped me out of it, but that was so lucky, so lucky. If, if you think about how that would've turned out differently now, it would've been an email or some type of notification that I would've archived, and I would not be here. So I came very, very close, and at the time, it's because I viewed the only option for extinguishing the loop was to kill myself, and what I've learned since is that it is possible, and I'm not a hammer looking for the nail in the sense that I'm not recommending these tools for everyone. They do not address everything. They have risks. They have side effects, but tools like ketamine, tools like psilocybin, in some cases with trauma, MDMA for PTSD with qualified facilitators and therapists allow you to do what I so desperately wanted without killing yourself.
- DMDebbie Millman
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
And so I wanna just emphasize to people, if you feel that you're fatally flawed in a way that dooms you to unhappiness and self-loathing and a desire to kill yourself, don't believe everything that you think because as I learned later, even though that seemed true in the moment, that is not true. There are tools and options available to you. You know, Debbie, one thing I'd love to ask you is, are there any books or resources or organizations that you've found particularly helpful or that you've recommended to people that they've found helpful?
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, and Tim, I just wanna caveat. I know that, um, I was talking to Roxanne about a book that we've both been really helped by, and it's called The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yep.
- DMDebbie Millman
But I've heard since that there's, that there's some problematic issues in that, and I don't know if it's because of the way that they talk about trans. I don't know. Um, so that book was enormously helpful to me, as was, um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... Bessel van der Kolk's books. They still-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- DMDebbie Millman
... continue to be helpful, and I'm happy to, to say that sort of separately again so that it's good for the podcast, but I, I don't know. I... Let me look into what issues there might be because I don't want to give anybody information that, or, or recommend a book that, that's problematic for any reason.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, uh, and I'll also say, we can put the, we can put any disclaimer in the show notes for people.
- DMDebbie Millman
Okay.
- TFTim Ferriss
The Courage to Heal workbook has also been sent to me, and it was recommended by someone with a lot of in-the-trenches experience working with trauma survivors. I will confess that I did not actually have the stomach to go into it because I was coming off six months of very deep-
- DMDebbie Millman
Right [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... intense work and-
- DMDebbie Millman
Yes
- TFTim Ferriss
... just could not even digest the possibility of going through [laughs] 200 or 300-page workbook.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I have not cracked it, but it was recommended by someone who I respect tremendously as a clinician, so we can put that in the list.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, definitely. I mean, The Drama of the Gifted Child is a book that I also read. When I... So, so I, a- as, as I mentioned earlier, the first sort of 25, up till about I was about 23, 24, I was in this mode of, "This didn't impact me. I'm not gonna let this, uh, destroy my life. I'm not gonna let him win. This is something I'm gonna overcome and have the best possible life for," and I think a lot of people feel that way, and then it comes, everything comes crashing down. And I ended up at a party, um, it was about a year or two after I graduated college, and somebody that I admired a great deal heard about a job that I had gotten and said to me, "Oh, Debbie, I'm so jealous of you," and I just stood there and looked at him and thought, "How could he possibly be jealous of me? I'm the, the most disgusting, ugliest, uh, unworthy person on the planet," and that's when I decided I needed to go into therapy for the first time, and when I did, the gates opened. They really did. I remember being at, um, at the, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music watching Einstein on the Beach, and something triggered me in that performance, and I went home and spent two days in bed just weeping, um, at, at who I was and what I was in my life, and at that point really tried every possible, at that point, this is the '80s now we're talking about, every possible book, workshop, nutritionists, um, any, any way that I could find to try to be better, to try to feel better, to try to change who I was, and, um, a lot of it was sort of trying at that time for quick fixes. You know, I didn't want to Have to, I, it, the idea at that point, if anybody told me at that point that I would be 58 years old as I am now still working on these things, I, I might have packed it in, you know? [laughs] I was like, "Why do I have to deal with something that occurred in the first 18 years of my life for the rest of my life?" But that's, those are the cards that I was dealt, and my brain developed in the way that it did with the neural pathways that it did, with the panic response that it has. And what I can say is that with all the resources that I've undertaken, they're all worth it in some way, shape, or form because they are all moving you forward to a path that isn't completely, um, catastrophized by what happened to you in, in your early, in the earlier part of your life, and gives you a way to recreate different neural pathways that lead you to the way that you wanna live your life and the way that you wanna think about your life in a way that's healthier.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- DMDebbie Millman
Um, so, so some of the books that I read in my 20s and 30s, Ellen Bass' The Courage to Heal, and her accompanying book, workbook, um, The Drama of the Gifted Child, which as you said is the gifted child is really the more sensitive child or is a sensitive child. Um, Bessel van der Kolk's books, website, resources, anything that he's written, um, has helped me, um, because of h- where we do keep the score, which is in the body. And in addition to my journey as a businesswoman, as an entrepreneur, as a brand consultant and strategist, as a podcaster, as an artist, a writer, an illustrator, whatever it is, there's always this parallel path of being a person that's looking to understand my motivations, my place in the world, my purpose, my trauma, and how I can integrate all of that together so that anything I do in my life isn't just a response to the trauma, isn't just, "I'm doing this to feel productive in the world because I felt so meaningless. I'm doing this to feel meaning because I don't have any sense of who I am." And that's something that I think I might be doing for the rest of my life at this point. But for me, it's trying to find comfort and contentment about who I am and doing what I do because I love doing it, and not because I feel that if I don't do it, I'm nothing.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's really important. It, it's extremely important, and it, it's, it resonates with a... I suppose it was a realization that I ha- that I had prompted by something that Tara Brach either said or wrote. Tara Brach, very well-known mindfulness teacher.
- DMDebbie Millman
Absolutely.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'll simplify her-
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah, absolutely
- 1:34:41 – 2:20:01
Anger, forgiveness, confrontation, and reframing trauma into connection and purpose
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. I agree. And y- I've felt very conflicted about revealing or not revealing the name of the perpetrator, because I know exactly who this person is. And at least for now, I've decided not to do it. I thought-
- DMDebbie Millman
Have you thought about confronting them?
- TFTim Ferriss
... about doing otherwise. I have, and I, I don't think, at least at this point, that I, I don't think I'm going to do it. Um, uh, I, and, uh, if, if he happens to be listening, don't worry, at least a few people know who you are. So if anything happens to me [laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, there, there is a, uh, there, there are a few things locked in the vault. But the, the reason that I decided not to is because I don't want rage or vindication or vigilante justice to be what drives me, and that rage has been my default for decades, right? I mean, I've, I've always wanted to return vengeance upon anyone who harms me or attacks me tenfold, right? I mean, smashing flies with a sledgehammer. And I no longer want that to be a driver for me. So I've, I've, I've really tried to look at it, and I know this will make some people cringe, but I mean, I don't know how old this son was when it happened. Maybe, I don't know, 10, 12, 14. I really don't know exactly. But it makes me wonder what happened to this kid also, right? There is a... I, I mean, this is before the internet. So it's just like, how, how would that behavior even manifest, right? And it's, uh, I'm not trying to wade into moral relativism where I say it's okay. It's absolutely not okay. It's completely fucked and atrocious and damaging. But I've, I've tried to look at it through multiple perspectives.
- DMDebbie Millman
I actually have confronted my, one of my perpetrators.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right. Right.
- DMDebbie Millman
Um, and it didn't quite have the result that I was hoping and expecting.
- TFTim Ferriss
Could you speak to what you expected and what happened?
- DMDebbie Millman
Sure. And I also, I wrote a short story about it called The Man, which I'll, I'll send you a link to as well. Um, well, um, I had a person in my life at the time that I was seeing. This is before I came out. I didn't come out until I was 50. Um, so at the, before 50, I was, uh, primarily dating men and had been married. Uh, but I was, I was seeing someone. I had re- Engaged with somebody that I had been, um, who was a high school boyfriend, and this was when... This was, um, 20 years ago. 20 years ago this happened. And I- he knew about my history, and because at the time, um, my stepfather was still living on Long Island where, near where I grew up, um, I was able easily to find him. And so, um, my, my then boyfriend and I, um, went to his house. My boyfriend was, was rather, um, was, was a bodybuilder, so he was somebody that I felt-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
... could protect me.
- TFTim Ferriss
Help- helpful en-
- DMDebbie Millman
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, help- helpful enforcer to have.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of a, a, a complicated cast of characters, which I'll- I'll talk a little bit about more once I finish this part. But, um, I decided that with his sort of physical presence, I, I might feel safe going to his, to, to his house, to the stepfather's house, and ringing the bell and saying what I needed to say. Um, so I did, and I remember it very vividly. You know, this, as you mentioned, it's just really extraordinary what we remember and what we forget. But I, I rang his bell. I was wearing a yellow coat and a black beret, and it was the fall, and the air was very crisp. And I rang the bell, and his third wife answered the phone... I mean, uh, came to the door, answered the bell, and I asked if he was there, and she looked at me skeptically. You know, "Who are you, asking for my husband?" And I said, well, I was, um, that my mother had been married to him years and years and years ago, and I was his stepdaughter. She then thought I was like a prodigal daughter coming back for reconnection and, and family. She didn't know why I was there. She, she only saw this as a positive thing. So she squealed. She was like, "Oh my God, that's amazing. Come in." And I said, "No, no, actually, it's okay. I'd like to, to stay here out on the stoop," and, you know, "Is your husband home?" And she's like, "Yes," and she, like, yells for him, and she's so excited. She- He comes walking over, and he looks at me, and I looked at the wife and I said, "Can I, can I have a few minutes with your husband by myself?" She's like, "Absolutely, of course. You sure you don't wanna come in?" I'm like, "No, no, I'm good." And she scampers away, and she then yells in the background, you know, "Let me know if you'd like some coffee." [laughs] You know? It's just, like, surreal. So not what-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... I expected, Tim. So then he looks at me, and I said, "Do you know who I am?" And I, I think he maybe was a little bit senile. I don't know. At that point he was probably 70. No, 60, 65 or so. And he said, "You're [beep] daughter." I said, "That's right. Do you remember what you did to me?" And he didn't say anything, just kept staring at me with the exact same eyes. He was much heavier, and he had a beard, but he was... He had the same exact hands, and I was so scared, Tim. I was scared.
- TFTim Ferriss
It sounds so fucking intense.
- DMDebbie Millman
I was so scared. My heart was beating. I could hear it in my ears. And I said, "Do you remember what you did to me?" And he just said, "You're [beep] daughter." That's all he said, again. And all I could say, and it wasn't strong enough, and it wasn't what I wanted exactly to say, but I was so nervous, and everything had stopped, like time stopped, and the only thing that was moving forward was my heartbeat, and I just said, "You're gonna burn in hell for what you did to me." And then I walked away, and I left. And there's this really dumb movie called The Specialist with Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone, and she has quite a lot of vengeance in the movie to make up for her parents being killed by this drug dealer. And at the end of the movie, Sylvester Stallone says, after they've been vigilantes and killed everybody, he says, "How do you feel?" She says, "Better." [laughs] You know?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- DMDebbie Millman
And I, and, and I relate to that so much. Like, how do, how did you feel? Like, better, but, you know, not, not, not that much better that it changed anything about how I felt about myself. And that, again-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... that work still had to be done by me and only me. [laughs] But-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- DMDebbie Millman
... I still keep tabs on him. I know exactly where he lives. I've looked on Google Maps. Um, I keep track of him, but I haven't ever felt the need to do anything more.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's a very intense story, Debbie.
- DMDebbie Millman
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Um, I would be worried that I would kill him.
- DMDebbie Millman
Yeah.
Episode duration: 2:20:11
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