46. Dr. Christopher Cortman - Time Doesn't Heal All Wounds

What does it actually take to heal something you have carried for decades? 

This week I sat down with Dr. Christopher Cortman, a psychologist with 40 years and more than 85,000 therapy hours behind him, to talk about guided imagery: a technique where you close your eyes and finish the conversation that trauma cut short. The goodbye you never said. The apology you never got. The brother, the mother, the friend you lost.

Cortman walks through real cases. A young man whose mother died by suicide. A woman who lost her little brother in an accident on her watch. A Vietnam veteran who watched four men die and carried it for 50 years. 

In each one, nothing about the facts changes, and yet people walk out of his office different. 

We talk about how all of it connects to what we see in trauma and PTSD recovery with plant medicine and integration: that time doesn't heal anything, but what you do with the time does. 

Healing comes from going back to the unfinished business and finally putting it down.

We get into whether any of this is "real" and whether that even matters, the five steps Dr. Cortman uses to finish a trauma, the explosion of dissociative identity cases he saw in the 1990s, and why he believes hope, not time, is what actually pulls people out of the dark.

Guest Bio:

Dr. Christopher Cortman is a licensed psychologist based in Florida with more than 40 years of clinical practice and over 85,000 therapy hours, including early work treating Vietnam veterans under a VA contract. He specializes in trauma, grief, and PTSD, and is known for using guided imagery to help people find closure with what they have lost. He is the author of several books, including the recently published Praying for the Darkness, a true story drawn from his work with dissociative identity disorder, and a recent book on guided imagery. He now sees clients largely by telehealth across roughly 44 states.

Connect with Dr. Cortman:

Website: srqshrink.com

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drchristophercortman

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drchristophercortman

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-christopher-cortman-5196b222/

All books can be found on amazon or here:  https://srqshrink.com/book-store

Thanks again for listening!

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Visit https://www.becomingom.org/coaching for all the info and to get in touch with us.

Or DM us the word INTERESTED on Instagram.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of the Plant Medicine for PTSD podcast. This one was a very fun one for me. I was joined today by Dr. Christopher Cortman, who is a licensed psychotherapist. I believe he works primarily out of the state of Florida. And Dr. Cortman has written a number of books. We get into a couple of them today. Primarily, this episode kind of touches on his latest book, which is called The Guided Imagery Cure. We also veer into some interesting territory around the Satanic Panic, as it has been termed, because Dr. Courtman, interestingly, has worked with a number of patients back in the day who allege, and I actually use that term very lightly because I believe a lot of this stuff is real. But he's worked with a number of patients who claim to have been part of ritual satanic sex abuse, which is not the primary thrust of this episode, I promise. Uh, but it's pretty fucking interesting. And I do believe that the world is run by satanic pedophiles. So if you also believe that, you will probably deeply enjoy and also kind of be troubled by this episode. But like I said, that's not the main point here. The main point here is Dr. Cortman's work with his patients to heal from trauma, specifically his use of this guided imagery technique. Um I think there's a lot of really fascinating overlap between what Dr. Cortman does and what I believe is the mechanism of action behind the healing of psychedelics and plant medicines. So there's a lot of overlap with like what he does with his clients and what we do with our clients in our integration program, which I thought was fascinating. Dr. Cortman's also just an awesome dude. I had a lot of fun talking to him. I feel like I could have talked to him for hours, and maybe a part two is going to be necessary sometime in the future. So if you're in Florida, you should 100% go check him out. Even if you're not, you should check out his books and his other work. Uh, his website is srqshrink.com. And honestly, I did not ask him what the hell srq means, but there it is. So all of the links and everything will be in our episode description. Definitely encourage you to check out some of his books, and you can follow him on Instagram and see uh pictures of him with his little baby. Uh, I I'm I'm gonna screw up the ages, but Dr. Courtman is like in his 60s and has a newborn child, which I think is awesome. So go check him out, check out his books, enjoy this episode, and I'll see you on the other side. Is there anything that you want to share about yourself at the top? I always find it interesting how people introduce themselves, and I know that that's something that evolves over time, especially someone with as lengthy a career as yourself, and now uh being a new dad again. So, how do you care like uh characterize your life right now? How would you introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Yeah, well, when you say a um a lengthy introduction, that just means I'm old. I was being generous with it. It's a euphemism for damn year olds, and you're still doing awesome. Yeah, but um, you know, I I think what when I want to talk about introduction, it's just uh I've been given this fantastic gift to um to do 85,000 therapy hours in in 40 years, and I'm pleased to have been as healthy and as invested, and you know, I still love what I do. And uh now I feel like I have to live another 50 years because I have a baby. So I don't know if I'll ever be tired. So I gotta keep cranking, you know.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Well, as we discussed last time, you're doing pretty well on that front, getting a lot of steps in, taking care of yourself. You know, it's interesting what you said too. Actually, you've been doing it this long and you still love what you do. I think that actually is somewhat rare. It's very people nowadays like talk about burnout so much. What do you what do you attribute that to? Why do you think that you love it so much and have continued to love it so much this whole time?

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Well, you know, it's funny. I had uh a six-way bypass last January. I take back what I said about your health, man. Because I thought I was in fabulous shape, right? I'd walked 47 miles that week, lifted heavyweights three times, and they said you got a hundred percent blockage in your widowmaker. So um, but they said because of all the years of exercise, your heart has formed other tributaries, you know, it's it's pumping out, and so all we really have to do is uh, you know, uh recircuit, you know, do the recircuitry. Yeah, and uh so my heart this year was absolutely perfect. And he said, you don't need to be here for another year. And it was like, okay, but so I I attribute so much of that to they said you can't outrun your genetics. So this was the blockage was the genetics. Okay, okay, but um what I have done in the course of my career and my life is I've exercised almost every day, and I have a basic faith and I have a an understanding that I'm here to help people, and people are my thing. I don't have all these great mechanical skills. You know, if if I if it's time to hang a picture on the wall, I gotta call the guy, you know. But my skills are people, and they come in and they talk to me every hour of the day, and that's like I don't find that stressful. I find it like, you know, this is it's invigorating for me. It it actually uh it makes me well to have connections with people, and especially if they're actually getting better. You know, and that's that's the joy of doing this.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

It's uh seeing people change and grow. Yeah, I mean, you're you're describing kind of what attracted me to physical therapy in the first place, and then I found out that was a little bit misplaced, my you know, the things that I enjoyed about it. You mentioned you have a basic faith. This is something we're gonna circle back to because you you got a few interesting things in your uh in your career that I want to highlight, but talk to us just about that first, and then we'll get into some of your work now with the guided imagery. That's really what I want to hear about. But give me a background. What what what is your faith? Where does that come from? What does that look like to you now?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

When I was a boy, I um my parents became uh born-again Christians when I was probably seven ish. And um they were hook line and sinker into the Christian faith, and that's how I was raised. And in order, you know, in a lower middle class family, we didn't have any five kids, we definitely had no extra money for anything. If I wanted to go to camp, I had to memorize scripture, Bible verses. And if I did that successfully for 12 weeks, I uh could go to camp for free for um a week. And I loved doing that. And the first year was like second grade, and they gave me three Bible verses, not bad, but then they they just cranked them up. And when I was a teenager, I had like 14 or 15 verses to memorize in a week. I look back, I memorized over 900 Bible verses. Why am I telling you this? Because I remember most of it, it's it's like permanently embedded in my head. So I have this background. Now I veered away from the the very strict fundamental Christianity. I still am a person of faith for sure, and I believe in God and I believe in Christ and and so forth, but I don't believe that people around the world are on the wrong team and therefore they're going to hell and and and for eternal torment. I don't believe that a loving God would do that to his children to begin with. I I don't I don't believe that. I believe in a loving God, I believe in redemption, I believe in forgiveness, I believe in something beyond this. You know, and and I have integrated my faith with my work in the sense, not that I'm Bible thumping, I'm certainly not, even though the scriptures are still in my head. What I'm doing is affording hope in the way of there is such a thing as love, there is such a thing as forgiveness, there's such a thing as letting go of worry, there's such a thing as um giving something over to your version of a higher power so that it's not yours to control anymore. So there's something that um hopefully is beyond here that's positive. So if you lost a loved one, it's okay to believe that I'll see them again someday. You know, I I have a faith that works with my therapy, and yet I don't see all Christians. Only probably half of my 50 to 60 percent of people would probably say they're Christians. I have a lot of Jewish people who work with me, and there's no conflict whatsoever. I have some atheists, uh you know, it does it's like, what do you bring to the table? We're gonna work with that. But I believe that there's something more.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Yeah, no, I I think that's beautiful. And I think that it it the way that it's able to inform your practice, just as you said, regardless of what you want to call it, having some faith and something out there. I almost feel like that's actually necessary to truly heal from things of the past because it it allows them to make some meaning out of things that have happened. So I'm I'm actually really curious, in all of your clinical experience, folks who have faith versus those atheists that you mentioned, do you notice any differences in the patterns of like how their therapy progresses or almost their prognosis when you meet them of how you think things will go based on if they have some faith or not?

SPEAKER_00 10:09

You know, I'm gonna answer that question by telling you something specific. Okay. I had a delightful Jewish lady. I mean, I really enjoyed our our time together, and and so did she. And um, she had this big career, and uh yeah, she just was a successful woman, but she lost her favorite person on earth, her daughter, one of these people that was just a superstar, and she died in her mid-30s of cancer, and it was just devastating. And and you know, we're we're talking about this guided imagery thing, um, and my my recent book. And I like having the opportunity to have people say goodbye in imagery to the person that they lost. But this was the one and only time that the goodbye was really goodbye because in most of or all of the other ones, it's I'll see you later. Right. The person has moved on into the beyond. But since this woman said, No, when you die, that's it. Her precious daughter, you know, to see her one more time was very powerful, but there wasn't a sense of see you later, baby, as there is in so many of these other times when I have people talk to the loved one that they lost. And you know the difference. Forget about death. You know the difference. If you were to kiss your wife or your child goodbye in the morning, it's like, okay, I'll see you later. It's like it's not devastating when I'll see you later. If it's like this is the last time she's walking out of your life, that feels different.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

I have a hard enough time when my daughter is downstairs yelling at me to read her more books, and I have to go upstairs to record a podcast for a couple hours, and I'll see her again right after this. Man, it breaks my heart. Well said. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

My heart went out to this lady because it wasn't she could not say to her daughter or even uh hear from her daughter that her daughter's in a better place, like in some and that she's well, and mom, I'm good here, I'm fine, don't worry about me. Man, you'll you'll be here one day too.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

All right, let's let's put a pin in this faith thing. Because I actually I have a couple theories that I want to run by you and see what you think about how we choose what to have faith in. Because I think at the end of the day, we're all telling ourselves a story, and I think we can choose a better story for ourselves. But you brought up the guided imagery technique, and I know that's the focus of your latest book. So, can you break that down for us of just what that is, how you use it, and then I'll have some specifics of how this can apply to the healing path that we talk about with plant medicine. But give us an understanding, like what it is that you do when you say guided imagery, what what are you doing with people?

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Yeah, great question. So, first thing I want to say is guided imagery is not something I invented, and I'm not trying to take credit for creating a new technique. Um, I was trained in this and I learned in subsequent research that it's been around in different places for hundreds of years where people basically close their eyes and they imagine things. And what makes it guided is if somebody else is telling you where to go versus, you know, and the power of it is um much like our dreams. Because a dream, as you well know, is a movie that you wrote, directed, and starred in, probably. Um, but it's not real, but it has an amazing impact on your nervous system, so much so that uh I don't know about you, but I have awoken from dreams before, and I was like, that was so real, that was so disturbing or so funny, and whatever it was, it it impacted my nervous system. And sometimes I've had to ask myself, did that happen or did I dream it? Did I ask her that? Or did she and I talk about that, or did I just dream it? You know, my my favorite story was a uh a woman saying to her husband, I dreamt last night that you were flirting with my best friend right in front of me. And he goes, That never happened, and she goes, right in front of me. And he's looking at me like, what am I supposed to do? You know, it was so real to her that she was mad at him. She created that in her mind, but it felt real. So with guided imagery, we are seeing and experiencing something that plays a trick on the nervous system in that it feels like it's real. And it's not like I'm trying to change reality as much as I'm trying to help people put something in a better place. So I have many stories that uh are are in the book and many other ones that didn't make it in the book, but I need to really illustrate this point by saying let me share something with you so you know what I'm saying and what I do. So that's it's not like I'm trying to um create a false narrative with people as much as I'm helping them accept what really did happen. So I'll if you don't mind, I'll just um please I'll start with one um a young man twenty-three, twenty-four years old comes in for depression and um I ask him about how long he's been depressed, and he says he's been depressed since his mother took her life. She she uh she died by suicide um several years ago. And um this guy, um, a young man was going to college at the time, and he had seen her on that day, and he knew she was suffering with her illness, but he did not expect her to take her life, and he felt guilty that he didn't know it. It happened on the same day he saw her, and so on. And so the guided imagery plan, you know, I asked him if he believed in a life after this, and he did, and he believed that his mother was in a better place. But, you know, that that's about the extent of it. And I said, what if we had a chance to talk to your mom another time? And I will guide it, I'll help set it up, and you know, you can picture your mom wherever you think she might be, and or you can picture your mom in your living room or somewhere where you're comfortable talking to her. And you know, people have an option where you want to do this, you know. So he meets with his mother and I speak for her, and I always take the information that people give me to try to speak intelligently for the person. And I say you'll hear this as if coming out of your mom's lips, not out of mine. But I say things like he told me, which is I was sick and I felt like I was a terrible drain on you and your father. Here you are in college, and instead of doing college boy things, you're coming home to be with me and make sure I'm okay. I just hated being such a burden, and I thought I would release you and your dad from this terrible, terrible burden. And um, what I realized is I ended up hurting you more, and I'm so sorry if I had known then what I know now. I wouldn't have done this. I tried to do this to help you. Anyway, I said something to that effect, and he heard all of that, but he heard something else that I did not say, which was really great. He heard his mother say, I will always be the angel on your shoulder, which was a way of him creating something that gave him hope. That's right. That mom is still going to be with me through the rest of the ride. Well, here's the cool thing. He came back the next week and said he felt differently. He felt better, he had hope. It wasn't, I didn't bring his mother back to life. I didn't do any kind of incredible miracle, but what happened in the guided imagery session is he had a and I still see him occasionally, you know, years later, four years later, whatever. He's good about his mom. You know, that that's she's still dead, but she's in a better place. And one of those better places is on his shoulder. That's beautiful. No, so that's an example of using guided imagery for grief, unresolved grief. And I I have a lot of those stories, and so you need to help me with where I need to tell one versus you know explaining things.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

And I think I I I may have I may have gotten myself in trouble telling you this would only be like an hour and 20 minutes because I have 77 follow-up questions from that. I will try to focus myself. So you shared something with me. You used the term unfinished business, that this is kind of what this process is all about is finishing that unfinished business. I think maybe you mentioned somebody else, Fritz Pearls. Maybe he coined that term or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

I did mention Fritz Pearls. I loved Fritz Pearl's work. He was the father of the gestalt theory of psychotherapy, and it's really all about gestalt meaning wholeness.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

I was gonna say I'm nodding as if that meant anything to me. Yes, I've heard that.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

I know that's a word. It's a German word, and I speak as much German as you do, probably.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

My wife is Austrian, so I can I have excellent uh farmers market German. Can I sample your goat's cheese? That's about the extent of it. So I I like this idea of the unfinished business. Without having read all about this, I think it makes a lot of sense of why people get stuck in the past. You know, um, um I'm sure you're familiar with Dr. Gabor Mate. I think he's done a lot of good work around this stuff. And one of the things he says is that people don't get traumatized because of what happened to them. They get traumatized because they're alone with that hurt and they don't really have tools to process it or to make sense of it or to move on from it, and they kind of get stuck in that place. So I think what I'm hearing is you offer people a way to find closure and sort of it's maybe too simplistic to file these things away where they belong so that they can move past it and kind of make new sense of what happens.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

You have so heard me, and you use the word I have not yet used today, but it's all about the closure. Okay. Because while we're not bringing people back to life, we are putting them somewhere where they're let me tell one more story now, if you don't mind, along the same lines. So a 31-year-old woman comes into my office and she was physician referred because she's depressed. And I asked her about how long have you been depressed? She said, not about how long. I'll tell you exactly the day I became depressed. I was 19 years old. And she tells a story about her favorite human being in the world, which was her 12-year-old brother. And they went to Walmart together and they were shopping, and he disappeared, and she got really anxious. Like, oh my God, I if he ever got lost on my watch, I don't know what I would do. And then she finds him and she's so relieved. And you know, a half hour later, she pulls out too far in traffic, and a big truck swerves and hits and kills her little brother and misses her completely. And there it is, her worst nightmare in the world, her favorite person. He died on her watch because of her mistake. She not only it not only happened while she was with him, but it was her fault. So here she is, 12 years later, she's made no progress. And I told her about Guided imagery and asked about what she thought, where he was, he's in heaven, that's good. So um I didn't waste any time. I, you know, Dave, I at the very next session is like, if you're okay to do this, and she's like, Yeah, I'm okay to try anything at this point. You know, the physician had given her a lot of different meds, nothing worked. You know, this is why she was here. So I had her see her brother in whatever she conceptualized heaven to look like. And he said, Look, um, I am so excited uh to see you, but I want you to know I'm not allowed to tell you a lot of things about what's going on here, but I want you to know I'm happy, I'm well, and I don't want you to feel sad and down every time you think about me. You're my favorite person. I loved you and I know how you love me. I want you to think of me and feel hope. You know, I want you to be like, I didn't use the word since he was 12, inspired by thinking about me. And one day you're gonna be here with me. And it's it's okay to be here. It's all good. And um, you know, I could see that it was working because she was, you know, tears are streaming down her face, her eyes are closed, she's watching this and talking to him and saying what she needs to say. And then at the end of it, I said, Um, oh, and tell mom there's no curfew here. So anyway, you know, I could see her her smile at that, and then we I bring her back. And most of the time at the end of one of these things, people are very quiet, they don't have much to say, and I don't know how well it worked. So the next week she comes in and she says, Dr. Cortman, I can't get that to a bad place if I try. When I think of my brother now, I think of him in heaven, I think of him well, I think of him happy, and it's like, I can get on with my life now. One day we'll be together again. So all the facts were the same. What changed was her perception. I instead of like I ruined my brother's life, my brother's well, he's okay. I need to live, you know, my time, his time was up, my time isn't up yet. I got more stuff to do. I better get going. And the last thing she said, Dave, is um, can my mother come in and do this? Because this was her son. You know?

SPEAKER_02 24:19

I think that's exactly right, man. Like we we see this all the time. Veterans or cops with survivors' guilt. It's like, well, your buddy that died, would he want to see you drinking yourself to death too? Or would he want to see you just crushing it in life and having a family and having fun and like honoring his memory in that way?

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Exactly right. Honoring him. You don't honor me by destroying yourself and others around you.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

So is that would you say that's pretty typical where you are kind of speaking for that loved one? Like you're almost filling that role to uh to play out a scene, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

I have trusted myself with that responsibility. And and and by request, I'll ask them, do you mind, you know, I will speak for your person, but you need to hear it coming from them. And if you need to translate it or add a southern accent or whatever your grandpa would have done, you know, do what you need to. And only one time, and and and again, I've been at this literally for 40 years. Um, only one time did that not work where a woman completely opened her eyes and said, My father would never speak like that. And but I knew she didn't, she wasn't in, she didn't want this to work. She wasn't bought into it, yeah. Yeah, she didn't she wanted to hold on to her perception, she didn't want to forgive her father. She didn't oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

I mean, we see that too, right? You can lead a horse to a guided imagery session, but you can't make it change its mind. So true. When uh when you're doing this, where where do you draw that from? You know, because I as as I'm hearing this, this is like we're straying into like uh medium territory or like channeling people. Is that what you think you're doing? Or you're just kind of yeah, how how do you conceptually?

SPEAKER_00 26:01

No, I I don't think I'm channeling anybody. Okay. I'm uh what I'm doing is I heard role-playing. Yeah, I heard what they said about this person. Okay. And I'm I'm taking this person and projecting them into the next realm, including with the ability to say, as I've done so many times, I didn't know what I was doing then, like I understand it now, and I would have done it differently if I had the time. Now I can only say I'm sorry. I did this recently with a um a woman whose um her her parents, she was um, she's 82 now, just to put this into perspective. And um a Jewish um of Jewish American family, and uh they were ready for their two sons to become doctors, but she wasn't allowed to go to college because she was just a girl, and girls don't deserve that same level of education. At least that's what they believed back then. And we're both doctors, we understand that.

SPEAKER_02 27:04

They can't handle that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

They can't, you know, they're only females. That's right. Now the calls are gonna come in. But um, one of the things we did was an imagery where I got to speak for her mother and said, I did to you what was done to me. And this was my understanding of I understand now the world has progressed, and I kind of wish I had a chance to grow up in this world where I could do so many more things. And I'm so sorry for the way I held you down, but I'm very proud of the fact that you broke through the ceiling we put above your head and became a successful professional. Like this woman's a teacher, and she's had a great career, not because of her parents, but because of her determination to go to college when they didn't want her to. You know, so my point in saying that is I spoke for her for her mother as if her mother has had more insight, more growth. She's evolved into a healthier version of herself.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

It's it sounds a little bit like the movie Inception, where you're because you are you familiar with that movie? It's where they like go into people's dreams and plant an idea so that the person thinks it was their natural idea that they came up with, but really you're I and I don't mean to say that you're planting fantastic, fantastic movie. But where basically you know the place that you're trying to get this person to come around and see it from this new perspective, you know that, but they're not quite there yet. And that's I I feel like that's really what I'm trying to do with our clients as well. We do it usually through uh journaling prompts that sort of lead people to a specific conclusion that I want them to come to, but they have to get there themselves, yeah. And you're doing that really just in this one session by acting out this scene, so to speak, and allowing them to just have that processing take place pretty pretty much instantaneously. But you're just helping them get to this new conclusion that you know is better for them, and they just haven't been able to connect those dots yet.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

That's letting go, which is an is the real definition of forgiveness, right? Yeah, you know, the the let go of something and and say, I'm sorry. When people say I'm sorry, it really increases your chances of forgiving them and saying it's okay, mom, um, I still did well anyway.

SPEAKER_02 29:29

I'm I I like that I like that frame that forgiveness is really about letting go. It's something that we talk about too, is like there's a difference between forgiveness and justice or atonement where I could forgive the person who maybe molested me as a child. I still want them to be in prison, but I can forgive them because it's really about the weight that I am still carrying. It's not about that person, it's about how I am perceiving it and how I'm carrying it forward. Do you agree with that? Or am I kind of twisting your words around?

SPEAKER_00 30:02

No, I actually do agree with that. And I teach people that there's two kinds of forgiveness. There's forgiveness. Um, I I kind of see it like the old commercials. Um, sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. Almond Joy and Mounds are the same candy bar. One has a nut, one doesn't. There's forgiveness, and there's forgiveness with reconciliation. Sometimes letting go is all you're going to do. You're not sure. No reconciliation. Relationship with the person who molested you. Totally. But if it's your husband and you intend to stay married the next 46 years, you not only have to forgive, you have to reconcile, which is to reinstate the person's position to where they were before or close- Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

Yep. That I like that.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Yeah, so lots of times it's just letting go. Otherwise, I am in prison because of what they did to me and my bitterness.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

Oh, yeah. My friend Seb phrases it like we're all in prison cells and we're holding the key to it. We just have to like it's it's we think that we need the other person to let us out, but no, we are holding the keys to that. We just have to allow ourselves to let go of it. I like that very much. I'm gonna steal this, the forgiveness and reconciliation being distinct things. I like that. So you said a few moments ago, I appreciated how carefully you were phrasing this. You're saying you're not trying to change reality but put things into a better place, and you said you're not trying to plant a false narrative in their head. Right. And I I can appreciate that you're trying to be careful about that. So you're you don't it's not like oh Dr. Cortman, he just helps people lie to themselves. But I actually wonder does that distinction matter really? Absolutely, it doesn't.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

I I I don't think so. I'm gonna back it up with a story if you'll forgive me. This is a Vietnam veteran, and this guy did a great job in therapy, sharing so many stories that we can't even imagine went on over there. And um, he did wonderfully. But in this one story, he couldn't seem to get past it, and so we did an imagery. And um, the story involved him um doing literally nothing but being there with a couple of other people in the helicopter came by and um to make a long story short, it it uh set on fire, it just burst into flames with four guys he knew, and he helplessly watched them die inside this helicopter, and it was helpless and horrific, and uh he just carried it all these years. I mean, we did this exercise, I don't know, five years-ish ago. So, you know, Vietnam, we're talking he was there in '68. That's a long time to be carrying this thing. And so what I do in cases like that is I want them to watch it on the big screen, and I want them to do something that helps them finish it. Um but he did this, and this is why I'm telling the story. He did this. What he did was after the the helicopter was destroyed like that, he saw this incredible jet come by, and the jet started uh taking off near him, and he could see the pilot and the co-pilot were angels, and they both saluted him. And in the back were the four guys, these angels swept down, put them on, and he could describe the plane in detail. These are the military guys. And they that didn't really, I'm pretty sure that didn't really happen, but he created that in the imagery and sent those guys off to a better place, and they're good. There are no more nightmares about that. And I didn't do that, I just gave him the opportunity to create. So there's your false narrative.

SPEAKER_02 34:02

Yeah, I mean, we we spoke before about you know dreams or something vividly imagined. Our brains really can't tell the difference between that and reality. That's why you can practice free throws in your mind and you get better at free throws in real life. We've we've studied this, right? So saying that you're not changing reality, you actually are. That is that guy's reality. That's how it's constituted in his mind. We know that memories are bullshit, man. Like memories are not a reflection of reality whatsoever.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Yeah, they're our version of what we experienced.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

Yeah. And that's I'm wondering, and maybe uh what what do you make of like that one woman you said where it didn't work because she wasn't on board with it, right? Where she was like, that's not how my dad would speak. What do you think is going on with somebody like that? You know, do you think that you could have done more prep work to bring her around? Do you think that something like this wouldn't have ever worked because she didn't want it to work? Do you think there is something else that could have cracked that nut, so to speak?

SPEAKER_00 34:57

Well, you're asking questions as if you were an intelligent supervisor of mine who said, What went wrong there? Let's learn from that. And I like that. I like that because I don't have that in private practice. Hey, mister, your your guided imagery didn't work that time. What happened? I like that. And and I think I think she really wanted to hold on to her victimization.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

And like I wasn't going to take that away from her by making her dad apologize. It's like, no, he wouldn't have done that. He sucked, and my life has been ruined by him, and don't try to change that. That's what I think happened. Could that have ever improved if you know she stayed with therapy? I don't know, because she was the kind of person who wanted to keep me in her life as a safe outlet, but she didn't really want to change anything.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Yeah, man. We've got, we've got, I know some people like that too. But where I where I was going with that question, not trying to be here a critical supervisor. But you know, as I'm hearing you say all this, I'm trying to justify my freaking career here. Cause I'm like, well, if people can do all this in one session of guided imagery, do they need plant medicine ever? And your your story of the Vietnam veteran. So this painting of this Jaguar here behind me is done by a gentleman named uh Damian Robertson. He was a Canadian veteran who was in the largest uh train crash in European history. He was in uh in Crimea, I think, deployed. He was on leave on vacation and he gets in this train accident. And he's pulling people out and stepping over bodies, and it was just horribly traumatic for him. And he carried anger for decades at all these other people who were not helping because he was trying to help everyone and they were just trying to clamber over him and escape. And it wasn't until an ayahuasca ceremony where he basically watched a movie of that happening, and the medicine, the ayahuasca said to him, Imagine how scared all those people were. You are someone special, you were there trying to help. They were just doing all that they knew how to do. Like, don't be angry at them. You're a hero, you are the only person there trying to help. And just like the Vietnam veteran that you shared, it completely changed how he viewed that. And you know, 26 years of pent-up rage was just completely erased in this one evening of ayahuasca. And I'm wondering, could he have saved a lot of money and just flown to your clinic instead of flying to Peru with us, man?

SPEAKER_00 37:25

That's hilarious. I don't know. But you know, what you heard you're demonstrating there is that time is not the healer. No, that time heals all wounds thing is bullshit, dude. That's I'm glad you said it. What time does is pass. What we do with the time determines whether we totally totally and he did all that healing in one shot by by having that insight wherever it came from to um to help him to reconceptualize the whole thing and emerge from it um thinking I was blessed to be the guy who could make a difference. I don't know. Those other people were frozen in terror. Exactly. That's sad for them, but I was blessed to be able to help in any way that I did, and I would do it all over again, and I'm gonna put that in a good place. You know, it's fantastic, and that's feeling, and that wasn't because time went by, you know, it was because he had a chance to reconceptualize it and and not at all. I don't need to keep this old way of thinking.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

Yeah, and for him it's so cool because he's literally a world-famous tattoo artist, and all of his work up until he started healing, it was all skulls and weapons and like demons, like the the demon masks, and now it's like Buddha heads and jaguars and all this beautiful stuff. That's great, that's a great story. One thing that we really preach though with plant medicine is that this one experience, it really is not going to magically fix you. We use this analogy of it's like having a sick goldfish in a dirty tank. And so you can take it out and take it to the vet and give it some antibiotics, and that's great, but then if you put it back into its dirty tank, it's gonna get sick again. And we really emphasize the integration work and doing everything that you need to do to clean up your life and change your relationships and enforce boundaries and all these things on the other side of that. Is that something that you emphasize too? Do you find that that actually makes a difference? You know, if if people don't do other work, they kind of go back to the same way, or maybe the intervention you give is enough for them to naturally make all those changes on the other side of it too, because it changes who they are. So, how how do you conceptualize all that?

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Yeah, great question. And um I like your goldfish thing, and one of the reasons I like it is I learned uh early on in my life that great teachers use parables and metaphors all the time. And you know, I can't tell you how many times I just say, wait, this is a new thought. I'm gonna tell you a story right now. I've never told this because I'm just creating it now. Yeah, but but an example of that would be when I would see a child and um working with the child on feeling better and processing the divorce, and the parents are still fighting and doing terrible things, and and I gotta send the kid home to that situation. Yeah. And I say to them, Well, let's just say I'm a pulmonologist, right? And your kid, the kid comes in with some lung issues, and we do some procedures and clear it all up, and then we send them back to a smoky house. And it's like, you're gonna breathe all that in again, and then what we could keep doing the procedure, but it's like, why don't we put them in a better, you know? So so yes, I I strongly work with people on let's make changes that make your entire life healthier. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 41:01

I have more questions about this false narrative thing. I find that so fascinating. But before we get there, the this this might be a good example of the child with the divorcing parents where it's not one event, it's not my mother killed herself, it's not I had this car accident. We see this with CPTSD, the complex PTSD, where it's an amalgamation of everything from childhood to their career and so forth. Does this technique work just as well with someone like that? Is it just a matter of more sessions where you kind of match one imagery session to each traumatic event? That might require a lot of sessions. So, how does how does that work when it's not just one event?

SPEAKER_00 41:41

In the 90s, for whatever reason, my practice was overloaded with a certain type of person, and that person was somebody who was telling me about being what was called ritually abused. They were in devil worshipping cults, and it was unbelievable how many of them found my little office in Venice, Florida, because they were from all over the country and one of them from Africa. But they all came to me, and I'm talking dozens of people, and they were multiple personality disorder people, now called dissociative identity disorder people, and their stories were horrible and fascinating and entirely consistent with one another, having never met each other before. They were all telling me the same stuff. And these were people who were functioning on the outside. They were teachers and they were nurses, and nobody knew that they were carrying all of this stuff or that they were multiples. And I learned to not only listen and understand where they were coming from and and what these cults were about, but I learned how humans heal by not only telling their story, but they had to they had to I I gave I put five steps into it remember, feel, express, release, and reframe. And the reframing is that there's meaning after all of it is done. Like you are healing from this, what do you want to do with your life? You know, you were you made it through that experience in this cult, and you're still here to tell about it. If if you asked me at the end of the day, what is your biggest triumph as a clinician? It would be that 17 of these people made it to the finish line as one integrated person. They're not multiple anymore, and they're still years and years later, they're still done with their childhood, they're high functioning people. And if I talked to them today, they'd say, That's over with. We dealt with that, we put that away. And that was That was before they even had the term complex PTSD. There were so many stories they needed to tell me. And I would say to them, it was like you have a closet full of all these stories. But once they would take them out and tell me, and we finished them, we never had to do that one again. But we had to clean the whole closet. Right. Before every last person, I have one of these people now. In the 90s, I had, they were coming out of the woodwork, but I have one of these people now, and she's healing, and she will she will make it. She'll be the 18th multiple who makes it to the finish line. But anyway, you know, back to what we're talking about with the complex PTSD, we didn't have to do guided imagery, but they did it for themselves. Like they would not know these memories until they would come up one at a time and they would say, I have a memory for you, or I've had this dream all week long that won't go away. So I guess I might as well tell you. And then they would tell me. And it wasn't a dream as much as it was a memory couched in a dream. And once they told it, they had to share it. They cried about it, they talked about how horrible it was. And I'm I'm sitting there in shock, like these stories are horrible. But and by the way, um, I I believe it so much, and now I think it's so consistent with the Epstein files that there are people in high places who are doing things like this to people. Anyway, so these people healed, and they healed by being being brave enough to bring in their traumas one after another until they had finished their traumas.

unknown 45:37

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 45:37

Cortman, I need a six-hour podcast slot with you to talk about all this. All right. First thing you said there's like a five-part framework. What did you say? Remember, feel, walk me through that one more time.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

Yeah, remember, meaning we got to go back to what's not finished. You know, go back to Pearl's unfinished business. Well, we got to go back and talk about it. All right. Remember, then you got to feel your feelings. You can't intellectualize it and go on. You have to go back. How old were you? You were seven. All right, you got to feel it like it happened that day. Because what they did was they farmed it out, they dissociated, they sent it to another part of themselves. And when they got really good at that, they created other people to carry it for them. That's all that is. You know, they're not schizophrenic. There, there's no, they they created people to carry memories, feelings, and functions for them. So remember, feel expressed. They have to express it. It doesn't heal without them saying, I want, I gotta tell you what happened. They have to, and I make them go through everything. I make them say words they don't want to say. And I I I feel like I'm doing something cruel, but they know. Well, the I've sat 45 minutes in a session one time after a woman said to me, and then he put it in my mouth, and I said, He put what in your mouth? She goes, You know. So, what did he put in your mouth? I knew. But it took her 45 minutes, and once she said it, then the tears came and we could finish the memory. Totally. You know, but prior to that, if I just said, Yeah, I know, that she's not getting into what she needed. It feels express release. Remember, feel express release, and then reframe. And reframe is like I have a gift. The multiple personality was a gift to me that I had all these people to help me through my horrible childhood. And now I have a chance to live a well life and I could help other people because I have hope. And some of these people have great stories. That if someone says I've had a hard life, it's like, sit down, I'm gonna tell you my life, and then whatever the other person's story is like, yeah, mine wasn't so bad after all, you know.

SPEAKER_02 47:42

I love that it ends in the reframing. It's exactly what we talk about with cultivating gratitude for everything that's happened to you, where I'm not stoked that I got abused as a child, but it I I've come around to a place where I love myself so much right now that I can accept if that's part of what made me who I am, then I almost have to love that thing too. It's like if A equals B and B equals C, then I I have to love that also and be grateful for that also. I like it, man.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

You um one of the funnier movies I've ever seen was um a movie with Billy Crystal called City Slickers.

SPEAKER_02 48:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 48:18

And uh if you haven't seen it, it's it's worth your time. But no, I've never seen this. I'll cut to the chase where these guys go out to a dude ranch for a week and uh they show them sitting on horseback and riding for miles, and they're going rolling, rolling, rolling. Boy, my ass is swollen. It's just it anyway, they reach a they reach a place where they're trying to think of things to talk about. So they go, um, all right, best worst day of your life, best day of your life. So one guy goes, he does the worst day of his life. He says, Um, my father used to hit my mother, and it was terrible. And I was a boy and I was so scared and upset. And and one day he hit my mother and I couldn't take it, and I ran in the middle, and I said to him, You get out of here. And my father left, and that was the worst day of my life. And they go, they just sat in silence for a second, and they quickly go, Best day. And he goes, same day. Yeah. Same day. Absolutely. Because without that day, you know, without that day, he wouldn't have been the guy he was today.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

So it it probably sounds slightly cheesy in our program in our community. We have Win Wednesday every week where people share two wins and one challenge. So two things that are going well, one thing that's kind of that that's a sticking point. Over the course of the six months, I love to see how the challenges from the initial weeks become the wins in the later weeks because they come around to that place of reframing things just like that.

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Because they went they bravely face them and work through them and now they're the things they're most proud of.

SPEAKER_02 50:02

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 50:02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:03

All right. I like that. Why did you see so many of these cases in the 90s? So for people, I mean, you you I'm sure you know more than I do, but for people unaware, this was a thing. They called it the satanic panic. And as we discussed, I think that label was applied to delegitimize a lot of it. What do you think was going on there? Why why was there this explosion? Because some people would say that folks just like yourself and these practices planted false memories.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

And that that to me was just so absurd because it's amazing how I didn't plant these to anybody else since then or before then. You know, um they had this thing called the False Memory Society, and um there was a man who was writing about all of that, and he said, I want to show you who's on the board. And 90 something percent of the people on the board were also part of this um Nambla thing. North American man-boy love. Uh, in other words, the people who wanted to uh legalize um sex with minors.

SPEAKER_02 51:15

So those folks were on the board of this false memory society that was trying to prove that these were false memories. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Yeah. And make this go away. And they did a great job doing that. They're not making Epstein go away, but they did a great job of um silencing people and making it turning it on the therapist. It's like I didn't know anything about this stuff, and my patients didn't either. They didn't read all these books, and there weren't many books. There's like a couple of books at the time that were talking about this, and I have written one since, and I just recently had it published um called Praying for the Darkness, and it's a true story. I just changed the identity of a couple of characters for you know, for protection, but everything I write in the story really happened, and it was it was crazy stuff. And they taught me, my multiples taught me how the human mind is is incredibly uh integrated with the the body and can do things with the body. I mean, I'll I'll tell you a story. I was so fascinating. There's a we start the book with this woman who was like 5'2, 100 pounds, and she calls me on a Wednesday. I'd seen her on Tuesday, and she said, she said, Chris, did you notice if I was fat yesterday? It's like, yeah, I must have missed that. She goes, Well, I want you to know that I'm fat today. I I feel like uh uh I look like I'm seven months pregnant. I said, You look like it or you feel like it. She goes, No, I look like it. And this was this was back in the 90s. I said, Well, you know, take uh take some pictures. I want to see this. And you know, we have a session coming up on Friday. She didn't wait till Friday. She came down, wearing one of those pregnant tent dresses. She showed me Polaroids that she took where she blocked her eyes. Oh, I don't know what that good that would do, but she blocked her eyes out, and her belly, her belly was way distended, like like seven months pregnant. Like, what? You weren't that way yesterday. So Friday, I sat her in the chair and said, Umbody knows what's going on here. I don't, so whoever knows. And somebody comes out on the altars, goes out and goes, Yeah, I'll tell you what happened. And uh, long story short, she walks me through how she was impregnated by the cult at age 11, and she was like delivering it in my office. I'm like, this is so crazy, you know, and and I'm not an OB Jinn. Like, if there was a baby coming out, I was like, I might as well have been a plumber. I don't know what to do. So but there was no baby, but the story was there, and the and you know, she walked me through what happened. This baby was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck and they and it was dead. And horrible story. But what we did afterwards is I want you to name the baby, and I want you to write a a goodbye to the baby and hand the baby over to God. She was a person who had faith. And and then it was done. Her dummy returned to normal next time I saw her, everything, and the memories, and it was one thing after another like that, like that. Memories were stored and then came out in the body. How does that happen? I don't know how that happened.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

You probably have a hard time talking to normal people about this, man, because you you tell most folks that and they're like, You're fucking crazy. And I'm hearing that having sat with my wife when she was on mushrooms on her birthday one time and experienced uh a string of like past lives where she had a miscarriage or a stillbirth or something like that, and went through like birthing these children while on mushrooms, like one life after another. So you're telling me that, and I'm like, Yeah, of course. Naturally, that's how this works.

unknown 55:15

Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:17

Do you think um what what do you make of the multiple is what's the current terminology? The multiple personality disorder? Is that like the appropriate term?

SPEAKER_00 55:25

No, it's dissociative identity.

SPEAKER_02 55:27

Dissociative identity. Because I I'm wondering, uh, is that almost like on a spectrum of normal? And folks who are at that point where they actually qualify for that diagnosis are so far on that spectrum. But I'm I'm thinking like a lot of us do have ways that we dissociate. That's I think what a lot of addictions are. They're ways that we numb ourselves and kind of solve this pain in a less than productive way. But I think anyone who's addicted to scrolling or addicted to porn, things like that, that is a way of dissociating from the pain that we have. So maybe they just haven't gone so far that it's completely split into another person. But does that make sense to you, or am I like way off in associating these two things?

SPEAKER_00 56:09

You know, not to sound like a kiss-up, but your questions reflect a deeper understanding of this stuff than one would be capable of on the periphery. I mean I just I just read I have to do continuing education, you know, to keep my license. And I just read a month or so ago, like the most recent stuff on trauma. And I'm so pleased that there's an acceptance of this dissociative identity disorder. And back to your point, it is dissociation is exactly on a spectrum like that. You know, I I love the use of of uh of spectrums because like if you said I'm not feeling well today and I gave you some kind of a depressive test, you somebody might say he's not clinically depressed. Yeah, but maybe he's uh uh a 27 on a one to a hundred. He's not zero, he's not a hundred. Yeah, there are worse people, but he's you know, like on the spectrum, but yeah, yeah. Not what not talking about autism. So it's a different spectrum. But over here is driving down the road, and you put yourself in a type of a uh hypnosis because you're not going one white line, one white line, one white line. You're just you're driving and you're not there on the road. You're somewhere, you know, you might be in sixth grade at that point, or you might be in, or you might be on stage with Pink Floyd. You know, you are not where you are, you have dissociated, and that's way over here on that same spectrum of dissociation. Well, on the other end is not only DID, but the kind of DID where one person doesn't know about the others. You know, there was there's a study that I read once out of the Harvard Mental Health Letter that I thought was so fascinating. But there's all these multiple personality uh males in prison and um that were never diagnosed, but they know that by several things, including how their handwriting changes and how some of them have no memory at all about what they did, and they swear they didn't do it, and they didn't, somebody else did it. They are guilty of the crime, but the people who are out were not the ones who committed the crime. There are darker alters who took care of the business and and got rid of that person. But anyway, um, so part of that is is people not even knowing, they're not you know co-conscious of one another, and therefore, as a as uh one of the symptoms is that you lose time. That's right. You know, you have no idea how those hours pass. You know, one of my patients um was humiliated by her DID. She was not proud of it, and she found herself three hours later sitting on the floor of a Toys R Us, and like this is a woman in her 60s, she was not proud to be playing with toys on the floor, but she wasn't out. One of the child alters was out playing, having a great time. She never went back to Toys R Us, not for her grandkids or anybody, because that was humiliating.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah, I mean, the the loss of time thing, that's exactly what I was thinking with your the highway hypnosis, I think is the term for it, where next thing you know, you're like 30 miles down the road, and you're like, what just happened there? Like I have no recollection of this. Yeah, it's concerning, man.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

I had a Vietnam vet wake up in another state, and uh, I mean that literally and figuratively. He was in Pennsylvania. It's like he didn't know how he got there, but he was also in another altar because he learned to change people when uh the combat was bad enough.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:02

All right, I've I have a couple other topics I kind of want to explore, but before that, I'll give you a chance. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you think is important for people to understand, maybe about your practice, about the guided imagery, just in general, something you wish people heard more?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:19

The most important ingredient in overcoming depression is hope. And the biggest ticket to a clinical depression is hopelessness. When people lose their hope, they sink like a w a rock in water. And sometimes they do better immediately just coming in because somebody has heard them and they have hope. They feel so much better because they have hope where they didn't have hope before. And if they have somebody saying, This is totally treatable, you're not crazy, you're not alone, but you need to tell me everything that happened. Right. You know, I want you to empty your duffel bag and we will finish whatever it was that happened to you. There's only so much stuff that happened, you survived it. Now we need to heal it. I want people to always know that when it comes to traumas, whatever they've been through. And that's why this population, uh, meaning the the multiples and the and the uh combat veterans. I I had a contract with the VA to treat their uh Vietnam vets when I first got started in the clinic I was in, which was such a gift to me because they taught me so much about PTSD and how people stay stuck and also how they heal. And healing always requires the courage to go back to the unfinished business. That's what I want people to understand. They don't have to do imagery, they don't have to do any one thing. What they have to do is to make peace with what happened and integrate that into their lives. Not everybody uses this technique or needs to, but they what they do need to do is make peace with everything that's happened to them.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:04

Yeah, I well, for one thing, I love what you're sharing about hope. I completely agree. There's a a book I read that really impacted me called Coyote Medicine. It was written by this gentleman who's half Native American, half white, I suppose, and he was a Stanford-trained physician and then got disillusioned with the healthcare system and went and trained under like Navajo and Lakota healers. So he has this dual perspective. And that's what he says is that the healer's job is to maintain complete faith that their patient will get better and hold that faith until the patient comes to believe that themselves. And so I do think sometimes all that somebody needs is someone else to feel that they're not broken, they're not too broken to heal and to instill that hope in them. So I love that that's your your take-home from all this.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:52

I have a guy, I don't even remember how he ended up with me, but he had two children and he lost them both. Um, one of them in a stupid gun accident when the boy was 14 and the father wasn't even home, he was out of town, and it was literally like putting the gun away kind of thing, shot him through the neck. And it just, you know, you hear terrible things in when you work in trauma. But because he's been able to do the fantastic work to talk about all of this, and he keeps on healing, he said, I have to tell you what happened to me this week. This is the first week since my son died 34 years ago that I want to live. I have not wanted to live since he died. I want to live again. Beautiful. That's just a beautiful, beautiful message. This guy's done so well. He's one of these people that I'm gonna really have a hard time graduating because I don't want, you know. I hate the fact that when people do really well, they leave me. Oh, yeah, man. Oh, great. This is my thanks.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:56

We recently changed our program to just be a lifetime membership to our community after you graduate because I have separation anxiety. Because after six months of working with someone, they're just my best friends, man. I I want to keep seeing them exactly like this.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:10

This is how one should feel.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:12

I don't know. They taught a lot about clinical distance and all that. My patients know that I love them and they love me, and nothing inappropriate comes. I've had zero affairs with my patients, no inappropriate kissing, touching, whatever, but I touch them all. Most of them want hugs. You know, I got Italian guys who kiss me on both cheeks at the discussion. I'm pretty sure they're not in love with me.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:35

I actually think that's a missing ingredient in a lot of therapy, is feeling like somebody actually gives a shit about you because there is supposed to be this professional distance. I think that's a benefit I have of having given up my PT license. I don't have any ethical professional guidelines to adhere by, so we get to just do what works for people. That's cool. I've what one question I want to go back to because you're kind of saying the the whole point is to get to this place of releasing and reframing things. You talked about remember, feel, express, release, reflect, or reframe, excuse me. Makes sense. Do you do you feel though it's necessary to remember everything, to almost resurface all these details? Or is the purpose of remembering just to get to the place of feeling the feelings? Like we have to remember the thing to feel it. I because the the reason I'm bringing this up, I've definitely met folks who are reluctant to revisit those memories, precisely because they're so painful. But then there's also times where it's like, I'm not sure that this happened to me. I don't know if this is a real memory or not, or I was so young when it happened. So do you think it's necessary to remember everything, or it's really just a bridge to get to the feeling part?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:44

Another really great question, and I'm gonna give you two answers and then put them together. Okay. There are the answer to that is are you at peace with what happened? And if you are then good, good to go. Yeah, yeah. And the second one is I have had I've had multiples where they'll tell me a um a memory, and they say that there was an altar personality to help them with that. And so we're going to integrate, and we go to integrate, and it doesn't work. And uh I'll tell you a story, it's kind of humorous. This this woman had this way of integrating her altars, and she her higher power was Jesus. She had Jesus and me on a canoe and her and her altar in the middle, and we're going downstream, you know, we're we're we're paddling away, Jesus and me, and I don't yell to the front, come on, pick it up. You know, you could walk on this, I can't. You know, we had to anyway. So um we we get down to where she usually goes, and the two people jump in the water and they come out as one. It's a beautiful thing, beautiful ritual. So this time they jump in as two people and they come up as two people. And I was like, What happened? It didn't work. I say, listen, respectfully, when it doesn't work, there's some part of it you didn't tell me. And sure enough, we had to go back to the memory and go back to the place that she didn't finish, which was how terrible she felt when the abuser abandoned her and left her there to cry. So when she cried about that, we had to go back down the river. Jesus and I were tired. Anyway, and then they jumped in the water and came back up as one because it now it was done.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:23

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:24

So my answer to your question is you don't have to go anywhere unless the person is stuck back there. Right. And then I tell people, I don't need to go into your childhood unless there are things we need to deal with to heal. I said, imagine you come into my office and I close the door and you go over to the couch and you can't get to the couch because your shirt is caught in the door. We need to go back, open the door, and get your shirt out.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:51

Right. So it's almost less about resurfacing the details as it is about being honest with what is there.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:58

Yeah, and what's important to you about.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:00

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Man, I have a lot to reflect on just in my own life here, man. This is excellent.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:07

Um listen, listen to this one more thing, if you don't mind. There's a family that goes to Honduras on vacation years ago, and they all come in to see me because on the first day on vacation, these men with hoods came into their abode and tied them up at gunpoint and were looking to execute them until they realized, whoops, we got the wrong people here.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:35

Sorry, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:37

You know, they kind of untied one and went out. And then and surprisingly, that ended the vacation. They wanted to go home the next day. I don't know why. Anyway, but they were all in my office, and here's the cool part, and the purpose of the story: all five of them had different places that they needed to process. It wasn't one story. It was the dad saying, I'm the leader of this family, I should be. It was the girl who was asleep on the hammock saying, Now that I'm awake, should I pretend that I'm still sleeping or should I go in there with my family and die with them? You know, it was like everybody had their own perspective on what the trauma was. And so for me to do a good job, I had to help each one of them get unstuck from their part of it. Yeah, it didn't matter what the other people.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:29

Does that make sense? It it it absolutely makes sense, man. One of our clients right now is dealing with something similar where his son was sexually abused and it's eating him up because he wants to talk to his son about it. This is going back, you know, 14 years and it all just got swept under the rug. He wants to talk to his son about it because he doesn't want his son to have all this unprocessed trauma. But this guy has all of his own feelings about it, and I'm trying to work with him to work through his stuff first. So when he goes to see his son about it and talk about it, he's not putting anything else on his son that is his own unprocessed shit. Does that make sense? So, like just be there for your son. Don't your feelings of failing as a protector shouldn't enter your son's equation at all because now you're gonna make him feel even worse because he's thinking he did this to you as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:17

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:18

Not only his life is screwed up, but he screwed up his dad. Exactly. All right, I have like so many questions, and I'm gonna pick and choose here. So this is uh zero transition here. Are you familiar with the split brain experiments that that came out of uh epileptic patients back in the day?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:36

I um am familiar to the extent that I've read a little bit, but not a lot. So I'm not an expert on answer.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:43

I I I won't I won't ask you to explain these things. And to refresh your memory, maybe they they they started doing the surgery to sever the corpus callosum in people with extreme epilepsy, and that afforded them the opportunity to study what happens when the two hemispheres of the brain do not communicate with each other. And I I'll botch all the details, but it's like they presented a set of images to one eye exclusively, so that information only got to the one hemisphere of the brain. And they asked people to explain the correlation between the images. And sometimes there would be things with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Like they chose there was a chicken and a shovel, because on one side they showed a chicken coop and so the person selected a chicken, on the other side there was like a snowy scene, and so the person selected a shovel. You know, they had these objects to choose. And then they asked them, Why did you choose those two objects? And because they they can't access the information on either side of the brain, they just invented a story completely out of nowhere to relate the two. So they were like, Oh, there was a person who was cleaning up the chicken poop, so he needed to get the shovel in order to shovel out all the chicken shit. Completely made up. But the takeaway from these experiments was essentially that humans have to make stories to justify our behavior and our choices and to make sense of the world. And I think we know that culturally. We are a storytelling culture. And this is where I was going in the very beginning, asking you, does it matter if these are false narratives? And does it like does it matter if you're just gaslighting yourself into feeling better or pretend like choosing to have this faith? Because I think we are always telling ourselves stories. The story might be I pulled out in front of traffic and caused the death of my brother, and I am a terrible person because of it, and I will always suffer, and he's gone forever. Or the story can be Jesus called him back to heaven, that was his time. There is nothing I could have done differently. He's at peace now, and I'll see him again one day. I think we choose to tell ourselves a story.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:47

So for okay, you're you're what you just talked about there is the uh the notion of the explanatory style. Precisely how we explain the world to ourselves has much more to do with how we feel than what's really happening. Exactly. And and for instance, the research says depressed people have a different explanatory style than non-depressed people. They blame themselves more for things, they see things as more global, and they project more doom and gloom into the future than non-depressed people. So, yeah, we all have a way of projecting our own stuff onto whatever's really happening.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:27

Yeah, so the the more that I've worked with plant medicines, with psychedelics, things like that, you know, people go into the neuroscience of it, the default mode network, the neuroplasticity, that's all great. But I think this is the mechanism of action of why these things provide healing is helping people to reframe that narrative. And in all of my interrogation of you, I feel like that's exactly what you're doing with the guided imagery techniques as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:51

I think you're right. I think it's a chance to reframe something and put it in a place that affords somebody closure and therefore peace.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:00

Well stated, man. All right. Last thing I want to get your your thoughts on. So I did a podcast a little while back. It's yet to be released. I don't know if it ever will be. I did it precisely because I absolutely hated what this person was doing, and I wanted a chance to explore why, because it it it bothered me on a deep internal level, and I couldn't express it. And I don't think I did a good enough job researching the philosophy behind it to explain it, but I want to share what this thing is with you and get your thoughts because you you're operating in a somewhat similar space. So there's this guy who made this company called Reflecta AI. The idea is that you build an AI persona to mimic a dead loved one by uploading everything that you have about them, their photos, recordings of their voice, their handwriting, all these memories, and it creates this AI avatar of this dead relative. And this guy's business model is that all it provides closure and look how great it is. I can talk to my dead grandpa and I can ask my grandmother for her cherry pie recipe. And I'm like, this feels satanic to me. I can't precisely explain why, but you're you're becoming a demiurge, you're creating this thing that doesn't exist. And I say you're you operate in a somewhat similar space, but I don't really think so because you're creating the opportunity for closure and to move on. Whereas this, I actually think is almost keeping people stuck in that because they think that they are relating to this thing that they are not. It's a facsimile of their actual spirit, it's not really there. Am I crazy? Have I watched too much Black Mirror? Do you feel like this is positive also? Or are you with me that like this just doesn't feel right on a deep level?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:48

So it's uh a tool, and tools can be used to do good, like chainsaws, sure. And chainsaws can also, as we know from the movies, be used for evil. Sure. And I think if you took this stuff and you made it so someone had a chance to do the closure exercise and say what they needed to say to grandpa and grandpa set it back, and then they could let grandpa go, that's a good thing. But if that kept them stuck in having secret meetings with grandpa all the time so they could hold on to things to their detriment so that they never had to progress, I think you could take the tool and use it for less than healthy.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:30

Fair enough. Yep, that's what I always say. You can build a house with a hammer or you can hit yourself in the dick with a hammer. I'll edit that. You're a professional person, you can hit yourself in the thumb with a hammer.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:40

You you could.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:42

All right, Dr. Corbin. Like I said, man, I I could talk to you for hours. You're a fascinating guy, and I really love the work that you're doing, man. It sounds incredible.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:49

Um I love the questions, and and you know, I I shouldn't be surprised, but every time you say something, I think, man, this guy has a deeper insight than he's supposed to have. I appreciate that, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:03

I I take very little credit, man. I've had great teachers, I've had uh great folks helping me in the medicine space. I have my own faith in God. Um, so thank you for for the kind words. Uh it's reassuring to me to hear that there's actually a lot of similarities with what we do. And I'm I'll I will definitely be getting some of your books. I I find this stuff fascinating. Do you exclusively work with folks in person? You're you're based in Florida, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:27

I'm in Florida, and now it's probably 65% is telehealth, and the other 35% are coming to my house. Where back in the day it was 100% at the office. And so um, yeah, you mentioned the suit before. It's I I got it a month ago and never wore it.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:46

So I'm gonna put it on today and do some videos. Fantastic, man. I I joke, I own five shirts and I wear the same two of them on podcasts because this is my buddy's brand and I like to represent it. Uh so if if we can I'll I'll ask you for all the links and everything. I'll put them in our episode description. I I I'm a big supporter of what you do. Um I get a lot of inbound emails of people wanting to come on this podcast, and most of them seem like bullshit. And you are I'm I'm very happy to have you here to discuss this, and I would feel great sending people your way to get some of this treatment for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:18

I appreciate that. What we now have that we never had before is the ability, it's called PsychPack, where I can treat people legally in like 44 of the 50 states. That's right, yeah. And that was not the case before. You had to be in the same state to work with them, and you had to be in person, and we can do this, and you know, this is effective. That research says it's like 97% or something as effective as the real deal.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:44

Yeah, awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:45

So, yes, I'm treating people in Ohio and Arizona and Michigan and Georgia, and and the reason is because I can and because they called.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:54

Any hope for Canadians? We have a lot of Canadian listeners who get the they can get the book.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:59

I treat Canadians, but most of the time they're Canadians who spend some of the year here and some of the I mean Thursday at one is Canadian half the time, but she's also in Florida the other half. Oh, that's that's not her multiple personality, one of those Canadian. I'm gonna ask her, you guys know of each other? Do you know of the Florida part of you?

SPEAKER_02 1:19:22

Was I saying sorry a lot in our session the other day? All right, Dr. Corbin. I'll let you go, man. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I had a great time speaking with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:31

I had a great time. If you invite me back, the answer is yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:35

Beautiful. Thank you very much, sir. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:37

I really had a nice time. So thank you for everything. Absolutely. And have a great day.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:44

All right, guys, that's it for this episode. Hopefully, you enjoyed some of Dr. Cortman's stories. Maybe you got a little inspiration from hearing some of these tales of healing, which is always my hope. I would definitely encourage you to check out his books. If you want to um really just be depressed about the world, you can go investigate more about the Epstein Files and the Dutreaux affair. Uh, there's a podcast called the Martyr Maid Podcast with a gentleman named Darryl Cooper that does deep dives on all this stuff. Um, so yeah, if you want to just ruin your day, go listen to all of that. If you want to feel better about your life, though, continue listening to the Plant Medicine for PTSD podcast. Check out Dr. Courtman. If you're interested in the stuff that we talked about here, if you're in Florida, you can go schedule a visit with Dr. Cortman. Or if you want to learn more about our work with all of the plant medicine stuff, you can check out our website, becoming home.org. Shoot us a message on Instagram at becoming.om, or send us a smoke signal and we'll figure it out. So thank you for listening. God bless you. Be safe until next time.