Can you give me an example of something you would say to someone, and what, what the follow-up could be that would feel good, and then what has happened in the past?

It's honestly, like, anything to, like, a, a memory of my past, of, like, this, I did this when I lived in New York.

I, uh, used to take martial arts, and it was a really big deal for me growing up in a really abusive household to, this is actually a real story, uh, abusive household to, like, to, to learn how to fight.

And I was with someone then who just said, "Cool." And then, like, oh my gosh, I, I could just feel myself shut down, and I didn't wanna have sex with them, where if they had said to me, "Wow, that's really intense.

Thank you so much for sharing it," or, um, "Hey, what feels so, like, what feels so different for you now than it did even then-

Uh-huh

... that is much more likely we are in...

Like, here's a great example.

I don't remember that question.

Oh.

My origin story.

We can each tell our origin story.

Okay.

I mean, I'll make a sort of a story reference and then I'll come back to myself, which is I was teaching like a year ago and I don't know what came over me, but I was like, I asked, I was like five, 600 therapists in a room and I said, how many of you got into this profession because you wanted to help someone? And they all raised their hand.

And I said, and how many of you feel better helping someone than paying attention or being in your own body and focusing on you? And they all kind of raised their hand.

don't have to get on an airplane to do it.

Anytime anybody is, has a longer elevator ride or, you know, is in, standing in line, the phone comes out.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, one of the things that I was looking at in my research was, okay, I think 15, 20 years ago, at the height of my addiction to drama, you know, it w- we could really look at specific individual factors that contributed to that.

Certain early childhood traumas, certain, um, ways in which the stress physiology actually pr- creates a level of numbness, and simultaneously it gives us pain relief and energy and gives us some type of sensation in the body while maintaining, uh, a level of dissociation.It's pretty brilliant what stress actually does.

And so we could really identify these individual factors, uh, of someone's life that contributed to the individual process of addiction trauma.

But as you're saying, like, oh, this whole generation can't sit still.

They can't sit in line without checking their phone or without, um, doing something.

Yeah