Overcome With Travis White

Why Your Anxiety Won’t Go Away (And What You’re Missing)

• Travis White | Mental Health Advocate • Episode 55

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If you’ve tried therapy, coping tools, or “positive thinking” and your anxiety still won’t go away, this episode explains why.

In this powerful conversation, Travis White sits down with Julian Bermudez to explore why anxiety isn’t something you simply eliminate and what actually helps when nothing seems to work. This episode breaks down why suppressing emotions, fighting symptoms, or trying to “fix yourself” often keeps anxiety stuck.

Together, they explore how anxiety is often rooted in unresolved trauma, self-criticism, and a lack of emotional safety. Julian explains how healing begins when we stop trying to make anxiety disappear and instead learn how to relate to it differently. This conversation offers a grounded, compassionate path to transform suffering, rebuild self-trust, and move from survival mode into agency.

If your anxiety keeps coming back, if you feel stuck in cycles of fear or self-judgment, or if you’re exhausted from trying to make it stop this episode will help you understand what you’ve been missing.

What We Discussed

  • Why anxiety doesn’t just go away
  • The hidden role of trauma in chronic anxiety
  • How self-criticism keeps the nervous system activated
  • Why suppressing emotions often makes anxiety worse
  • The difference between coping and true healing
  • How to build self-trust and emotional safety
  • Moving from victimhood to agency
  • What it really means to transform suffering

Learn More

Explore the work of Julian Bermudez, learn more about trauma healing and psychedelic integration, and connect for insights, resources, and upcoming offerings.

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Hello and welcome to Overcome a Mental Health Podcast. I'm your host, Travis White. This is a place for you to share your mental health stories. I'm very excited for tonight's guest. I'm speaking with Julian Bermudez. Julian is a psychedelic therapist that transforms suffering into agency, responsibility, and liberation. Julian, welcome to the show. Travis, thanks for having me. Pleasure's on mine. Without wasting any time, I'm just gonna hand the microphone over to you. Sure. Yeah, my name is Julian. And just like you said, I help people to reclaim agency and liberate themselves from old patterns of trauma and suffering and all the adaptations and layers of personality that we pour on top of ourselves as it adaptations to pain. That's awesome. What inspired you to dedicate your life helping others heal trauma and transform suffering? Well, it wasn't to help others really, it was to help myself first and foremost. I mean, don't get me wrong, I got into it because uh that was one of the inspirations was to help others. But once I really started getting into it, one, the main inspiration was I was suffering myself. And once I really got into it, I really realized that I had to work on myself a lot more before I could help anybody else work through the same things I'm going. And are you willing to go into any detail of what you were suffering with and kind of along those lines? Yeah. mean, significant childhood trauma, negligence, abandonment, and I mean, all sorts of different abuse. I'd love to say that it was special and unique, but you know, I think a lot of people go through something similar, some degree of the exact same experiences, somewhat normal in today's society. Yeah, and that's one thing that I've realized since I've been doing this podcast is we as people have such, it's like our stories are so different yet so much the same, so similar in so many different ways. Yeah, and that's one of the things that really enables me to work with people. It's like the Buddha said, it's because you suffer and it's because I suffer that we can understand one another. So it becomes a shared language. Yeah, for sure. And so if comes up to you and says, I'm suffering, I'm dealing with bad stress and anxiety, what are the first steps that you tell them to help get them on their path to recovery? Yeah, I never tell anybody what they should or shouldn't do. My main tool is to be very present with people and to try my best to not just be there with them, but to see, listen and understand what they're going through. And the more that I can really understand what they're going through, the more I can reflect what I'm seeing back to them. And this shared perspective of understanding things is transformative in itself, but it also really allows me to understand why those patterns of suffering are there. And that understanding, that awareness, that's the prerequisite that we need if we're gonna make any choices in terms of moving forward. Yeah, that makes sense. And you're basically allowing your client, or I imagine you call the client, you're allowing them the opportunity to basically take control of their own path, for what I can tell. Precisely. It's kind of like in the first Matrix where Morpheus is talking to Neo and he keeps saying, I can only show you the door. You're the one who has to walk through it. When we're suffering very frequently, we're looking for somebody to come and save us, to give us the answer, to give us the thing that we need that's going to rescue us. In other words, we see ourselves as victims. But I see things quite differently. I think that all the wisdom, all the knowledge, all the information that knows how to heal, that knows how to be whole, it's inside of each and every one of us. And so my job is to help people to reconnect with that. And then they can make the choices and take the steps that they need on their own. I like that you brought up the kind of the victim mentality because I think a lot of us have it. I know, I know for a fact I do and I've had to work on ways to overcome that because it's like I don't want to be the victim. I don't think any of us do. But what are some of those first steps that you give a person to help them reconnect with themselves? Well, there's lots of ways that we can do it. So if the victimhood, the mentality is coming up, the first thing is, again, becoming aware of it, really learning to recognize and identify when this is here. Once we start to recognize it, then I want to get very curious about what do we do with it? The vast majority of the times, I think that when we're in that, in that. pattern, we'll call it, whether it's the victimhood or whatever the suffer pattern of suffering is. When we're in it, most of times we have a very specific relationship with it. And that looks something along the lines of we don't like it. We want it to go away. That's the victimhood right there. I want to be rescued. I want to save be saved. I want this thing to stop and go away. And if we're constantly rejecting or exiling or fighting, judging, criticizing whatever dynamic or pattern is here. we can't make any choices in terms of how we engage with it. So the first thing is we need to learn how to recognize and identify these patterns. And then we have to work on accepting those patterns. And that right there is the first two big steps. And my job again is I just try to be with people and ask lots of questions and reflect the things that I'm seeing when they're coming up. And that shared understanding right there is usually enough. just from understanding what's present and what do we do with a thing that's present. That's really cool. It's just, it's a completely kind of a different take on like kind of the mental health whole world of healing that I really have never even thought about. Like just that your approach to it is a little bit different and I really admire that. So thank you for bringing a new perspective here. Yeah, thank you. Unfortunately, the vast majority of our medicine is based on cures and making things go away and external sources. So again, that's the victimhood is something out there is causing me to suffer. Somebody is doing the thing. Somebody is hurting me. Some system or structure, whatever it is, is harming me in these ways. And I need something outside of me to help me. And that's the way a lot of our society structured, but again, I come from the opposite, which is all of it is happening inside of you, including all the wisdom that knows how to heal. So the goal is to, if you're looking for somebody to save you, it's to become the person who's going to save you. uh That's a cool way to put it. Yeah, you're basically, if I'm understanding this right, you're saving yourself. You're becoming that person to save yourself. That's really cool. What types of tools and techniques do you use to push forward with this? Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, inquiry, presence and inquiry. Those two are the most important. If I can't be with somebody, there's no way that we're going to have any sort of therapeutic healing relationship. If I'm so wrapped up in my own mind and so disconnected in thinking about what I'm going to say next or thinking about being a good therapist or thinking about how I'm going to be important to this person, I can't see what they're going through. And I'm going to be more concerned with giving the right advice or saying the right thing or citing the right source or whatever it is that I miss the mark completely. And I think that plays a big role in why people go to therapy for decades and oftentimes don't get any any any real relief or change. So presence first and foremost is my greatest tool. And then the inquiry piece is so critical again. I'm not providing anything that this person or whoever I'm working with doesn't already have. When you use the word recovery earlier, how do you help somebody into recovery? The word recover means to find something that you've lost. So when somebody is recovering, what exactly is it that they're recovering? They're recovering who they were before all the pain forced them to adapt. All that wisdom, the knowledge that knows how to heal, that knows how to be whole, that knows how to thrive in this world, that all still exists inside of each and every one of us. And so my inquiry is geared to help people recover that part of themselves. First and foremost, those are the two most important characteristics. It's really cool. Yeah, it's, it's in this, like I said, it's a great perspective. Coming from, I'm trying to think of how to word this. As a person, I'm going to use a personal example here and kind of push it back to you. I'm trying to get into the mode of being a little bit vulnerable and I'm not always the best at it. So I've suffered from anxiety and depression for years and years. And I had a little, I'm hoping that they don't listen, running with like HR this last year at my work. And it's been really hard to overcome. It's been really hard to push past that. So I get this like little strain of PTSD. feel like every scene after every single weekend, coming from that, like what would you say? Like personally me. would help me to kind of get over this little hurdle. Yeah, First thing, what do you mean, get over the hurdle? I don't want to say not get over but like I guess push past it push it aside because yeah, that's that's what I should say is because I feel along the lines that like, you know, I've gone to therapy over this multiple times and I just keep finding myself in this same rut of like, I can't I don't know if it's me not being able to forgive people or feeling like I guess I can go back to victimhood. Maybe I feel like the victim and I just cannot move past it at all. What exactly are you feeling when you go into one of these interactions or after you said after, you know, when you go into the weekend, you have like this PTSD experience. What exactly are you feeling here? So it's like Sunday night comes around and I work mostly remote, but Sunday night comes around and I start feeling a lot of anxiety and kind of feeling like I'm going to go into work tomorrow and things are just going to go awful. I'm, you know, I'm not going to be valuable for the position of work or the work that the type of work that I do. And usually it's like when I get on the computer on Monday mornings, I'm usually fine. I usually just get over it really quick. It's just that Sunday night seems really, really hard in particular. So dread. Fear. Yes, lots of it. a lot of fear. And then I heard a lot of evaluations and judgments and it sounded like something along the lines of, I'm not going to be able to do the right thing. Correct. Let me ask before I go into that part, how long has this sense of anxiety, this dread been there? It's probably as has been there longer than this job or did it come from this job? no, came from this job. Yeah. What do you do with that feeling of fear? Dread. so I was taught this kind of thing, in therapy where it's like, you know, you pretend like there's a stream or river kind of flowing past you just off to the side and any negative thought that you have, you just push it aside and watch it just float down the river. That's kind of the, what I've been trying to do is just watch it float away, but then it's like, I feel like every time I do that, just comes back to some other negative thought comes into my mind and starts repeating. Okay. Tell me if I'm wrong, Kira. I'm throwing some spaghetti on the wall. But it sounds like you're trying to get rid of this feeling. I'm totally trying to get rid of this feeling. what I thought. So we have these feelings and we're trying to get rid of them. Let me ask. If we were to listen to that feeling of dread. that fear, what do you think it might be trying to tell you? Well, the fear would probably be trying to tell me... I'm trying to think of it'd be along the lines of, I'm trying to think of the way to say it without being ultra negative. then it would be, it's always a negative thought. Fear is always a negative thought. Like kind of, you're a piece of garbage. You're not good enough for this position. Sometimes it's kind of like, you know, nobody here likes you. And I think some of that comes from I haven't been able to build relationships in the same way here as I have at other companies. So let me ask you a question, my fast Travis. When this fears here, what's your relationship to yourself? I tend to go a lot down the rabbit hole of I hate myself. That's what it sounds like. There were a lot of evaluatory words, a lot of evaluations of, I'm not good enough, I'm a piece of shit, I'm not capable, I'm not deserving, so on and so forth. So it sounds like the relationship towards yourself is very harsh. True story, it's kind of takes up and it's like goes up and down and I've been working on ways to like, cause in the last probably two months, kind of went through this dark rut. I was pretty depressed and I'm coming out of that and I'm learning ways to climb up that ladder per se, but I still fall every once in a while. and kind of get stuck and then I could climb up a little bit higher. But I've seen this just repetitive thing of me getting stuck on the same things. And that's okay. That's probably because there's something here that needs attention. And so when these emotions are here, the first thing is there's a tendency to do what with the emotion again? uh to push it away. push it away. Okay, so the emotions here, we don't like it, we try to push it away. And then the second thing is, is you treat yourself how for having the emotion. But like you said, for having that emotion, I treat myself like shit. Where did you learn to do that? Where did you learn to treat yourself so harshly? I honestly have never been able to figure that out. I think it's coming from uh a point in life when I had medical problems and those medical problems made it so I couldn't hold down a job. took years for me to get married. Like I was engaged for a long time and I ended up marrying the same woman that like stayed with me. Like, so I got a keeper and I don't think I would have made it out without her. But I just always look back at the during this medical problems when like I had to start becoming more dependent upon people and I did at first I did not know how to do that because I was always so independent doing everything by myself. and it was kind of a time where, you know, I couldn't hold down a job. I had to stop going to school. And so I feel like the medical problems like brought up all these emotions and things that were that I'd never felt before. And that was kind of where I got to like this. place to where I do hate myself every now and then. Mm-hmm. Okay, so where did you learn to be independent and do everything on your own? I would say that I was just growing up. Like I was just, yeah, was just, you know, if I had laundry, didn't, my mom always taught us like, okay, if you have something to do, you need to do it. Like I was taught a good work ethic. I was taught like how to kind of just fend for myself. And that's not saying that my parents weren't there for me because they always were. course. I suspect that the belief of unworthiness, the harshness of I'm not good enough and the I have to fend for myself and do things on my own are intimately intertwined. Now, I'm not saying that your parents weren't there for you. They absolutely were from what you've just said. Our parents always do their best, but somewhere along the lines, their best could be a little bit better. And sometimes the message comes across when something's happening in the relationship with the parent from a child's view, it's that it's my fault. So perhaps. You know, not to say that you had bad parents or any way, but perhaps in there trying to do their best, somewhere along the line, the message came across that I can't rely on others. I have to do things on my own and I'm unworthy. Where these where these beliefs came from right now isn't exactly the most important. What's important is that they are here. Yeah. So I'm curious, when you have to do everything on your own, when you have to take care of everything and you can't rely on others, one. And then two, if you fail or you don't do it right, that means that you're a POS, a piece of shit, a terrible person. What emotion do you think you feel there? Hmm, I think it's really kind of mixed. uh Sometimes I feel, you know, like it's a mixture of anger, resentment. There's yeah, there's a lot more I could probably go into. Fear is a huge one too. m Yeah. So earlier I asked you how far back can you remember this feeling of fear, dread, anxiety going? And we initially identified this job as its origins. But you know, this specific fear and anxiety, yes, that would probably be like this job, but if you're talking like anxiety is a hole that goes back like years and years. When I first remember feeling anxious is probably back in 2009, 2010. I was 23 at the time, 22, 23. So it goes, and how old are you now? 39, okay. So it goes back, you know, a significant ways. Now, when somebody's treating you harshly, They're evaluating you and judging you and critiquing you and saying, Travis, you're doing a crappy job. You're not qualified to do this job. How does that make you feel? I always get very defensive. Yeah. And it's, it's kind of like a, I can usually take criticism fairly well, but inside, like I get a little defensive and frustrated and a little angry as well. So we get defensive. In other words, when is there a time where you need to defend yourself? Honestly, a lot of times I don't always defend myself. Sometimes, most of time I don't feel the need. Like, when... If they're... In general, I say when somebody's attacking my personal character. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Who's the person attacking you here? In this case. honestly you would in this case it probably just be myself like So independent of the relationship with people at work, independent of your relationship growing up, independent of your relationship with your partner, the relationship that you have with yourself is highly critical. There's a lot of judgment. There's a lot of evaluation. And this creates a need to be defensive because when somebody is doing those things for you, one, it's scary. Two, it promotes anger. the need to set a boundary. And these are defense mechanisms. If somebody were to lay into you, Travis, and call you all sorts of terrible things and say you're a terrible person, let me come back to this question. How would that make you feel? like garbage and yeah yeah How would that make you feel? What does it mean to feel like garbage? Uh, to me it means, you know, it's like a feeling of sadness. Yeah. Mm-hmm. so in other words, there's pain here. The fear is telling you there's something dangerous, there's a threat here, and that's the pain. And the anger, the frustration, is telling you to get defensive and set a boundary with it. Now, if you're walking down the street and some random person says, hey, you're a failure as you're walking by and you've never met him before, how would that affect you? In that case, I could just keep walking. I don't really care because I don't know the person. It's usually people that I know because I don't want to fail. I don't want to be portrayed that way. Yeah. Cass, so if it's a random person, it doesn't matter because they don't know it. So it's not true. If somebody were to say, Travis, you are so six foot ten with a bright red nose and orange hair, how would that affect you? That I could care less. Yeah. Yeah. So why does you're a failure? You're not qualified to do this job. You're a crappy person at doing this job from somebody who's connected to you. Why does that one affect you? If the other ones are, they don't have no weight because they're not true, why do these other ones carry so much weight? I would say because to some degree, since I work with these people and have some kind of connection with them, I don't want to, you know, look like I failed in their eyes. And the thing is, is like, know that like most of this is in my head. Yeah. There's the answer. Who's the one who really believes that you're a failure and you're not good enough or you're unworthy? myself. That's the source of the anxiety right there. Awesome. This is really cool. It's really like the fact that you could get me to admit that in what, 15 minutes? Yeah, well I didn't get you to admit anything we found it Yeah, we found it. We found that the relationship that you have towards yourself is very harsh and judgmental and critical and This causes a tremendous amount of pain and the reason why the this relationship is there is because you believe That you're unworthy or you're not good enough And this is the source of tremendous pain So let me ask you, when you're feeling like you're not good enough, like you're a failure, like somebody's saying that you're just crappy person, what do you really need during this time? You know during this time I need even a few small wins like just to to Make myself realize that like you know what this is this is me thinking this this isn't anybody else like And Sometimes like even someone just saying reaching out saying thank you for for doing that or You handled that really well kind of, you know, reforms by thinking of like, okay, well, obviously this person isn't thinking this, like it's still all me. you need some reassurance. Mm-hmm. You need some validation. You need somebody to see what you're going through. to see that this pattern of judgment and criticism is, it's a mental pattern that you're carrying. Mm-hmm. So that's the key right there, is I need somebody to see what I'm going through, to see the pattern that I'm in, to validate me and say, look, you're just being really harsh to yourself right now. And of course you feel scared, of course you feel angry, of course you're in pain because it hurts being treated that way. Yeah, and in all reality too, and it's like, I look back and it's just like, it was just one little experience that made me think this way. And, uh, back on that one. I'd push back on that one. I think that this is a pattern that built on top of another pattern that was in place. Yeah. I mean, whether I recognize those patterns or not, I could totally see where you're coming from. Yeah. So when this pattern is activated, when this anxiety, this sense of dread, the fear, the anger, the pain, all these emotions are here. What do do with those again? I push them away. So what we just discovered is on the one hand what you really need is somebody to embrace what you're going through and to be with you and to see and understand and listen to you and to validate and reaffirm you. But on the other hand, what you do, what you do in that situation is you push yourself away and you judge and criticize and exile yourself for that. Yeah, I've, that's something that I can say that I've done my, for a long time. Probably since my teenage years is instead of like, you know, embracing the situation, following through with it and making sure everything is okay, I distanced myself. And I got to the point where I was really good at it and I just, what's the word I'm looking for? I pretty much bundle everything. up inside and just hold it there. Yeah. Where'd you learn that? Where did you learn to bottle up your emotions? that I have a harder time pinpointing out I have no idea like I can't even think of a time that I think sometimes like it's just me I think sometimes being the peacekeeper and not wanting to like offend anybody or start any type of confrontation Where'd you learn that from? Be the peacekeeper. Keep everybody happy. Avoid confrontation. That's probably something that I did growing up, like just unintentional. Yeah, that's an adaptation right there. What would the consequence be if you didn't do that? If people did get angry and there were confrontations when you were growing up. And... consequence of that is, you know, like thinking back like most of the time there's confrontation it was because I have always thought it was, you know, good to have some kind of confrontation just to to get over things and push past and figure out the differences and but I think the consequences of it could be different things. Sometimes it could be hurt feelings. Other times it can be you break some kind of relationship or... break some kind of relationship. And we're talking about your childhood here right now. So what would happen if you broke a relationship when you're a kid? oh I would say... I was a kid. Because most of my bottling up, think of, I think back to like with friends and stuff of them saying, know, because friends joke around all the time. Like, and sometimes those jokes go a little bit too far and you have to learn when to say stop. But I think sometimes like... Like I look at the group of friends that I had is like we didn't know where that point was, where that line was that we didn't cross until it was too late. Okay. So when somebody would cross and they would, it sounds like they would hurt you in some way. Who'd you talk to about that? Nobody. I don't think I've ever really talked to anybody about that. I've brought it up in therapy a couple times. Yeah. How old were you there? Um, I could think of times from like 13 to like 18 ish. Okay. Do you got kids? Yeah, I have three kids. I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old. wow. Okay. So let's say your five year old is a little older. Let's say they're 10, 12, 13 years old and something happens to them and they're in a tremendous amount of pain and they're scared and they're angry. Who do you want them to come and talk to about it? my wife and me. That's that's yeah that's yeah yep. How would you make sense of it if they didn't come and talk to you about it? I don't know if I could make sense of it because I would be questioning like where did I go wrong? why did I not? there you go. You just made sense of it. I went wrong somewhere. So from the child's perspective, why can't they come and talk to you? because they don't feel like it's a safe space. They don't feel like it's a safe space. There's the trauma right there. This anxiety that you're talking about feeling. This sense of dread, the fear, the self-criticism. The I'm not good enough and I'm always worried about being good enough. That's the source right there is when you were a kid, your relationships were conditional on you being good enough and it wasn't safe. the relationship with your parents. For all the good things that were there, all the tremendous things of them being there for you, there was still a dynamic where it wasn't safe. And that's the trauma. So this leads me into a question, just a kind of curiosity thing. How can healing trauma lead to more authentic relationships with others? Yeah. Well, one of the adaptations, the traumas being the peacekeeper. Another adaptation is you suppress your emotions. You bottle them up and stuff them down. Do you know what the word depression, the actual literal meaning of the word depression means? I wouldn't say I know the actual literal definition. Okay, I'll tell you there's two definitions. The first one is to bury something. So if you depress power lines, you have buried your power lines. The second definition is that you take away something's energy. So again, in this situation, you would cut the power to the power lines and then you bury them kind of like holding a beach ball. Mm-hmm. The more that in this case, well here let me ask, in this case, when you say that you're having depression, what is it that you're holding under? Oh, that's a good question. I've never thought of it this way. So give me just a second here to kind of go through my mind here. You know, it's, I'd say it'd be a few things. I'd say it could be, you know, bits and pieces of my past would be some of it. Maybe. Just overall, like, things that I felt, like, I guess it relates back to my past. Yeah, things that I felt. Yeah. you do what with your emotions again? Yeah, stuff them down, bottle them up. That's the depression right there. Is when you went through the trauma, which is you didn't have the safe relationships, the safe connections that you needed. For all the things that were there, of course, this was one of the things that was missing. It wasn't perfect. And so you adapted to this trauma by suppressing your emotions by suppressing your boundaries and you adopted very specific roles such as being the peacekeeper because being the peacekeeper means that we can maintain our relationships we don't lose our connections so if we want to have more authentic relationships when we start to heal the trauma what we're doing is we're talking about healing these adaptations So all of those emotions that we're stuffing down and we're bottling up, what we're gonna learn how to do is to recognize them, to identify them, to accept that they're here, to accept that, hey, I'm actually angry about something or hey, something that's happening is really scaring me or something that happened has caused me a lot of pain or something that is happening is causing me a lot of pain. And rather than stuffing it down, I'm gonna accept that it's here. And I'm going to learn how to process these emotions and to express these emotions in constructive ways. And I'm going to learn how to nurture myself by setting boundaries and comforting and soothing these emotions. When we can start to do that, our relationships are no longer based on these adaptations to the trauma. And therefore they're more authentic, meaning that we're expressing what we're actually feeling and we're allowing people to see and interact with and engage with what we're actually feeling, which let me tie that back to when I asked you earlier, what were those things that you needed? What were they again? I'm trying to remember. Oh, reassurance was I think was that one of them was reassurance. Validation. Yeah. Somebody to see you. If somebody's going to reassure you and validate you, first thing they got to do is see you and listen to you and understand you. So what you're saying here is I need more authenticity. I need to be able to have my emotions, to express my emotions and to have them seen and validated. So that's how we can heal the trauma and have more authentic relationships by being more genuine and authentic with what we're experiencing and all those patterns and adaptations that we have of suppressing ourselves to maintain our relationships and to be good enough. Well, we can comfort and soften and soothe and nurture those the pain that's underneath those that need those adaptations to begin with. That makes sense. Totally makes sense. You have just made me the most raw I think I've ever been on one of my episodes. but it's, think it's like good to like see how this works and see, you know, how, where you're coming from on your side. Yeah, I didn't make you anything. You did it. See, again, what were those things that you really needed? You need somebody to see you. You need somebody to listen and understand you. But it kind of plays off what you said. We need to recognize these patterns. you helped me recognize something that I don't think I even realized was there. And that's the way that it works is because these adaptations, see, when we started tracing them, we started off with it was at this job and then it went back into the 20s and then it went back into the teens. And then we went back into childhood. See, these patterns, they oftentimes that I'm talking the patterns of suppressing your emotions, I'm talking the pattern of criticizing, judging, evaluating yourself. I'm talking the pattern of being afraid that something bad is going to happen. All these patterns have developed so early in life when we're children. That's when they always develop because our bodies are developing at this time. Our nervous system is developing. Our emotional circuits are developing. Our hormonal systems are developing and our worldview, our perception of the world and of ourselves all develops when we're children. So these patterns very much become just what is. That's just how things are. They're normal. That's just how I feel. That's just what it is. And it's very difficult to identify them when you're looking at the puzzle from just a couple inches away from it. And so talking to somebody like me, who's going to ask you lots of questions, I help you see all the pieces in the puzzle. And speaking of patterns, have uh another question that's in regards to patterns. do you, someone that comes to you and is completely overwhelmed by old patterns, but does not trust themselves, how do you guide them? That sounds like what we were just talking about, doesn't it? Is that a personal question then? Or maybe not even consciously personal, but maybe it was. maybe it probably wasn't even consciously personal. it's, it's, yeah. not conscious, but here's the thing, Travis, is there's a part of you that's speaking right now. This part of you that wants to be seen, this part of you that wants to be heard and understood and validated and reaffirmed, that's who's talking right now. That's who's asking that question. And this other part of you that learned how to adapt and suppress and depress all your emotions, you're having an internal conflict here. So I'm butting heads like internally back and forth. Precisely. You have unmet needs and one part of you wants to meet them and the other one is saying, well, things are really dangerous and I know how to adapt to this, so let me go ahead and take care of it. And these two are fighting with each other. So how do we learn to trust ourselves? Well, what you are responsible for doing now is being that person who's going to pay close attention to what you're going through. pay very close attention to what you're feeling and what you're thinking. So when that criticism and judgment and evaluation and punishment is there, you can see that as, oh, there's a familiar pattern. What were those things that I needed again? And then you try to do it yourself. You try to be the person that you needed when you were going through that pain originally who didn't see you, who didn't hear you. you're saying that I'm just going to kind of push this back and you tell me if my thinking is completely off here. So you're basically saying I need to become that person that is reassuring myself, giving myself the validation that I need to, I don't want to say overcome or maybe push past all these negative thoughts and types of different things that I'm feeling. Very good, very good. And the words that I think you're looking for are, you're going to be the person who's going to comfort all these things that you're going through, that's going to soothe all of these things that you're going through, that's going to nurture yourself as you're going through it. That's what we're looking for. You're going to become the person that you needed, that you didn't have. When you were experiencing all that pain and you couldn't talk to anybody about it. You were all alone and isolated and you needed somebody to be there with you and show you how to navigate these difficult times. You're going to become that person because if you stay in that pattern of being very harsh to yourself, judging, critiquing, evaluating, punishing yourself, you're treating yourself the same way that you were treated when these patterns originated. And round and round will go negative feedback loop. Makes sense. No, I'm going to take kind of the focus off of myself now, not that I think it was really good to do this. But how do you? go ahead, go ahead. that, when you started, you judged yourself quite harshly in the beginning where you said, I'm not very good at being vulnerable. I'm not very good at doing these things. And you could see that conflict that was there. There was the part of you that was saying, I want to do this. And then the other one was saying, no, don't do it. So what I'm saying here, Travis, celebrate, be kind to yourself, say, After we get off this call, or even right now, you can just take a moment and say, wow, this was the deepest and most vulnerable and raw that I've ever been on one of my shows. And I did that. Good work. Good job me. is. I think the only other time I've been, and it's not that I don't try to be vulnerable. I think the only other time I was like really way vulnerable was my very first episode when I was telling my story. But I think the perspective that you've brought in, I could go redo that episode now and probably tell it in a different way. And probably your story. You can reinvent your story. I could, yeah, reinvent it and tell it in a way I think that's where I'm more vulnerable because I feel like it's almost like the way you've maybe recognized what's going on, I'd feel more comfortable doing so. Hmm. So there's the outcome of seeing yourself is you start to feel more comfortable. And that's something you're really looking for in terms of all that anxiety that's there and all of the despair and the dread is you want to feel more comfortable. So now you know exactly what to do. Now all you got to do is go and practice it because it's not going to come easily because you're learning a new skill. So what I'm saying here is keep practicing, keep doing it. and celebrate yourself a little bit because you are doing it. Will do for sure. yourself a high five and a hug and say, job, buddy. You did fantastic today. So, I will applaud myself really quick. I wish I had an applaud button. Maybe there is one and I just don't, and I don't know there is one. So how do you see this kind of healing work uh impacting larger communities and culture? Well, when you listen to spiritual teachers all throughout the ages, they all say the exact same thing in terms of social change. If you want to change the world, start with changing yourself. When we heal as individuals, society changes naturally and inevitably. That's Jidayakrishna Murti right there. That's a direct quote from him. So, When we as individuals continue to turn our attention inward and we recognize these patterns of how we're being super harsh and judgmental and critical to ourselves, we can start to soften those and nurture and comfort those. And the more that we can do that, the more that we can do it for other people as well. And the easier it becomes when we do it with other people. So this healing is not just a societal and a collective thing. It's an individual thing. And when we do it as individuals, it becomes a collective healing. So this is very important is you can't, you can't be with somebody else if you can't be with yourself first and foremost. So when the plane starts to go down, you always put your mask on first because if you pass out, you can't help anybody else out. So the more that we take care of ourselves, the more that we have to pour to help other people out. And if you don't mind, I want to go back to kind of the beginning when you when you'd mentioned the very first when we started this episode, you mentioned you you didn't do this to heal others. You did this to heal yourself. What was that? Turning point for you to realize that, you know what, like, how did you recognize that you you needed help to overcome internal conflict? Well, when I first started getting into this, of course, like I said, of course I got into it because I wanted to help other people. I wanted to be that knight in white shining armor that's going to go back to my family and go back to my old community and help and save everybody. But what I really realized was I was trying to help myself there. I needed to be valued. I needed to be accepted. I needed to be respected. And there were lots of points where I was really starting to realize this. I used to have this and I think a lot of people do. This is really common in our culture that I'll feel good when I do the thing. When I graduate from college, when I get the job, when I get the license, when I get the promotion, when I buy the house, when I got the car, then I'll feel good. And I was, I was taking my own path. I was doing things quite independently. I'm not much of a materialist anyway. So I was Gathering experiences and each time just felt hollow and empty and I was just always feeling in despair and When I first really started turning my life around trying to figure out You know how to heal these things that was because of me. It was because my life was so miserable I wasn't gonna be able to continue living I was in so much pain I couldn't continue and so I said I'm figure this out And so then fast forward, you know, 10 years down the road and I'm sitting here and I'm saying, well, I'm still miserable even when I'm doing all these things. And that was when it really clicked for me. I think that if I was going to ever be able to enjoy this life, one, that was a prerequisite for being able to help people. And if I was going to do that, I needed to heal myself. There was still pain that I was ignoring. There was still patterns and dynamics that were affecting me and I really needed to figure those out. Yeah, I can see that and it totally makes sense. Because sometimes I get this, you know, as I, the more I do this podcast, and I love doing this podcast, I love hearing people's stories, I love connecting with people. But there's, sometimes I feel that sense of like, you know, this goes back to my kind of negative talk and but I think like, am I really in the spot to be doing this? Like am I, I still have all these things that I'm struggling with, yet I'm pushing stories out there and they're not all mine, like hardly any of them are mine, but I'm pushing stories out there that are basically telling people different ways that they can, you know, treat themselves to overcome whatever it is that they're struggling with. So, so I have that internal conflict that is... It's kind of been there and it's like sometimes I'm like, well, but I guess that I always come back to, you know what? I'm doing this. pushing forward because I know it's a good thing. Okay, yeah, you can try and convince yourself that way too. That's good. Very good job on noticing that pattern of harshness. Awareness is always the prerequisite to making choices. So again, here's that belief of unworthiness. I'm not good enough. I'm not deserving. And so what are you going to do with it? uh i think with this like the more i keep going the less i feel like this the less i feel that way it's like because it's like it's it comes down to you It's gonna go back to exactly what you said. I've just seen the patterns here. So it goes back to that one person in 500 people that listen to the podcast or whatever. mean, that reaches out and says, you know what? You've really helped me. This episode really helped me. I want to come on and talk to you. And that's... of a reassurance that I'm doing something good. Okay, so again, you need validation, reassurance. You need somebody to see you. Now, how are you going to do that for yourself? This part of you is over here yapping saying, I'm not good enough. I'm not deserving. He's clearly in a lot of pain. It's that belief comes from a place of not feeling great and being in despair, being scared and angry. What are you going to do? I'm going to continue to recognize these patterns. Keep seeing them, Keep seeing that part of you. Now, that part developed at a certain point in your life, and this is the exercise for you after this, is to really try to figure out where in your life you first started feeling I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, I'm not deserving. And it's probably like a four-year-old or a five-year-old or an eight-year-old. And if your five-year-old was believing that he wasn't good enough, It's a boy, right? My five year old's a girl. Yeah. So if she starts to have these beliefs of unworthiness, what would you do? If she was saying, dad, I'm just not good enough, I'm a terrible person, what would you do? I would sit her down and have her explain to me why she feels that way. Yeah, yeah, I'd comfort her and, um, I'm trying to think of like a kind of an example, like usually when she's down, like if she's depending on her mood and stuff, I'll kind of go sit by her, put my arm around her. She'll come sit on my lap or whatever. Yeah. Yep. Scoop her up. Yep. you hold her. So this part of you that believes that he's not good enough, that he's unworthy, that he's not capable, that's what you want to do. Is you want to start to extend that same amount of presence of seeing that pain, listening, understanding, and then scoop him up and comfort him and say, it's okay, I'm here, come, let me hold you. and you do that for yourself. See, when I say that the wisdom's inside of each and every one of us that we know how to heal, so you knew exactly how to do it right there. Now, let's just apply that same wisdom to you. Yeah, that makes sense. I stop because of like, you know, sometimes I feel like I look blank here, but it's like I'm literally like really taking it in and trying to process it all. Yeah, see, there was the judgment again. look blank. It's sneaky. It's very elusive. It comes up in lots of ways and that's okay. I'm just taking it in. I'm allowed to take it in. And what's the, I think you, I want to say you kind of touched point on this before. What's the difference between fixing oneself and truly integrating healing work? Fixing comes from the belief that you're broken or that you're damaged. And there's the harshness and that's not true. These beliefs come from experiences. We go through things and their adaptations and we are so much more than the things that we've gone through. So nobody's broken. Nobody's damaged. We've just gone through things and we're much more than that. When I ask people, What did they need when they went through the pain? Sometimes people say this, but when I ask further questions, it usually becomes actually, no, that's not what I needed at all. I've never ever once heard somebody say when I was going through that pain, I needed somebody to fix it. See, if any time your children were going through pain or discomfort or hardship. or loss. They were experiencing difficulties in life. If you just came around and fixed it for them, you would do them no service in life. No, absolutely not because it's like I want my children to learn how to, it's like I want them to learn the coping skills and how to get past it themselves. I don't want to fix them at all. because at some point you're not going to be there anymore and they're going to need to navigate life on their own. That's the difference right there is we're not trying to fix anything. We're not trying to make anything go away. What we're trying to do is learn how to navigate the difficulties, to navigate the hardship, to navigate the pains and the loss. And this is getting closer to that wholeness. All of the ability to navigate these things, to thrive in this world. to heal and recover, it's all there. And that's what we're trying to do. absolutely love it. So if you could leave listeners with one practice to begin cultivating their self-trust today, what would it be? Usually here I'll say something along the lines of try to be yourself. You know, this is such a common message though, and it's almost cliche. You hear people like Chris Cornell singing, you know, be yourself is all that you can be. And yet he's in so much despair that he ends up ending his life. So this idea of be yourself, I don't think really lands for a lot of people. What I'm really saying here is to listen very carefully to what it is that you're feeling, just like we did today. Listen to it. Try to understand why it's here and look at what you do with the things that you feel. The vast majority of us suppress our feelings. We stuff them down, we bottle them up and we try and get them to go away. Instead of doing that, allow yourself to have those feelings and maybe try to constructively express them. That's what I mean by be yourself. Listen to what you're feeling. Allow yourself to have those feelings and try to figure out how to process and express them. That's the first thing, right? There's just to start to pay attention, to listen to what am I feeling right now? And that's the first step to being yourself. I love it and I can relate to that one. I remember when I first started going to therapy, that's one of the first things that I was taught was like you need to start recognizing the way you're feeling. Like you need to, like even if you just, as you're feeling angry, even if you stop just for a minute to think, okay, well why am I feeling angry? And then after time you'll subconsciously recognize that that's anger that you're feeling. You'll know why, you'll know kind how to turn it around. Yeah, much easier said than done. Oh, very, very much. because we've learned from so many places, whether it was from our parents who said, if you're going to be angry, you're going to get a timeout. In other words, I'm going to threaten you with your attachments, the things that are most important to you until you learn to suppress your emotions. Or it was society saying you can't have emotions. We all learn somewhere along the way to suppress and exile our emotions. And so to differentiate between thoughts, perceptions, evaluations, judgments, and feelings is very challenging for a lot of people. was certainly challenging for me. I had a therapist always ask me, what are you feeling? What are you feeling? That's not what you're feeling. That's a thought. And I would get so angry and I'd want to strangle this guy. And he's like, ah, there's anger. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that's anger. And now I can identify it. So it's difficult to do that. But yeah, that's the first step. You got it. And it's like I always think of like with my kids, when they're, because you know kids, especially young kids, they feel really deep like, and they don't know how to connect those emotions together or make any difference of them. I think of my daughter, the moments where she kind of gets a little bit mean with us and it's like, okay, I always, we're always saying that you have the right to be mad, you have the right to be angry, but you don't have the right to treat people badly. Sure. See, but how do you treat yourself again? badly and it's like it it's probably yeah yeah let's see if we do the actions yeah so she's, she's getting conflicting messages here. So you asked me earlier, how do we make changes for our communities and for societies? And I said, the way we do it is by making changes for ourselves. So if you want your daughter to learn how to be kind to people, you start with being kind to yourself and she'll pick that up. Awesome, I love it. I have a lot of new things to try and to, and it's like, I feel like with everything, especially when it comes to mental health, it's all the work of progress. Like it's all... um not trying to get anywhere where everything's great and fixed and rainbows and butterflies. Again, that's not it. The destination is to be on the path. That is where we're trying to get to. And then once we can start to be curious and start asking ourselves, what's really going on with my internal state and how can I enact some choice in this matter? How can I liberate myself from those old patterns? that's the destination and we'll continue to do that for the rest of our lives. We'll keep going deeper and find new areas where we were no longer making choices, but we were on that autopilot. Yeah, for sure. I have one last question for you. It's a pretty generic question. I like to the responses I get. What would you say is the biggest stigma when it comes to mental health? boy. You know, there are so many stigmas that, the biggest one I couldn't even tell you. Probably that you're broken. Probably that there's something wrong with you. Probably that the answers are outside of you. Probably that you need somebody to fix you or to heal you. All of these things. They're very, very common there. And you know, it's useful for the current model of healthcare and mental health care that we have, but again, I think that those are all backwards. I think the answers are always inside of you and that we're not fixing anything. We're just enacting more choice, more agency. We've been wounded and we've become scarred and we become very stiff and rigid because of that and numb in lots of ways. And the more that we stretch, the more that we soften, we become more flexible. We have bigger range of motion. That's what we're trying to do is have more mobility, more range of motion, more flexibility in terms of how we respond to things. And that's very different than the, need to take this or I need to get this and that'll fix me, which is very common. it. Where can people find you? My website's first and foremost, um psychedelic-integration.net. Or Instagram's great too, Psychi Integration. We have lots of information. We do free consultations and we have free groups too, almost weekly. They're usually on Fridays where people can come in. They're free groups. You can participate, ask questions, come and work through whatever it is that you're working through. And I do my own podcast too where I talk to people just like this. Those are all free resources for anybody who's going through depression, anxiety, addictions, any sort of trauma or pain and they want to work through it. I absolutely love it. And we discussed a lot of topics here, quite a few, and is there anything that you'd like to bring up that we did not discuss? I think that when we start to, and this was something that we touched in with, with the examples that we're working through today, when we start to uncover the source of all of these patterns that we have, usually it's a painful experience. And usually it goes very back, it goes back very early into our life. So we noticed earlier that I don't want to talk bad about my parents. They did great. And I'm not saying that we want to blame our parents. for anything, this is a very important distinction to make. See, our parents do the best they can, just like you're doing the best for your children right now. But these patterns get handed down through the generations and we do the best with what we got. And you know, some parents do such a good job that they go and ask the experts and they go to the doctors and they say, how do I take care of my baby or my child in the most optimal way? And the experts will tell you, don't hold them. Let them learn to cry it out. Let them learn to self-soothe. They need to become independent. In other words, when your baby's crying out trying to get their needs met, don't meet those needs. These are the sources of great pain. so blame in this situation to say, I'm in this pain and it's this person's fault. It's my parents' fault. It's whoever's fault. We're back in that victim mentality. And rather than seeing it that way, what I really recommend is to start to see where can I enact some choice? Where can I enact some agency and where can I liberate myself from these old patterns? This is how we empower ourselves. So this dynamic of blame is something we want to be very, very aware of and very cautious of. Blame is not conducive to any outcome that we're looking for here. Mm-hmm. Absolutely love it. Well, Julian, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode. I really admire the work that you're doing. Let's see. thank you very much. really appreciate you getting out there and pushing the comfort zone and tapping into those areas that you're looking to explore. So good job for you too. Thank you for having me. And thank you. Thanks for the kind words and thank you everybody that's listening. If this resonated with you, please share it. Please leave us a review and follow us on any major podcast platform. Thanks again. Till next time.