Got childhood trauma? Or think you might? Discover how to deal with that sh*t with Dr. Don St. John and Dr. John Schinnerer
Got Childhood Trauma? Here’s How to Stop It From Running Your Life
Childhood trauma—it’s one of those buzzy phrases that gets tossed around like popcorn these days. But what does it really mean? And more importantly, how do you heal from trauma?
Here’s how: You listen to the wisdom of those who’ve been through the sh*t and emerged stronger on the other side. Enter Dr. Don St. John, a man whose life story sounds like a hard-to-watch Netflix drama—brutal childhood beatings, relentless verbal lashings, and enough emotional baggage to fill a football stadium.
By his early 20s, Don was a wreck. No emotional connection. Zero impulse control. Alcohol? Plenty of that. By 35, he’d racked up three marriages, three divorces, and a body that felt like it was falling apart. Basically, he was on a one-way train to a gutter.
But here’s where things get wild: Don flipped the script. Through deep work, self-discovery, and some serious will power, he turned his life around. Now he’s a psychologist, award-winning author, and living proof that no matter how screwed up your beginnings were, you can build a life that’s thriving.
In this episode, Don shares his hard-earned wisdom, and the tools and insights that helped him rebuild his mind, body, and relationships from the ashes, like the phoenix.
What’s Hidden In This Episode?
🔥 What is trauma, really? (Because it’s more than just a trendy buzzword)
🔥 How does trauma affect you when you’re not even aware of it?
🔥 How do you begin healing that old baggage—no matter how heavy it is?
🔥 Why your physical health, romantic relationships, and body awareness are all tangled up in the trauma web
🔥 **Key insights for building deeper, richer, and drama-free relationships**
🔥 **The Loneliness Epidemic**—how it’s messing with our heads and what you can do about it
Don’s story is proof that no matter where you started, no matter how many times you’ve crashed and burned, you can still rise up and live a damn good life.
If you’re ready to trade your emotional baggage for some peace of mind, **hit play now**. Your future self will thank you.
🚀 **Listen in and start healing NOW!** 🚀
To listen to this heroic episode on Podomatic, click here.
To watch the video, click below.
If you’re a reader and want to read through the transcript, it’s shared below for your ongoing health, happiness and healing…
Got Childhood Trauma? Here’s How to Stop It From Ruining Your Life w/ Dr. Don St. John – Transcript
Dr. John Schinnerer: Hey everybody, this is Dr. John back with another episode of the Evolved Caveman podcast. And today my esteemed guest is Don St. John. And Don’s life has been nothing short of miraculous. He suffered abuse, pretty extreme abuse in childhood, violent beatings and constant verbal abuse. In his early twenties, he was incapable of feeling human connection, had poor impulse control, drank excessively and had poor physical health.
By age 35, he had gone through three marriages and three divorces. He had very little, if any, sense of connection to his body or to his own emotions. His life trajectory looked bleak indeed. Today, the author of the award winning book Healing the Wounds of Childhood, a psychologist’s journey and discoveries from wretched beginnings to a thriving life, shares and teaches about the work he has done and how he transformed his life [00:01:00] from the inside out.
He offers ways for others to do the same, no matter what the age or what the beginnings. Don, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Don St. John: Yeah. Thank you for having me, John. You summarized those early years of my life quite well. And my, my journey began I was about 20 years old and I woke up in the backseat of my car and I was bleeding from my throat.
I’d been out drinking all night and hollering and just making a racket and burst of blood vessels. Didn’t know what it was until I got to the hospital and I realized I needed help. So I looked in the yellow pages, found the psychiatrist that worked on Saturday. I was in the Air Force at the time, working Monday through Friday.
And that was the beginning. That [00:02:00] was the beginning of a journey that’s ongoing some 60 years later.
Dr. John: Wow. That’s amazing. And so that was your bottom. That was your low point. That was the point where you woke up.
Dr. Don: Yes, that’s the point where it began. That was the low point. Clearly I was on a trajectory that would end in early death.
And almost did. Almost did. Had I not altered that. that trajectory in my 30s I’d have been dead now, without a doubt.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah I call that a slow suicide. I’ve had other clients that are alcoholics, for example, or addicts, and I beseech them to stop the slow suicide because I think they don’t want to live.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: They’re just, they don’t want to kill themselves either.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Exactly. There wasn’t much to live for.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah,
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I was pretty frozen on the inside. I didn’t really ever [00:03:00] feel a human connection. Didn’t even know what it was till years later. Into my thirties before I did. So yeah, there wasn’t much to live for.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Smoking, drinking, not paying attention to anything health related. Yeah, I agree with your assessment John. I’ve had a lot of younger
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: clients, sorry to interrupt, I’ve had a lot of younger clients in, late teens, early 20s that don’t expect to live past, fill in the number, 21, 30. And so they’re just a, they have that live fast, die young mentality.
Dr. Don St. John: Yeah. It’s a tragedy.
Dr. John Schinnererr: Along with purposeless wandering and an addiction to hedonism, right? They just want sex, drugs, rock and roll.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, I think that’s because they don’t know an alternative.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I’ve come a long way since [00:04:00] my early 20s and my perspective is changed considerably.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I’ll make an extreme statement. We can unpack it more if you’d like. My childhood was hideous, obviously. Even things you didn’t mention, like a very difficult birth. Like being unwanted at conception. All of that. Yeah, yeah, that’s rough. When you hear it. And yet, and this is where I ask you and our listeners, hold both of these statements.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: It was hideous, and it was perfect. Because every moment of that childhood, Preceded and led to this moment that you and I are having here talking about it all.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, and thank you for saying that, [00:05:00] Don. I think it’s that to me is a reflection of wisdom. That to me is a reflection of the mature ability to hold competing truths in your head at the same time, which I think is a hallmark of emotional maturity.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I completely agree. I call it and, A N D, consciousness.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, I love it.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Both.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Explain that. Explain that to me.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: If you look at my childhood, you could easily conclude that it’s hideous. But can you also hold that there was a perfection in it, that it provided me with a path that led to my writing two books.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: You mentioned the first book. The second that just came out a few months ago is Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture. An adventure of a lifetime, which is a different perspective here [00:06:00] because, let me stay with the and consciousness because that’s the question you asked. When we look at our identity, for example.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: If we’re locked in to a specific image of how we’re supposed to be, for example, completely monogamous at all times in our thoughts, feelings, and actions, then what do we do when we have feelings and thoughts that aren’t aligned with that particular image? What do we do with that? Suppress
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: it.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: We feel shame. We feel guilt.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Exactly. We hate ourselves. This stereotype is the preacher who rails against all forms of immorality on [00:07:00] Sunday, and then the next Saturday night is caught in a house of ill repute. because, he can’t integrate those sides. And that’s what I mean by, and I am monogamous.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I clearly am, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t wanna be
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: .
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And it’s important that I acknowledge that too, and that keeps me out of trouble.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, acknowledge it and accept it. I like to explain that the and philosophy using improv comedy. So I talk about the yes and rather than the yeah, but, and explain that the philosophy comes from improv comedy, where if you’re doing improv comedy on stage, You take what your fellow actor or comedian has built for you verbally and you accept it completely and you build upon it.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And that’s where the humor comes from as it leads to such absurdities. But the idea is the same in life that if we can use [00:08:00] that to accept life and to build upon what’s already present, whether or not, a lot of times we are resisting what is present.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I didn’t hear the last, was that the dog barking?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Sorry, I was muting it because of the dog. Yeah, just the idea that we can, that I think a lot of times we’re struggling against what already exists in our present situation. Yeah. You just don’t want to accept the present.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. For example, if I have a belief that as a male, I need to be tough all the time, then there’s no room to be tender, to be receptive.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Even to be adaptable, I rigidify around an image, and in that process negate my [00:09:00] authentic experience.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, and negate huge parts of yourself, which leads to illness, whether mental or physical, or acting out behavior. I suppose we can go a lot of ways with that.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: All of the above.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Let’s talk a little bit about trauma, because your journey is traumatic, was traumatic, and trauma is a vague and overused word, and it’s used a lot these days.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: How do you define trauma?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Well, trauma, originally means wound. And in my book, I use that generic wound, because trauma First of all, it’s ambiguous. People use it as, oh, I had a traumatic day at the office because the coffee machine wasn’t working. Versus, I got hit by a bus. And, using the same word to describe those [00:10:00] extremely different experiences, it can become confusing.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: if you go in the literature, you’ll come across concepts like shock trauma, big T trauma, little t trauma, developmental trauma, relational trauma, a lot of definitions. And what it basically means is we’re wounded. We’ve been wounded. And the intensity, the magnitude of those wounds differ,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: whoops,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: an Italian
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: talks with his hands, and I knocked the mic, and I’m Italian, so I can say that, I can get away with that.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Fair enough.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: So here’s contentions, John, it’s that we’ve [00:11:00] all been wounded.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: I agree.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And rather than use the medical model, do you have trauma? Don’t you have trauma?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Let’s look at our wounds there. We all have them and the journey to healing as far as I’m concerned is the purpose of life because I
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: love that. I love that idea of the purpose of life is growth, evolution, healing. I think that’s really true. And I’m in my estimation, I think that just growing up male in this man box culture is traumatic to some degree.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Now, I can say the same for females, but I’m more focused on males. So females, forgive me who are listening. But I think just growing up in this culture, we’re going to be bullied. We’re going to be name called. We’re going to be hit. We’re going to be put down. We’re going to be shamed for feeling human emotions.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, [00:12:00] exactly. And more fundamentally, our deep experience, our authentic experience is not appreciated, not supported. Punished either subtly or overtly. So we learn to cut out parts of ourselves. There’s this tension between attachment and expression.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Can I read you a quote real quick from Soren Kierkegaard?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: One of the great philosophers, he said, the most common form of despair is not being who you are speaking to that authenticity, or lack of authenticity. So when it gets cut, when we get cut off from ourselves, It leads to despair,
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: which we most of us do to, if not all of us, John, if not all of us, it’s hard not to some extent or other.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Right.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: I’m [00:13:00] sorry. I interrupted. No, go ahead. Okay so how does trauma affect us? How does it impact us? What are the various systems in the body that it speaks to?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Might be easier to answer what doesn’t it? But let me talk about the ways that are not yet well understood because, obviously it affects our emotions.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: It affects our capacity to be intimate, to be close, to reveal ourselves deeply to one another, to open our hearts and, and love. Yeah.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And be loved.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And be loved. Absolutely. And it affects our brain. It affects our nervous system. What’s not understood is that it also affects the very tissues.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Tissues of our body, [00:14:00] a metaphor that I’ve used to convey that idea, John, is if you compare a sponge that’s wet, moist, versus a sponge that’s completely dried out. That’s what trauma does. It dries out. It renders the tissues more dense. And to the degree that it interferes with our connection, our conscious connection to those tissues, it affects our sense of ourselves.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Hey, when we look at take a male body, Hey, we were talking about the wounds. to maleness. If you’re in touch with those back muscles, and shoulder muscles and pelvic muscles, they’re strong, [00:15:00] even on a, I’m a kind of thin guy here. But when I’m in touch with those muscles, I feel that I feel my capacity to fight, for example, okay, but In Frontier, in the belly and in the heart, although the heart is protected by a rib basket, but those tissues are tender.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: They’re really soft and tender and receptive. So if we can be in touch with both sides, for example, it’s more complex, but just to illustrate, we can be in touch with both our strength and our force. and our tenderness, our vulnerability.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: I think that’s the goal, right? Is to have access to all sides of yourself, all aspects of your psyche.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I agree. And it correlates [00:16:00] highly with our connection to our own tissues.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. And I, in my mind, I’m right now I’m equating stress and trauma, which aren’t the quite, they’re not quite the same thing. But when you were talking about trauma affecting the physical body, like I, I know a man in his fifties who is rebelling against his life and has turned to sex drugs and rock and roll as a distraction.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And somebody who knows him quite well was saying he’s aged. And, two years he’s aged noticeably and I feel like there’s a disconnection from meaning and purpose. And there’s more of this wanderlust or shrugging off of rules and constrictions and control and an attempt to, I don’t know, live life to the fullest or live life, live a life of pleasure.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And I just think that’s tempting. I don’t think it is. It [00:17:00] serves us in, in many ways.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I think it misses the mark. How which by the way, is one definition of sin. I don’t remember what language or culture that came from, but it misses the mark in the sense that, yeah, one is attempting this gentleman may be attempting to free himself from the constraints and restrictions and limitations, the wounds of his childhood and early life.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: He may be seeking to be free. But turning to sex, drugs, and rock and roll isn’t going to get him what he wants. My guess is that what he wants is genuine connection.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: You
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: know it’s the ability to, on one hand, to just [00:18:00] love in your interactions with people.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: To love. I would add love and be loved because I think we can struggle with both or either of those.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Oh I think you’re absolutely right. I think one of the most difficult things for human beings is to really receive love.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Absolutely.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Someone asked me I think we don’t feel worthy
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: of it.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: That’s probably the single biggest issue. The single common denominator issue running underneath all the diagnoses and many of the chronic physical health issues as well.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Can I interject something there? So yeah, I was in the shower this morning because this all revolves around inner child work to me. There’s so much inner child work here that needs to be done. And so I’ve been working on it myself and I was doing a little IFS work, internal family systems, and so I was [00:19:00] meditating in the shower, talking to my four year old who, didn’t feel worthy because he got yelled at by a mom. And so I was Having a conversation with my four year old self, just saying, Hey, look, I understand you were hurt. You’re safe. Now you’re with me. I’ll take care of you. I love you.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: You are worthy. You’re worthy of love. You’re worthy of giving love. You’re worthy of receiving love. You’re worthy of success. You’re worthy of happiness. You are fucking worthy. And just trying to have these ongoing conversations to get him to let go and relax and understand that he is in fact worthy of many things, love being one of them.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, that’s beautiful. He’s a very fortunate four year old, because as I said, I think every other issue is built on that profound feeling of not being worthy. Yeah, and that comes from parts of self [00:20:00] being rejected or not being met. I think one of the things,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: let me pause you there for a second, because one of the things I wanted to get to, because I think obviously this is not an issue with us, but I think it’s an issue with 85 percent of the population at least.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: So my experience has been the trauma largely operates outside of our conscious awareness. So how do we begin to become aware of the trauma in ourselves? How do we make them conscious?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I think the way it usually happens is some suffering, whether it’s an illness, a divorce, distress in a relationship, my case, waking up in the backseat of my car, I was in the backseat because I let somebody else drive one of the few times that I did that.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And, that, that was enough to say, wake up. [00:21:00]
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And let me ask you this. So I agree that I think, and I think life does this to us all, cuts us off at the knees and forces us to experience some really tremendous pain and suffering. And I think those are great wake up opportunities because we get humbled and because it puts us in a position where we are willing or forced to ask for help and forced to introspect.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: So how do we begin to heal from these traumas?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Let me count the ways.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: What are some of your favorites, put it that way, because there are a number of ways.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, there, there are beginning with simple self reflection. And an attempt to understand what the beliefs are that I formulated out of those traumatic experiences.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: For example, the belief that I really don’t [00:22:00] deserve to be loved. But I think, I boiled it down to four areas in my second book, we have to look at the body, or more specifically, our connection to our body, not, there was a philosopher term somatic practitioner by the name of Thomas Hannah. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: No.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Have you heard of the Feldenkrais method? Yes. Okay, Hannah brought Moshe Feldenkrais to this country. Gotcha. Took his first training and went on to develop his own somatic work. Now, Hannah was a philosopher by trade. He was a, he was chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his philosophy led him to [00:23:00] an understanding of the body That’s still pretty not discovered yet.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And that is the body has two sides. See, I look into this monitor, John, I see your body. I see your shining skull and majestic quality. I see your shoulders. But from the inside, you’re not experiencing your shoulder. Okay, we can all see your shoulder. What we can’t see, and only you can know, is that sense of connection that you have to those shoulders.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: How do they feel to you? What information do you receive from those shoulders? And that was Tom’s insight, and he coined the word [00:24:00]
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: somatic.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: The body is what everybody sees, and we have libraries filled with books about the body, it sounds like
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: our sense of interoception, which is our sense of the internal workings in our body.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Yeah. But again, one can explore that for a lifetime and still be discovering more.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. And let me make a comment there because my experience is that men in general are so focused externally. And we’re looking for external validation as opposed to internal validation, but we’re also.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: think that the majority of reality exists outside of ourselves. So we pursue things like fame and wealth and power and prestige, but we’re not very good on the whole turning inwards. I think it scares the crap out of us. Most of us.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. We don’t have too many [00:25:00] roadmaps.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Or models. Yeah. Role models.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And women focus externally as well. They tend to focus on how their body looks and whether or not they meet, Vogue magazine standards, rather than what’s it feel like in your pelvis in your shoulder, what’s the connection.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And let me give you a metaphor that I think helps with this, John.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: If the body were composed of a million tiny light bulbs, okay, that’s your body. How many can you light up?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: . I like that. That’s, it’s gamifying it.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Yeah. Think about that. Many of us can light up our heads, we can breathe. Oh yeah. But can we light up our hearts?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Can we light up our hearts and pelvis? You start thinking about it this way, [00:26:00] you begin to realize how important that internal connection is. And that’s also a good Metaphor for the concept presence. How present can you be? How much of your energy and attention can you direct towards something in front of you at any given moment in time?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, so at the gym recently I’ve been trying to connect with my obliques. And get them to work on command and get a better feel for them. I’ve never been connected with them.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: The other thing that
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: you’re saying is, direct your energy, which makes me think of attention. I was just writing this morning about, how we’ve got this massive problem with young people.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: hating reading or just having a terrible dislike for reading. And, one of the [00:27:00] factors for that is continuous partial attention, I would argue based on devices and social media, that their attention is so fragmented. They’ve never trained it to focus on one thing, which may not be, some of the reading may not be that stimulating, might be boring for long periods of time.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And so they can’t really attend to something for any length of time. Yeah. Total tangent there. I apologize. So let me ask you another question. So you have a, you’ve made a connection. Oh, go ahead.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Oh, I just wanted to finish answering your previous question about how to go about healing these wounds and one is, as we’re seeing enhancing that connection.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: to your body from the inside, whether you do that at the gym, whether you do it through yoga, there’s a system called continuum. It’s a meditation movement system that’s brilliant. [00:28:00] Whether you do it through Feldenkrais, so many ways, but with the intention of strengthening that connection. The second is relationship.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And for most people, it’s going to mean a good psychotherapeutic relationship, not one that’s focused on getting rid of the symptoms, but one that’s focused on, deepening relationship. Because a person comes to psychotherapy generally, they’re not able of having a good intimate relationship. So the job of the therapist is to have a good relationship with somebody who doesn’t know how to have a good relationship.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And I think that’s, that can be very helpful, very important. And when
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: you said, Oh, good.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: The third is, relational education, how to be in a [00:29:00] relationship, how to be present, how to bring yourself authentically into the relationship and allow the other person to do the same.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. And I, when you said relationship, at first I was thinking, oh yeah, healing within relationship, because one of the ideas I love is That there’s certain wounds that we have that can only be healed that can only be healed while in relationship because they don’t show up unless you’re in relationship and then they can’t, you have to be in relationship with someone who’s willing to work with you in order to heal certain traumas.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: A fear of abandonment,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: For example.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Sure. Which is, it’s huge.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Or fear of betrayal.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Also huge. Fear of being suffocated.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Fear of being controlled. Sexual insecurities. All sorts of things.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Exactly. That can be healed only in a relationship.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. So thank you for going back [00:30:00] and finishing that.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Sure. My continuous partial attention took us away from that.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: There’s one more spirituality.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Don’t know how much you want to get into that or not, but you have another question. The,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: the older I get, the more I’m, I’ve been interested in open to spirituality. So I just think it’s interesting because also, as being taught at Cal as a quote unquote scientist.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. There’s not really much about spirituality and up until, I don’t know, I would say 30 years ago, it was looked down upon to even believe in a higher power as a researcher or scientist. Again, going back to the beginning of our conversation that I think it’s emotional maturity, psychological maturity to be able to hold competing and opposite and contradictory views in your mind about yourself at the same time.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: So for example, I’m a scientist that values empirical [00:31:00] data and research, and as such, I don’t believe in God because there can not, there can’t be empirical proof of God. And yet at the same time, I choose to believe in God because I find it emotionally comforting and it helps me to deal with the anxiety around my own death.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. And, if you’re fortunate, you have life experiences that make it very hard to not believe in a higher power higher than me, higher than my own, rational apparatus that there’s some force, some intelligence Transcribed by https: otter. ai some connectedness that influences me that’s beyond me.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I can tell you a brief story if you’d like. Please. Okay. Back in 2001, [00:32:00] our health insurance company canceled the policy in the state of Washington and told us, to go shop. Okay. Had a trip to Albuquerque, both my wife and I, or our church was going into court to contest its right to use our sacrament and its services.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And that was the first day of a five and a half year court process that culminated in a Supreme court decision, but we can answer that in a minute. On the way to the airport, we put an application. for a new health policy in the mail. Okay. Two nights later in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as I was getting ready for bed, I had a severe heart attack.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I was 59 years old. I’ll be 80 next month. I was [00:33:00] 59 years old and the pain was in my solar plexus. I checked my chest, no pain was all down in my solar plexus. And it was extreme. I couldn’t lie down. I couldn’t stand that. I was just at 90 degrees for about 45 minutes of intense pain and sweat. It finally went away the next day, got up, went back to the courthouse, and after the third day, went home.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: A month later, I went to a doctor and I convinced him to look in my abdomen because I was convinced that’s what we were dealing with. Three months passed before I saw a cardiologist. And when he looked in there, he couldn’t believe it because he didn’t think there was anything wrong with my heart because I appeared [00:34:00] normal,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Like the kind of,
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: and he found that I had pretty serious heart attack.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: My left ventricle was hardly functioning. Three coronary arteries were mostly down and there was a blood clot loitering in the left ventricle. And I’m still walking around. Yeah. Did not die.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Okay, I’m going to make this as succinct as I possibly can. He diagnosed the apex of the heart as being gone. And much of the left ventricle maybe not. It turned out that it was hibernating and returned after the surgery. The surgery was a rather cool experience. It was amazing. It really was.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Three months later. The [00:35:00] apex of the heart was normal. He could not believe it. He got me back in for another test. He said that cannot happen. He doesn’t make mistakes like that, yeah. So that kind of thing, including the insurance, but they covered an 80, 000 surgery. Because I put it in the mail two days before.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Could have easily waited. When you get a series of experiences like that, John, it’s hard to say that there’s something else going on here.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, that’s a wild story.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: I’m sorry that happened. I’m glad that you survived it. That’s scary as hell.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Me too.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: You, you reminded me so tell me a little bit about your church and the sacrament that you consider holy.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah it’s a church that began in Brazil. It’s both [00:36:00] Christian and indigenous. It’s a, Technically, it’s called a syncretic religion that combines various elements. Our sacrament is what you generically call ayahuasca. And I’ve been participating now for 28 years. We have a group here where I live in Salt Lake City.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: We went all the way to the Supreme Court in four different courtrooms. We won in every one. The Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous back in 2006. Yeah what else can I tell you about it?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah that’s an incredible story too. I think the reason I wanted to bring it up is because I think that’s a fifth avenue to healing trauma psychedelics.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Oh, absolutely. And
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: not anyone that’s listening don’t just go and take psilocybin on your own. But there’s a process, there’s a ritual. I think there’s rules that you wanna follow. [00:37:00] What are your thoughts on that, Don?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Absolutely. I took it on my own back in the 60s when I was in graduate school.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And the first time I did, I realized that my very rigid, secular view of reality needed some tweaking that it’s, it opened me up to possibilities that I otherwise would not have opened to. But I completely agree. I don’t think young people in particular should be playing around with psychedelics.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I think they require. a whole lot of consciousness, either in a spiritual setting or a psychotherapeutic setting, but I think they’re very powerful. And John, I think it’s the wave of the future.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: I do too. I had an experience back in college with psilocybin where I came away and it [00:38:00] stayed with me ever since.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Just an, a visceral understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. That’s a huge understanding that I am extremely grateful for because it’s shaped everything since.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: That’s profound. It’s profound. Once you have an experience like that, it’s hard to feel like an isolated, separate object in the world of other objects.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: As described in a Newtonian physics, right?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems with depression is when depressed, we feel like we are absolutely alone and cut off from every other living being on the planet.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Or said it another way, when we feel cut off and isolated from everyone else on the planet, we feel depressed.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Or alone or both.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: So yeah. [00:39:00] Depression is a reflection, a manifestation of a lack of connection.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that about your church. I think it’s just a fascinating story. And as you said, I do think psychedelics are the future in terms of, and I’ve just heard it repeatedly that psychiatry doesn’t have a tool as powerful in its toolbox as some of these psychedelics.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Oh, MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and they’re even looking at acid and ketamine. So I’m pretty excited about the possibilities that those present.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, me too.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Okay. So here’s the question that I wanted to ask a little bit ago, which, but you. rightfully reminded me that you weren’t finished with the question I’d already asked.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Thank you. So how are vibrant health, high quality, intimate relationships, and a good relationship with your body all interrelated?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: [00:40:00] That sounds like one of those graduate school essays. But I figured you were just the
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: person that come to for an answer.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: That you write on your comprehensive exam, two hours and you get your organized.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: But look, stress affects our health. The evidence is now conclusive. Intimacy is a human need. Interpersonal nourishment is essential to our sense of wellbeing. If that isn’t present. If we’re not receiving, giving that nourishment, it in and of itself is a source of strength, which in turn, [00:41:00] okay, affects our nervous system.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: It affects our hormonal system and our health, our connection to our body. I was reading a book recently and the author, I’m not going to mention his name. But he’s very well known in the field of trauma and he was saying he had an experience with his wife. She disappointed him. She was supposed to pick him up at the airport and she spaced out the time.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And he said it took him 24 hours. to let it go to get over that. And I thought about that. I’m now able to get over something like that in 24 minutes at the most, and sometimes 24 seconds. [00:42:00] And here’s a man, clearly he’s done his work. He’s an expert in the field. Why is it taking him 24 hours? What could be the difference?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And my guess is that I’ve But much, much more attention. On my bodily tissues, my muscles and connective tissues, which in turn allows me to release the, the effects of the wound is a contraction. We contract, you can feel it. And what’s being called for is let it go. Let it go. But if those tissues are tense, held, dense, it’s harder.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: It takes more effort.[00:43:00]
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Did I, how’d I do on that essay test?
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Great. It seems to me to speak to the idea of resiliency, which I define as, at least on a physical and physiological level as the ability to return back to a normal resting rate, resting heart rate, resting breathing rate Exactly. Resting goals as quickly as possible.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Exactly.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And part of that is predicated on physical health, part of that is predicated on what you do to relax yourself and let it go psychologically.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah both. But again, those tissues are a big factor in the ease in which, let’s assume that you have the psychological wherewithal to say to yourself, okay, she messed up, it does not mean she’s abandoning me.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: She loves me, I know it. Let’s let this go. Okay. So assuming [00:44:00] the psychological wherewithal, the tissues have to cooperate.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Check out the work, John, of a woman named Emily Conrad, C O N R A
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: D. She passed about eight,
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: nine years ago. She came along and she said, you know what, the body is some 70 percent water. We all know that as a biological fact. What she did with that was say, if it’s water, how does water move?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And spent the lifetime developing both within herself and teaching how we could actually link our consciousness to that. Deep [00:45:00] level of our body and become fluid, internally fluid.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Did you ever see the movie, What the Bleep? Do we know? No, I don’t. It was probably, it’s a documentary. It’s part fiction, fantastic movie. It’s probably 20 or 30 years old, but it has to do with quantum physics and, emotion, molecules of Candace Pert, and I think Joe Dispenza’s in it, but there was work.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: By a Japanese researcher, and I can’t remember his name, but he was looking at how our thoughts can affect the molecules of water.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, Emoto, I think his name was. Is that
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Emoto?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: I think so. I know who you’re talking about.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Okay, but I’m just picturing the different, at a molecular level, what the water looked like after, a monk or a priest had blessed the water.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: for 10 minutes versus someone thinking hate towards the water versus someone thinking love [00:46:00] towards the water. And it makes me wonder, wow, what tremendous impact our own thoughts would have on the water molecules in our own body.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. You remember our little exchange on LinkedIn? About swearing.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yes. That’s what I was thinking about. Yeah. I don’t believe it’s the word itself. I don’t believe it’s a combination of letters. Because L U C K. Look, change one letter and all of a sudden it’s word, but I do believe, but I do believe the energy that we imbue the word in affects the water.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: That’s the research that I was referring to.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah,
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And I
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: do swear a lot and I try to swear on the, on a positive, on the positive side.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. I know. I know. I picked that up [00:47:00] in your post.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. So yeah, I’m so fucking proud of you, for example. So the energy behind that is different.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Partly and partly I do that because a, we don’t receive compliments well at all. So I’m trying to break in to someone’s psyche. Partly because I want to magnify the intensity of that positive emotion for them. Yeah. I want to wake them up to the extent I can.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And I think it’s just, it’s, I think it’s different than when it’s done with a, that harsh negative energy because the water, our bodies are recording it.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And so is the other persons.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. Yeah. So we only got a few minutes left. So can you give me some key insights and practices to build an extraordinary relationship. In [00:48:00] five minutes, no pressure.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: You must and heal the world at the same time. Professor, huh? Great essay questions in
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: five minutes.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: What are some practices to build a better relationship? I’ll simplify it.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, I get the question and I want to see. What I, what’s the best answer I can give you I think it has to do with be willing to take the risks to let yourself be sincerely known.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: But Don, that’s fucking terrifying.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yes, it is. It is. And it’s, and again, it’s a practice. It’s not an all or nothing, because in that practice. We reveal ourselves to ourselves as well as to the [00:49:00] other, and if that can go both ways. And there’s another image they talk about in my book, and a woman named May Wan Ho said that the water was structured in the following way.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Maximum independence. and maximum cohesion. And she used the metaphor of a jazz band, everybody playing their own, doing their own thing, but doing it in harmony, cohesion with the whole. And in a relationship, I think it’s a dance. between maximum closeness and maximum freedom.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And it’s it moves, it’s dynamic, because if it’s always maximum [00:50:00] closeness, you’ve got a codependent relationship that feels a little suffocating and is always fraught with resentments.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And if you have just maximum Freedom, it’s empty in the sense that there’s not enough closeness. There’s no
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: relationship potentially. Yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: So to be able to hold that’s another one of those and things that we spoke about earlier, that you can be free in that relationship. And very close at the same time.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah, I love
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: that. Not telling, not keeping secrets letting ourselves be known,
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: yeah.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: And being, and listening, practice listening.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And I would add to that, listening non defensively, that is huge. And that takes some practice, right? Huh. And consider that anytime you’re trying to explain what you were thinking or what you were doing, [00:51:00] to some extent, that’s being defensive.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And it’s hard not to do to just say to your partner, I hear you, I understand. I’m sorry, I hurt your feelings, period.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yeah. If you’re listening defensively, you’re not listening. You’re defending to that degree. I think that’s the best I can do in five minutes. I think
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: it’s, I think it’s great. So thank you.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: So do me a favor and share with the listeners. The titles of your two books and where they can find you.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Okay, let me just share the second book because it’s a revision of the first and it’s just a better book all around. Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture, an Adventure of a Lifetime.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: with many
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: rewards in that adventure.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: [00:52:00] And where can you find that? Where can I find that?
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Amazon, Barnes and Noble bookstores. They can all order it on my website, WWW. dot paths of connection dot com
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: paths of connection dot com.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Yes.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: Okay. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today, Don. This was fantastic. I truly enjoyed it.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: Totally. I really enjoyed talking to you.
Dr. Don St. John, Top Men’s Counselor: It’s yeah.
Dr. John Schinnerer, Top Men’s Counselor: And that is it for this episode of the evolved caveman. If you liked this episode, please be sure to like rate review and share. And if you didn’t like it, you don’t have to do a damn thing. Thanks so much. I’ll see you next time.
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