A person should be able to talk about what’s going on inside of them because it’s burying those unhealthy seeds, so to speak, that then compounds original trauma into something that can end up being far, far worse with a whole cascade of problems. It could be depression. It could be substances. It could be self-harm. It could be an eating disorder. There's so much that gets compounded when the original trauma gets pushed outside of consciousness and outside of communication.

This unconscious mind, this supercomputer, is doing all of these things ... And then what comes up from all of that is the conscious mind. So, imagine an iceberg ... And we see the part above the surface. That's the conscious mind. But there's a huge part of this iceberg, maybe 95% of it, that's underneath the water ... That's the unconscious mind.

If you think there's something that you can't bring up into consciousness because it's going to take over your mind or, as people often say, 'I'm going to curl up in a fetal position; I'm going to cry and never stop,' that is exactly the thing you must look at.

All attention deficit is not attention deficit disorder ... Attention deficit can come from many, many places, and one of them is anxiety. There's so many other reasons—depression affects attention, poor sleep affects attention, poor diet can affect attention, stress in life can affect attention.

If you want to take the best care of yourself that you can, you want to understand yourself... Let's say the answers are in 5 or 10 different cupboards, look in all of them ... If we want to know something, look everywhere for it ... What we are creating may be a recipe; there may be things from different cupboards that overlap.

The factors that tell us is this person enjoying life, do they take care of themselves, are they happy, they're here, are they engaged productively in the world is agency and gratitude. And if we have those two things... you almost never see someone go wrong.

Our lives and the world around us can seem to us to be very helpless and hopeless at times. We can feel helpless and the world can seem hopeless. And that’s not the case.

By self-scrutiny, what are the givens? ... If you can't solve the problem, go back and look at the givens? What are you taking for granted. 'Oh, I know that every time I see an x, that x equals 4.' Really? Maybe you wrote down 4, somehow, because you were thinking of 4 at the time, and x actually is a 3. So, just go back and look at what you're taking for granted.

If you look at even traditions of understanding, how are people happy? ... It is always people who approach like through the lens of agency and gratitude.

The unconscious mind is the place to start, because that's the deepest level of the structure of self. So, imagine sitting on top of a biological supercomputer the size of a house. That's what's going on inside of us—the unconscious mind is that biological supercomputer.

I do believe, if we work hard enough toward them, there can be silver linings to anything, no matter how bad it is.

More lithium, including more lithium in the groundwater, so small amounts of lithium that are higher in all of us, seem to sort of make everything better. It seems like there's less depression. There's less violence. There may be less dementia.

The wish for or the impulse to really just suppress intrusive thought born of trauma or whatever else is really futile. That's not going to work ... We have to embrace these narratives and not expect them to disappear in a finger snap.

If we stir up the pot of the unconscious and you put some new information in, it can do new things; it can figure new things out—which is why the process of self-reflection, for example, and often the process of therapy, is not always, and in fact often is not, a pleasant process. But then we take take away from that hard work renewed insights.

Striving for sameness doesn't make good things happen in relationships. I've been doing this for over 20 years, and I don't see that the alleged factors of sameness matter.

There's a humility in 'I don't know' that leads to collaboration ... It leads towards progress.

Do I want to be impacted by the opinions of this other person? Because I can let someone else's onions... very much impact my thoughts. But I want to kind of decide that. Do I really value that person's opinions? I don't want them automatically inside my head, telling me how I feel about myself.

What is that phantom? Where did it come from? That's how we get rid of it ... How does it go away? It goes away through understanding. So, very common example that the phantom in the driver's seat is trauma that we have pushed in an unconscious place...

The idea that half the population in this country couldn't survive and move forward [from] a $500 unexpected cost ... We've talked about 'Oh, look how great the economy is doing because employment rates are high,' but so many people are living either in desperation or one step away from desperation.

So, structure of self—we all have an unconscious mind, right? And we pay so little attention to this part of us that really is the biological supercomputer.

Then imagine that the conscious self is girded by a set of long tendrils that come out from under the water. There are defense mechanisms that are unconscious to us that sort of gird the conscious mind ... That are there to try and protect the conscious mind from the slings and arrows of the world around us.

Asking of better questions about oneself is really what leads to the understanding—so, better forms of inquiry. To me, these better forms of inquiry, better questions, are really the cardiovascular exercise, the strength training, the flexibility training, the mobility training, coordination training of physical health—just translate to mental health.

If trauma arouses shame, then the trauma itself immediately alters our perception mechanisms that we can use to understand the trauma and navigate our way through it.

Dopamine is like a currency. People say, ‘What does dopamine do?’ It’s like saying, ‘What does a dollar do?’ It depends on where we’re spending it.

Your willingness to talk about your own trauma is so powerful. It's so powerfully helpful because you're pushing against reflexive stigma—because trauma makes reflexive shame and reflexive stigma, and that's what makes people go underground, so to speak, with their trauma, and that's where confusion comes in.

Absolute truth resonates with logical systems in our brain; relative truth (personal truth) resonates with the... limbic systems in our brain.

Our ability to unleash emotion has way outpaced our ability... for our logical processes to keep up with that. The explosion of social media, of people being able to communicate with one another so rapidly about what they feel—our control mechanisms haven't kept up with that.