Sid and Miriam Moss explain why their 67 year-long marriage has been so successful. Then Max talks with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk about his life-long pursuit to understand the nature of trauma: how the pandemic has reshaped his definition of trauma, how he applies his experimental research to his own life and how we can make peace with our past at any age.
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transcription
[PRE-ROLL]
[OPENING MONTAGE]
Madeleine Albright: I know this program is 70 Over 70, but I really wish I were younger. I wish I was 70 … but, I am ready!
[THEME MUSIC STARTS]
William: I’m 72 years old.
Paula: I’m 75, miraculously enough.
Sandy: I am 83 years old.
Betty: I am 88 years old.
James: You know, I’m here at 92.
Lucia: I’ll be 94 in May.
Donalda: I’m 101 years old.
Sid: My name is Sidney Moss. I'm 96 years old and I live in Northampton, Massachusetts.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
Sid: So Miriam and I, we’ve been married --
Miriam: Sidney, let me interrupt you a little.
Sid: Please do.
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Miriam: My name is Miriam Moss, I’m 92 and I live with Sidney, my husband, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sid: That was very good.
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Miriam: Sidney, tell-tell a story about luck.
Sid: I think for me, it was luck that I married Miriam because I-I haven't found in the world that there's too many people with whom you can share your ideas, in such a way that you meet, you know, approval at the other end. And I think that is the fundamental implications of a good, solid marriage, between two people who feel their individuality but also devotion to each other.
Miriam: Well, we met 70 years ago in graduate school. We, uh, got married 67 years ago, and we've worked together intensely that is on research in regard to aging in the field of gerontology for-for almost 30 years... we shared an office--
Sid: We were in the same room for all those years and it became like a sacred shrine for us.
Miriam: And we were known through the conferences of the Gerontological Society as the Mosses. ‘Oh, well this is a paper by the Mosses.’ And, uh, people would say, ‘you work with your husband? I could never work with my wife or my husband.’
Sid: Though there were times when I said, ‘I won't do this damn thing anymore. That's it!’
Miriam: We both have different ways of looking at our work. Uh, so I'm more of a researcher. He's more of a qualitative, deep reader.
Sid: But I trusted her judgment and she accepted what I had to say too.
Miriam: And-and it always worked.
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Miriam: In general, people don't seem to be able to find the kind of satisfactions that we had of working together.
Sid: I-I think it's essential that the person establishes the things that he or she would like to do, and-and does.
Miriam: Yeah, I do the laundry mostly. He does the dishes and keeps things in order in the kitchen too. So we have a lot of opportunity to be separate, but we have a lot of opportunity to be close and together.
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Sid: For me personally, sharing a life with another person who understands and appreciates your-your being amounts to, well, a-a blessed event in your life. And nothing could be better than that.
[THEME MUSIC FADES IN]
Miriam: Sometimes you're just sort of lucky. We have been lucky. We have been.
Max Linsky: That was Miriam and Sid moss, and from Pineapple Street Studios, this is 70 Over 70, a show about making the most of the time we have left. I'm Max Linsky.
[THEME MUSIC CONTINUES]
Max: My guest this week is Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.
Bessel is a psychiatrist who focuses on trauma. He's best known for his 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, which helps explain how we internalize traumatic events, how they impact us in ways we can’t always explain or even perceive.
People keep turning to Bessel's work, especially during the pandemic, to try to understand their own struggles. And I wanted to know whether these last 20 months have taught him anything new about how our bodies and our minds really work.
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Max: And if he has been able to take what he’s learned, not just during the pandemic, but over 40 years of seeing patients and running experiments and studying new treatments, and apply all that to his own life.
Bessel van der Kolk is 78 years old.
INTERVIEW
Max: Bessel, thank you so much for doing this.
Bessel: Let's hope it will be a pleasure.
Max: I can't imagine that it won't be. [Bessel laughs]
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Max: I'm hoping that we can start with the pandemic. So you have studied, looked at, thought about trauma in many, many forms, including collective trauma. [Yup.] The Holocaust, Vietnam, 9/11. Where does this pandemic fit on that spectrum for you? How do you understand what we're going through right now?
Bessel: Well, in my own evolution thinking about trauma, I think about it more and more, maybe in part because of the pandemic, as a disorder of synchronicity, uh, where [unclear] the world around you does not pay attention to you, doesn't care how you're feeling. It's a very lonely experience of being confronted with horrible pain, and nobody comes to your help. And what I’ve come to understand more and more is that a lot of bad things happen to every, all of us, none of us get spared. But as long as you have people around you who you feel safe with, who you feel understood by, who you feel are on your side, by and large determined doesn't really get into you. And what a pandemic to me really brings home is that it affects people very differently. A person, like me, who is sort of settled, I have a good number of friends, I have a stable marital relationship; it's an inconvenience. It's not a terrible thing. Uh, my own children who have very young kids, they're also fine because they spend more time with their kids, they're financially somewhat secure and so they can really spend pay much more attention to each other. But you have financial impact. You have kids at home or you're living with a partner who you can't stand, being locked up with somebody. It's a very terrible thing. It's very important for people to be able to get away from each other. So this affects people very differently.
Max: So the stability of your family life is crucial. The stability of your financial life is crucial. But what about the stage of your life that you're in? How much does that matter?
Bessel: It's much harder for a young person than for a person like me. You're in a phase of your life--like some of my young people work in my lab came to work with me, just before the pandemic, and they had hoped to hang out with all kind of people, learn about science, learn about research, and they are miserable because we don't get to hang out together and have lab meetings and have people flow through, and they are very deprived. So it's very hard for them. Then if you go further, when you're 21, your job is to go out there to make friends, to get to know people, and it's a time of expansion. So if you have a pretty steady group of colleagues, friends, you keep it up. But if you're just making these contacts, it becomes much harder because it's hard to make new relationships during this time.
Max: Is that something that holds true for trauma across the board, does trauma affect different generations differently? And specifically, I'm interested in how trauma affects older people.
Bessel: Well, I think by having a lot of work to do and stuff to do and being with people, and if you have a trauma history, you can keep yourself unaware of this stuff as long as you keep yourself busy. When you're locked up by yourself, you're confronted with yourself. And so if you have a lot of stuff that's still festering inside of you, the social isolation may become very hard for you. And that's certainly something that I've noticed for a long time for people who are in nursing homes, is that once you lose your social obligations, your role in life and if you have old stuff that's still festering that is likely to come home and become very hard on you.
Max: And do you have advice for people who are in that situation?
Bessel: Well, a lot of people [are] going to therapy right now. You know, the one profession is not hurt by the pandemic, from what I can see, is talking psychotherapist.
Max: Therapy and podcasting.
Bessel: [laughs] Podcasting, I've done so many podcasts the past two years, it's unbelievable. So- so there are certain things that you can do and I think it's also a time to think about people in your life who have been who have been important to you and to restore old relationships old friendships, to reminisce with people, to talk with people and to really affirm those old ties in a very deliberate way.
Max: But I imagine doing that, if this trauma is finally coming to the surface, can be quite challenging.
Bessel: Oh yeah, no. I think, you know, I'm not quite there yet, but I'm facing it. I think growing old is hard. And it's--I think hard for everybody to know that you're no longer relevant and life is over. You're staring the end of stuff in the face is a very great challenge and it's not for the weak of mind, you know to face death and extinction.
Max: Well, clearly you're pretty relevant. You're on all these podcasts.
Bessel: Well thank you very much for asking me to be on your podcast because it makes me feel like it's not over yet. Um, but I think being able to really value who you have been, what you have done becomes very important to this part, and to really reflect on what life has been like for you. The fact that you have hopefully done what you wanted to do. It becomes very important. I think a lot of people also get confronted with the fact that they haven't maybe done what they wanted to do. And then the question becomes, how can you still fulfill some of these holes in your life?
Max: Do those kinds of questions come up in your--in your work?
Bessel: Not so much. I-I don't really see a lot of people who are older than I am. Over the years in my work, I've come across it quite a bit of people who start becoming demented. And one of the things that happens is your frontal lobe becomes weaker than used to be. And so this old issue starts gnawing at you and your sadness and your rage is harder to control. I'm very much reminded of a colleague of mine back at Harvard a long time ago was a geriatric guy, and he said, ‘You know, it's amazing how many people I see in nursing homes who are concentration camp survivors and when they become demented, all these memories start coming back for them.’ So the job of your frontal lobe is to keep you focused on the present, focused on your task and when that part of your brain starts deserted you, the old imprints start becoming more powerful.
Max: And at that moment, when your frontal lobe is starting to fail you [yeah], is there a therapeutic approach in that situation that can be effective?
Bessel: I would say, do your work before your frontal lobe starts going [both laugh]. Uh, you know, but your question reminds me of what Oliver Sacks writes about. He talks about the power of music. And even when your mind goes, music continues to have this very powerful effect on your emotions and helping people to revive their musical interests and possibly singing and listening to music together, playing music might actually be a very comforting thing at that particular stage.
Max: You were talking earlier about this time in people's lives and thinking about their connections and the people around them, their families, their kids. How do you think about passing on trauma? What can people do to try and make that not happen?
Bessel: Oh, as the poet says, ‘they mess you up, your mom and dad’ [Max laughs] and-and they do. We inevitably pass on our hang ups and our difficulties to our kids. And I think it would be a weird child who doesn't think my parents did nothing wrong, so I'll do the opposite. It's actually the opposite. You make your own mistakes, so we pass our traumas on to our kids. And so the sooner we start really dealing with ourselves and resolving things, the better off we are. There's no question about it. And of course, many people start having kids and only after they have kids, start getting comfortable with their issues and get to therapy and may resolve some of it later on.
Max: Passing down trauma to your kids-- what does that look like?
Bessel: Well, if your parents were very harsh disciplinarians, you have been hurt by that, you may have a hard time setting limits with your kids telling your kids, this is right, and this is wrong. So we all are in the flow of generations and no generation knows what-what is right. So we're always struggling with our past and reinventing things and creating new things over time.
Max: How much of this have you applied in your own life?
Bessel: Oh, it's very central to my own life, of course! One thing that really marks my career is that I'm always intrigued with new things and what else we can do. And so, for example, my lab right now studies psychedelic treatments. It is actually much more intriguing than I expected originally. And so when you take psychedelics, which I did also in college and didn't do much since that time, and now we're into it again and right now, when you take psychedelics, you go back into experiencing things that are much larger than what you know. There's psilocybin research being done at Johns Hopkins, which some of my friends also have been subjects to. Uh, so one of the lessons that we are learning is the psychedelics are actually extremely helpful for many people facing terminal illness because they are preoccupied with their fears and their terrors and then they have a psychedelic experience you get to see that, OK, life is finite and you get very deep understanding about where you fit in-in the universe, so --
Max: Wait, wait, wait. What have you learned about how you fit in the universe?
Bessel: Oh, you know that we are transitory, that we are just particles.
Max: Like, you yourself have been learning that?
Bessel: Absolutely, you learn that, yeah, yeah. There's no question about it. And my friends who are terminally ill also really come back and they cry profusely as so, I saw that this happens to all of us. It's part of being a human being. And people before us have gone the same way and I’m going to join people who came before us. It's a very consistent message people get. But let me tell you my own personal experience. Um, I was born at the end of the Second World War in the Netherlands. My generation is a famous generation because of the famine. A very large number of kids of my age died at that time. I didn't. But I was a very sickly child because I grew up under extreme adverse conditions and that memory and that sort of imprint disappeared. I feel strong. I don't feel like I’m sickly person anymore, but I always knew that there was some trace of that in me. And so in my most recent psychedelic experience, I actually sort of felt what it must have felt for me to be a year and a half years old, probably unwanted, probably starving, very sickly, having my mom be really freaked out by the war and I felt for the child. I was just filled with feelings. Oh, that poor child had to breathe for his life. He had to starve, he was hungry. Nobody was holding him. And I just very deep experience of taking care of that little baby who I once was.
Max: Wow.
Bessel: And I had a guide who was also very lovely with me. She didn't know what's going on, but she-she picked up that I was going through something distressing. And my guide, sort of, helped me as I was in this very primitive state, and I came out of it, I felt like, ‘Oh, I really got what I needed back then.’ So I felt some little hole in my soul was healed. And these are the sort of things that can happen on psychedelics.
Max: When a hole in your soul is filled, what do you do with that?
Bessel: You-you just accept life the way it is. That's the flow, the flow is you get born and you do stuff and you die and it becomes something that's acceptable.
Max: Is there like an infiniteness to that feeling? Can you attain more and more of it?
Bessel: Well, you would have to interview a whole bunch of people to see what their experience is.
Max: That's what I'm trying to do.
Bessel: [laughs] I'm not there yet.
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Bessel: But I-I noticed this in myself and the people I know that you get a much greater acceptance of how you are just part of this larger universe.
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[[MIDROLL]]
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Max: Part of the reason I wanted to talk to you [yeah] was you've been doing this work for so long [yeah], you’ve written this book that has meant so much to so many people. You have come up with ways of thinking about trauma that did not exist before and are changing people's lives.
Bessel: I'm not sure that's true, actually. I don't think that I have made any original contributions.
Max: How would you describe your contributions?
Bessel: I think I have put things together. The main thing I think I've done is that I grew up in a very small country. And so when you grow up in a small country, you learn that your universe is very small compared to the other universes. So as a Dutch kid, I learned six languages, that was sort of standard for me. And when you learn six languages, you learn to think in different frames of minds. When you speak English, you think differently than when you speak German or when you speak Swahili or Chinese. And so when you're multilingual, you can think in different terms. And I think what has really helped me a lot is that I can think as a neuroscientist, I can think as a developmental person who understands how the mind and brain develop. I can think more or less as a psychoanalyst. And I think what they've done is to bring these different things together into a coherent whole. But I don't think anything's original, what I've done.
Max: OK, I'm not totally sure I buy that, but I do feel like we don't have enough time to argue it. And if we did, I'd still probably lose [Bessel laughs]. But the question I do have is you have amassed all of this knowledge about how trauma works. What do you still not know?
Bessel: Oh, I think the big question has always been and continues to be, how people can find peace with themselves and really be fully alive in the present. And of course, we can see when people get traumatized, the past keeps coming back and they keep experiencing themselves as the deprived or hurt or, uh, traumatized person, which they were back then, which is actually not happening right now. But they cannot take in the fullness of life right now because their perceptions still are stuck somewhere in the past. So the big question is how can we repair the damage that trauma does to people and causes them to not be fully alive and present and engaged in their current life?
Max: And do you think you've done that for yourself?
Bessel: Well, I'm working on it and trying it. I think that I've a pretty good life, but I'm also aware of as I grow older instead of having 15 hours of productive work on me, I have only seven hours of productive work in me, so I very much see the limitations of what happens when you grow older. And of course, accepting that and adjusting yourself to it is the mature thing to do.
Max: But it's not easy.
Bessel: It's not easy, no, no. If you, uh, have an internal sense of security, which comes from having felt like you're a loved person, you are much more accepting of these limitations that you have than if you have always struggled to overcome nasty things. And so I've been very much working on accepting my limitations. My very first office was in 51 Brattle Street, a Harvard Building. And a patient had written on the bathroom mirror in soap, said, ‘live with the sadness of your limitations or the pain of your transgressions’ and that just blew my mind. It so captures what life is about, you have to accept your limitations or you get yourself into trouble. And I think that's the- for most of us, that's not an easy thing to do.
Max: Does it feel to you like that work ever ends?
Bessel: No, I don't know. If I'm alive two years from now, call me out to see how I've progressed with that, you know [both laugh]
Max: I think what I'm wondering is like, do you yourself think of that work as something with a finish line.
Bessel: No. One-one thing that I'm really also it's hard for me is that I've done this for over 50 years, so I know a fair amount.
Max: Yeah.
Bessel: And I also know, very sadly, that a lot of stuff that I know I will take with me into my grave, but like one of my first--very first patients I ever saw was the former head of internal medicine at Mass General Hospital, he was 95 years old. And he was brilliant and he knew so much. And I sit with this shriveled, little old guy let go his head and his mind is so full of knowledge, and a year from now or two years ago, all that knowledge will disappear with him. And I'm very aware that people take a lot of hard-earned knowledge and wisdom into their graves all the time. And that's sad.
Max: I don't know. It feels like there's some tension in there for me because like I think about like your book having this moment in the pandemic that it has had and your work is about trying to help people, but also the way that you can reach the most people is by being the most successful at disseminating the things that you have learned or am I thinking about it too crassly? Maybe-maybe a better way of asking that question is, is ambition versus helping people, are those things complimentary or are they in tension?
Bessel: [laughs] Does our ambition get in the way of helping other people? That's a complex question. Like, No, you need to have that drive, you know, to learn and to figure things out and to know when you're wrong and to learn from experience and so ambition basically is a good thing for people to have. That energy, that life force. And that's certainly something that in my work, I see all the time. How people ask me, ‘how can you tolerate working with so much misery’ and that is because the upside from the work that I do is that I meet people all the time who have gone through things that are unimaginable and find a way of going on with their lives. And many of the people I work with are so inspirational in terms of their courage and willingness to embrace things and to try out new things. Uh, you really get to see what an amazing creature human beings are in terms of inventing and recreating important things.
Max: So for you, like the weight of hearing those stories year after year after year is more than counterbalanced by realizing that people can overcome --
Bessel: I wouldn't say more than counterbalance, actually. People all the time say, ‘Oh, you should see that movie or watch that-watch that show or read that book or let me tell you another story and I go, ‘Thank you very much. I want to see Walt Disney movies in my spare time.’
Max: Yeah, well, that was part of what I was wondering about, too was like, what's it like when you go home? You know, and I mean, you hear this horrible, horrible stuff and then like, you go home and make dinner and yeah, like, you want to watch a-- watch a cartoon.
Bessel: I'm very much into not doing trauma in my spare life. I-I ride my bike a lot. I garden a lot in the summer, so it's very important to to really lead a life that you need to lead and be an example of a person who leads a not traumatized life, yeah.
Max: Is it work to invest in those things or is it just, um, flow for you?
Bessel: Eh, well, I don't know how to answer it. I do it. I know that's important. And it's also something that I encourage everybody else to do. I very rarely say to people, ‘No, I'm not going to be part of that conference. No, I'm not going to be part of the training’ because I need to do other things besides trauma.
Max: You need some balance.
Bessel: Yeah.
Max: The thing you were talking about earlier about drive, has that been steady for you your whole life?
Bessel: Yeah, pretty much so. And I consider that a gift. I've seen people who lose their sense of drive, their sense of purpose, who get so discouraged it is shut down. In my mind, those are the hardest people to treat, people who no longer have to get up and go to go on with their lives. And I think that's extraordinarily difficult when people become passive and expect other people to take care of them and who give up on their--on their own lives.
Max: And do you have some sense of where that came from in you that drive?
Bessel: You know, it's hard to know. Uh, it's a gift.
Max: Yeah, always there.
Bessel: Yeah, my sense is that early adversity does help you to, sort of, get that edge. That they're trying to survive is probably not that bad for people. I think you learn who you are through adversity through coping with challenging situations. And if things become too easy, I think it's hard to keep that motivation going.
Max: You mentioned earlier, sort of offhand, the ability to know when you're wrong and I wonder what your relationship is with realizing you're wrong, admitting you're wrong. Has that gotten easier for you?
Bessel: Well, people who know we may disagree with me, but I really consider myself really so genuinely a scientist. The issue is not to be right, but to have good questions for which you try to get an answer. An example I like to give is that Judy Herman and I did a piece of research 30 years ago where we thought we proved that borderline personality disorder is the result of childhood abuse. I mean, it's pretty good data to support it. And it turned out we were wrong that it's not a function of abuse. It's a function of neglect. It's a function of somebody not being there for you. And I was delighted that somebody proved that we were wrong. And at some point, I thought that certain psychiatric drugs were very helpful for people and it turns out they weren’t. And you go, OK, it didn't work. Life is like that, you know you-you're wrong a good part of the time. And I don't think I've had much difficulty being wrong. You know, it's like, OK.
Max: You're just running an experiment.
Bessel: Yeah, life is an experiment, you know, [laughs] but it's, you know, you cannot prescribe that to people. That's-that's who I am. So I'm-I'm intrigued with how people make sense out of the world and how people organize themselves. And then trauma gets in the way of that, but my fundamental curiosity is, who are we and how do you manage our lives?
Max: And that is a question that has an infinite answer. There's no finish line to that question.
Bessel: No, we are just as incredibly intriguing, complex, crazy and magnificent species, you know.
Max: I listened to this interview you did with Krista Tippett on On Being in, uh, 2013, and you said this thing that has been rattling around in my head since I listened, which was, ‘I don't think you can appreciate the glory of life unless you also know the dark side of life’. And I've heard you talk a lot about the dark side, but what's your version of the glory of life?
Bessel: Oh, the glory is everywhere! The glory is in my grandchildren learning how to play with toys in the bathtub. In learning to write their first little essay, for drawing their first pictures, of students who designed their first research projects, of people who have been horribly abused compensating for their own abuse by becoming exceptional health care workers. Uh, you know, you see enormous creativity that we all have, it's everywhere.
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Bessel: It's amazing, yeah.
Max: How does that connect to what you want from the rest of your life?
Bessel: You appreciate it as long as you can, and then you die [both laugh]. That's it.
CREDITS
Max: 70 Over 70 is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and it’s produced by Jess Hackel.
Our associate producer is Janelle Anderson. Our editors are Maddy Sprung-Keyser and Joel Lovell. Research and additional reporting by Charley Locke.
Our mixer is Elliott Adler, and Jenna Weiss-Berman and I are the executive producers.
Our theme song is Like a Dream, by Francis and the Lights, and the music you’re listening to now is by Beverly Glenn Copeland who is 77 years. Original music by Terence Bernardo. Additional music by Noble Kids, and music licensing by Dan Knishkowy.
Our cover art is by Maria Kalman, who’s 72. And our episode art is by Lynn Staley, who’s 74 now. Happy Birthday, mom!
Thank you, Sid and Miriam Moss and thank you, Bessel van der Kolk.
I'm Max Linsky. Thanks for listening
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