Comedy Centered

Hello, Hello. Happy Sunday, everybody. It is I, Tiffany Norton. How are you? Comedy centered. Welcome, welcome. Happy Sunday. Happy Easter Sunday. If you celebrate that holiday. Hi. Welcome on in. Had a fun day. Had a fun day. Got to hang out with the family. Got to see my kiddo and my mom and my stepdad. And so that was nice. But I've been. This is a book I've been kind of chewing on for a while. It's an author I brought up a couple of times. His name is Gabor Mate. And I first discovered his work probably a decade ago or so.

He had a book called in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And it was mostly his insights as a psychiatrist and a doctor. He worked and volunteered in Canada and I can't remember exactly where at the, the Free Needle Clinic. And, and the reason why they did that was they had a lot of street people that had a lot of drug addictions and they found that if they offered a site for people to come and get clean needles, then they would actually come and interact with the medical community and they could hopefully get them some help.

Right. You know, some assistance. And so I've always liked his stuff. And then this one is kind of a thick one, right. So I've been whittling on it and I, I love talking about books because sometimes, you know, authors, they have, they have, they have real publishers and things, like people that write, write better than I do anyway. But there's been a lot of talk around in my family, we've got some family members that, you know, have some illnesses and stuff. And, and so this work that, this, this latest book that he has, the Myth of Normal, he's analyzing the relationships between trauma and illness.

Now, I mean, we all know, like, Right. Like, it's just like we've heard before, like, if you're an angry person, you could have high blood pressure long term, and long term, you know, you could have a higher risk for, you know, like a heart attack or something like that. Right. So we kind of know that, that there's a link in some of that stuff, but there's some really interesting new information. I just thought I'd share some of it with you. So he's pretty technical. He does a nice job though, of, of explaining all the big words.

But I'm gonna do my best to read some of these. But I think we've all maybe probably heard of the theory of evolution, right? The theory of evolution is the idea that there would be mutations in any kind of a species and that these happened randomly or spontaneously or sometimes because of a large environmental change. Right. That all of a sudden the species has to adapt to a different climate. And so for a very long time, that is kind of where the thinking was along the lines of cancer. And this is.

He's dedicated a lot of his stuff in this book to people that are suffering from different types of cancers and also people with autoimmune disorders. Okay. And he believes that. Excuse me, excuse me. I totally just burped that there is a causal link between trauma, untreated trauma, unprocessed trauma, and a higher disposition or predisposition to possibly having a more serious and significant disease later on. And why is this? Well, it's because of a thing called epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of the genes.

And what they're looking for are the mechanisms within our genes that. That turn on or turn off in response to signals that we receive from outside of our body. Right. You know, that could be like, we're talking about evolution. That could be like a sudden climate shift. Right. But they also react to signals from within. So our own internal distress, our own internal stuff also can affect how these genes turn on and off. Anyway, so he's talking about epigenetics. Okay. And so he's quoting a doctor here.

Dr. Zayef and his medical team in Montreal performed one of the most cited epigenetic studies with major implications for how we view development, behavior and health. Working with laboratory rats, they examined the effect of the mother's interactions with the infant in the first days after birth on how the offspring for the rest of their lives would respond to stress. They're testing with the. With the rats. If a stress response, a stressed mother, what, you know, what, that'll do anyway, whether appropriately and confidently, or if it was a mother who was responding with anxiety or overreactivity.

And yes, rats have those behaviors too. I know. Who knew, right? All moms, I guess. But the focus, the. Okay, the stress regulating feedback loop between the hypothalamus and the pituitary and the adrenaline gland. So they're studying this. Right. And then the researchers are looking all these models. Okay. Like I said, he gets pretty hard in the pain on the actual, like, science of it, which is great, but it's kind of boring. Enough. Let's get to the point. Right. So the study showed the quality of early maternal care to have a causal impact on the offspring's brains biochemical capacity to respond to stress in a healthy way into adulthood.

Key epigenetic markers, the way certain genes are expressed themselves were different in the brains of rats who had received either more or less nurturing contact from their mothers. So they can actually see a difference in these markers, these biochemical epigenetic. Okay, yeah, you get. Okay. Strikingly, the offspring in turn passed on to their own infants the type of mothering that they had received. Well, that one stopped me. That one stopped me. I'm like, I'm going to give that one a little think because.

And of course I'm aware of the idea that when a mother is, and I have one child, I don't have the experience of multiple children. Right. But I have one. And I knew even then, without any of this study and that, you know, it was 25 years ago or whatever that I was way too stressed. I was at the time single. The relationship with the father had ended. I had to move back home. I was starting a new job. I was starting out on the ground floor of a, a very thin base pay job, plus the promise of commission.

And so it was, it was go time on stress. And one of the things that's very prolific about his work and this is something he's been studying, this has been his field of expertise for 20 some years. More than that is this link between growing up in America and having to be a mother in America and what that trade off looks like for our children. Because when you read a lot of his work and it makes sense, we are now living in an environment where you're lucky. I mean I, when my child was born, I just started that job.

So I only was eligible for 10 days off, 10 days off after a pregnancy because I didn't. And at that time, if you're old enough in the replay, you might remember this, but that was back in 98 and pregnancy was considered a pre existing condition if you switched medical so that if they didn't have to pay for it. So yeah, I didn't have medical. So I actually had to get assistance through Catholic Charities in St. Paul and they graciously helped me and got me prenatal vitamins and I got to do a Lamaze class and all that stuff with other moms that, you know, were single and didn't have the, the father around.

And you know, I think about those women often because you think, oh no, like, oh, is he in jail? Or like what's wrong? Or something. I mean, no, there was, there were women in there that the. Well, you know, there was a woman that, that was the case. But most of the women, their, their husbands were serving abroad. You know, they were in the Service or one gentleman, you know, the husband was trying to come to the United States at the time, and they were having immigration problems. Right. So when I think about.

And I think about how I was raised by my mom, Right. Like, it. The fact that the, The. The. That it continues and that you are going to more than likely raise your children the way you were raised unconsciously. You know, we like to judge ourselves and think that we have all this free will and we decide all of this stuff, but some of this is not decided. You know, we do and we mirror what we've seen and what we've experienced. Right. Kind of like the idea that you can't have a dream about something you haven't seen.

It has to be in there somewhere. Right? Okay. So that's what got me on this kick to talk to you guys about this today too, so. All right, cool. All right, I'm gonna jump ahead. We're gonna grab some stuff out of chapter six. Okay, this is a quote. Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars. A lifetime study of the internal combustion engine would not help anyone to understand our traffic. A traffic jam is due to a failure of the normal relationship between driven cars and their.

In their environment and can occur when whether they themselves are running normally or not. And basically the point being that we're looking at the wrong part of the problem. Right. He goes on at quite length, at a great length, too, about how, especially when we're talking about disorders or diseases that someone might be fighting, that we use a lot of war metaphors, like, I'm battling cancer. I'm, you know, I'm waging war against this. And. And you know, you know what I'm talking about. Right.

But even that type of language isn't necessarily helpful for us to be saying out loud because it's framing. It's frame. Yes. I mean, yes, of course. I mean, you. Yes, you are battling. There's no lie about that. But also, too, what they're finding is better. Your attitude is towards it. And, and if you can start approaching any disease or thing that you're going through, not as a thing inside you that's bad that you have to fight against. But why wouldn't we view it as a process instead of it being stage three cancer and stage one cancer, maybe it's the beginning of a process.

One through this. And I'll go on a little bit and explain that point a little bit better here. But this concept that our attitudes really do affect the way our genes and the epigenetics of our cells are going to react is kind of crazy. In fact, I want to find the one. Let's see if I can find it quick enough. Because like I said, there's so much good stuff. I underlined a ton of things. But the. Well, I'll find in a minute. But the. The thing about cancer, which I did not really fully understand until I started work or reading his work.

We have cancerous cells in us all the time. All the time. We have abnormal cells, and that's all cancer is. It's a spread of abnormal cells. And we get them out when we're. When our. When our system is working correctly, when we're getting enough sleep, when we're. When we're keeping our stress, when we're keeping our cortisol levels down, we're eating the right things, we're walking, we're. You know, then we. Our immune system is stronger. We are able to pass those through our body, and they don't necessarily latch on like that.

Right. So. But if we long term live and lack. Or if we have a lot of unprocessed trauma that we haven't worked through, that actually hinders the immunity process and the immune process that. That removes these cells. Right. So in chapter seven, he talks a little bit about personality types and their correlation. And chapter seven is called a Traumatic tension. Attachment versus authenticity. Okay, so he starts out with a quote. Sorry, dry mouth. Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not.

How many times. Hey, yeah, like, how many times have we talked about that? A comedy center about being authentic and taking the mask off and having. Having the. The guts to do that. Right. I'm gonna say it one more time because I really like this quote. Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not. So, okay, jump in to hear Anita Morjani, that was the person who gave the quote, tell it. The disease that nearly killed her was no random misfortune.

The person I was before I got cancer, the author told me, was afraid of disappointing other people. I was a pleaser. I completely lost myself in satisfying other people. I became so drained. I was someone who could not say no. I was a rescuer. And I would be the one who was there for anybody. Anyone. Yeah, Rescuer. Let me put on my cape. Let me come on in. I know that one. Yeah. I didn't even learn that it's okay to be me when I had cancer. It took me being in a coma to learn that. It took her going into a coma before she was able to, to let go and, you know, receive.

Okay? Her quote, my personality was such that I needed something as drastic as cancer to give me a reason to take care of myself. Right. And what is taking care of ourselves? It's not, it's not what they sell you on Instagram. It's not what you, it's not what they say. I'm not like, I mean taking a nice warm bath is great. Definitely do that. Like that's cool, definitely a good idea. But the right bath salt, the right lotion, spending money, self care doesn't require spending money, self care requires a good sleep regimen.

Wash your sheets, drink lots of water. You know, it's real, real basic. But you know, but, and I say that like it's easy and it's not. I have a timer set on, I watch. That reminds me to drink water like five times a day. Otherwise I wouldn't, I would seriously just drink Diet Coke mindlessly. I don't know why I'm not. Yeah, Anyway, okay, so he's talking about the relationship again between personality types and, and, and the development of these types of particular problems later on down. Right?

And so now he's quoting a study or a book, I should say, right here. In 1987, the psychologist Dr. Lydia Tamashki Tamash proposed what became known as type C. Type C personality, no, bad joke, okay. Type C personality, referring to traits strongly associated with the onset of malignancy. So these are character traits that they are noticing in people's personalities that they are seeing a link between that type of personality, that C type, and a development of malignancy. Okay. These couldn't have been further from type A traits on the temperamental spectrum.

The C traits include being cooperative, appeasing, unassertive patient, unexpressive of negative emotions, particularly anger, and compliant with external authorities. You're just going along. You just want everybody to get along. Everybody's fine, everybody happy, everybody good? You good? You good? You need anything good, right? Okay. She interviewed 150 People with melanoma and found that these patients tended to be excessively nice, pleasant to a fault, uncomplaining and unassertive. They were identified pleasers.

While anxious about their disease progression, their worries were focused in specifically outward directions away from themselves and towards the effect that their illness was having on their families. So to the, the earlier quote, it makes sense when she's saying it took me until I got into A coma before I started actually taking care of myself and not thinking outwardly about my disease and thinking inwardly about it, what do I actually need? Because when we live a lifetime of not meeting our own needs and think if we go around meeting other people's needs instead, that eventually, like, you know, we'll fill your cup, fill your cup, fill your cup, fill your cup.

And then we come up with our empty cup and we're like, can we, can we have ours? Can I soak up? Can I soak? And maybe they give it to you, maybe they don't, but it doesn't, it doesn't serve right. Okay? Hard, hard habit to break. And also we just learned that we learned everything from our mother. So, you know, and as a mother, I know we always blame the moms. It's not all mom's fault. We try. We do our best. Okay, so now he's, he's skipping ahead of bed, but he's talking about addiction and some of the, the, the relationship with these things.

Okay. Harvard, Harvard educated psychiatrist and specialist. Specialist in adolescent addiction. Most recently author of the Tech Solution, Creating healthy habits for Kids Growing up in a digital world. Right now we have mothers who are on their phones while they're nursing or giving an infant a phone during a diaper change. She said the d. The diaper change used to be this whole dynamic experience between the caregiver and the infant. You'd have to find a way to make him sit still. And now you just give the child a phone and they lie quietly.

You go to any restaurant and you see many, many children are being fed in front of an iPad or a computer. Yeah, yeah, I see that a lot. I can, I can stay out of that argument. I'm not trying to say what's right, what's wrong for people's decisions as parents. I didn't have to face this because this was not a thing. We had cell phones when my kid was young. But you didn't do anything with them. I mean, like, you texted with them. That was it. There was no Internet on them really. You know, so nothing interesting, Nothing a kid would care about.

Okay. The phone is so attractive to that young brain. What gets displaced is the neurobiology of attachment. The release of the bonding and mood regulating brain chemicals like oxytocin, serotonin, and the endorphins present in the cerebral circuits of both parent and baby. So the parent gets the benefit of an increase of oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. So does the child when they're looking at each other when they're engaging with each other, changing. You know, you don't think about changing poopy diapers as, as the good stuff necessarily, but it is on a biochemical level, right?

Okay. Both parents and babies, when they lock eyes in attuned and responsive connection, that's when these chemicals are emitted. Dr. Kane points out there are known to be the key to long term happiness and success. The unintended but wounding message to the child is again, you don't matter because the child is to a certain extent a clean slate. But to a certain extent it's not. Babies come with an operating system and a, and a, and, and because as a human being, what do we need? We need that skin on skin contact that releases all the good hormones.

Right? That's why nursing, you know, even if you can't nurse, as they always say, like, because I, I had trouble nursing, I could not nurse. I, they tried the La Lechi Ladies game. Everybody tried, everybody looked. Wasn't, wasn't working. But they, but they made me feel much better like just laying there and doing all that stuff that, you know, you're, you're still, you're doing what you can, right? But this disconnection, the, the brain chemicals, the brain is very flexible. The brain will adapt to whatever situation that it has.

And he, this Dr. Gabor mate also has another book. He wrote, he writes a lot about attention deficit disorder. He also has attention Deficit disorder himself and he writes about how that affects him and how that affects his family and his impulsive behaviors and, and you know, the ups and the manias and the downs and whatever. And so it's cool. A psychiatrist and he's explaining his own stuff. So you know, I, I really, I really dig him for that. But Attention deficit disorder, he hypothesizes as well that when we live in a society where moms don't get any time, moms are doing the best they can, I'm sure, with what precious little time they have.

But you know, babies are not designed for working mothers in capitalism. That's not how babies, babies don't have that in, in mind, you know, and if everybody in the family's got to work two jobs and then, you know, someone's got to go to daycare and there's a bunch of kids at daycare and then, you know, the daycare, you know, you get attention. It's kind of fun, but it's not mom. Right? And, and children can't process that in any other way than, you know, I don't matter because that's, because to the child, the, the parents, the only thing that matters to them and they can't, you know, see it any other way.

So when I think about, and that's kind of why he's going through all this, we, he, he really does bring it back to the positive. And he also underscores the fact that the way that we are operating in, in this American society right now, there is precious little that, you know, it's really hard to avoid because it, it is almost impossible for it to just be a one income household. And it's very, very important. You know, in, in other cultures, right? It's, they don't set the child down. The child doesn't even walk.

The child is, you know, strapped to you or, you know, or handed around. It doesn't even put its little feet on the ground until it's like two, like two years old. I mean, we're making our kids walk by one, you know. Well, is it because we want them to just hurry up? Is it because we're trying to rush the process along? Are we trying to push evolution? Are we trying to, you know, and I feel like we're not giving enough respect to the fact that, you know, there's just a lot of, this is brain chemistry and the child's brain is being wired just like when they were talking about the experiment with the rats at the beginning of this.

That's why analyzing this stuff now is so important. Obviously there's nothing that can be done. I cannot go back and make myself less stressed during my child's pregnancy. I can't go back and fix the situation. It was what it was. I did the best I could and I have a wonderful kid and I'm lucky. But you know, we've. Something has to give as far as how willing we're, how willing we are as a society to really just gamble with, with our, with our mental health, our biochemistry, our children's mental health.

And you know, these are not things you can't control your hormone levels, right? We talk about that all the time. The, you know, if, if you're hungry, they've proven you're less empathetic. You're. If you are just hungry and you haven't eaten, there's an example of not taking care of yourself. That's a lack of self care. But when you're hungry, they can prove that you actually exhibit less empathy towards others. Why? Because one of your base needs is not being met. But who is not meeting the base need?

You. You aren't so all of these things, if we can just start trying to actually listen to our body instead of ignoring it, saying it's wrong or, you know, trying to play with the chemicals by adding other chemicals, taking other chemicals out. The, the body knows what it's doing, but we don't let it. Like we think we know more or something. And he, but he does talk about the fact that if you are someone who grew up in poverty, poverty itself being trauma, because there's a constant fear of insecurity, you know, that's, that's the definition of poverty.

And, and you know, you want to. I'll tell you what, I've had a lot of fights and a lot of relationships about religion, politics and all that, the fights about money, we all know those are the really bad ones. And you know, all this stuff affects our kids and they, and they can't, they can't fix it for us either. So, you know, super upbeat, right? Super beat, super upbeat, comedy centered. But I don't know, it was, it was. I say this, and I want to talk about these other factors in the, and, and the, the, the brain chemistry and the neurology that's, that's behind a lot of this stuff.

Because what I hope to do by discussing my personal story, sharing stuff like this with comedy centered is to destigmatize the idea that we're bad people, that we're just bad or wrong, and that it's always going to be that way and that we're, we, we're weak or we're powerless or we're unable to, to do anything. That's not true. That's not true. You know, but it, it does take work to look at it. But a lot of the stuff that might be going on with you, it might be worth it if you, if you have the insurance and if you have access to it.

It might be worth exploring, getting a blood panel, getting some screenings, having them check your hormone levels. Because maybe you're seeking, you know, alcohol or food or a substance and you're doing it in a compulsive way. Maybe it's not because you don't lack any willpower. Maybe it's because that's something that your body actually needs or there's a, an imbalance that's been created because the longer we ignore the imbalances, bringing it back to the topic of, of, of cancer and disease, that's what happens.

We know when we're off, it's a, it's constantly ignoring when we're off and saying to ourselves. Well, tomorrow or tomorrow we'll do it. We got to get this first, then we'll do that. No, no. We all only have. You only have this one special, precious life. That's it. You have one, and you're doing it, and you're doing it right now. So, you know, you know, we're all just doing the best we can. All just monkeys out here trying to do the best we can. Well, everybody, have a great week. I will. I will.

See you next week on comedy centered. Love to see your comments and questions in the replay and the chat. And we'll see you around. Have a good night.