Therapy, Treating Trauma & Other Life Challenges | Dr. Paul Conti

This section of the episode develops the topic through the following source points: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Conti is a psychiatrist who did his training at Stanford School of Medicine and then went on to be Chief Resident at Harvard Medical School. He now runs the Pacific Premier Group, which is a collection of psychiatrists and therapists focusing on solving complex human problems, including trauma, addiction, personality, and psychiatric disorders. Today we discuss trauma in detail and the therapeutic process in detail. For instance, we discuss what is trauma? How do you know if you have trauma? Dr. Conti shares with us, for instance, that not every experience that we think is traumatic is necessarily traumatic, and yet many people might have trauma without even realizing it. We also talk about the therapeutic process generally. For instance, how to pick a therapist, how to best approach and go through therapy, and how to evaluate whether or not therapy and your relationship to the therapist is working or not. We also talk about self-therapies because we acknowledge that not everyone has access to or can afford therapy, and we talk about drug therapies, for instance, antidepressants, antipsychotics. We talk about alcohol, cannabis, ketamine, and the psychedelics, including psilocybin, LSD, and we talk about the clinical use of MDMA and what the future of that looks like. The reason for bringing Dr. Conti onto this podcast is because I see him as the person who has the greatest and most holistic view of therapy, trauma, drug therapies, talk therapies, and how self-therapy and work with others can be integrated for both healing and growing from difficult circumstances. Dr. Conti is also the author of an exceptional book entitled "Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal from It." That book describes trauma and its many features, and many tools, some of which we discuss on the podcast today. Whether or not you have trauma or not, by the end of today's episode, you will have a much deeper understanding about what trauma is. In fact, I'm confident that you will gain insight into whether or not you have trauma or not, whether or not people close to you have trauma or not, and the various paths to recovering and indeed growing from trauma that we can all take. As you'll soon learn, Dr. Conti is an exceptional communicator and has a unique window into the trauma and therapeutic process that I know that all of us can benefit from.