Infants on Thrones

  So the phrase that I would use for you that I tell parents when I'm working with really volatile kids is calm is contagious and so is everything else. Calm is contagious. So is everything else. Every single human being that is triggered becomes a seven year old version of themselves until someone more mature steps into the conversation.

Someone more mature. Someone more mature. Children are the collective representation of the combined trauma of their parents. Combined trauma. Shame is one of the biggest examples of this, right? We both come from spiritual backgrounds and we were indoctrinated and introduced to so much language around what was wrong with us.

And then we weren't equipped with the idea of what it looks like to reconcile that in a way that lets me know I'm fully capable of becoming a healthier version of myself. Because if somebody tells me the only thing that you're going to do is try to be just a little less broken tomorrow, then the only thing that I know is I'm speaking the fluency of brokenness.

The fluency of brokenness. We're designed for connection, even on the neuronal level. Uh, so I think the, the innate nature of the way everything is designed is to seek out that connection. Connection and to seek out personal growth and development. But to do so in community, you're kind of like one of those Russian stacking goals that if you're 30, there's a 25-year-old version of you inside of you and a 20-year-old version and a fifteen, ten five, and all of those versions are informing the greater version.

And it really gives you an opportunity to go that even by myself, if I'm alone, by myself, if I really check in. And, and start to learn and do self discovery and inner work. I can learn that I'm, I'm a constellation of different systems and experiences and versions of myself through my own kind of microcosm of my interior evolution.

Microcosm of interior evolution. Micro, what to the, huh? So I think just giving ourselves the opportunity to, to be consummate learners and, and more than anything, to, to learn about ourselves. The more that we ask questions about who we are and we are open to answering those questions and self discovery, I think the greater possibility that we have of being healthy and impacting the other people that we come into contact with in healthy ways as well.

Calm is contagious and so is everything else. Because the world is round It turns me on This is Infants on Thrones Baby steps You want someone to preach to? The philosophies of men I like What religion do you believe in? I don't believe in them. There will be many willing to preach to you the philosophies of men mingled with humans.

Baby steps. You can buy anything in this world with money. Look for the people who will set your soul free. It always seems impossible until it's done. Look for the good in everyone. All right. Welcome back to infants on thrones. I'm Glenn Ostland, and this is episode 738. Calm is contagious. And so is everything else.

A Mind Expanding Conversation with Dr. Jerome. Now, Dr. Jerome is a functional neurologist who runs a clinic in Decatur, Georgia. He's the author of the brain based Enneagram, which we discussed previously in episode 728, and if you haven't listened to that already, I strongly recommend that you do so. Dr.

Jerome is a wealth of information and makes difficult ideas very easy to understand and digest. And I was just absolutely blown away by this conversation that you're about to hear. But before we get to it, I want to give you a brief quiz. So Dr. Jerome and I discussed this in great detail. I want you to listen to the following statements and just ask yourself whether you agree with these statements or not.

Now, if you've been following Infants on Thrones for a while, you'll know that a few years ago I started getting very interested in better understanding just what impact the Mormon church had on the way that my mind was formed, the ways that I see the world, the ways that I see myself in the world. And that interest led me down a number of different rabbit holes that I've been exploring ever since.

So these are some of the questions that I posted in the Mormons on Mushrooms Sangha Facebook group a few weeks ago, because I was curious to see if others saw things similar to the way that I did, and some did, some didn't. And after my conversation with Dr. Jerome that you're about to hear, I can definitely say that I learned some things that I didn't previously know.

Yeah. All right. Anyway, so here are those questions. Are you ready? I am responsible for how I think and feel. What do you think? Are you responsible for how you think and feel? Other people are responsible for how I think and feel. My brain creates 100 percent of my thoughts and feelings. Consciously or unconsciously, but mostly unconsciously.

My brain does not create 100 percent of my thoughts and feelings, consciously or unconsciously, but mostly unconsciously. I perceive less than 1 percent of everything that truly exists around me. I perceive more than 1 percent of of everything that truly exists around me. Alright, so, those are the statements.

Do you know where you stand on those statements? Are you interested to hear what a functional neurologist has to say about those statements? And oh yeah, one more thing. Do you think it's possible for you to choose your thoughts the way you choose your clothing? Alright, well, hold on there. Hey, good to see you again.

Good to see you too. Cool. So we, we've got an hour today. And, um, last time when we talked, we spent a lot of time talking about the Enneagram. It was really fascinating. And, um, I want to focus on the brain today. Cause we really didn't talk about that other side that you do, like the, the neuro theology and the company that you have.

And I know you've got some e courses. Um, there's a line from a movie called eat, pray, love that you might be familiar with. I don't know. Julia Roberts. Yeah. And, and there, at one point her character is told that she should learn how to choose her thoughts. Like you, like you choose your clothing. I cannot focus in there.

All I think about is my meditation room and how to decorate. The meditation room is within groceries. Decorate that you always talk in bumper sticker. I do and here's another one You have to learn to select your thoughts the same way that you select your clothes every day now That's a power that you can cultivate You want to come here and you want to control your life so bad work on the mind and that's the only thing you should Be trying to control because if you can't master your thoughts, you're in trouble forever If you can't master your thoughts, you're in trouble forever If you can't master your thoughts, you're in trouble forever And so I want to ask you about That and from from the perspective of neurology and like what our thoughts and feelings Do some thoughts physically exhaust us and drain us and other thoughts energize us and boost us Like what's the difference between?

repressing suppressing and expressing thoughts and feelings and Absolutely What's healthy and that sort of thing if I'm naturally feeling one way about something and I change it to feel another way and I'm not Is that honest? Yeah, that's great. I love those. Cool. All right. And I want to start off, um, I want to start off by reading a, uh, poll.

So there, there's a, there's a group, uh, called Mormons on mushrooms. That's a Facebook, it's a podcast. And then there's a, uh, they have a Facebook group that, uh, I joined about a month ago and about two weeks ago. Put a poll up just to see how, what do people think about their, the relationship between themselves and their brains and thoughts and feelings.

And, and so I want to read to you the poll questions and get you to get your comments on them. Sounds great. I'm looking forward to it. All right. So the first, the first thing that I asked was I am responsible for how I think and feel and for people to just kind of take like a true false Select this one if you agree with it.

And 46 people, which was the most of any that filled out this poll. 46 votes for I am responsible for how I think and feel. What, what do you think about the way that that question is framed and how would you answer that? Uh, it's a, it's an interesting, it's an interesting dynamic because you're, you're asking, think and feel.

And I think in most situations, somebody is going to go, uh, consciousness initially. Right. So I think the, the kind of the, the natural response to that is what I'm thinking and feeling on a conscious level and excuse me, uh, I think, uh, a way that I would look at it is technically speaking, if I had to answer yes or no, the answer is no, if it's based on just the way that this phrase there.

Okay. And what I mean by that, is the first several years that we are on the planet. We're nothing more than a sponge learning the fluency of the other experiences that we have around us. Right? So most people have the question of nature versus nurture. It's actually that it's nature, nurture, and we have to And discipline based conditioning combined that end up producing your capacity to think and feel at all.

Right? So when you're responsible for your thinking and feeling, I think if you add the caveat of, am I responsible for what I'm aware of and what I do with that? Am I responsible for when I become conscientious of my thoughts, how I choose to move forward in terms of what that does in my mental health, real estate, am I responsible for my emotions in terms of how I feel?

Uh, if I've just become aware that I don't feel good having vulnerable conversations, am I responsible for that? I think we're talking about moving from unconscious to conscious, and these are levels of competency, right? So if you ask the exact same question, but you do it in levels of competency, there are four levels of competency that most people study.

You've got unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, I'm sorry, you've got unconscious incompetence, conscience, conscience. Oh man, it's hard to say. I'm gonna start over. You have four levels of competency. You've got unconscious incompetence. I don't know what I don't know. Yeah. You've got conscious incompetence.

I know that I don't know something. You've got conscious competence. I know that I know. And then you've got unconscious. Unconscious competence. It's a tongue twister, right? So I have three kids that are five and under. All right. It's also one of those things Are you asking these questions as an adult?

Are you asking them as a child? Yeah And then realizing and as soon as she did that she immediately popped her head out of the room and said I apologize I'm sorry There was a cockroach. Because she knows as soon as she gives that scream, it's instinctive for her in terms of the fear. She grew up in a trailer park and her experience growing up her entire life is she has had a lot of very negative experiences, both from poverty to actual lived experiences with cockroaches, right?

So she sees it and it immediately triggers a scream that is the kind of scream that you only use if you found someone dead, right? Interesting thing. And the reason that I use that phrase is that scream that she gave immediately took me back to 14 when my mom found that my dad had passed away and she hit him with a, with a, with a CPR hit on the first hit.

She broke his sternum. And as she did, that was combined with the sound of his sternum breaking with the sound of that scream, with the realization that she knew that he was dead. So when she gave that scream, I immediately went into that space, primal trigger. So in that space, am I responsible for my feeling of panic?

Is she responsible for what she thinks when she sees a cockroach? Absolutely not. Now, as soon as she becomes aware that the scream that she's just offered has put me into one of the quintessentially most traumatic places that I've ever encountered, Is she responsible for how she handles her emotion, what she says and thinks next, and how she engages with me in terms of what she feels is appropriate based on her felt sense of safety?

Absolutely, she's become aware and she's deciding how to engage, right? And then am I responsible for being triggered and being taken back to what my body's protocol was hearing that scream? Thinking I've got to protect her, I need to protect myself, something's wrong? No, that's a survival strategy. But am I responsible for collecting my thoughts and my emotions and reigning in my reaction as quickly as possible so that in my fight or flight response and in my sympathetic response and in my sympathetic storm, I don't respond as if my life is in danger or someone else's life is in danger, which my reaction in that space is to get angry because it's so intense, right?

So I think what we're talking about is am I responsible for The base nature of how thoughts and emotions are created. No. Am I responsible for the environment that produced that thought in terms of what nurtured it? No. Am I responsible for the discipline based conditioning that I grew up in that I was not yet an authority figure in and I didn't have a seat at the executive table to make a decision about what that looks like and how to respond and what we qualify as appropriate?

But once I developed conscientiousness and competence and consciousness, and I started to move into the driver's seat, am I responsible for how I choose to respond once I understand that I'm reacting 100 percent that's on me. Yeah. I think it's a transitional space, but initially, no, it actually takes a lot of development to get to the point that you can even be aware of what your thoughts, emotions, and actions are, nevermind be responsible for them.

Wow. What an awesome answer. So are, are you responsible then for doing that work and getting to that point? Is that something that is 100%. Um, and, and okay, and I'm, I'm also really interested in the distinction between conscious and unconscious that you talked about there. Um, and I think that'll come up over the course of the discussion more.

There's a few more questions here from this poll that I want to read. So there was, there was the inverse to that question and I loved how you answered it. Um, that other people are responsible for how I think and feel and no one selected that one at all, which I was really. I'm interested to see. Yeah, which the, the answer would be yes to that.

So tell me other people are responsible for how I think and feel, you, you say yes, to explain that. Absolutely. So I'll give you an example. Okay, because we'll try to always make it practical. What part of the country you in Glenn? I'm in Arizona. Okay. Um, um, Where did you grow up? Ar Arizona. Tempe. Yeah. Yeah.

So we talked, we talked about that. 'cause I was in Mesa. Thanks for reminding me. Um, so why don't you have a southern accent?

Well, you're gonna make me do a southern accent just, uh, . But that's the thing. Like you didn't, I didn't grow up. Yeah, yeah. You didn't grow up around it. Or, why don't I natively speak Japanese or, right, exactly. Right, right. Yeah. So I'm a, I'm a South African born Congolese immigrants as Zimbabwean parents.

Okay. Right. I came to the States with an africon accent. Yeah. Who's responsible for giving me that accent? Am I responsible for my accent? Am I responsible for the change in accent because of my experience when I moved to the States? Yes and no, right? The reason I say that, I went to 11 different schools before I graduated high school.

None of my experiences were enjoyable. Being an immigrant kid with the name Jerome in Northeast Tennessee schools with a bunch of southern country folks. Who don't like immigrants, even if they look the same as them, I intentionally chose to change my accent and my dialect because I didn't feel safe with a South African accent.

Now when I got to college, everybody wished I still had it. My older brother still has it and people love it. But why I say that about thoughts and emotions, are other people responsible for my thoughts and emotions? Yes, and no, but primarily yes. Okay. And the reason I say that is when we come into the world, we come in primarily first and foremost with what's called a mirror neuron system.

We're mirroring and reflecting what other people are providing to us in terms of their dialect. So what is their dialect in real time in terms of how I learned to speak cadence tone? Volume, particular accents, but then let's change that from just a natural physiology of how I learned to speak. But how do I learn to speak thought process?

How do I learn to speak emotions, right? So one of the ways that I because about 60 percent of the people that I work with in my clinic are, you know, Pediatric nonverbal autism, pediatric head injury, all sorts of different things. Right. And I tell the parents, one of the questions that commonly gets asked is how did my kid arrive here?

What happened? And I say, nature, nurture and discipline based conditioning, but also our kids are a collective representation. of the parent. Sorry, let me rephrase. Children are the collective representation of the combined trauma of their parents and either the way that they've worked through that or the lack thereof.

Okay. So if I'm four, I've got a five year old, a three year old and a nine month old, my five year old is learning to be responsible for his thoughts and emotions, but he's responding to what I provided him as the context of the way to engage based on a particular experience. Yeah. But my three year old daughter is learning agency how to speak up for herself.

She's learning self control She's got a different relative experience with that than her five year old brother The nine month old doesn't even know that he has the capacity to speak yet Never mind control his thoughts and emotions. He's nine months old, right? So my ability to look at my three month three year old Um, is she, is she responsible for her thoughts and emotions at the moment?

She's learning to be. Is my nine month old? No, he's nine months old. But as an example, is someone else responsible? Yes. Because here's the thing. The person who's in a position of influence to teach, train, equip, and also bias or inform, the adult in the conversation, the authority figure, the caregiver, the primary contact person, the primary form of mirroring and reflecting is teaching that child the language they will speak as it relates to mental, emotional, or physical language.

So when my three year old starts to panic because she can't find one of her shoes, what is the way that I model how I feel? And I'm going to that. Am I upset? Am I supportive? Am I irritated? Am I neglectful? Do I dismiss her? Do I support her? Because whatever I feel in that space and whatever anxiety comes up for me in that space, her body subconsciously is learning how to speak that particular dialect and becomes fluent in that particular accent.

So you get to 16 years old and you're dealing with a 16 year old that doesn't even have a fully developed frontal lobe and everybody's like, why are you so angry? Yeah. Well, where did that child learn that fluency or where did that child lack the self regulation to be able to metabolize anger? The reality is at some point when you become aware that you don't have the skill set or you don't have the training or you don't have the equipping or the resource to be able to figure out what you're thinking and feeling, there's a part of it that goes, okay, that's the environment that I grew up in.

And then you get to choose as you become aware, do I want to reinforce that? Yeah. Okay. So a really quick way that I would give you a three word, a three question step process that I use to answer some of these questions or kind of give you, okay, well, where do I fit in all of that is you can say, you can ask yourself the question, is this understandable?

Is it appropriate? Is it sustainable? Is this understandable? Understandable. Is it appropriate? Appropriate. Is it sustainable? Sustainable. And that means is, is it understandable based on my history? That I might have some fluency in a particular type of emotion. Yeah. Is it appropriate based on this current environment for me to be responding the way that I am?

Maybe. Is it sustainable long term? If it's not, it's not going to move you towards a healthier version of yourself. So is it understandable based on my past, when my wife screamed like that for me to be triggered? Absolutely. Is it appropriate in that moment with that scream for me to act in a way that is profoundly survival based?

Absolutely. Is it sustainable once I become aware of what's happening for me to continue escalating? No, that's not helpful. Right? So I think when we talk about is somebody else responsible, initially, 100%. My nine month old has no agency. They can't decide for themselves what they want to think or feel. So, so you're, you're kind of taking a holistic approach that, um, includes the person's entire lifetime from the way that they were conditioned and you know, that, that nature nurture, the discipline of conditioning, all of it.

So I, I might be in a moment with you, like with the cockroach scream and isolating just on that moment, but you're saying, well, there's a lot more that's going into that moment than just what you're seeing in that moment. Absolutely. It's, you know, it's, it's a, the nature of how did I genetically come out from the factory?

That's, that's the, the nature of the way that I was built. I'm an identical twin, right? So I, my nature changed dramatically in utero because I became two people, right? So I'm a part of an original embryo. Um, the other thing is, what was the environment that bred that protocol? It's interesting because the thing that's fascinating for me, Glenn, to give it kind of a different context, is we don't ask these questions about our immune function, right?

Is someone else responsible for how I get sick? Sometimes if they, if they, they didn't feed me well and I didn't get good nutrition, am I responsible for when I spike a fever if I get an infection? No, right? Like I didn't wake up this morning and God like for my heart rate to be resting at 90. Am I responsible for how I engage in my body to be able to lower my heart rate and to be able to take a deep breath?

Yes. Mental and emotional responses and reactions are innately tied to the immune systems that we have. We have an immune system in our mind, in our heart, and in our body. So if I'm exposed to chickenpox when I'm five, my brain has a protocol of how to handle encountering herpes zoster for the rest of my life.

So if I encounter it in the future, it's innately efficient at taking care of me before I'm even aware that I have an infection. Right? But that's my immune system. Well, if I have thoughts that are tied to the anxiety that my dad died, and I'm worried that if I don't hear from my wife for a couple of hours that she's not coming back, based on my history of experiences, could it bias me that I might have a concern that if I don't hear from somebody, I might start getting anxious that they're gone.

Yeah. But what do I do in that moment to catch myself up and go, what is happening with my thoughts? Am I holding a thought that allows me to reconcile if that's true or not? Right? Because I have a distinction between something being honest and something being true. There's a difference. But in all of these spaces, if we realize that our body, here's a stat that'll help you.

Our body, our mind, and our heart, our entire central nervous system, our experience as a human being. The science shows that 95 to 97%. of what happens in our body as a process, whether it's a thought, an emotion, or an action, or a reaction. 95 to 97 percent of the processes that happen are subconscious.

We're not aware of them. So it's not that we use three to five percent of our brain It's that we're aware of three to five percent of what happens only three to five percent reaches the boardroom And when three to five percent reaches the boardroom, then the question becomes what's the executive team going to do about it?

Once they become aware of it. Yeah But the process and the protocol and the blueprint, that's the basics of efficiency. It's designed to keep us alive for as long as possible. Even if that means reinforcing anxiety, depression, or panic attacks, it's whether or not once we've become aware of that, we want to sustain it because it might be understandable and it might be appropriate, but that doesn't mean that it's sustainable.

Okay. Yeah. And here we're, we're getting closer to that conscious versus unconscious part of our of our brains. And, but, but, but you're not calling it brain. You're, you're including mind, body, and heart. But, but when we talked last time, um, you associated mind with the left hemisphere, heart with the right hemisphere and body with the stem.

Is that right? That's right. And then the, the body also with a lot of the other subconscious things around it, like limbic systems, amygdala, all of those other kind of, um, Yeah, subcortical pieces. But I still mean the same thing when I say mind, body and heart, I'm talking about those kind of triune, uh, connection pieces of left brain, right brain and subconscious brainstem systems.

Okay. Well, there's a few more questions in this poll. I think it's, I think they're connected and I just love the way that you've been Picking apart these questions and adding layers of nuance. Um, it's re it's brilliant. I can't wait to go back and listen, listen to it multiple times. Um, so the next question that I asked, And again, I asked a positive and a negative version of this.

My brain creates 100 percent of my thoughts and feelings, consciously or unconsciously, but mostly unconsciously. So I asked it that way, and then I asked it again. My brain does not create, uh, 100%. of my feelings. Anyway, 29 people selected my brain creates 100 percent of my thoughts and feelings, um, consciously or unconsciously.

People that chose against that had an issue with the word create, whether the brain's creating it or, or not. But when you hear a question like that, my brain creates 100 percent of my thoughts and feelings. How do you respond to that? Uh, my initial answer would be yes, it does. Uh, I think I would offer, um, maybe a synonym, uh, that it interprets, 100 percent of what's happening.

Yeah. Which, even in that interpretation, you can make the semantic argument that it does create it. Yeah. Because the reality is, you know, and this is to some of the amazing stuff, like Harvard's done some amazing stuff around their artificial intelligence, Pre cognition, pre sentiment, a lot of other things around mindfulness and consciousness.

But the reality is, if we're talking about like my nine month old, okay? My nine month old, the way that, that Finley is creating consciousness or creating thoughts and emotions. It is all unconscious subconscious with an on ramp into developing conscientiousness or awareness. It's really tied to self awareness is what we're talking about.

But when you talk about thoughts and emotions and actions or behaviors, you cannot have a thought You cannot have an emotion and you can't respond or react without physical chemical substrates, your neurochemistry, your biochemistry, your neurophysiology, your biophysiology, your interpersonal neurobiology, which is really the catchphrase that'll help everyone who's listening understand that.

I'd recommend reading Anything and Everything by Dan Siegel. Right? Stephen Porges, Pat Ogden, Bessel van der Kolk, all of those folks. Um, V. S. Ramachandran is a great one from Mirror Neurons. But when we're talking about is my brain responsible, I think part of the challenge is, again, responsibility and creation, right?

So if I reframe that just a touch, is my brain the manufacturing plant that produces my thoughts, feelings, and actions? Yes. Okay. Because for me to interpret. The experience with my wife, my body had to go through a protocol based on previous experience. But when I'm innately in the first, like, I'll give you an example.

When a baby is born, the very first thing that they do in the situation is they do an APGAR score. An APGAR score is saying, how healthy are we qualifying based on what we consider the baseline gold standard qualifications to be? How healthy is this baby? Okay. Some of the things that are on that is do they respond to painful stimuli?

When they get pinched or pricked or touched, are they screaming? Is their color changing? How quickly is the color in their skin changing? Are they able to breathe? All of these things that are basic functions of saying is everything coming online that needs to come online. Once you come from this kind of five star sensory deprivation float tank into the real world, and you've got to start pumping blood, hearing things, seeing things, smelling things, tasting things, breathing in, moving, all of these things are a part of it, right?

But when you have a brand new baby. Right. My identical twin brother's got a two week old as of yesterday, and he's got four kids. I've got three. When you've got that brand new baby, we're talking 60 seconds post uterus. Is that baby creating thoughts and emotions and actions? If we think complex expressed emotions, absolutely not.

They're, they're literally one minute old, but are they processing instinctively and innately? What the hell is happening? Yeah. I'm freaking out. Yes. Are they increased in emotionality? They're screaming. One of the scores on the Apgar is can they scream? Right? Are they alert? Are they thinking something's just changed?

And are they behaving and reacting in a way that lets us know that they're alive? Yeah. Absolutely. Now, did somebody else produce that for them? No. Did their environment change the way that they responded? Not from a relational standpoint, but if you clothe that baby, you swaddle that baby, you get that baby's skin on skin, the baby gets a chance to start to feed immediately, it starts to self soothe, can you, as an outside influence, change that baby's response, which is actually more of a reaction.

Can you change that baby's reaction to what they're thinking, feeling and how they're behaving in real time? Absolutely. That's why everybody in the room is like, is the baby latching? Is the baby feeding? Is the baby calming down? How quickly can we get the baby to rest? Right? So there's a lot of outside influences, but realistically we're hardwired in a primitive survival based way to instinctively think, feel and act in a way that helps us to stay alive.

Yeah. My brain produced that even at one minute old, it's producing it in utero as well. But then the consciousness question becomes at what point does that turn on? Well, at what point does the heart start beating? At what point does the blood start circulating? Right? Those are survival strategies that are happening based off of the pure mechanics of the brain.

So I think one of the ways that I would frame it and kind of, kind of put it into opportunities to have contrasting perspectives is are we talking about thoughts, feelings, and actions as mechanics? And survival strategies instinctively, or are we talking about the nuanced complexity of a advanced. Kind of complex thought and advanced complex expressed emotion, or something that is exercising effective restraint in our reactivity and taking control of our thoughts, taking captive a thought, which is in some of the scriptural texts, right?

It depends on who's in the driver's seat. And when you're an infant, you're on autopilot and your brain is definitely creating or interpreting the environment to create a particular response, but it's instinct, it's instinct and survival based, not. Conscientious and safety self gratification kind of engagement community relationally based so it's it's different in that I would just define it by Are you talking instinctive, subconscious, or are you talking complex and intuitive and intellectual thought and emotion?

Those are different things. Yeah. Okay. Well, I want to throw another wrinkle into what you're talking about. Yeah. Um, I, and I, I like what you said about how the brain interprets what's coming in, whatever that is, it's interpreting and maybe you could, you could talk about that interpretation as being a form of creation, um, in a sense.

But, but to say that you are. 100 percent responsible, even though it's your own body, it's your own physiology. Um, it, it, you're not the one that formed it. You didn't choose your genetics would be that determine what your brain is that determine how things are interpreted. You didn't choose your environment to, you know, things like that, but there is, there is some degree of, uh, Once once you get a level of conscientiousness that you can have some influence over how you react and respond to these things that are happening that you don't really have responsible responsibility for that.

That's kind of how I understand what you've been saying. Yeah, absolutely. In a way that I would make that into like a really layman's kind of analogy or metaphor that everybody would be familiar with. is think of this idea of when you get an opportunity to get into the driver's seat and you you start to become self aware you start to become sentient or self conscious think of it like you just got hired As a CEO for a company, you did not build.

Okay. The company's already built structurally. The employees are already there. The leadership is already in place, but you have now stepped into the driver's seat to lead that company at a CEO level. When you become aware of that, it's like, okay, well, what's the physical quality of the actual manufacturing material?

Like, let's say that you took over Tesla. And you became the new CEO and you're walking around and you're going, okay, well, what's the stage and state of health of all of the actual hardware, the buildings, the infrastructure, that's your body. What's the stage and state and training and, and, and natural skillset of all the employees.

What's the health and the stage and state of my leadership team that I Have authority over that reports to me, but I just got into the conversation. I'm just becoming aware that these people even exist Am I responsible for what was built before I got here? Am I responsible for the resources and material that were given to me generally generationally from the previous entrepreneurs?

No. Am I responsible for the way that the employees have worked up to this point before there was a CEO in place? No. But as the, as the new acting CEO, am I going to decide once I take an inventory and I'm able to understand what's happening and I increase my self awareness or I increase my company wide awareness, what do I do moving forward?

Right? That's the nature of moving into adulthood and becoming self aware. Like, oh wow, nobody ever had the conversation with me as a 315 year old senior in high school who had a twin brother that was 85 pounds lighter than me, and identical, that I might go into my 20s with some body image issues. Right?

We had the same body and mine ended up 85 pounds heavier and only into my mid 20s that I realized that a good majority of my shame was body based because I had the direct representation of what I should have looked like if I was 85 pounds lighter. So am I responsible for how I ate as a teenager? Yes.

Am I responsible for my particular style of metabolism? No. Once I became aware that I have a body shame issue in relationship to an identical twin, and I'm in a leadership position to do self leadership and self awareness, do I have the opportunity to change the way that I move forward as it relates to my own awareness about my body and the way that I engage in my body?

Absolutely. So I think it's not, most of the time, when I think as human beings, we're trying to answer a question, it tends to kind of innately be binary, that it's either, it's either or, it's yes or no, it's black and white. It's right or wrong. Uh, and I think it's a both and then some. It's both. I'm wholly, it's not that I'm irresponsible.

I was irrespective of responsibility. I didn't have any agency up to this point and it was built for me. Now I'm being given this company and given this opportunity. As I become more aware, what do I choose to do moving forward? I've got the keys to the car. How do I want to drive? So I think it's knowing that there is going to be a point where a CEO steps in and you get to decide how you want to lead your own system and your own kind of incorporated, uh, world of experiences and how you choose to move forward conscientiously is up to you.

But what you got handed that may or may not be part of your responsibility, it might have been something that you inherited from your parents, or it might have been something that you became aware. Hey, the way that I've. Engaged previously. Now that I'm aware of it, I have to choose if I'm gonna change the way that I engage.

And that's a, that's a one way to look at it. Yeah, that's a, that's a good metaphor. The, the thing that, I don't know if this is relevant, helpful, practical or not, but this is where my mind goes when, when I hear you talking about becoming the CEO of this company, that you didn't build the, the executive.

And the whole role isn't possible without billions if not trillions of living cells that are all cooperating in these just infathomable ways. Instantaneously. To even provide the experience of awareness. And when you were talking about a newborn baby, that's 60 seconds outside of the womb, and they're just reacting and responding to the environment around them.

I was thinking about an individual neuron and, and wondering like, what, what would be the experience or what is the experience of an individual neuron? Do, and I don't even know if this is something that, Is known if the cells in our body, whether it's a neuron or some other eukaryotic cell go through a maturation process similar to what, uh, an infant, a baby, a newborn baby would do of here's a new cell.

It's receiving all of this stimulus from its environment around it. It doesn't really know what to do with it, but it's got in its core, it's genetic coding. So it kind of moves towards it anyway. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if there's anything even to that question or not, but that's what. I love it. And I think you could connect, you'd have to make what's called an evidence bridge, which means that no one's really studied it in that particular way.

But is there enough kind of ancillary studies that you could put together to kind of make an argument or a hypo, a hypothesis? Yeah. I think you could. I mean, the interesting thing that, what came up for me when you were mentioning that Glenn is, is two main things. One, anybody who looks at quantum entanglement or quantum physics and looks at things like double slit studies where they activate one.

You know, one molecule and it's pair simultaneously coactivates at a mild distance, right? When we talk about that or more, you know, it's like when we talk about how things activate and also looking at the, the sentience or the, the capacity for things to act on their own, independent of other. And kind of influence or direction, you know, there's, there's a lot of fascinating stuff around how capable, even on a cellular level, cellular intelligence is right.

Like you look at things like cell memory for organ transplants. It's a great example. You know, there's stored memory in organs in different people. That's become very reliable. It's not esoteric or kind of sci fi. It's really legitimately. evidential, right? But that on one side, I think the idea of how, how intelligent and kind of what's the, the maturation or the, the individual evolution of one cell to another, uh, I don't think it's out of the question that you could make the argument that they go through a similar maturation process that we do on a macro scale.

They do it on a nano scale. I mean, even way lower than micro. I think there's, there's similarities there. Uh, but one thing that I think that's really relevant is in the body, even on a neuronal level, even on a, on a, on a, the subatomic levels, every single thing that we see in the world across the board reinforces the narrative that nothing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani, M. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Ph. D., Engagement as human beings, the reinforcement that we see is that we're designed for community were designed for connection, even on the neuronal level. So I think the, the innate nature of the way everything is designed is to seek out connection and to seek out personal growth and development, but to do so in community.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, and I, I keep asking, is this even practical, you know, like having thoughts like this, what, why, why would exploring questions like this make any difference at all in everyday life? And I think you hit on it. It's if, if you can look at the way that cells in our body Need to communicate in, in a community and that the result of them communicating in what we would call healthy ways is, okay, we are a healthy person.

We have healthy cognitive abilities where, you know, we're able to walk around and move. That's the result of all of these billions and trillions of intelligent living things cooperating in some kind of harmony. And there's times where there's disharmony. We talk about that as illness. That if you extrapolate that out to the level of society and think about individual people as selves, how are we communicating with each other?

What is the world that the larger world that we're creating, especially in times right now where there's so much, uh, anxiety and disharmony, um, where we're, we're connecting with each other. You talked about the synapses that connect the neurons. And now we've got social media that's connecting people together in ways that we never have before.

There might be some practical value in looking at. at it that way. Yeah, I think so. And this is, you know, I mean, regardless of where you feel you fit into the grander, greater scheme of network and community, you know, coming back to the idea of a large company. I mean, look at the major companies that are trillion dollar companies, Walmart, Facebook, Google, Apple, you know, these sorts of things.

Even if you go to the global nature of the way that everything is interconnected in their, their, their global Company network drill all the way down into one. Walmart or one apple store then drill even further down into one employee You can go from the global network. That is apple to one genius bar person that one genius bar person is a constellation of systems working together to create To even be able to get out of bed in the morning, nevermind interact with a customer, be an employee at the store, impact that particular location and the scale goes up.

So I think it's one of those things that, you know, for the cool, fun, technical term, everything is a fractal. Right. I mean, this is all fractals that the global network is seen in the idea of how one individual cell interacts with itself in relationship to the next cell, nevermind the next system within our own body in relationship to our body connected to other bodies.

Right. So no matter where you fit in the world at the moment in this last year and a half is a great example of that conversation, the idea of. Loneliness and being alone and the idea of being in community. You know, the idea of becoming aware of our own system, I think one of the, the, the most effective approaches to this is a therapeutic, uh, counseling system called internal family systems and internal family systems is a fantastic way of teaching that you're kind of like one of those Russian stacking dolls that if you're 30, there's a 25 year old version of you inside of you and a 20 year old version and a 15, 10, five.

And all of those versions are informing the greater version, and it really gives you an opportunity to go that even by myself, if I'm alone by myself, if I really check in and, and start to learn and do self discovery and inner work, I can learn that I'm, I'm a constellation of different systems and experiences and versions of myself through my own kind of microcosm of existence.

My interior evolution, right? So it's this really fascinating way of going, you know, I think the way that I interact with the world is probably a direct reflection of the way that I interact with myself, you know, and the way that I am able to engage in a healthy way with others is a direct reflection of my capacity to engage with myself.

Yeah. So it gives us that context in all of those different spaces of, of what it means to be a human in relationship with other humans, even if we're not in proximity to those other humans. I, you know, I think it's really interesting that nesting doll analogy that, you know, inside of me is all of the younger, you know, Versions of me and whether we're going in five year increments or one year increments or one day increments or one second increments, we're all, we're constantly like updating, updating, updating, and, and I don't know, have you been watching the, The Disney plus show Loki.

I haven't, I haven't had the opportunity yet, but I love Marvel. My undergrad is in digital animation and film. Right. So I I'm keen and I see it's a, it's, I see the Yoda behind you. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah. Yeah. And the star Wars shirt, but yeah, no, I, I love, love the MCU, but I haven't had a chance to watch Loki yet.

Well, I won't give any spoilers, but that there is, except for one, there are different versions of the character of Loki that he comes into contact with. Um, and there's this question about how do you interact with different versions of yourself that they're playing out in this really, really interesting way.

Fascinating way. At least that's one of the things that I pull out of it when I'm watching it. And that's, that's the heart behind internal family systems. Yeah. So, so talk about, if you get triggered, go ahead. Well, well, I was, I was thinking about your experience where you compared yourself to your brother and you are 85 pounds.

But you're also comparing yourself to earlier versions of yourself that you might love or hate or any kind of like reaction. What is the healthy or a healthy way of being in relationship with all of those different versions of yourself? As you go from a point where you don't really have a lot of control and executive function and you make mistakes and there's things like that and then is that going to be a millstone that hangs around your neck and makes you feel grief and shame for the rest of your life because that's your relationship with that earlier version with yourself.

Um, Yeah. I, so I take, take a couple of things, throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Oh man. That's good. Um, you know, I think there's a couple of things here. Glenn one is, I think this is the sort of conversation and these is the sort of spaces that we, No matter, even regardless of how much skill and development you have in your area of expertise, regardless of how much I have in my area of expertise, I think research has a great phrase that's used that human beings as a whole could learn to implement a bit more often.

And I think our strategies would move towards healthier versions of us with a much higher degree of reliability. And that statement is based on our current understanding. And then you finish whatever you're thinking, right? Yeah. So I think part of it is having the permission and the grace to say, based on my current understanding, this is where I have arrived at, right?

Yeah. I don't know how to speak Spanish. Yeah. So when I go to a, go to a place where I don't even know how to ask for the restroom in Spanish, the best thing that I can do is say baño. I know that, I know that's involved, right? But as a healthy adult. My ability to reconcile, I don't have that skill set. I don't have that fluency, or am I going to spend my life going, damn, I wish I had been taught Spanish.

I must be an idiot. Cause I don't know Spanish. I don't know Spanish. Right. But then we get into situations where it's like, God, I have no emotional intelligence. I'm a stupid person. I've got no capacity to learn how to do schoolwork. I can't ever get myself under control when I'm angry. I always shut down when somebody asked me a vulnerable question or I did this thing.

And when I did it, when I was 17, God, it's ruined my entire life. If you pause and you go, based on my current understanding in that moment, did I understand how to speak the language of calm and reconciliation and self control and emotional intelligence and academic understanding? Maybe. Maybe not. If you did, and you did not engage with the resources you already had, then your level of ownership and guilt is profoundly different than the person who went, I had no idea how to interact with that.

I was 14 years old. I watched my mom give my dad CPR. He'd already passed. I'm not going to be upset at myself as an adult that I didn't handle that well. I had no fluency in what it looks like to watch a parent pass away. So why I say that is in these situations, I think this is a beautiful thing with something like IFS and the opportunity that we have, regardless of what type of approach you use, is in any other situation in our life, when we are trying to get better at something, we very, very, very rarely do it on our own.

Right? There's a mentorship. There's an apprenticeship. There's a learning curve. There's a resource, right? If you're under the impression that you are going to spontaneously figure out emotional intelligence, you are going to be rudely mistaken. If you're going to spontaneously figure out how to reconcile things like shame and grief and rage, you're going to be sorely mistaken.

Because if you're talking about how to figure out a more effective digestion, you're Or a more effective heart rate or more effective vascular blood flow. Your body will figure that out for you because it needs to survive, but it's not there to help you figure out, well, how do I reconcile that way that I engaged with my first marriage that didn't succeed?

Yeah. Right. That's something where you go, I have to step back and go, what? degree of fluency do I have in that particular language or that particular dialect? And if it is low, is it understandable that I don't understand what I'm doing, and I don't understand what people are doing to me, and I don't understand how to speak that language?

Okay, let's start there. Based on my current understanding. Does it make sense that I don't understand and nothing makes sense? Yeah. Then where do you go from there? Yeah. It's a flopsy conversation, right? This is like shame. Shame is one of the biggest examples of this, right? We both come from, from, from spiritual backgrounds and what you have on this podcast, the name of this podcast and the example of what we're talking about is we were indoctrinated and introduced to so much language around what was wrong with us.

Yeah. But we didn't develop that language. We were taught that language, and then we weren't equipped with the idea of what it looks like to reconcile that in a way that lets me know I'm fully capable of becoming a healthier version of myself. Because if somebody tells me the only thing that you're going to do is try to be just a little less broken tomorrow, then the only thing that I know is I'm speaking the fluency of brokenness versus somebody going, Hey man, I know that you don't know how to do this.

And I know that you're learning, but here's kind of the way that I'm going to walk you through either as a counselor, a spiritual director, a life coach, uh, you know, somebody who's going to be able to mentor you in that space. Here's a resource that allows you to start developing the fluency because right now you, I can't give you answers.

You don't even know the questions to ask. Yeah. Right. So we've got to learn the alphabet, start learning the basic conjugation, start learning the basic phrase structure. And for the love of God, in some of the areas that we don't understand, maybe just learn a common phrase or two that lets us know we're in the right building.

Right. And then, you know, maybe we can start to understand it. But I think that's the challenge that a lot of, for a lot of us, it's hard for us to give ourselves some space and some grace, because as adults, we're under the impression that we should already have this figured out, but no one ever taught us.

So the question is whether or not we want to learn it And give ourselves a space to do so. Yeah. Yeah. Now I, I know we're, we're almost out of time. This is just flown by. Um, There's, there's one more question on this poll that I think is, is, it, it relates to this. And I, I asked the question, I perceive less than 1 percent of everything that truly exists around me.

As opposed to, I perceive more than 1 percent of everything that truly exists around me. And I just kind of arbitrarily picked 1%. But I think it's way less than 1 percent of what we're perceiving. And, and, and that what you're saying here is we're kind of. Conditioned to think that we should know everything that's going on.

And if we don't, we're broken. And then we get into these loops. Like you illustrated brilliantly just a couple of minutes ago. Like I'm not good. I'm not bad. I don't know these things. There's something wrong with me. I'm broken, you know, whatever. And, and that in itself is. Is a neural pathway that becomes a habit of focus.

And then the way that our brain interprets what's coming in gets interpreted through those ways of viewing ourselves and other things like that. Is it really our responsibility that we have it that way? Maybe not. Do we, once we become aware, Oh, I've got this filter in my mind that's filtering this way.

What can I do with it? So anyway, I want to know what, what, where you would fall on this, I perceive more or less than 1 percent of everything that truly exists around me and how an understanding of that would really be practical and helpful in somebody's life. Yeah. Uh, I think the answer is you perceive less than 1%, but I'll tell you why.

Okay. And 1 percent in the global picture. Yes. Far less than that. Yeah. But in terms of your own personal experience, again, it's three to 5 percent that reaches conscious understanding. So here's the, here's the analogy that I give you. Okay. And we'll go back to Tesla and Elon Musk. How much is Elon Musk Currently in real time aware of that is happening globally in all of his companies.

Yeah. With every single employee. We're talking, we're talking boring. We're talking Tesla. We're talking PayPal, Dogecoin. I mean the, the SpaceX, right? We're trying, I'm trying to figure out how to navigate a couple of businesses with three children and maintain a healthy marriage. This, this, this guy's running, this guy's running, An ungodly amount of companies with increased volume.

But if we look statistically quantitatively, how much of every single action all the way down to somebody clicking send on an email, Out of everything that's happening for him, how much is he aware of in the global container of his own company, nevermind the experience of every other intersection from every other outside influence that in integrates and intersects and interacts with his companies.

It is, is astronomically low when you look at the comprehensive data, right? It's going to be lower than three to 5 percent of the conscious experience of the brain. Yeah, exactly. And it'll be way lower than 1%. I mean, The global experiences of what's happening is, yeah, it's almost an immeasurably low number of what you're collectively perceiving, collectively aware of, right?

But what you're personally aware of versus collectively aware of, I think what we're talking about, I use a phrase of degrees of perception, Right. And you're asking a question around perception. It's actually in my work, which we don't have time to go into right now. There are nine layers, nine degrees of perception, uh, all the way from internal to divine, right.

It goes internal, local, regional, global, solar, uh, universal, uh, Or solar galactic universal, uh, cosmic divine. I think that might be it. I'm trying to think it off the off the top of my head. There's nine layers, right? Of how, how you, you grab the whole container, right? The internal is what's happening in me.

The local is what's happening within reach that could possibly interact with me internally. At this moment, the regional is something that is in my area, but I'd either have to move towards it in order to interact with it or to have to move towards me. And it's got to close the gap. It's a proximity issue.

And then the global is everything that's happening in my experience that I come into contact with, whether it's in myself with somebody I'm in relationship with my community or the world at large, but it's my experience with those things. Then you've got to go into the next layer of, well, what's my wife's experience with her things.

Yeah. What's my kids experience with their things. So I'm talking about in the internal, local, regional, global, kind of my lived experience. I can become aware of three to 5 percent of what's happening in that space. Right. So when we look at it that way, and we, we say, okay, what does it look like for me to, Be aware or understand what I'm perceiving.

I think, again, it starts with giving yourself permission that that's actually understandable and it's appropriate because if Elon or when Steve Jobs was leading or Tim Cook is leading now or other people like that in big, big corporations, or even small companies with 10 employees or two employees, it is wildly inefficient for a manager to micromanage.

You have to delegate and you have to assign somebody to be in a leadership position and be constantly aware or want to even be aware of what everyone is doing at all times is wholly inefficient. Yeah. But what happens is if you become aware of something and you perceive something. And it reaches the boardroom, it becomes enough of a conversation in the system or the company as a whole to now capture leadership's attention and leadership gives that to the boardroom and the boardroom has an executive team or a board meeting about it.

Once it reaches the, the, the level of, of leadership attention and executive level conversation, then once you perceive it. And you become conscientious of it. Then you have an opportunity to change what you intentionally do about it, because now you have the opportunity for a decision. Your frontal lobe in the brain, the CEO is the executive decision maker.

You can't do anything about anything until you can make an executive decision about it. That's autopilot. You're on autopilot 95 to 97 percent of the day. The question in terms of where you go and, and, and. In regards to being a healthy human being is when I have the opportunity to make an executive decision, am I moving towards the healthiest version of myself and what I need with that particular decision in that particular moment, based on the current state and stage of resources and health that I have available, but it's based on my current understanding.

This is probably the best decision that I can make. And the next time I have an opportunity to make this decision, I'll do my best to make an even healthier one, but based on my current understanding, this is the healthiest decision that I can currently make. And you keep moving towards that in terms of what becomes conscientious and Give yourself the permission to understand that your system is there to support you, but you're also in a position of influence that you can change direction and change culture because you have executive capacity, which is kind of cool.

And it is. And I know we're right at the end. I, I started this by giving that phrase from the movie, eat, pray, love, choose your thoughts. Like you choose your clothing. Is that, is that even possible from what we've discussed? I think it is. Yeah. And I think this is also again coming back to healthy leadership and healthy parenting has the opportunity to change the relationship downstream for every single thing that you come into contact with.

So the phrase that I would use for you that I tell parents when I'm working with really volatile kids is calm is contagious and so is everything else. Mm hmm. If one of my kids is getting upset and I can maintain my attitude, check in, and model calm for them, it doesn't mean internally I'm not having a really hard time with the volume, because I've got massive sound sensitivity because of my migraine history.

So when my three year old is screaming, it is loud. Legitimately painful. Yeah. It doesn't mean internally. I'm not hurting. It means that I'm electing in that moment to go. How do I want to engage in this? That's my thought calm is contagious. And so is everything else. So you have the opportunity to select.

And to manage and to engage, but it's not just a single thought I'm choosing how I want to project and what I want to show up with in the room that I conveyed to my three year old. And I'm also at the exact same time honoring and respecting the fact that my lived experience in real time at the same moment is profoundly painful.

I think the benefit with that, you can change your thoughts. Like you can change your clothing is it's also remembering that you're wearing more than one piece of clothing. Most of the time, I'm Chandler. Could I be wearing any more clothes? And human beings have profound capacity for paradox. So I can both have joy and grief at the same time.

I can both be calm with my daughter and have my internal real estate going through an absolute conniption fit in real time. So yes, you can. But just remember calm is contagious, and so is everything else. So it depends on what it is that you choose to allow into the world and also into your system and what manifests on.

We have a lot of authority and control and capacity to influence that in ways that are both healthy and unhealthy, depending on our decisions. Beautiful. Wow. The hour just flew by. Yeah. Thank you. So is, is, is there anything that you would want to say in, uh, at, at the end before we just sign off? Yeah, no, I would just say, you know, I think the biggest encouragement that I would give with everybody is just remind yourself to say, based on my current understanding and then go, okay, what's, what's the next thing that I can engage with?

Is it a podcast? Is it a book? You know, My, my content, I think is helpful from the, from the neurotheology of self care side of things. People can find that at the drjerome. com site, but I think, you know, also two really great apps are Hoopla and Libby. H O O P L A and L I B B Y. You just put in your local library card and it gives you access to all of your free digital loans from your local library.

And you're like, man, I'd love to read more about internal family systems, right? I'd love to read more about quantum entanglement. I think the best thing that we can do is just make ourselves available to a little bit more information and a little bit more learning and go into that with the understanding that if it's brand new, it's okay.

If we feel completely incompetent, everybody is. You know, my nine month old doesn't know how to walk yet because he doesn't know how to walk yet, and there's nothing wrong with that. So I think just giving ourselves the opportunity to to be consummate learners and and more than anything to to learn about ourselves The more that we ask questions about who we are and we are open to answering those questions and self discovery I think the greater possibility that we have of being healthy And impacting the other people that we come into contact with in healthy ways as well Yeah.

And, and you, you do have some materials on your website. You've got, um, some e courses, you've got some podcast episodes. So people who are interested in learning and want to hear more from Dr. Jerome, it's drjerome. com. That's your URL. Yeah. Just D R J E R O M E. com. DrJerome. com. All right. Well, thank you once again for joining me today.

I really appreciate you taking your time and sharing your wisdom with me and my listeners. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on Glenn. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for the time It's always good to talk to you. You always have such great questions, man. I appreciate it. Thank you Would you be open to do it again sometime?

I would absolutely. Okay. Sounds great. Thank you, sir All right. So based on my current understanding I think that was a really valuable conversation. I just love talking with Dr. Jerome. He's quickly become one of my favorite people. And based on your current understanding, I hope that you found it valuable too.

Because if you're listening to this podcast, chances are that you're interested in learning more about yourself, especially if you were raised as a Mormon and have come to a place in your life where you're questioning your faith or your identity. Or even just how to interact with people you love who don't really understand or accept who you are anymore.

The good news is that you can learn new ways to think and react and respond.