Beyond the Hero’s Journey: Overcoming Trauma and Finding Empathy | Ep. 078

Episode Transcript

Ben: 0:00

light and darkness, good and evil, love and hate, all of it, all the gods, all the devils, all the universes, like Joseph Campbell once said, live inside of you. And whenever you come alive and awake to that fact, you start to bring all of those things in and make a home for them. That is the Antihero's journey.

Codie: 0:39

Welcome to the Mind Hack Podcast, where we explore the psychology of self-improvement and mindset to help you live a happier and more fulfilled life. I'm your host Cody McLain, and today we're talking with Ben Doc Askins, a veteran psychiatric physician assistant and author of Antihero's Journey. the Zero with a thousand faces. Ben's unique journey from a combat medic to psychedelic assisted psychotherapy offers profound insights into trauma healing, and the philosophical depths of human existence Ben has dedicated nearly two decades to practicing and teaching wilderness, tactical and expeditionary medicine in the military. He is certified in MDMA assisted psychotherapy by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or otherwise known as maps. His book, antihero's Journey is a thought provoking memoir that challenges traditional narratives and embraces the concept of zero, a journey beyond delusions and towards enlightenment. Through his experiences in philosophical reflections, Ben provides a unique perspective on the paradoxes of life and death. Today we'll dive into the themes of Ben's book. Exploring his insights and trauma, the role of psychedelic assisted therapy and his philosophy to life's paradoxes. We'll also discuss his journey from the battlefield to the therapy room and how his experiences have shaped his understanding of healing and personal growth. So without further ado, please welcome Ben Doc Askins.

Ben: 2:14

Well, that was a very kind introduction. I'm grateful to be here, Cody.

Codie: 2:18

Thank you, Ben. so in your book you introduce this idea of the zero myth as a counter to the traditional hero's journey. Can you explain what the zero myth is and how it challenges conventional ideas of success in personal growth?

Ben: 2:36

Yeah, I'd be happy to. Uh, I think at this point, most people in our culture are pretty familiar with the Hero's Journey concept taken from Joseph Campbell's book, the Hero With a Thousand Faces, which I'm obviously riffing on in the subtitle of my book. And the Mono myth is another term for the hero's journey, which is why I call it the Zero Myth. And the Hero's journey essentially has, depending on who you talk to, three or four components, the idea of a call to adventure, an initiation experience that's leaving behind one's people and going off into a non-ordinary world for an ordinary person and having an adventure or. meeting some challenges. There's a, a separation from your people, and then there's a return with all kinds of gifts learned on the lesson. And pretty much every superhero movie that you see, or good book out there, or even organized religious story kind of follows this pattern to the point where now it's really hard to pitch a script in Hollywood without it being the hero's journey. In one form or another, they'll just flip to page 20. And if page 20 isn't about initiation, then obviously you don't understand how to write a script and that stuff will get chucked, right? it's kind of in the water and in the air at this point, if you wanna sell something or make a movie. And it's also very popular and prevalent in psychedelic assisted therapy to talk about the psychedelic experience as. Paralleling the Hero's Journey. Dr. Stan Grof is a very influential physician on what's called transpersonal psychology, and he was friends with Joseph Campbell. So it's harder to get closer to the roots of some of those ideas being kind of intertwined into the way that we approach therapy in general, but psychedelic assisted therapy in particular, and I think that, I think there's benefit to it. I think the hero's journey has a lot of lessons to teach us, but I think that they're mostly lessons that are intended for earlier stages of human evolution and development, and that we may need to outgrow them and move on to what I call the anti-Heroes journey, which doesn't have nearly as clear a structure or narrative pattern to it. It's a lot more complex and complicated and has a lot of zigzags in it, rather than just being in a circle compared with the nice, neat formula of the hero's journey or the monomyth. Is that making sense so far?

Codie: 5:01

Yeah, I would think of, uh, say in pop culture, like maybe fight club or Breaking Bad. Where you have, you, either you reject societal norms or you transform from this teacher to somebody who's like a ruthless drug Lord. And so are those in line with the idea of challenging this hero's journey?. Ben: Yeah, I think those are good and the, it's helpful, I think probably to point out that an anti-hero is someone who looks or seems very heroic, but has this tragic flaw or is tempted towards the dark side to use more Star Wars sci-fi sort of language. Um, that there's a lot more complexity to an anti-hero than some of the more. Simplified versions of there's the good guys and there's the bad guys, but there's a lot more going on with an anti-hero. They're a lot more interesting. They're a lot more compelling characters. You're not sure what they're gonna do next.'cause they don't necessarily fit that hero's journey mold and it's a lot more interesting. It keeps you on the edge of your seat. In terms of pop culture stuff, whenever I use the term anti-hero in the idea of the Antihero's journey, what I mean by that is also someone who is far more complex than the simplistic. Roles that come out whenever we focus on the hero's journey. The tendency is for us to take things very literally and to think in terms of be like the hero, don't be like the villain. And that's valuable lessons for learning ethics in the first place when you're a child. But I think whenever you get into the big bad world out here, it's a lot more complex than, just be like the good guy. There are situations that require all sorts of things of us that we'd never imagined in the first place and that, the. The duality or the, the polarity between heroes and villains starts to create some problems in adulthood. There are aspects of every human being that, Carl Jung called Shadow, or that are things that we consider negative stuff that we hide or don't want people to know about. And we wear multiple faces, thousands of faces sometimes to hide showing some of those other faces and that, what I refer to when I say an anti-hero is someone who's done some of the work to integrate that shadow aspect that recognizes that the capacity to be both hero and villain is the range available to every human being out there from the most saintly to the most devilish. And that we have to figure out ways to bring in those aspects of ourselves that aren't destructive and violent and require, I. Suppression and war and those sorts of things where if I don't do the work on myself to recognize what's my own inner villain like there tends to be this thing that Jung called projection where I put that onto somebody who resembles that aspect of myself much more strongly, and then I hate them and I decide that I don't want to be around them, or we need to destroy them or eradicate them, or whatever the case might be. So, you know, on a particular day I may look very heroic, and then on another day I might look really villainous and what am I supposed to do with that? Just pretend that that day didn't happen. How do I bring all of the aspects of what it is to be me to bear in a way that makes me whole and healthy and well and doesn't involve, all of the complexes and problems that psychology's attempted to address whenever we. Suppress that shadow aspect and just project it onto others, and that's just at an individual level. There's also, the familial level and the societal level and the collective levels and it just, you know. Ripple effects happen throughout the whole thing. But I think once you start to, to integrate all aspects of who you are, you start to resemble a bit more complex character who's a lot more fun and a lot more interesting to watch. My favorite example, uh, to just give a little riff here, is the Deadpool character. Around the time that that first Deadpool movie came out, I personally was very exhausted with superhero movies I just couldn't tolerate watching them anymore. It was just the same thing over and over again, man. Same like slightly different colored tights. Same story over and over. And then here comes this guy who actually shoots people in the face, does a whole lot of cussing, does a lot of crazy things that don't seem all that heroic in the first place, but who has, you know, at the heart of what he is doing, there's a lot of love and a lot of humor driving him, and it's just complex and a lot more complicated than the simple hero's journeys out there. Yeah, I really love your explanation of that. Because you really dig into something that I don't think is discussed as often as it should be, which is the fact that we grow up in a society that teaches us to, try to be as good of a person as possible. But inevitably we are complex people and we will end up doing things that even we think are good, but to other people are bad. And that actually reminds me a bit of something called the Karpman Drama Triangle, which is a, as a social model of human interaction. We don't have to dig into it, but it just, uh, I love all the psycho psychology and human models, but it brings up, it's a component of something called Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne. It's a psychological theory where every time we interact, we're either interacting in an adult, a child or parent role. And there is a really fantastic, if you just Google search on YouTube transactional analysis. There's a really fantastic set of short videos that explains this. But in the drama triangle, which is a component of that. have a victim, a rescuer, and a persecutor. And so often we're in a situation where we say, we feel like we're the victim and somebody else is persecuting us, and then we might bring in a third party who tries to rescue us, but to the persecutor, the other person, they're the victim and you're the persecutor. And so when we kind of incorporate this model, or even just the model of the fact that we have a shadow of self and that it is possible for us to do things that other people perceive as bad, even if we think we have good intentions regardless, that's an important part that we should most likely incorporate into our identity, into our ego. Because I think if we don't do that, there's certainly consequences to that. So. what consequences do you think exist for a person that, doesn't believe that they have a bad side or that has grown up thinking that they're only out in the world to do good? Is that even possible?

Ben: 11:39

Yeah, I think that there will be ample opportunities for feedback from the universe to let them know. And whether they'll take advantage of that feedback or not is, a question mark. But there's all the ways that we oversimplify things and then kind of have to deal with the consequences of not recognizing, the larger and broader context of every interaction that we have with other people, we're bringing all of these assumptions into it and. Being able to develop a level of openness and empathy in those interactions is what transforms a lot of them. I was just, you know, talking to a, a client in my therapy practice who was telling me a story about him getting angry at somebody at work who wasn't answering them. There was, somebody at the cash register and he is yelling at this guy trying to figure out like, why aren't you listening to me? And it turns out that the guy's actually deaf. Like he didn't, you know, he made these assumptions about the person being exactly like me and they're not exactly like you. So you made the wrong assumption and then wound up getting a little egg on your face looking silly. Now, not a ton of harm there beyond just. Being embarrassed about yelling at someone who certainly didn't deserve to be yelled at. But I think that's a microcosmic example of cross-cultural, uh, interactions of all sorts or other examples all the way, you know, up to where we're putting a whole lot of our shadow in the western world onto the villains of the eastern world or there's, the holy wars of the past and present day. There's all sorts of, global strife and geopolitical dramas that are writ large examples of, not starting from a place of acknowledging the humanness of the other people involved in whatever interaction that we're talking about. And also not having the humility to acknowledge that. Everybody out there is doing whatever they think is best in any given set of circumstances, given the prior conditioning that they had received, right? If I had been born into a jihadist country that, you know, America has gone to war with, and I've fought on this side of that war, I wouldn't be doing anything different than the people over there that I was sent to fight with. I have to acknowledge that at the outset, and that transforms a great deal of the interactions that I would have with somebody rather than just look at those, you know, others, in a whole bunch of othering ways of speaking negatively about somebody and just looking to destroy them for being, radically different from me.

Codie: 14:13

So, in another way, idea of have, of being an anti-hero of embracing zero. it's another form of empathy that we can apply to other individuals of realizing that, you know, look, we're all dealing with some shit. we've all grown up in a certain circumstance and certain environment that led to us making certain actions. And of course, it doesn't excuse you from those actions if those actions hurt others. But more often than not, we end up getting angry at people without really, the level of understanding that can justify that anger. And, that reminds me of, of that really, of that old Chinese parable the guy going on the river at another boat coming towards him. And the guy's yelling like, you're gonna hit my boat. You're gonna hit my boat. And then he starts cursing and stuff. And then, he ends up seeing that there's nobody on the boat. So he was yelling at nothing. You know, I. So often that's, what we end up doing. So is how can we apply this concept? you mentioned this, idea of embracing the shadow self of bringing it for, for in. And so what can we do with this knowledge? where do you typically apply this and where does this apply?

Ben: 15:21

Yeah, there's a lot of, uh, inner work to be done transforming the way that we think about and talk about identity and, some of those sorts of things or, or ways of, of doing it. The example that you gave of the drama triangle, it becomes this presenting problem a lot of times in psychotherapy, but a big piece would be figuring out the inner drama triangles that exist inside of us and trying to figure out how to. Resolve that drama in yourself is how you begin to evaluate, how can I resolve these dramas with other people? If you don't have yet the resources within yourself to figure those things out, obviously you're not going to be bringing peacefulness to the outer dramas that may exist around you. So a lot of that interior work is a component of it, and that's certainly not a simple place to begin. I recognize that the concept of an anti-heroes journey is to some degree. Contingent on and derivative from the hero's journey, right? Like it starts with anti, you're not gonna make any sense of what an antihero's journey is if you're not at least passingly familiar with the hero's journey, right? So a ton of, you know, psychotherapy and theories and practices. Go back to stories about your family of origin. Where'd you come from and how did you learn in the first place about what a hero is and isn't what a villain is, and isn't what's good and bad, what's right and wrong? What'd you get disciplined for and what did you get rewarded for? All matters. And I wonder if there's a certain amount of knots essentially that get tied in us in childhood, that later on adulthood, the work winds up being untying those knots. So that, you know, the way I call it in the book is un telling all your untrue stories and then living out of whatever you find on the other side of your last lie. There's a whole bunch of things that you got told as a kid that just don't wind up. Being useful or making sense or wind up holding you back more than helping you out whenever you get to be an adult. So I wonder if maybe the Antihero's journey could just be like a blip on the radar screen that gets folks to think about the hero's journey a bit differently sufficiently that we start to raise kids in a way that doesn't tie them in knots so much and allows them to just figure some things out for themselves to some degree so that maybe we can get rid of both the hero's journey and the Antihero's journey and just go on the journey together.

Codie: 17:58

So I guess in another way of, looking at what. How we might apply that is in relation to the societal pressure that we put on each other and to succeed, and especially in America and other Asian cultures, there is this, work mentality. And you, you have to, to make money, you have to, you know, keep up with the Joneses. And this, concept, , is kind of dying down a little bit. I mean, we've seen, we saw that the, the lying flat movement shortly after Covid, especially in China. And we have, aspects of, having the minimalist movement of people traveling in vans of just being a digital nomad, of just getting rid of all your possessions. And it seems like we all end up on our own journey of sorts where we, experience this for ourself that all these things or money doesn't really make us happy, and then we have to go on our own journey. that's often an a, a loop. You know, we go backwards, we go forward. It's never an easy journey. So how would you apply this idea to somebody who's going through the societal pressures? What advice would you give to either a family, or who raising some kids or other people that you've worked with in terms of what, how, what advice have you given them and what situations have you, , worked people go through?

Ben: 19:12

Yeah, it's a really good, really big question. It's certainly one I continue to struggle with as a father of four. You know, there's a way in which we raised our kids, kind of the first decade or so that we were doing things that was pretty traditional, pretty, religious. And then my wife and I kind of had our own awakenings about some of the ways in which we could see through the illusions of things that we'd been taught and grown up with, and , have steered things in a different direction. So there's certainly, I tied my kids in some knots that are gonna need untied eventually. I don't wanna pretend to be anything other than what I am in that regard. But I think that a bunch of that honestly starts with a lot more listening. to kids rather than telling them a whole bunch of things. I think that there's a way in which when we do kids wind up being remarkably intuitive and closer to the source of life in ways that we still need to maybe mold and shape and guide, but that there's a lot of wisdom. To just not pretending that the 30 year head start that I got on them in the grand scheme of a 13.8 billion or so year old cosmos, is that valuable? Like, I just, I've been, I've been around so much longer than you guys. Let me tell you how this, how things work here or whatever. There's just a whole lot of pride and a whole lot of ego that I think if we can make quieter stuff down or do whatever we need to do to bring it to the table in an integrated way, to allow us to just kind of go on this journey together. Like, Hey, the way I approach a lot more parenting at this point is coming alongside my kids and saying like, I got some tips. Like I, yeah, I've, I've got a few more summers in than you have. Let me tell you what happens in the summer. It gets hot. But to pretend that like I understand, all the cosmic, uh, questions that my kids bring to me, I just say, let's, you know, let's hold hands and take a look at the sky and see if we can figure out what's going on here too, rather than me. Puffing up my ego to let 'em know I know all the constellations names or whatever the case might be there. Right. So a great deal of character work, I think is a big piece of that. Having the character to be humble, having the character to do a lot more listening, is a, a good starting point anyway. And then the conversation kind of evolves from there.

Codie: 21:35

and certainly as, a, as a parent, it's, it's something where you try to, you, want them to make mistakes, but you don't want them to hurt themselves. And certainly, like, it's like , if they don't wanna brush their teeth, you know what's good for them. So you have to force them to make sure that they brush their teeth, even if they resent you. that's one of those things where if you allow them to make that mistake, they're gonna be paying for that significantly on later on as adult. So some things you can't let by, but for other things you want to allow them to make mistakes because there's so many books, so, so much self-help knowledge right now, but it seems no matter how much of it you consume, I often find a lot of the, like the big things are things that only you can experience yourself and that you can learn only experientially. And that even if you're reading it through somebody else's story, you don't really embody that. And so I think the aspect of, of making mistakes. so do you have any comments, uh, thoughts on that in terms of how you parent and where do you draw the line?

Ben: 22:33

Yeah, that's one of the biggest things is, just drawing the line around where actual harm is, is usually a lot bigger line than where our impulse is to draw a bunch of that stuff, right? Like it's, it's more about like, are you being annoying at this point or am I sick of hearing whatever, you know, like it's more about my comfort and me coming first on a bunch of those things rather than like, yeah, they're not gonna get hurt. Just let 'em run. Just like they could fall down, they could get hurt and yeah, that, that's part of getting scuffed up as part of growing up, uh, along the way there. I think, again, letting them learn those lessons and gaining the level of intuition, along the way that they need to, to make those decisions is where the path leads them to start to learn the tools to do their own self-development work, to do their own figuring things out to help themselves, to use the self-help terminology, right.

Codie: 23:27

before you were a dad, I understand that you were a combat medic.

Ben: 23:31

yeah, I was,

Codie: 23:32

what was that like? What, how did that reshape your views on the world on identity, heroism

Ben: 23:40

yeah, that was a real important thing to me. growing up, I, and I don't know, I kind of got spun out that way. Like, I don't know if it was, epigenetics to some extent. My dad was a Vietnam veteran. Both my grandfathers served in World War ii. It just seemed like a thing that my family did was when the nation made the call, we answered the call. So that was my plan from a real early age, was to to be a hero like they had been in some, way, shape, or form or fashion and wound up. Stumbling my way into being a combat medic eventually.'cause that seemed to me to be in that, you know, kind of grandiose, idealized, childish way to be, you know, like the hero's hero. Whenever the heroes need help, who do they call for a medic, right? And, that was what I was chasing. And the actual realities of doing that job are, strikingly different from the movies or the recruiting posters. It's a lot of, actual, like truck maintenance is what a ton of being a combat medic winds up actually looking like most of the time, to be honest. But the training is good. Training. I learned a lot about, how to do some important skills in high stress situations and, made some really good friends for life. and those sorts of things were really valuable. It winds up, being a good. NCO I was a staff sergeant before becoming a, a physician assistant through the military, and now I'm a captain. But being a good leader, I guess would be a better way of saying it. It does involve learning how to kind of be a lot like a parent to people who may be older than you, maybe younger than you, a whole mishmash of, people that you wind up being responsible for. I was a platoon sergeant in Iraq and I just had, men and women of all ages that I was responsible for leading. And it, it does, it looks a lot like parenting. There are times where you're like trying to be mom and the shoulder for somebody to cry on and the traditional sense, or you're trying to be dad and telling him to, you know, harden the fuck up and let's get outta here. We. We got shit to do. You know, and trying to thread that needle is a difficult thing to accomplish. For the most part. People kind of fall off the wagon, one side or the other and then just lean into it and that becomes their whole personality. But I did my best anyway to try to, to be what the people that I was serving needed and to be what the situation required from me in a way that brought the most life into it, even though that wasn't always an option, you know?

Codie: 26:05

Yeah. and it seems that no matter how confident we are, we always end up in situations where we become a leader. And when we're a leader for others, we become responsible essentially, in many ways, for their emotional wellbeing because they're relying on us to to always know what to do, even if we don't know what to do. Were you in any situations, or had to console somebody, how did you react as a leader? And perhaps this goes beyond even what you discussed in the book, but is being a leader and having the awareness, the ability to, to push aside your own personal discomfort, your own personal, fear of the situation, is that something that you think is kind of, is innate or something that, that anybody can learn?

Ben: 26:51

Yeah, I, I mean there's probably some innate level of skill that some people have, and then there's a range of ability to develop that afterwards. Right. I do think the principle that I took away from being in those roles a lot of the time is that the way that we look at leadership in a lot of organizations at this point, hierarchical organizations like the military, like corporate culture, where, there's the guy at the top and there's everybody underneath. You got your, direct reports and all of those sorts of things, uh, that are. Are the best way we've been able to come up with, for running some of those sorts of things at this particular point in human evolution, but that we think that authority is housed in those particular places, in those organizational structures. You know, the generals at the top, the privates at the bottom. There's a whole mishmash of us in between. But the truth is that authority flows toward responsibility. It's the people that take responsibility for whatever their area of operations is and do it effectively that wind up. In a, meritocracy, in a place where how well you do the job matters for promotion and that sort of thing that wind up tending to move upwards in those organizations. It's the person who can figure out how to pack their own ruck sack more efficiently and quickly than everybody else that can then turn around and help two or three other people to do it more quickly so that the entire squad or platoon has their stuff up and ready to move out a whole lot sooner. And you take notice of that, and that's a person who you give a bit more responsibility to and test 'em out and see, okay, so you can pack three rucks real quick. Well, you're smarter than the rest of these numbkins here, so what do we do next? Or with you? And that's who becomes sergeant and that's who becomes, you know, yeah. Moving up. Uh, from there is the ones who take responsibility, get the authority in that situation. And I've been in, in. organizations where the leadership that you would see in terms of the structure isn't the actual leadership of the organization, right? We've all seen that to some extent. the guys at the top, the company commander or the First Sergeant, aren't good leaders, don't know what they're doing. They put out all of the information they're gonna put out, and then everybody who knows what's going on turns their heads and looks at who the people who actually know what, how to implement this stuff are, and we wind up doing whatever those guys say to do.'cause you know, oh, the lieutenant over here, he is brand, brand new, and he is got the rank on his chest. But, uh, you know, Sergeant first class over here is on his seventh deployment, and I'm gonna follow him. I wouldn't follow the lieutenant out of a burning building, but I'll follow this guy over here into one. You know what I mean?

Codie: 29:44

Yeah. and it seems unfair in some respect that there's often situations where the higher ups give orders or commands that really don't make sense or they don't have really good understanding as to what's happening on the ground. And then we have to revert to the people that who do know what's going on, and that does have our trust. and they end up probably having to find a way to implement some order that, even they don't agree with.

Ben: 30:11

Yeah, for sure. That is the, uh, the struggle of being in, in leadership in the military is that's just a constant battle. It's like something out of the old Joseph Heller novel Catch 22, where there's just all these crazy making insane conflicting orders being given down from multiple levels of leadership simultaneously. And you just do your best to not screw up in as many ways, you know, you're not gonna succeed. So it's like, how do I just stay alive and make sure all my guys make it outta here too, and just take the licks for like, you know. The conflicting, situation that you get put in. It's like, uh, yeah. You know, I, and I play around with that a little bit in the book along the way, like that. There's just, there's a lot of contradictions inherent it seems in being a person and the contradictions that we can't fully grasp. We call 'em paradoxes and, try to, uh, understand how to navigate with all of these conflicting interests all at the same time coming at us.

Codie: 31:13

And, and whether it's being a leader or just being in the military, that it often requires a level resilience and inevitably, you probably face trauma. But in your book, you mention that trauma isn't something that you think should be overcome in the traditional sense of, letting that trauma go. I'm wondering if you can elaborate on your view of trauma and, how it, we should incorporate it into our identity.

Ben: 31:38

Yeah, I think, there's a bunch of ways that we've developed of thinking about what trauma is in the first place, and what I've found to be a useful way of explaining it as an analogy is sometimes for people to hear that, you know, there's. trauma surgeons who are dealing with physiological trauma, like these structures of your body, have been damaged by violent forces applied to them, and now we have to try to hold that together. A very literal sense of trauma is a fractured bone or a lacerated liver, right? Emotional or psychological trauma, I think, is closely analogous to that because it's the same tissues being affected, but it's more like, memories are being encoded in your body in a way that also affects the structure and functions of those tissues, so that now those memories have you wired up in your nervous system to respond in ways that are mismatches between your experience and your environment. The classic movie example is the veteran diving on the ground after a truck backfires, right? That kept him alive in Iraq. Now it's embarrassed him in civilization. And what, what are we supposed to do with those mismatches between our nervous system and our environment? The, uh. Classic example I like to cite is that, that, that, that's essentially what a trauma response is, is it's something that you learned, that your memory carries for you in a way that was adaptive to an unusual or very stressful circumstance that now you're carrying into the rest of your life that's creating dysfunction and difficulty for you. For example, there's people who drown while scuba diving because they have a panic attack, and the regulator that you have in your mouth is the only thing that's keeping you alive and in every other circumstance in your life. Before that one, how do you deal with not being able to catch your breath in a panic attack? It's get all this stuff off of my face, get this stuff out of my mouth. The one time that that's intensely maladaptive would be if you're underneath the surface of the ocean and that thing in your mouth is the only thing that's keeping you able to breathe, right? We have examples like that. That's what a trauma response is.

Codie: 33:56

Yeah. and the book, the, the Body Keeps Score is really one that dives into this concept that the trauma is something that lives within us, and it's not just something that we can just forget about. And, and I love you bringing up the idea of scuba diving. I, have maybe five or six different scuba diving certifications. I'm a rescue diver, deep sea, uh, a wreck diver. And that was, I think, one of the things that drew me to it. Is knowing that you can be down there at 40, 50 feet down and you, if you, you have to, even if you have a panic attack, which I've probably had, a few of them while scuba diving is you, have to slow your breath down. You have to, go inward and, have that, that conquer, like conquer your mind, so to speak. And I think there's something to that, and that's even why I went out and I, I got a pilot's license, so I fly a plane and I find flying a plane to be incredibly, one of the most stressful things that, that you, you can do. But you know, I never have a distracting thought. you really can't because that distracting thought is the difference between life and death. And so I, I find that it draws me in. And I'm sure you've had scenarios like that where you get drawn in. I don't know if that's maybe a, panic or, or if I'm drawn towards. Uh, events that, that are stressful or what that might

Ben: 35:15

Yeah. Yeah, I, that's an interesting point that you raised there. Right? So we have, in psychedelic assisted therapy, we make this distinction between ordinary states of consciousness and what they call non-ordinary states of consciousness. Psychedelics being an obvious example of a time that your ordinary state has changed and there, but there's tons of examples of non-ordinary states. the hyper focus of staying alive during having a panic attack under the ocean or flying a plane that you're describing, that you know, way that you tunnel in on the task in front of you is non-ordinary. There's changes happening neuro transmissivity that make that possible. Being in, under combat stress as an example, we do, you know, combat stress reaction, shooting, uh, training where you're doing close quarters combat and your heart rate's up around 200. That changes the way that, Your body responds to those pressures. The classic example is Colonel Dave Grossman's book on Combat describes a lot of the physiological responses to that level of stress, where your heart rate's up your, you have auditory exclusion, you have tunnel vision. You literally are not able to see any wider than that, experience. Those are non-ordinary states of consciousness. And then you're, you know, running somewhere with a weighted pack. And then you have to try to put, rounds into something the size of a, a card from a deck of cards or something, right? Like that's non-ordinary. That's not, that's at the extremes of human capacity, right? There's plenty of other examples., Altitude and breath work and cold exposures or ways of inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness. And I do think that there's some. Trauma, like it's a dose dependent sort of thing. You can do a four minute cold plunge and upregulate norepinephrine release throughout your body that resembles what Effexor the antidepressant does, and that's beneficial for you. And you can spend four hours in the same water and get hypothermia and your heart slows down enough that you get bradycardia and an irregular heart rhythm and die. That can happen to you as well. It's a, there's a dose dependent relationship to these non-ordinary states of consciousness where they can be medicine or they can be poison for us.

Codie: 37:32

when you were talking about that, it kind of changes at the topic, but I was thinking of the Uvalde school shooting where the police didn't rush in and, you know, made up a bunch of excuses. And know that whenever you're being trained as a police officer or you're in the military, if, you don't train consistently, then you're going to lose that ability. And I think there's so much you can know how to shoot a gun when you're at a gun range, but when you're in a stressful environment where you have somebody shooting back at you, there's no way that you're really going to know how you're going to react. And all you can do is really try to train for it. I'm wondering though, if that training itself causes some form of trauma, or how can we apply that in other areas of our lives and from day to day living is, there any connection there?

Ben: 38:15

the principle, the way that I've, often said it is like, the more we sweat in training, the less we bleed in combat. The idea being as much as you can. My, my goal with a lot of the training cycles that I would do with young medics on my last appointment was I would want the training cycles to have been so much harder and so much worse than the real things that they wound up dealing with. That whenever they were in a real scenario, they'd say, oh, this is way simpler than that. Bullshit Doc was throwing at me before we came out here because I would turn it up to 11 on everything. It's in the dark and you're trying to, you know, start an IV in a weird situation, in a tight space, and somebody's spraying you in the face with a hose. That's not gonna happen even in a firefight, but you're gonna have a whole lot of stress going on. You're gonna have a whole lot of things that are distracting you. It's gonna be like you've got boxing gloves on trying to put this tourniquet on somebody the first time that you're doing that while you're stressed out. So the idea is to make sure that whenever the moment that you need to perform presents itself, that winds up somehow being easier than all the things that you were doing beforehand. Because the principle we use is you, nobody rises to the occasion. Everyone sinks to their level of training. So make the training wet, nasty, dirty, filthy hard, and do it over and over and over again until you're exhausted. And then do it one more time. And that's how you set yourself up for success. So that whenever you're. Thrown into a real life situation, it may actually wind up being a little bit easier than some of that nonsense that we put you through in training.

Codie: 39:54

Hmm and I'm, thinking of, of David Goggins, Jocko Willink, what do you think of those guys and are there anybody else that, that has endured a lot and has something to say that, that you agree with?

Ben: 40:08

Yeah, I mean, I, I think they've got a lot of good advice to put out. Waking up early is important, Jocko, right? Like you get a lot more done in the early morning hours whenever it's quiet out there. And I, you know, got tons of leadership experience to draw on. And David Goggins is a machine, right? Like he, runs on the, uh, you know, he's basically got a sock full of crushed walnuts at the end of every race that he goes running on or whatever. And there's something to be said for those levels, of endurance and high performance for sure. I don't know how well, uh, that. Translates into all the other avenues of your life. Like there are circumstances that require those sorts of things from us, but, I don't know how well adapted that winds up making you in, you know, a family setting. I know that at least in my own experience, the guy that goes to Iraq is not necessarily quite as welcome, at my dinner table as, uh, the dad that I wind up being winds up looking a lot different than that. And I think that level of, adaptability and range is something, at least that's been important to me in trying to, be capable of, doing a lot of different things rather than specialization maybe is something that's kind of the question behind the question. You get real good at that one thing and then try to apply it to everything else. It may not translate. If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail and that's not great whenever you're trying to fix a mirror or something like that.

Codie: 41:38

think David Goggins is an example of somebody who has endured a lot of trauma and he's able to use that trauma in, uh, in a way that is benefiting a lot of people, inspiring them, pushing them to, to, to, to push themselves harder, even though, of course it's at the expense of his own body. And I think, there's another perspective about why do you push yourself to the point where you're, you're physically breaking down. And I think it's when you're using that as a source of fuel of internal drive, it's like an on and off switch. Like you can't just turn that off. you can't tone it down. it's either on or it's not. And, uh, I, I think that the same is true with, with say, drug addiction. You know, you, a lot of drug addicts might say, you know what, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take a little bit less. But, you know, you have to either, you have are either on the bottle or off the bottle. You know, it's very, very difficult to navigate that, that toning it down. And I see that from, from a trauma perspective. And so to, to kind of shift, I know that you do MDMA assisted psychotherapy. And I'm wondering if you've worked with, people who have PTSD or other mental health issues, perhaps some trauma that they're trying to overcome. and how, what are these outcomes and, how do you work with them and et cetera?

Ben: 42:57

Yeah, there's ways that,, know, be an all or nothing. If there's circumstances where that's beneficial and that's important, but they wind up being a smaller range of the circumstances out there. I think, and it may be better to not have like lights on, lights off, but to find a dimmer switch for a lot of life. And that was something that I, I also, you know, very much had to learn. that was something psychedelics taught me to some degree was the dimmer switch idea. Like, Hey, you don't have to be so extra all the time, man. Like, the can't hurt me idea. Sounds an awful lot like a, a trauma response turned into, a philosophy of life. So at, at the extreme points of that. Sure. but there's certainly benefits to developing endurance and resilience, at the, at that 110% level that he goes at. Right. you know, the. MDMA being, not a legal medicine. I don't, I do. It's a weird time in the world to be trained to do therapy with medicines that aren't quite yet legal. So I wind up using Ketamine assisted therapy. Just to clarify, in my clinical practice,'cause that is legal, but the approach to therapy still very much resembles some of the training around, using MDMA and the way that I do it in my clinic. The way of approaching that winds up being, it's, it's interesting 'cause I was, discussing non-ordinary states of consciousness previously. Right. And trauma is an example of a non-ordinary state of consciousness for the most part. Like whatever homeostasis set point is, it's not, a violently abusive situation, right? So that's non-ordinary compared with what your body's naturally adapted to as an environment and using non-ordinary states of consciousness like psychedelics. Is an example of trying to almost do a little sympathetic magic. You're trying to cure the non-ordinary state of trauma with the non-ordinary state of psychedelics. And, you know, what does that look like? It varies certainly from person to person. A big part of it is, a ton of it is the psychedelics get a lot of the headlines, and it's the therapy that matters. It's making a person feel safe. It's making them the, you know, the mantras in all of psychedelic therapy is set. And setting the mindset that you have needs to be one where you're able to trust and feel safe and let go of expectations and be open to what you find in a a psychedelic head space. That's important. And then the setting. You're with trained professionals who you know and who know your story and who are gonna carry it carefully and who are gonna help you through, the experience are key components to this. it's psychedelic assisted therapy for a reason. The psychedelics augment it and accelerate it and do a lot of things that are very difficult to do any other way. But that therapeutic container around the event of the medicine is really, I think, the prime mover in a whole bunch of ways.'cause you can do these medicines, people have been in all sorts of settings and with all sorts of mindsets and that doesn't necessarily help people with, Traumatic memories either prevent getting them or recover from them. Although there was like an interesting study, I, I'm gonna screw up the details on this, but there was a large scale, uh, event where I, I'm not even remembering the details. There was a, it might have been a, a mass shooting, or a bombing of some sort at a, a rave or a disco hall. And they did some kind of really interesting work looking at like who had taken MDMA and been in this dance hall and then did and didn't develop PTSD afterward. And it did seem to kind of have a protective effect to prevent people who'd been in this crazy situation from developing PTSD later. Now, whether or not you can hang your hat on that is like everybody should be taking MDMA prior to possible trauma or something. I wouldn't go to the prophylactic route in that regard, but, uh, it was an interesting, piece, but now I'm just getting off on a tangent here. Sorry.

Codie: 47:10

Yeah. No, no. but I think that was part of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, and there are some people who were on MDMA and they ended up not developing PTSD. And actually, I find it, it's interesting that if you're in a traumatic car accident, one of the things that they'll do at a hospital is, I'm not sure exactly which drug, but they will inject you with like a high dose of, of, opiates sometimes. And they found that if you're, if you have, uh, high amount of opiates after a traumatic event, you're less likely to have that PTSD or that traumatic response later on. I think it just kind of, uh, lessens the memory since opiates obviously, affect your memory pathways. But, but

Ben: 47:51

there's similar data around, ketamine's use at point of wounding. If people get sufficient pain management after being, you know, blown up in a war, whether it's opioids or ketamine, then there's lower rates of PTSD later on for sure. and there's, there's data going back as far as like the Vietnam War around some of that stuff. There were lessons learned back then that we had to relearn in the global War on terrorism, try to start reintroducing that stuff. but yeah, you're right. I do. Yeah, that was the Paris attacks. Good memory. Nice.

Codie: 48:20

but then so you mentioned, what you, I think what you're referring to is the default mode network, is that psychedelics end up turning that default mode network off. But people take, people will do what's called like candy flipping, or, number of things where you combine, say like shrooms and MDMA and you go to, to EDC or a music festival, you're guaranteed to have a great time, but nobody walks away from that feeling like a completely new person, who's been able to, overcome a lot of their traumas because it's not the drug. It's the setting and your attempts thought prior to taking this as, not as a drug, but as a medicine and using this medicine to heal some aspect or component about yourself. I, so I assume, and not working with MDMA, but with ketamine, I assume that's the kind of work that, that you do with people.

Ben: 49:07

Correct. And you know, in the MDMA assisted therapy training that I did, they showed us a video from the clinical trials where it was legal to use. in one of the first videos they had us watch was of a, a combat medic in Iraq whose friend had died and he had frozen. He was a, a childhood sex abuse survivor. And whenever he had been abused as a child, he had frozen under those circumstances and felt very much the same sort of freeze response took place whenever a friend of his was, hit in an indirect fire attack. And he was the medic he was supposed to respond to take care of his friend, and his friend had died there. And that, you know, re-traumatized him in a way that, left him. With a lot of struggles to function in society afterwards. And he had this MDMA session where, you know, with the therapists holding space for him and him wearing an eye mask and listening to some music, he went into this inner journey, is what we call it, rather than, the outer journey of a rave or a walk in the woods or candy flipping or what have you. and was right back in that traumatic scenario watching his friend die, and then had the experience of his friend getting up and coming over and talking to him and saying, look man, I was gonna die anyway. There wasn't anything that you could have done. I forgive you and I love you. And he had this incredible healing experience of what an alternate. You know, reality could have been like, now that doesn't change the events that took place, but it changed his way of relating to the memories that he was carrying so sufficiently that, he no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD at the end of participating in the clinical trial, all of the ways that, you know, he is hypervigilant, hyper arousal, sleep disturbances, emotional swings, all of those things that the constellation of symptoms that we call post-traumatic stress, he got relief from, significantly from having that experience. And that is a significantly different experience than just having a good time at a concert.

Codie: 51:11

Yeah. And I think MDMA has this, wrap as a party. It just makes you happy and, and you become overly friendly to everybody around you. But I think there is another component where it kind of quiets the ego. And so often it's our ego that it serves to protect us. It serves to, to make sure that, that we're we're capable of, living and surviving in this world where we have to, to effectively put on our oxygen mask before we can put on anybody else's, but then we end up having these, it ends up having these behaviors that are actually not helping us there. You know, they're no longer serving us as one, one might say. And I think, and in the right therapeutic setting, whether it's with mdma, ketamine, drugs, or just like therapy. I think, another aspect is that any sort of drug is a tool, and it's not, it's not a panacea. It's not gonna solve the problem. But if you have, have the right mixture, the right setting, the right therapist, the right situation, then I think you can have beautiful interactions like that where you're able to, uh, let go. I, I'm not sure how you would phrase it, but I would think of like, let go of a past that that's still haunting you, to this day.

Ben: 52:17

Yeah, it, it puts you into a head space where fear is quiet, and love is loud, is the way that I'll explain it to people a lot of the time, and you get to explore your life, your memories, your identity, your goals for the future, all of those things from a space where. For a change. Fear is quiet and love is loud, and you can take what you want from the data of that. And then we call it integration therapy. Integrate it back into your daily life. Whenever the medicine has moved through your system and you are back to the place where fear's a bit louder and love's a bit quieter, whatever your normal set point might be, but you're still able to remember what would it be like and you start to embody that and in and inhabit that into your life where you're able to access more love than you remembered being able to, and you're able to make fear a bit more quiet than you thought was possible beforehand. It's a a pretty significant emotional event for sure.

Codie: 53:19

On the other hand, one thing that I know MDMA and other drugs have been used for is also acceptance of, of death. And in your book, you discuss the paradox of life and death. And I'm wondering how did you, I, I'm wondering how has your near death experience and your work as a combat medic influenced your, understanding of these paradoxes?

Ben: 53:43

Yeah, it's, um, I wind up landing in the book on this kind of mantra or my, my purpose in life that I feel like I've discovered is to attempt to embody all of the paradoxes in a way that overcomes fear with love to kind of live out, uh, a life purpose that resembles the mechanism of action of MDMA in our, in our brains, in some capacity. I have had, you know, some near death experiences. I've been close to other people at the end of their lives on probably what's a larger number of times than the average person, but still less than plenty of other people, which has caused me to reflect, quite a bit on that. I did, uh, you know, have my own. Psychedelic experience of dying and being reborn repeatedly, and that's a pretty significant event to try to, to make sense of. I, um, The book was a result of trying to integrate some of those experiences for myself, it was just me making sense out of, you know, like the, the byline on it or trying to sell it or whatever. Is that the book's not about psychedelics. The book is a psychedelic, it's me trying to do psychedelic assisted therapy on myself out loud in front of other

Codie: 55:00

I love that

Ben: 55:00

So it winds up being kind of a, you know, a Gonzo autobiography that's kinda all over the place and stitching together a bunch of things that are, difficult for me to try to stitch together, to be integrated and to be whole and to be, you know, be more of an anti-hero and be less of a hero in that regard. But yeah, I had the feeling that I died all the deaths. Anybody could ever die in the last 13.8 billion years that it took to be me in the first place. Like if, uh, you know, I was a cell. That had its wall laced, like, just down to that level of detail, just however much death there's been in the universe, I felt like I had endured it and have real clear memories of, you know, like, I don't know, I'm, I'm not an expert on, spirituality or any of that. but I'm interested in it anyway. Like, I don't know if we have past lives or how any of that stuff works or whatever the case might be, but I have some memories of, getting killed a whole bunch of times and had to try to figure out how to, how to integrate that meaningfully back into normal everyday life. Having not actually died this particular time. But at, at some level, like, if like a plane landed on me right now, I wouldn't fully be surprised by it. I'd be like, ah, they got me one more time. Shucks, here we go again, or whatever. and trying to integrate that, uh, it's something I'm probably just keep doing for the rest of my life. It's a, a significant. Experience to have. the way that I wound up kind of getting through that experience was actually humor. And there's a whole bunch of just kind of dark humor and sarcastic humor and self-deprecating humor throughout the book as well, where the way that I escaped from what felt like a hell realm, like I was just dying and coming back and dying and coming back and dying and coming back was starting to. Make jokes about it, I guess. I live here now, so what the hell? Uh, you know, somebody'd be, cutting my head off and I'd say, didn't we just do this 3000 years ago? Like, you don't have anything original. There's only so many ways that you can kill this body. And I feel like we've exhausted them, but nope, we're gonna do it again, or whatever. Which was a little bit where I connected with that Deadpool character again, because he feels it every time he gets ripped in half, gets pulled apart and has to regrow those baby legs. And is Winnie the pooing around? Uh, he feels every little bit of that and the way he winds up navigating. It's a whole bunch of wise cracks and humor. And I do think there's something to be said for the value of humor in trauma work where, the ability to get to where you're able to laugh at some of the most difficult things in your life is a significant vital sign of healing.

Codie: 57:37

Yeah. And, uh, I think to , when you end up being bullied, uh, that, that form of self-deprecating humor, I think that's the baseline because nobody can attack you when, when you, you humor yourself, but you're able to do it in a way where you acknowledge your faults, but you're still able to laugh at it. I think there, there's a lot of, psychology around the, how we treat ourselves, where often today, we know we treat ourselves as, we're super hard on ourselves. and the advice commonly given is to try to treat yourself like you're friend and how would you give advice to a friend? you would acknowledge maybe their faults, um, but then you would say, Hey, look, you know, but it's not the end of the world. You would treat them with a level of respect and friendship. And I think in some ways we end up having a, a, a brain that maybe, you know, we, we might treat like a good friend, but we don't have to listen to it. but certainly having a humor, I think that's the, I don't think there's any, any more meta response than that, as a means of indicating that you love and respect whatever this thought or this action or this memory is. And, uh, I don't think there's any better, uh. The level that you can go to from that.

Ben: 58:52

Yeah, I think that's, um, at least that's the way that I've survived a whole bunch of stuff, is connecting with joy. Connecting with humor was the way that I got out of hell in that non-ordinary state of consciousness. And has also been the way of sort of enduring my own little hells along the way was, hey, if, if we're all gonna be here and we're gonna laugh about it together, it makes it, it makes hell one degree cooler somehow

Codie: 59:17

I, I love how you use that, dark humor as a way of dealing with, with the darker parts of yourselves. And I think that's something that we should all really do more often. And I think as like a case study, I think you have comedians like, like George Carlin, um, Hannah Gadsby, that, that use dark humor as a means to address, their own personal as well as societal issues, you know, that they turn pain into performance. And I think by doing that, you, you break down emotional walls that we keep up. so that's a perspective I haven't really read, or come across from a book in this area. So that, that was really enlightening.

Ben: 59:53

Yeah. Well I appreciate that. That's, I think that's the way forward. I do think that like, if you're capable of laughing at whatever you're enduring, it may not necessarily, I don't know if it trauma proofs us, that feels like too strong a language, but I do feel like it sets you up to endure in a way that if you're taking things very, very seriously, may set you up to be a bit more brittle and a bit more rigid. And, you know, joy and humor are kind of flexible and there's a certain amount of flexibility that's a part of resilience.

Codie: 1:00:25

and in your book, you, you incorporate a lot of philosophical reflections in quotes. I'm wondering what, what types of philosophies or ideas that have resonated with you or have influenced you in a way where, where you've kept them, as like a value as part of your, view of the world.

Ben: 1:00:41

Yeah, I, uh, got a master of divinity degree along the way and wound up reading a lot of theology and a lot of philosophy that was assigned to me and then decided that I, like the big questions were very interesting to me, for a very long time. You know, like the why to bad things happen, to good people idea or the, you know, is there a god and, uh, you know, like what's the source of all life? What are, what the hell are we doing here in the first place and what's going on? And just trying to, you know, find some anchors to, to sort some of that stuff out. I wound up reading, a lot of the philosophy, the way we do it, It's, it just gets so academic and so dry. And I didn't feel like a connection with that. But what I've enjoyed along the way is trying to translate that translational work winds up being a lot more like, uh, interdisciplinary stuff. Like getting familiar enough with a particular discipline to make it valuable to a different discipline is a way that I've found philosophy to be helpful. thinking hard about a subject harder than we might think on average is what I think is like the best strength of philosophy in that regard. But I wind up, you know, in the book, lean in pretty heavily on a particular guy named Graham Priest, who's a, professor of philosophy and has a, a unique. A bit unorthodox take on the philosophy of language and logic in particular. And he's written a lot on the Liar Paradox and several other paradoxes, and has developed a logic that's, para consistent around that. And I found that, very fascinating. And then he is also written a book called One About Oneness that is really just an attempt at, uh, you know, the analytic philosophy tradition, interacting with certain, perspectives from Buddhism and Eastern views of enlightenment, but trying to be real wordy about it for whatever reason.

Codie: 1:02:32

It was certainly, I think of philosophy, spirituality, uh, and religion. Whether it's, it's Buddhism, they incorporate a lot of these core components that can really be in my view, I look at it as like an operating system as, as. As values. Whenever we come across a decision, we often have decisions that don't have a clear answer where we don't know exactly what's right, what's wrong, and that's where we can refer to spirituality or, Budd or Eastern Buddhism really is a means of, looking at that, of helping us to understand what is the, what is the right path for us? how do we proceed?

Ben: 1:03:10

Yeah, I, you know, before. We were recording here, we were talking a little bit. And I think that there's those ways of connecting with what's been called non-duality are some of just the best ways to find joy in whatever circumstance you might be in. Like if you can connect with that mindset and, you know, there's a bit of philosophy in the background to try to ex explain like that duality is the quote unquote illusion of separateness. Or that there's a, you know, a different you that's different than me, significantly enough that we're adamistic and different and, maybe there's a life force that's running through everything that unites it all so that it's all one. And it's just looking at things from one perspective versus another. There's, um. Value, I think, in being able, not necessarily to articulate that perfectly or flawlessly. I don't know even know if that's possible, but if you can get to where you're able to connect wholeheartedly with that, that's a bit of what it is. Also to be an anti-hero, in my mind, it's bringing together everything in a way that fits. It's not. Hero versus villain versus victim versus bystander. But it's recognizing we have all of those things inside of each one of us, and that each one of us are connected meaningfully in those ways. Brings me a great deal of peace, allows me then to create out of a place of peace rather than out of striving or out of competition. but it's, it's hard to escape. It's hard to escape the basic either disjunctive or conjunctive ways that we do logic. It's, is it either or, or is it both? And Well, it's both or not, right? There's all these little word games whenever we get kind of to the edge of what knowledge is, what knowledge we're capable of having as, three dimensional human beings that are time bound.

Codie: 1:05:08

if I were to try to summarize, I think your key takeaway is, is really this concept of, viewing ourselves as a complete being. One who can, who can do good, who can do bad, incorporating all the aspects of ourselves and having a willingness to look into those perspectives, to not push them away, to try to, to view ourselves as, as a being that is, that incorporates this, the shadow self. as you know, one might say from Freudian psychology

Ben: 1:05:39

Yeah, light and darkness, good and evil, love and hate, all of it, all the gods, all the devils, all the universes, like Joseph Campbell once said, live inside of you. And whenever you come alive and awake to that fact, you start to bring all of those things in and make a home for them. That is the Antihero's journey. You're on the path at that point. Beforehand, you're just a kid. I think that's all there is to human development. You're either a child, you're an adult, or you're an enlightened one. And I'm not sure being an enlightened one adds anything at all to being an adult. In fact, I'd suggest it adds nothing.

Codie: 1:06:19

thank you for joining us, doc Askins, your book, your journey. It offers such a, a unique perspective on growth and identity, and really finding freedom and in places that we probably wouldn't have looked. And for everyone listening, I highly recommend picking up his book. It's called The Antiheroes Journey, the Zero With a Thousand Faces. And if you want to look at his clinic, his, website is advanced practice providers.com, or you can check out his website at antiheroesjourney.com. So until next time, keep questioning the norms and keep hacking your mind. And that's it for the show. Thanks.