2019-10-22
1 小时 15 分钟So my guest today, James Gordon, studied to become a psychiatrist at Harvard.
He became a clinical professor at Georgetown Med School, was chairman under Presidents Clinton and George W.
Bush of the White House Commission on Complimentary and Alternative Medicine policy, and really deeply involved in the world of government and trying to investigate what's working and what's not working in the world of health and medicine.
And the further sort of he moved into the field, the more constrained he started to feel by the rules and traditions all around him.
And the kind of inner advocate and activist and rebel inside him kept challenging the system and searching for new and different ways to help people and feel better.
That led him eventually to create a really different, integrated approach that draws upon self awareness and self care and group support to heal population wide psychological trauma, and then found the nonprofit center for Mind Body Medicine in DC.
His latest book, the transformation, helps us understand that trauma will come sooner or later to all of us as a part of the human experience, not as a pathological anomaly.
And he guides us to kind of step in a comprehensive, evidence based program to reverse the psychological, the biological damage that trauma causes.
He really shows, drawing on a lot of research and 50 years of clinical experience and a lot of wisdom and inspiring stories, how we can really meet the challenges that trauma brings, discover the ordinary joys as well as the meaning, purpose of our lives.
And he's also got a fascinating lens on healing trauma, both on an individual level, but also on a societal and global scale, and the importance of looking out into the community as part of the process.
We dive into all of this in our conversation today.
So excited to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
Curious, what originally brought you to want to explore medicine, even as a devotion?
Well, I had a.
My father was a surgeon, and he was not the easiest man on the planet, to say the least, but he was really good with his patients and he loved what he did.
So that was an influence.
And my mother's father had been a pediatrician, and I didn't know him particularly well, but through my mother, there was, again, the sense of.
Sense of service, a sense of compassion, a sense of concern for, you know, for people who were in trouble.
And in both cases, not just people who had money, but also people who had no money at all.