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

All attention deficit is not attention deficit disorder ... Attention deficit can come from many, many places, and one of them is anxiety. There's so many other reasons—depression affects attention, poor sleep affects attention, poor diet can affect attention, stress in life can affect attention.

It doesn't matter how many chefs or vacations or whatever a person has if the basics of self-care aren't squared away ... Are you sleeping enough? Are you eating well? Are you getting natural light? Are you interacting with people who are good to interact with?

I think we have to look at trauma as not only anything negative that happens to us but something that overwhelms our coping skills and then leaves us different as we move forward. So, it changes the way that our brains function, and then that change is evident in us as we move forward through life.

If you think about 100,000 overdose deaths in this country in a year. 100,000! Where is so much of that arising from? As a person who's treated addiction very intensively over many years, I feel sure that the majority of addiction that I see and treat arises, ultimately, the roots of it are in trauma.

The number of times I've seen alcohol having been a good idea for coping with something approaches zero. Alcohol for coping is just never good.

There's a lot of data about this over the years that if you look at what are the top 10 important factors to find in a therapist, just repeat rapport 10 times.

We're so afraid, so often, of looking at the trauma that has changed us that we'll look anywhere but at that.

The trauma inside of us that makes guilt and shame so often, so often, leads to a desire to punish oneself.

Good therapists are not pigeon-holed by a certain modality.

If we start with psilocybin and LSD, true psychedelics, I think why they have gained so much momentum over the last several years is because the data coming from the labs in the academic centers is so powerfully positive.

The trauma of the past dominates our present—and it doesn't have to be that way.

Crying is one of the best coping mechanisms we have. It doesn't hurt us, and it lets us grieve things.

I think that we tend to over-utilize medicines in this country because we have a healthcare system that's so based on throughput that we want to polish the hood when there's a problem in the engine. So, we over utilize medicines, often, as an endpoint.

In American medicine, we are so much better at starting medicines than we are at taking them away.