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Chef AJ: How to Move on From Your Past | Interview with Dr Jen Howk
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your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people just like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about back by popular demand my guest today is dr jen hawk she actually was on a surprise bonus broadcast on thursday which i'll link to in the show notes with dr michael greger from hawaii if you'd like to see that and at the very end i asked her a question that she knew was not going to be able to answer in five minutes so she agreed to come back today to talk at length about this subject and we're calling today getting past your past and these ideas may not be popular with everyone but i encourage you to listen to them with an open mind and and see what dr hawk has to say so when i've helped try to help people with weight loss when i used to do private coaching most of them came to me and said that the reason that they were overweight today is because of something that happened in their long ago past often it was a trauma physical sexual emotional abuse and they cited that as the reason that they first became overweight and why it was so difficult to lose weight and their adulthood and we hear this all the time and we had a few questions that came in and i'll read both questions now and then i won't talk the rest of the broadcast and i'll turn it over to dr hawk and i know she has some slides but i will re-read the the question that i asked and then the new one that came in actually from a doctor about this subject they're slightly different but on the same topic so emily had said that in one of the healthy living videos that there was talk about how past trauma had nothing to do with emotional eating and it's simply an excuse to be stuck in the pleasure trap she was wondering how self-love comes into play here if healing past traumas has nothing to do with getting out of the pleasure trap why is it that when people make an effort to love themselves more forgive themselves for past mistakes and be kinder to themselves that this often results in better motivation and therefore better self-control because for her self-love often comes with confronting the past and setting the intention to let go of it which relieves a lot of emotional pressure and then another i'll put my glasses on for this one uh the the question that was sent in by a doctor was saying that her mother and three of her sisters were all molested as children her mother also faced abusive caretakers who would change the refrigerator so that she could not eat my entire life i have seen my mother and sisters battle with food i suppose i just want to understand why that is if i use the logic behind the pleasure trap and family habits then it does make complete sense i left that family in my 20s and vowed that i would never allow food to have that much power over me but this doesn't mean that i didn't battle with other bad habits and then she goes on to say that um would you mind asking dr hawk to address the harvard study addressing adverse childhood experiences in particular that are linked to chronic health conditions and they leave they have all these things called the ace first childhood experience when i was looking at the list dr hawk except for incarceration of a household member i had like every single one of them so i'm going to now turn it over to you and please talk as long as you like about this important subject sounds good well um yeah i'm really glad to address this this comes up all the time with um you know when i i talk to clients when doc when i work with dr lyle and he talks to clients this is just it's a common set of incomplete understandings about what it is that makes us who we are and why we struggle with the things that we struggle with whether it's weight or anything else in life um and and really this is you know we could we could go on about this for hours and we actually do on our website if people people find themselves interested in this and they want like the full there's four hours of the background of the sort of the evolution of psychology uh and how it how it has these roots and freudian ideas that have taken us really away from how things really work and the behavioral genetics revolution and why it's still sort of um unappreciated and misunderstood and misapplied so i can only get into like the very very superficial top layer of this today and i'm going to try my best not to take the entire hour because i know people are going to have questions and i really want to try to address things but that means i'm going to be covering a lot of ground really quickly i also i often get criticized for speaking pretty fast and that's a grad school legacy i um when you when you go to grad school you have to you have to fight to get your ideas heard in a seminar so um i i tend to do that but you can always slow down the recording and repeat things and reach out to me and ask any questions to clarify um because i just want to sort of give people an overview of what it is that really makes you who you are um and and where trauma fits into that and where if you have a high a score as i do i have quite a high a score as most people in my family do what that really what that really means and the difference between um correlation and causation and just a bunch of different things so i'm gonna i'm gonna try to get some of these slides to uh play to walk us through this and let's see if the technology gods are with us today share the screen oh good it says unknown let's see if that works oh yeah of course i'm gonna have a glitch it's uh it's asking me to change my preferences let me check zoom okay you are worth waiting for oh yeah appreciate you being here it looks like i might actually have to quit zoom and come back is that going to screw us up can you keep recording i i don't think it was like you know you never know so yeah i mean i know that have been people have been knocked off zoom when they come back so yeah we can certainly try i certainly can't address this topic but i can entertain the troops while you're while you're okay entertainment i'll quit and come right back i'll click the same link i think it just i need to give it permission to share so okay this is what happens when we don't test it ahead of time we should that's true we've just then i can just i can just talk about it so okay great okay all right so here we go you're back already nope nope nope i'll be right back so hey everybody hey we see it for some we have some some superstars watching today you know who you are and you're all superstars in my opinion so i didn't expect to be on a loan so let's see i'll tell you who's up for the week that's a great idea here i've got a great week coming up why don't i tell you guys now you know if you're on my mailing list you get an email every few days we try not to do every day but two or three times a week to tell you who the guests are so tomorrow we have dr doug lyle it is totally a coincidence that they're back to back again that we didn't plan it they just looked at their schedule next month they come back together oh she's coming back okay let's let's hope that that worked i think it's because it's like it's recording so i had to give her permission to record um all right let's see yay all right did that work can you see my i can yes perfect okay all right so this this title that i gave this today is getting past your past why your childhood adversity is not why you are overweight slash underweight slash alcoholic slash depressed underemployed slash over stress slash divorce anxious slash successful slash miserable or anything else and anybody who's a big fan of the movie office space as i am will recognize milton down there um being all upset that he was told there would be a sense of accomplishment that you know things he could have been somebody things haven't gone the way that he wanted okay so like i said this is going to be an absolute whirlwind tour through a whole lot of information but we're going to cover as much ground as we can here so the fundamental question that we're really beginning from today is what makes us who we are you know you if you're an adult who is struggling with your weight you're struggling with keeping a relationship you're struggling with holding down a job why is it that you have these issues and and we we are rooted in a paradigm that was established in the late 19th century by this guy this is this is of course sigmund freud um and his ideas that he came up with at that time really continue to inform contemporary psychological thinking and i do want to just stress for people who are watching this who don't know who i am or don't aren't familiar with what i've talked about i am not a clinical psychologist i am not out here you know giving you advice as a clinical psychologist my phd is in social science and political science specifically and this is all my independent research into these questions um and my sort of intersection with them through my social science work so um you know you you dr lyle is a clinical psychologist and you can always speak to him if you uh you have specific questions about that my work is as a as a coach with these principles um but i like to take pains because sometimes people get confused and get upset that i'm calling myself a psychologist and i really am not but i do want to critique the field from where i sit in the research that i've done so you'll recognize dr phil here dr phil is sort of a modern day freud the basic idea of freud if anybody has ever ever been to a therapist usually the experience that most people have in the therapeutic environment and the way that it has emerged into our culture and all the self-help industry is this kind of tell me about your childhood kind of paradigm like what went wrong in your childhood to derail you from who you could have been and gave you the baggage that you have today this is just such a common idea that it really represents the conventional wisdom of how we approach um the issues that we have as adults and dr lyle and i call this the bruised banana theory so i put the banana next to dr phil because these are basically the same kind of thing that you were in principle this this unblemished banana and bad things happened to you and permanently bruised you and now you're damaged and if only those things hadn't happened that you would have been a different kind of banana you would have been you would have been just fine and it's the issues that it's it's the circumstances of your early life that took you off of that path um and this kind of thinking has its origins in freud freud in his clinical work very long ago um started to identify these concepts and these we explain all of this uh sort of the the lineage of this thinking in our four-hour human nature series on our website esteemeddynamics.com um but for the purposes of this talk uh the freud's ideas got a big boost um from the the ideas of learning theory and the the work of conditioning that pavlov did with dogs people have heard about how pavlov had these dogs that would drool they would anticipate their food coming when they they learned to associate it with the sound of a bell ringing so this kind of idea that we could shape behavior with these little with training and these cues and link these kind of things together became this very intuitive notion of of who we become as adults that we become in the words of many psychologists including dr phil um this uh you know the sum total of our experiences this is a very intuitive notion of what shapes us and what gives us the issues that we have um so this is i love this cartoon i know he cheated on me because of his childhood abuse but i shot him because of mine as this guy says in the courtroom so this is kind of the everybody has these these experiences they give us our adult issues they shape the way that we see the world and um are really responsible for how we behave uh almost everybody believes that this is true it's it's intuitive uh it has been repeated by over a century of work in the self-help and personal development arena and it continues to be really ascendant in the work of people like dr phil and other people who work in the space so it's all very intuitive it seems very plausible that this is what would make us who we are but it turns out that it is really just fundamentally not true so this is a photo of a fellow named robert ploman who wrote a book called blueprint in 2018 that dr lyle and i will talk about a lot on on our website and on our podcast beat your genes um robert plummen is one of the founding researchers in i don't have time to get into all of it today but the these monozygotic twin studies that began in the 1980s where if we really want to understand who where people's personality comes from and where their issues come from one of the most robust and powerful ways to do that is to essentially control for genes by taking identical twins who were raised in different environments separated at birth and raised in very different families and find out how similar are those twins as they grow up despite the fact that they have very different childhood experiences and from now decades of this this identical twin research that has been replicated again and again and there are over 15 million pairs that have been studied now we know this is really established that the nature nurture debate is actually very settled in the science it is nature it is not nurture that these twins despite the fact that you raise them in very very different environments and some have traumatic experiences and others don't some are given every advantage and others aren't that over time the twins really converge on similar measures of everything that you you could look at from personality to educational attainment to successful marriage and then of course all the other fun little things that you find that twins share when they meet each other after being separated where they they drive the same car and their house is the same color and their wife has the same name and all of these really interesting little traits um so we we know from the twin studies and ploman really was one of the he was he was a founding member of the cohort that devised those twin studies um corroborated later by adoption studies as well and he is a behavioral geneticist and psychologist who lives in the uk now he trained um at the university of texas so his book blueprint is kind of the we we think dr lyle and i really look at ploman sort of as the mcdougall of behavioral genetics he is decades ahead of his time he has been telling us how this really is since the 1980s and in psychology as a as a discipline and everybody in in the dietary and self-help arena has just been systematically ignoring this information because it's a little uncomfortable and because it doesn't it's not very compatible with what they're trying to sell you essentially um but ploman is really this is the this is the truth of how it works so this quote is from blueprint and this gives us some context for what we're dealing with he says genetic research has shown that environmental influences are idiosyncratic stochastic and unsystematic in a word random our experiences matter but they do not fundamentally change who we are we would essentially be the same person if we were cloned and our clone grew up in a different family went to a different school and had different friends okay so that sounds pretty dramatic right this is almost a sort of genetic determinism that that you're going to be exactly the same person if you share genes with them so it's more nuanced than that and we're going to talk about a little bit of that but the the idea that the what this what i want people to focus on is that the environmental influences are idiosyncratic they're unsystematic those environmental influences are the non-genetic components of who it is that you are they are the things that happen to you and this includes things that are going to drive up your ace score the adversity that you face in your childhood the traumatic events that is part of the environment part of the nurture effect that is creating who you are but that is not having systematic effects on your life over time it has passing unsystematic ephemeral effects it can it can change your perception of how to how to live your life in the moment but it doesn't permanently change your personality so this is very it's a subtle point but i really want to try to drive this home to help people understand it we're going to get more into this so this is a very stylized extremely scientific pie chart this is i put this together to kind of um give people a sense of what most of the behavioral genetics literature is converging on as far as uh any given trait that we could measure and what what creates that the expression of that trait so this is this is a topic called heritability so heritability is a precise term that is really talking about what percentage of the variation in the population is is explained by genetic variation and heritability is is slippery and it can change over time and it's subject to a lot of different different ideas but this is the basic notion here so in most traits whether it is um a personality trait or something like obesity or something like your likelihood to get divorced um they they converge around 50 straight up genetic we we can just trace the the heritability of that trait is very clearly usually somewhere between 30 and 70 genes so this little stylized pie is just sort of on average we're going to say that most traits are 50 heritable um and some are much more summer some are a little less um the rest of that this is where people kind of go awry they're like oh well if it's 50 genes that means the other 50 is nurture and so i have lots of control over how my children turn out and conversely my childhood had 50 percent influence on how i turned out but that's that's not what this means because the only piece of this pie that is really your childhood or your the parenting that you were exposed to or the the the sort of systematic shared what's called the shared environment is the little yellow section the little nurture section it's a very very very small piece of the pie the rest of it is these chance events the ephemeral non-shared events that ploman is talking to talking about um which can include traumatic events but this is everything this is everything over the course of your of your life and any particular event or any particular uh non-shared characteristic usually in most of these studies it explains one or two percent of the the variance in the distribution of the trait so even if it seems very extreme in your narrative history when we actually look at it and we control it over the population and we try to figure out how much of the variation in obesity is being explained by something like childhood trauma it's maybe one or two percent of the variance and the rest of that variance of something like obesity is between 70 and 80 genetic so this is and then the rest is all other little things that add up that are uncontrollable random and don't have long-term effects so this is really how people need to be thinking about this that it's it's much more um complex and nuanced than they're used to thinking about it it's it's but the the the determining um course that your childhood puts you on is much much much smaller than we have an intuition that it's going to be so this is just some sort of just to give people a notion of the the general heritability of various things that we think about so if if eye color were um a hundred percent heritable there would be no effect of the environment or anything that happened to to as far as what kind of nutrition you had what kind of trauma you were exposed to anything early in life or later in life that could change your eye color and of course things can change your eye color stress intense childhood stress malnutrition all these things could affect eye color or height height is only eighty percent uh heritable so there are these these influences that can change these outcomes um but there's still there's there's a lot of genes in the mix here so uh we've got weight usually is put at seventy percent heritable something like autism 70 school achievement how well uh any any given child does in school the level of education that they attain 60 heritable and then something like breast cancer 10 heritable so people often have um a sense they kind of get these backwards they think that the most heritable things are not heritable and at the least are are very heritable um so this is just to give people a little context for that okay so this is we're moving into a real big principle in um in science which is that correlation does not equal causation people may have heard this before but may not have a sense of what it really means and this is why responding in particular to the ace scores and to the the way that people kind of put together things it seems like the things that happened in my past seem to have ha it just seems logical that they would have this influence on how things turn out in the present or the future it seems this is very plausible we've got lots of observational evidence that seems to corroborate it but we are we're falling into this correlation causation error this cartoon kind of illustrates how we can get into this mistake so this guy's looking at this data pattern saying everybody who went to the moon has eaten chicken and this other guy says oh my god that's such a strong correlation that a good grief chicken makes you go to the moon when obviously this is this is funny it's a joke because clearly there are there's something else that is driving this data pattern it's not the fact that these people have eaten chicken that makes them likely to go to the moon it's that they are adults who grew up in a certain period of history at a certain level of socioeconomic status and had access to chicken that it's like there are all kinds of different ways we could explain this so this is a correlation the people that you have the same value that that moves in tandem with each other but it's not one is not causing the other so when we observe that things seem to happen in this kind of relationship we just as humans we're we're pattern detectors we're always trying to come up with a story to explain what we're looking at it's part of what's made us very successful throughout our evolutionary history so we're very quick to assume causal relationships when it seems like a change in one thing like looks to move at the same time as a change in another thing um so these are usually you know often these these assumptions of causality are correct when we see things arising together there very often is a causal connection and our ability to infer that pattern is part of what has made us very successful as a species it helps guide our decision making we our brains are essentially dr lyle and i often will call us correlation machines that's how we decide what is the next best thing to do we we look at our past experience and whether something was successful before whether it led us to an outcome that we desired it's likely that it's going to do that again we are inferring causation between things that that occurred in tandem before and that's a really useful guiding principle to help us make better decisions as we go throughout life um this is subject to error however so even though it's correct a lot of the time it's not always correct so some of the ways that it is correct you know clouds cause rain we see what you know when it starts to get cloudy it rain seems more likely so we put that together and there seems to be a causal relationship there okay it's pretty pretty plausible moldy food is going to make me sick going to going to cause digestive distress that's a very good correlation that we came up with in our in our natural history to keep us away from eating food that was going to make us sick being late for work it's going to upset your boss it's going to cause job insecurity another correlation these things seem to go together one seems to cause the other and it's more or less correct there's nothing nothing other than that the the what we call the independent variable that is having the effect on the dependent variable okay but this is not always so cut and dried so sometimes our intuition that one thing is causing the other is actually incorrect so just because two things are correlated this co-related they're related to each other that one is not necessarily causing the other and usually this is because there's a hidden variable there's a third variable that is actually causing the change in both of the two things that you're looking at so sometimes the third variable is very obvious you know we look at something and we see that there's a correlation but clearly they're not causing each other so there's a correlation between higher ice cream sales in a given city and more crime but nobody thinks that you know the fact that there's more ice cream being eaten is what's causing the crime so you see the increase in both at the same time but nobody thinks that those two things have a causal relationship because that that just doesn't pass the intuitive smell test so there's a third variable warmer weather that is driving both of those things to go up at the same time you have warmer weather people want ice cream warmer weather also causes people to be out in the streets not at home as much there's some evidence that it that it increases people's propensity to um sort of criminal behavior and anger and all kinds of things so there's all sorts of literature about this but but whatever it is we clearly can say that it's not ice cream that is causing the crime um another really common one that you'll see is there's a very strong very strong correlation between shoe size and reading comprehension but nobody would say oh you know the the the shoe size is having this determinate effect on reading comprehension of course not if there's a third variable that is age the age the older you are the bigger your shoe size the more likely you are to have higher reading comprehension so this is um sort of just a way that these things can arise and we intuitively intuitively are able to rule out the fact that they have a causal relationship this little cartoon with our crazy girl with the knives i like knives because i wasn't allowed to use the stove as a child um maybe you weren't allowed to use the stove as a child because you weren't safe around the stove and you're not safe around knives so this is how this sort of thing works okay so this is this is how conventional wisdom can get derailed and confuse us so we make these correlational observations which lead to these intuitive hypotheses about the world and those unchallenged become how we see the world working even though it's really not correct because there is another variable and this is particularly true when we're dealing with difficult or taboo or these tricky these tricky sensitive topics so the following statements are very these are based on correlational observations we seem to see these things arising together and it seems like they have a causal relationship but they haven't been um we're not that intuitive relationship we're inferring has not been subjected to really intense uh analysis that controls particularly for genetic factors so exposure to more significant trauma makes you more likely to develop ptsd that would be sort of an intuitive assumption that most people would think is as those things go together those things are true people who experience trauma in childhood are more likely to become obese or more likely to develop alcoholism or more likely to have later in life health consequences this is the core assumption and the finding of the the question that you were asking about the a study of the harvard a study this is a correlation we observe that this is true that the people who do have those adult issues are more likely to report childhood diversity so that seems like they have a causal relationship one is causing the other um the same as children who experience higher a scores more adversity are less likely to graduate from college so these these observations are not these correlations are not untrue they are true that we we see them repeated over and over again in the data they do go together but that doesn't mean that one is causing the other because we are missing this third variable we are missing genetics we are we are looking at these correlations without actually putting them through a rigorous controlled analysis that controls for genetic influence um so anyone who um has read this is the the dog that didn't bark in the night time silver blaze the sherlock holmes story um this the this is the scotland yard detective asks sherlock is there any other point to which which he would wish to draw my attention and holmes says yes to the curious incident of the dog in the night time and gregory says but the dog did nothing in the night time and holmes says that was the curious incident so the fact that the dog did not bark um is the is the clue that holmes needs to to to get insight into this mystery that the story as it was told of uh you know someone breaking in could not be true because the dog would have barked at a stranger but it would not have barked at someone that he knew so the fact that there was not a bark is actually the the clue that gives us takes us to the truth so what is missing from our analysis of these of these causal relationships between these things um and this is there's a lot of text and i'm going to just go through a bunch of information here and this is where um i know i'm i'm giving you way too much but i want to give people get people started on this if they're interested in it so just diving into these these assumptions so something like exposure to more significant trauma makes you more likely to develop ptsd well let's question that a little bit so we know from twin studies the in that have been replicated over and over again that the general estimated variance the the heritability of of exposure to what's called high-risk trauma so a lot of this literature comes from the combat literature so so people who volunteer find themselves in combat situations in war um that's high risk trauma so 60 of that is heritable so we can explain 60 of the variants and people who are seeking to be in a situation that is going to potentially involve high-risk trauma is attributable to to genes and a lot of that is the personality of the parents um a lot of it is is being traced through your propensity to put yourself in a dangerous situation and these are things that just are not usually addressed in this way um in the more conventional self-help literature 46 of ptsd is also heritable so there is a there's a genetic your your likelihood to develop ptsd is not purely related to the event it's it's related to the kind of way that you were wired and how likely you are to show that those symptoms that we would give the name ptsd but it's not it's not there's the the causal relationship is not the way that we're thinking about it and you can get an intuition for this if you think about how some people go through really really really horrific events and do not develop ptsd and other people go through other events that would not um not create long-lasting problems for other people and they are really derailed by them so clearly there's some there's something else going on other than the intensity of the event itself the same event we can't say that the same event is equally traumatic for everybody in the population there's variation and that means that we have variation in our susceptibility to it so we also know that there's an extremely high degree of genetic overlap between the gene the same genes that make you more likely to be exposed to high risk trauma and the genes that make you more likely to show the symptoms of ptsd so that means this in other words some of the same genes are driving both the tendency to seek and engage in high risk behavior such as combat experience and to exhibit those symptoms so this is the dog that didn't bark that's the same you've got a shared genetic driver that is leading to both of those things one is not causing the other not entirely so the cert and this is a point that that pluhman makes over and over in blueprint and elsewhere he calls this the nature of nurture so the circumstances and even the events of your life are not random you're seeking through your personality through who it is that you are through what where you feel comfortable through what excites you through what attracts you you seek certain environments and experiences in part because of your personality which can include an attraction to adrenaline producing high-risk behavior which makes you more likely to experience a traumatic event so in the case of combat veterans which is where the most of this literature comes from um the data suggests that some of those same genes that attract those people to dangerous situations are also likely to make those same people more susceptible to the expression of of post-traumatic stress syndrome so this is this is like this is why this is a very complex thing and i know that this particular example doesn't have anything to do with emotional eating or obesity but it's giving you um an insight into some of the literature that does exist that complicates these these notions of uh a correlation being the same as causation in this kind of this kind of example okay so here is a little more relevant of an exp of an example so women who experience childhood sexual assault are more likely to be obese and or alcoholic you'll see claims and assumptions that both of these are true so there's not as much research into this but there's some and we we know that there is there's one really robust meta-analysis that happened in 2010 that finds that both genes and the shared family environment affect childhood obesity but that family that environmental effect actually disappears by the time that child is about 14. so this is this is then another nuanced point that yes the the what kind of family you grow up in what kind of food you're eating what kind of rules you have around food how active you are that has a big effect on whether you're overweight as a child but it loses that effect as you grow older so the heritability of obesity actually increases as we get older the the environment has a bigger effect when we're kids than it does when we're adults by the time people are 40 they're basically the the the heritability of how obese they are is almost entirely attributable to jeans because their parents aren't telling them what to eat there's nobody buying their food for them and creating rules around it when as a child there is so the environment has a bigger effect but that environment that effect washes out over time when ploman talks about these things being unsystematic and random and stochastic that's what he means it's it's the washing out of the effect as we age and we essentially become more who we are over time um another just a sort of way to think about why this is maybe not as causally true as we would infer that it is is when you look at the fact that 82 percent of childhood sexual abuse victims are female most most csa victims are are girls um but adult obesity is distributed pretty equally across the gender spectrum so there's you don't have 82 percent um that doesn't it doesn't translate to 82 percent of obese people are females it's more 50 50. and actually in some some cases there's a slight skew to more males um at the same time men are twice as likely to meet diagnostic criteria for alcohol abuse so if if there was driving really simply if a traumatic childhood experience was singularly driving either of those outcomes you would see more of a proportional representation in the outcome and you don't um you see sort of a mixed result so what's going on there are are women who were abused more likely to be obese and men are likely to be alcoholic well why why wouldn't they be the same why would it split along gender differences in that way this is another case of the dog that didn't bark there are genetic factors here that are not being accounted for when people make these inferences so something like childhood sexual assault it fits into the the random non-shared non-systematic environment section of the pie chart it has an effect but the effect is very very very small it's one to two maybe three percent of the ultimate variance when you look across the population so people hang their hats on the fact that something bad happened to them and they're inferring that that is the entire environmental um causality of who it is that they are when really it's only explaining a very very small percentage of it um and it doesn't it's not it doesn't it doesn't persist over time so and then finally the other example here children who experience more adversity and have higher a scores are less likely to ultimately graduate from college well this is again we know that 60 of school achievement is heritable um and the the other 40 is is really random chance it's not um it's not the shared environment of what you were subjected to consistently that you would share with a sibling it's the chance events it's the teacher who took a particular liking to you and helped you with your college applications these things that are beyond our control as a family um so ploman again you know he makes this he really wants to remind us that the key environmental piece of making us who we are is down to chance to unpredictable events he calls this sort of a gloomy result because we have we have very little control over this um and that the effects don't last non-shared environmental influences are unsystematic idiosyncratics serendipitous events without lasting effects the systematic stable and long-lasting source of who we are is dna so he just he really drives this home and um you know the rest of the literature echoes this i'm quoting ploman at length because he's sort of the most most accessible source of this information um but people can dive into the literature if they're interested so all of this is just to say that we are not frozen in time by what has happened to us by the past events it doesn't we don't experience a traumatic event and just stay stagnant there it's quite the contrary we actually become who we really are over time despite what may have happened to us so you can derail people with traumatic events and and um sort of childhood adversity of all different types and that will have an effect on on what their childhood is like and how they experience their childhood and whether it's enjoyable or not so it matters it matters a lot we don't want um to to create bad environments of abuse and trauma for children obviously but it doesn't when you look over time through the twin studies and these other these other ways of actually controlling for these factors though it washes out it you become who you are you essentially overwrite those traumatic events and those those anything that would increase your adversity score as you go through your life it does not stay with you forever it does not determine who you are okay so ace scores specifically i just want to bring up a couple of things i'm going to wrap up here quickly and have a couple of minutes your question um so some specific problems with ace scores is that they're retrospective you're asking adults who have problems as adults did you also have issues in childhood and this is just notorious it's a notoriously inaccurate way of gathering data um and this this is a quote from a um sort of a critique in the uk of ace course individuals who do not see themselves as experiencing problems in adult life may not report conditions or relationships which may well have been negative but which they see themselves as having overcome so this is the third variable of just more robustness more emotional stability more resilience you're not going to remember every little sling and arrow of childhood if you don't see yourself as as having a lot of problems that would be explained by that as an adult and at the same time individuals who are experiencing difficulties as adult as adults may be more inclined to recall problematic aspects of their childhood experiences so if you're an adult who has a lot of issues you're likely to have the kind of personality that also uh remembers a lot of issues in your childhood so these are these are things that are being driven by that that hidden variable that we talked about talked about um the purported biological mechanisms of of ace scores and how ace how childhood adversity remains in the body and lives in the body these are these are again these are correlational and they're largely what we would call scientistic these are not medical facts they are not evidence-based the the mechanism by which um you know uh any kind of adverse event in childhood or chronic adverse situation remains in the body this is just not supported by evidence there may be sort of short-term effects again you you have higher cortisol you have there there are things that affect your childhood experience but they don't remain with you for life it doesn't live in the body forever um this in this gets even more uh fanciful and scientistic when people start talking about epigenetic trauma ancestral trauma the the sort of the the issues that your your great grandparents had continue to live in your body those people are they're selling you something if somebody is telling you about your epigenetic trauma there is no evidence-based mechanism for that um so i would want people to be very wary of that kind of language and then the final problem with a scores that concerns me is the sort of medicalization of normal life and the diagnostic inflation that we see with um a pharmaceutical industry that is eager to dichotomize and and and to diagnose and to tell you that you have some sort of condition as a result of some childhood situation when you break it down two-thirds of the population in the united states has at least one ace on this list so that means two-thirds of us are sort of you know diagnosable according to this framework as having some kind of we're more likely to have some kind of pathology and that silos people into this deterministic victim mentality that is actually much more disempowering than the childhood challenges themselves are the effects of which as we've seen even out and wash out over time um so for emotional eating pers like specifically i just want people to to really realize that it all comes down to the pleasure trap it comes down to the food that you were eating so i love this cartoon with the dinosaurs i can't believe i ate all that salad for nothing so this is the situation that we're in we all emotionally eat everybody emotionally eats you you eat to feel better that is your job as a species that is why food even a carrot stick is going to create feelings of um pleasure and the the notion that you're doing the right thing for your survival and reproduction that's what it's supposed to do food and sex is your whole job as a human as a member of the species food is supposed to make you feel better so there's nothing wrong with emotionally eating per se if you're stressed and you're having a hard time but you can't like the your ancestors no matter what kind of personality they had no matter what kind of heritability they had for obesity no matter what kind of conscientiousness or emotional stability they were endowed with they could emotionally eat 24 7 but they were emotionally eating a diet that was suitable for the species and so they would never become overweight the problem is not us it's not our it's not our desire to self-medicate by getting a little bit of dopamine to feel better in the moment because we're having a hard day that is a natural process you're supposed to be driven to do that the problem is that you're getting into super normal food that the species is not adapted to and that it is giving you it is hijacking your pleasure pathways and giving you false signaling about that being the right thing to do and that is going to lead to adult adverse outcomes because of the nature of the food that you're eating not because of what is driving you to do it or even the act of emotionally eating itself okay so some closing thoughts because i know that people when they hear about the hidden variable of genes and ploman's findings and just this general course of thinking i want i want to sort of contextualize it and and be specific about what we're really saying here so again this is from blueprint pluhmann says dna is the only thing that makes a substantial systematic difference the rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects it's not enough to show a statistically significant effect so all these ace studies they'll show a st they'll try to wow you by saying it's statistically significant that there's a link between childhood trauma and a certain outcome like obesity or alcoholism but the the issue is affect size so sure it may be statistically significant but how much of the variance does it really explain of who you are and how likely the population is to have that that outcome it's one or two percent so this is a tiny little piece of the puzzle heritability describes what is but it does not predict what could be this one of his key phrases high heritability of weight does not mean there's nothing you can do about your weight nor does it mean that we must succumb to our genetic propensities to depression learning disabilities or alcohol abuse genes are not destiny you can change but heritability means that some people are more vulnerable to these problems and also find it more difficult to overcome them so that's really the that's what i want people to understand is that it's it's this is empowering if you understand how it really works and you can compensate for it more effectively rather than trying to solve the problem with the wrong information which is the psychodynamic freudian notion that you have become who you are because of the things that happen to you in your childhood we want to give you the correct information so you can make the correct inferences so you can engineer your environment appropriately to compensate for your real liabilities not your perceived liabilities and then finally this is wonderful calvin and hobbes cartoon where uh we see how it's not always a good idea to talk about genetic influence whereas mom says you've been hitting rocks in the house why on earth would you do something like that and calvin very reasonably says poor genetic material and gets grounded for it so this is the situation we find ourselves in where the truth is very uncomfortable and we don't always want to hear it but it is ultimately much more empowering to see the world as it is than how we kind of wish that it might be so i will i will leave a few minutes for questions uh if people are interested that's our website is esteemeddynamics.com they can watch our human nature series where we get into all of this for four hours and we have lots of other content where people um can can totally get up to speed on all of us so i will stop my little screen share sorry i had my mic off because i didn't want to disrupt it in any way for me this was amazing but as you know not everyone agrees and i you were at the last live ultimate weight loss conference when dr lyle gave his epic talk not your trauma not your mama and a lot of people got angry and there are some angry people here saying things like well i disagree advanced child i'm not advanced adverse childhood experiences and ancestral trauma continued to live in the body and affect your life yeah sure there and there's plenty of literature i mean it's not hard to go to the literature and find evidence that supports that but that goes back to the point that i made at the end where there can be a relationship that can be statistically significant and so this is what we used to call in my program um stargazing because of little stars next to the the p-value the probability of this being due to chance uh and that is that yes something can be very statistically significant very fascinating correlation but we really care about the effects size we care about how much of the variance does it explain um and in the in the case of these things it's just it's a very small amount so we want we want to be looking at the things that have a much of the lion's share of the variants to give you the most um the most empowerment and the most authority over your life trajectory that we can you know i've dealt with other issues where people disagree like whether we should eat nuts or not to get people upset but i don't see anything to get people this upset yeah when you tell them that this might not be true they they get very angry and defensive and they they don't want to hear this oh i understand i didn't want i mean people who don't know me and don't know my story and haven't listened to me yammer about this on the podcast like i i used to be very much in the psychodynamic uh your your trauma shapes you sort of paradigm because i i have like i said a very high a score and you know went through some crap as a kid and had later in life problems with food addiction alcohol addiction and it seemed like these things were intimately connected i could draw all kinds of connections between them it was very intuitive and in my subjective experience absolutely seemed incredibly true so i had to be really hammered over the head with this data and um come to a new understanding but that was not it didn't happen for me overnight i had to really like steal myself and go into it and and be uh prepared to change my mind but i understand that it's not easy for people to do that and that i'm working against a lot of very strong intuition here well when dr lyle explained it to me i thought it was very empowering actually yeah i think when you do when you do realize what we're really dealing with it is empowering it just doesn't seem that way at first it seems very deterministic very reductionist very like oh well well you know it's how is it empowering to tell me that i'm you know my my genes are driving my ultimate you know how how obese i'm going to become and it's like no we need to actually realize how to more effectively leverage the control that you do have um that's what we're really up to well apple says she's angry about being dismissed as a stargazer oh okay not everybody who i mean the fact that you're you're discussing key values in a paper doesn't make you a stargazer it just it's that some papers tend to value that over actual like meaningful inferences i i haven't read her work so i couldn't say for sure but i don't mean to assume that everybody is and jane says well how will these insights help us get them so the it comes down to the food that is like really the whole thing i mean all of this background that i gave you is really just academic it's really just to help you understand where this where where you're starting from and to not delude yourself by misunderstanding what it is that makes you struggle with this problem what makes you struggle is the fact that you're eating super normal food that your environment has super normal food in it i mean this is the same message that i think you know aj hammers home all the time we try to hammer home all the time most of the guests on the show that it really if you were eating a food that is natural a diet that is natural for the species a stone age compliant diet you are not going to struggle with issues of being overweight or obese it's just not going to happen but the the sort of ability to control your environment is also heritable the level of conscientiousness that you have is heritable the level of emotional stability and your tendency to self-medicate is is heritable so understanding where you fit in and how how how disproportionately vulnerable you are because of your genetic predisposition can be an empowering way to understand okay well i'm more i'm less conscientious than average and that makes it harder for me to control my environment because i'm just more indulgent i'm more sort of spontaneously likely to stop by the pizza shop and get some pizza that means i need to enforce some more draconian measures on controlling my environment than somebody else might need to you need to think outside the box to solve the problems based on who it is that you really are not who it is that you think you could have been if not for the things that happened to you i think because you and i had the benefit of spending so much time at true north we've seen people with terrible stress and terrible trauma that still lost weight of course of course yeah i mean there's it's it's you do uh this this goes back to the sort of the ptsd example where it's not there is no uniform outcome across the population with how how likely someone is to exhibit ptsd based on any specific trauma this is all being mediated by personality by genetic characteristics that are that are beyond your control thank you jay says does emotional eating have anything to do with physical mental social relational or sexual needs not being met um so you you were going to as an animal that is seeking signals that you were doing the correct thing for survival and reproduction seeking food is always a it's always a good bet as as an animal in nature so you you have made these correlational analyses over time that okay when i'm feeling bad for any reason you know i had a hard day at work or my spouse was upset with me or i am not meeting some goal in life that is essentially the nervous system is is crying out for some signaling that you're getting back on track to do the right thing to make yourself more competitive and successful in the derby the the evolutionary derby of life and the main way that we are able to get those signals that we're doing something that is bringing us back on track for evolutionary success is to get a little hit of dopamine from somewhere this is how we have been built by nature dopamine is the is a guiding guiding mechanism to let us know if we're doing the right thing or not so anytime that you're distressed you're you're going to be more inclined to seek out a signal that you okay how can i feel better so of course you're gonna you're gonna seek out sex and food that's your job that's what you do and when you are exposed to or you're in an environment that includes super normal food that is so much more bang for your buck in terms of the feelings of success of evolutionary success that it's going to give you than something like a carrot stick so yes you're going to emotionally eat when you're stressed when you're having a hard time when you're feeling needs aren't being met um but again this goes back to the point if it's not super normal food there's no problem emotionally eat all day emotionally eat all you want it's you're you're supposed to eat when you feel bad that's that's how we're built um but you're not supposed to eat cupcakes and pizza and twinkies and everything else that people will get into that's not part of our history yep susan says well what about the evidence that severe physical abuse causes changes in the brain so those are um yeah they again these are observational correlational studies because people are not looking at the brain before because you can't do a controlled study where you you essentially have a severe trauma uh treatment of of the test group that would be totally unethical so these are just observational studies where it seems like people who have experienced this kind of severe trauma seem to have there there is a relationship between different different um patterns in the brain imaging but do we know that that changed as a result of the trauma or is there again that third variable that makes the trauma more likely and that you know creates the sort of brain imaging that we see later on so that's an emerging part of the science that has not been um like there's some evidence about that but it because it's so difficult to study and it's so difficult to control for it's a little less robust but it's it seems based on all of the other literature that we can control for and there is some with the twin the twin studies because you do have a built-in control group when you have certain twins that experience extreme trauma and others that don't um and you can see that they you know the brain differences are not significant so this is all an emerging science but i just want people to kind of think about these things more critically and get away from that very intuitive correlational observational way of putting the world together and and having these defeatist notions about what it means for struggling with the issues that you're struggling with as middle great michelle says does chronic high court how does chronic high cortisol do distress impact us um so lots of different ways and i'm not an expert on that particular topic so again i just want to sort of you have the caveat that i'm not a medical doctor i'm not a psychologist what i do know about that question is that yes we can see that the sort of a stressful event or a stressful environment for a child for example will lead to an increase at that time of high cortisol that it doesn't have it doesn't have that long-term um change to the brain over time when when we break it down and look at the twin studies so the the fact that it has an effect in the moment and that it is very intuitive leads to this kind of thinking but you you have to you have to stand back and really ask yourself am i missing something am i am i am i looking through this this am i looking at this question through a lens that is not considering a genetic factor if that is the case then maybe it deserves a second look there's some guy on that's stalking you named michael mcgregor or something that guy and i don't know who he is he says he has a chapter on stress and cortisol in his book how not to diet there you go there you go of course it's horrific probably some videos too yeah i don't know if i should ask this so i'll ask it and then you don't have to answer it but kat says well how do you feel about reparation for slaves i guess maybe that has oh boy that's that's a whole other that's a totally different topic okay so we'll come back up to that one for next time you come on and so so i guess this is a question a lot of people have if lauren says okay so can we have a few practical tips to uh that we can take to for you know to move on from our past yeah the just the sort of empowerment that it does not permanently shape who you are so it's it's the attachment that you have to the things that happened to you is because you are because of the strong intuitive notion that of course something that significant that happened is going to have this long-term causal effect so recognizing that it does not is really the first piece of moving on from it so recognizing that yeah that was that was then this is now here i am i have certain genetic propensities and liabilities and issues let me look at them very squarely and really assess who i really am where my strengths are where my weaknesses are and design an environment that accounts for those things not an environment that i hope that i can make work for me based on some notion of who i might be if i could just overcome my my traumas but in an environment that really honestly confronts the the things that are more difficult for you because of who it is that you are not because of who you were made into by what happened to you so it's it's the it's all the same advice that we are always giving people but but different people need to be um differentially creative about what kind of environmental solutions they come up with that are suitable for their personality and just for for how much they're going to struggle with this because not everybody struggles in the same way or to the same degree and that is because of genetic influences not because of past events anyway i don't know if you can see the comments dr hawk but they're largely just people love you you're brilliant and you know i listen to you and dr lyle like like like i'm a i'm a groupie like you don't know this but like before we came out i'm just always listening to something of yours over and over again and i say that because i think i just had an epiphany and i hope i'm right but good as i was listening to this i'm thinking do you and this is based on the work that you guys do do you think that a lot of people are really attached to trump this trauma theory because it keeps them out of the ego traps so it's sort of like saying well you know i would lose weight but i can't because i had this bad thing happen yeah um sure but that could be its own form of the ego trap you know it's sort of the ego trap for people who are not familiar is sort of it's it's a shorthand for creative competitive avoidance it's for it's for the situation where you are looking at something that you in principle would want to solve a problem to make yourself more successful competitively in the quote stone age village in an evolutionary sense so losing weight is one of those things most people in fur if they lose weight uh get healthy that they're going to be more attractive they're going to have they're going to attract a better quality of mate they're going to get a better job they're going to have friends that you know better better friends that like them more that is what motivates us to do it so anytime that people look at some kind of problem and they they they've tried to solve it and they're getting some evidence that it's not going to be so easy to solve and maybe they can't do it and so often losing weight is one of these things people have tried and tried and tried and failed and slipped and just can't do it the tendency to come up with ways to avoid putting yourself into the competitive fray gets very very strong and so if i can say oh well you know i i really would solve this if i could but i had all these terrible things that happened to me which derailed me from those efforts that can be definitely a form of avoiding the fact that this is just an incredibly difficult problem to solve and we never evolved to solve it people need to just forgive themselves and have some self-compassion for the fact that this is not something you're supposed to be able to figure out we did not evolve in a context of supernormal food and it's no bearing upon how how decent a person you are whether you can solve the pleasure trap problem or not nobody is supposed to be able to solve it your pleasure pathways have been completely hijacked by these supernormal foods so really just just having that forgiveness and that self-compassion and like okay this is supposed to be freaking hard and i'm having a harder problem than a lot of people trying to solve it how can i deal with that on the effect size not the cause causal side like the the whatever happened to you in your past it may have been very negative we wish that it didn't happen that way but it is not making it harder for you to solve the pleasure trap in this moment that is its own problem that is completely a function of the supernormal food environment has nothing to do with what you may have experienced or didn't experience in your childhood or at any point in your life well i couldn't have said it better this was just mind-blowing this was conference worthy seriously like this this if this if i was still producing conferences this is this is i don't have any cartoons i'm not the artist that dr lyle is so uh if we if we do do it at a conference at some time i'll have to get him to add some artistic value well pam is saying one of your best talks to date i couldn't agree more well thank you so much for doing this this was just mind-blowing and this is something that we'll all have to probably listen to again just sounds good and i'm happy to come back and clarify and i know people are going to have all kinds of questions and they're welcome to find us on our website um esteemeddynamics.com and sign up for the library the living wisdom library for three bucks a month to have full access to all of our ranting about this and everything else yeah yeah i'm listening to a couple of new things that are under the members library and they're they're fantastic so thank you so much i i so appreciate that you come on and do this either with yourself or dr lyle or dr greger now that that's like a whole another that's what we got a whole pack here in maui so yes yeah you are great you're you're just you're like you're literally the smartest girl i know oh oh thanks aj i appreciate that no really i just you're just just i'm just so impressed by you and thank you so much for doing this and i look forward to next month and i think you're coming on with dr lyle next month so that's always fine i believe so yeah mid-september so yep sounds good and don't forget to listen to dr lyle and dr hawk sometimes together sometime separately every wednesday night at 8 30 p.m pacific time for beat your jeans podcast there's like look over 250 episodes right now absolutely take care
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