Welcome back to the Simplicity Parenting Podcast with me, Kim John Payne. Oh, gosh, what a pleasure it is to introduce these next three podcasts. These will be with my dear friend and longtime colleague, Steve Bidoff, who, as you'll see, wrote the new book, Wild Creature Mind.
And we've broken it into three episodes, because when I first started talking with Steve, we thought it would be about a 20 to 30-minute call, you know, and you know how it goes. You're talking with someone who's very knowledgeable and is a good friend, and the conversation just goes deeper and deeper and expands. And this conversation ended up being close to an hour, actually, which Steve was very good to give us that time.
So we've broken it into three episodes. You'll see them coming and sort of rolling out each week. The first episode is more oriented around introducing the whole theme of the wild creature mind and what that is.
And Steve asks us in that episode to do a brief exercise, actually, which I'm hoping will be interesting to you. It sure was to me when I did this quiet little exercise. And then we dig in a little bit deeper into the next two episodes of the right and the left brain and how to balance the two.
And you'll see Steve really unpack this a little bit more. So anyway, this will be a bit of a fireside chat, really. It's more that, it's more fireside chat than it is interview, formal interview.
And I always think that's nicer anyway, more relaxing, but it means one can go deeper without having a set list of questions you're trying to get through. So there it is. These are the next three episodes.
I sure hope they're helpful. Okay, bye bye. The time has come for us to be able to introduce you to my mate Steve.
Steve Bidoff is just like, Steve, how do I introduce you? Your work has been so broad, so beautiful. Steve is a child psychologist, wrote this, would it be fair to say, Steve, the seminal book was perhaps, I know it often gets called that as raising boys, but I think of the book Manhood also as being just a core and then raising girls together with Sharon, your wife. And now this book, got it sitting right there, Wild Creature Mind.
And Steve and I go back a ways, we're still in the vertical plane, Steve, look at us. But Steve's work has been so influential. I think last time we spoke, Steve, you mentioned, I love the way you put it.
It was your books were in over 8 million homes. That's got to be more now, right? I think it's just past the 7 million mark. I don't want to overstate it.
Is it? Maybe I'm misremembering it. But that's a lot of homes that have been helped by your work over the years and really helped. Steve writes beautiful, I think of them as very lyrical books.
You smile a lot. You read them and you feel like someone is walking beside you. And that's something that I value highly.
So a welcome to you. And I'm just delighted to introduce you to the Simplicity Parenting community. Big warm welcome, Steve.
Thank you, Kim. And hello and love to everybody who's watching. It's kind of very touching because Kim and I knew each other probably 30 years ago, to start with.
And the fact that we're still alive itself is amazing. And I'm really looking forward to talking to you, Kim, in depth. Here in Australia, we have huge respect for your Simplicity Parenting book.
I thought it was the book the world needed so clearly. And so I'm humbled to talk to you and happy to see what we can do for people watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Watching and listening. Some people just listen in. We're a podcasty culture these days, aren't we? This auditory culture.
Steve, the book, Wild Creature Mind, you often hear the term breakthrough. And I know with all your books, you're very humble about it. You sort of bring this culmination of like where the research is going, where people with something very important to say, and you give it voice.
This is something I've always appreciated about your work, is the giving of voice, the culmination, and then lifting it up. Can you describe a little bit about the background of Wild Creature Mind and sort of where that springhead came from and where it's flowing now? Yes. Well, what always happens with me, I think, is that I get worried about something in the world around me and troubled by it and just think there must be answers to this.
And in this case, as I've been saying, I was ready to hang up my clogs and go kayaking on the river near where I live and be a contented old person. But this massive, massive problem arose here in Australia, pretty much, I think, in the whole world of anxiety. And anxiety is hammering the current generation of young people.
We've never seen the like of it before. I've just been working in China last week. They have one in four young people in China suffers from clinical depression.
And depression is the result of very protected anxiety going over years when the body starts to shut down on that. And so I couldn't walk away on the kids that have been raised with my books and your books and just leave because things were as bad as it ever been. And so I started to look for what is anxiety? Why do we have it? Because it's such an unhelpful condition.
It doesn't feel like our brain is doing what it's designed for. Luckily, I came across the work of Dr. Ian McGilchrist, who we can talk about some more. But he was probably the preeminent British psychiatrist, clinical director of the Maudsley Clinic, retired from that.
He wrote an astonishing book, which just rocketed through the neuroscience world about how we had misunderstood the brain hemispheres and had completely got the wrong idea about those. In fact, the opposite, 180 degree wrong idea. And that, in fact, this held the answer to anxiety, because anxiety is a condition of getting caught in one hemisphere and not using the other properly.
And so McGilchrist's book is ginormous. All his books are thousands of pages. But he was a very lucid writer.
And I encourage people to look him up on YouTube, anywhere at all. He speaks beautifully. But I thought, no one's going to read this.
Even the cover looked like a sort of a bad 1950s mystery novel. The title wasn't terribly inviting. Master and his Emissary.
The subtitle is much better, isn't it? Yes. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Because he says this is not just wrong with mental health.
It's wrong with our whole culture. But I thought, can I get this to a book that a 14-year-old teenager could read that would help them to move through anxiety and to transform it? And so how to use right hemisphere methods. And we called it Wild Creature Mind.
And just if I hold this for a minute, you can see graphic artists worked for months on this, Kim. There's a person. And then inside them is, in that case, it looks like a tiger.
Which was mirroring what actually is the case in the way our brain works. We have an animal mind. And in animals, the right hemisphere greatly predominates.
It's linked into memory in the hippocampus. It runs down into the body so that animals actually operate through their body. Signals directly to their body saying jump, fly, eat, whatever it is.
And it's a very sane and incredibly complex supercomputer of dealing with life. And we pretty much dealed it out. And we went off into our little left hemisphere.
Kitted ourselves that that was rational, which it is most definitely not. And then got tangled in our thoughts. And so, you know, if you go for therapy for anxiety, nine out of ten chances you will have a cognitive behavior therapist.
When you finally get to the head of the queue, you know, there will be a one to two-year queue in my country and in the UK to see a psychologist. They'll try and talk you out of your anxiety as if it's a thinking disorder. And it's very clearly not.
And luckily, there's been a breakout around the world of Bessel van der Kolk and people looking at this who recognize we have to use our body and our body signals to guide us back to balance. And even in the moment by moment. Now, as I'm talking, I'm feeling a flutter of anxiety that I'm saying too much at once.
But that sets the scene and we can unpack some of those ideas more practically as we go on into talking, Kim. Well, you know, that's a beautiful overview. I think it's really good to give that at the beginning of our conversation, Steve.
Yeah, so the flutter can the flutter can can just land. But it's a really good example of of actually the right left brain and also of the of the vagus nerve, you know, of how you felt that little flutter in your tummy. Am I saying too much? It's actually a really good example of exactly what you're talking about, right? Yes, yes.
I my long term aim is to when you use both hemispheres is that you're continuously aware of. It's just just to explain to people a bit more clearly. So, you know, I'm I'm here talking to Kim.
I'm talking to you if you're listening. I'm using words. The words are coming from my left hemisphere where language is just inside your left ear.
The language centers in the left side of your brain. My left brain is firing words across to Kim and Kim is firing words back. Our left hemispheres are talking to each other.
But at the same time, we're watching each other's faces. And so my right brain, which is the part that handles the very complex social side of things, is pacing with Kim's breathing in mind with the little movements of his face and his head. And if you're listening to this, your your right brain is picking up on my tone of voice and my pacing.
It's making decisions like is this person for real? Are they trustworthy? It's helping me and Kim to time the dance of our conversation so that it's flowing and and comfortable. And so right brains are doing this amazing complex job in in real time at very high computing speed to to make life work. And so if you have a situation, one of your kids has sort of said something and gone off to their room.
Your right brain is the part of you that gives you a little bit of an uneasy feeling in your tummy. Like, you know, what did they mean by that? Or do I need to go and talk to them? And so so our right brains inform us of a vast amount of information going on all the time. But but it doesn't have words.
This is the critical thing, Kim. The right brain has no language. Which is probably a good thing, because if you had two sides of your brain talking, it would be hell in there.
What it does is it sends sense felt sense messages. And I'll show you. Here's a diagram from the book of this is one of those those old anatomists of the 19th century.
But it's a very good representation of how it works of signals coming from your right hemisphere down into your, you know, around your chest and your heart, your throat, your face and way down into your guts. And all around, which is which is a two way system. As you know, you know, Kim, the vagus nerve sends message down, it gets messages back.
And so so if I anything I say, any single sentence I say, you hear it, you have a felt sense reaction. And but most of the most of the time, we don't even notice that most people don't notice that. And but, yeah.
And it's it's this, you know, thinking of right and left brain and right and left mind. The it's it's something that that I really get through reading your book. I love the emphasis on the mind and not just on the brain.
That was also very important, an important message of the book. But the but there's this awareness of subtle changes within your body that the right the right hemisphere gives us. It's almost like it reminded me a little bit.
And the wild creature minded. Actually, I don't know if this is a this probably has occurred to you, Steve. But I remember reading the book, The Golden Compass to my kids when when they were little.
And in that book, there's daemons. And the daemons are little animals that that follow the children around that follow people around. And they they speak to the animal.
The animal speaks to them. And the and the animal is picks up feelings and communicates those to the human being. And it really reminded me of that you're pointing towards our inner daemon.
Does that make sense? Totally does. It's a little bit like you're not the first to have made that observation. And it's like it's like like I have a panther sitting beside me and and you have one sitting beside you.
And they're kind of checking each other out. And but it's not always a panther. Sometimes it'll be a little timid little hamster and you have to look after it.
Teenagers with mental health issues really respond to this imagery because they can mobilize their panther or they can look after their little tiny cub inside them. But what I'd love to do, Kim, if you if you're brave, is is a sort of a two minute demonstration for our listeners that we can get this literally get the sense of this. Would you be up for a little experiment? Oh, I always am, Stephen.
And talking to you, I know that's always coming. Well, well, this is good. Now, what I suggest is that, Kim, you don't actually do this yourself, because I've done this with quite a few people on the BBC radio and places like that where the interviewer did it.
They lost the power of speech. And and and it's not good for the interviewer to do this. And so if you just sit on the sidelines and I'll do it with your with your audience, if that's all right.
But if you're listening to this and please don't do it if you're of course, if you're driving in a vehicle, of course. But if you're just listening and you like to get us understand how this works, the way it works is a really good, simple experiment is you you choose two people from your life. Two people that you know.
So if you've got kids, you could choose two of your kids. If you've got or it could be both of your parents or a couple of friends, it doesn't really matter. This is people that you know well.
And if you're a childless, friendless orphan, big hugs to you, but don't worry, you can choose your next door neighbors. It doesn't matter. And so you've got two people in mind.
OK. Now, just take one of those two. So you've got one person that you're thinking of and picture that person.
See them in your mind's eye, what they look like, their face looks like, maybe even what their voice sounds like. And as you're picturing that person, go down in the middle of your body. So down your throat, your chest, your tummy.
And notice what are the sensations that are happening as you think of that person right now. They might be just little, tiny little twinges. Maybe a glow around the heart or a little twinge in the tummy or anything, anywhere at all that you notice.
What are the physical sensations that happen with that person? Good. OK. And then let that go now.
And we start over again. Choose the second individual. Same thing.
Picture them clearly in your mind's eye, what their face looks like, where they stand, maybe how their voice sounds. And again, as you're thinking of them, what happens inside you? Especially in your torso, down the middle, down inside. Any sensations? And how would you describe that sensation? Is it a glow or is it a clench or is it a bit of a churn or a bit of a tingle or any word at all you'd apply to that? And how is it different from the first one, the first person? What are the differences? And then let that go and we'll come back and have a chat about it.
And if you didn't notice it, about one in ten people feel nothing at all. And we can talk about that. Most people have, you know, at least a couple of things happening.
And, Kim, the things to know about those, it's a real-time reading of it. So if you had an argument with a person this morning, that would be in there. You know, there'd be a little bit of a clench or whatever.
And also, it's never the same. It changes moment by moment. But we'll talk about it now.
And have you got any questions before we can unpack it further? Yes. Well, I did it. You advised me not to.
But I'm Australian, mate. You know, we just do stuff. Right.
And with the first person I pictured, one of my daughters, I had this just absolute clarity of warmth in the solar plexus. Down. Yeah, right in the solar plexal region.
And the second person I did it for was my dad, who died when I was still pretty young, in my 20s. And a very upright, strong, but loving guy came through the war. I don't know how, you know, you and I both had dads around the same age.
And, you know, this guy was, this dad of mine, was very in touch with his emotions, actually. Unusual for Australians of that generation. Didn't wear it on his sleeve, but it was clear that it was there.
So I had this feeling of uprightness, running right like a caduceus, like the, you know, the pillar and the snakes in the caduceus, in that symbol of healing. But an overriding feeling of safety, of feeling safe. Yes.
But a vertical, clear, clear safety that I experienced all the way down my throat, all the way. So it was, again, like, you know, visceral, of course. So kind of, for Alistair, so kind of like a column, like a column down the middle.
Yes. And it felt safe and strong. And that's so beautifully clear, Kim.
And how astonishing, really, you know, that our body embodies these experiences. And so what this means, and it would be brilliant to have everyone listening in the room, because you get the most diverse, you know, things in the throat, things in the shoulders. If you stay with it for a while, there'll be multiple places involved.
And, of course, if you were to stay with it, which is what we teach as an anxiety method, which we can talk about later, but if you stay with it, it will actually shift and go places, and your left and right sides will start to kind of pop as they make connections around it. And part of this was that Ian McGilchrist points out, and he draws on thousands of studies, but he's the one who integrates them all, that the right hemisphere is deeply and richly connected into the memories in the hippocampus, which basically stores everything, you know, your memories of your dad in the 1960s, you know, will all be in there. And it's also richly connected to the body.
The left hemisphere, by comparison, is like a little garage. It evolved for focus, and so it specifically doesn't pay attention to those things, because the part of it is like the blackbird chasing the worm. It just focuses on the worm, and it blocks out everything else.
And so we say that your right hemisphere, joking about it, you know, it remembers where you left your keys, but it also remembers where you left your keys in 1987. And so you don't want access to that kind of detailed memory. But if in the present moment, one of your kids is feeling uncomfortable around a piano teacher or somebody at school, it's because they're accessing memories deep down somewhere that means something.
And so sitting with that is very helpful as a parent, helpful thing to do, to allow their memory traces to start to, you know, what is that about? It's a misgiving. We have these beautiful words in English, misgivings, qualms. I don't know if people still use, you know, I had qualms about that, you know, business deal or that person.
Gut feelings. It turns out these are far more profound mechanisms that we simply just must give more attention to. But for our listeners for today, that's your wild creature mind.
That thing you felt down there, what we call the felt sense, is always there. It's always telling you something worth listening to. And whether you're in a moment of acute anxiety or whether you're just going through your day-to-day life, it's very worthwhile keeping in touch with that so that you have, as you said, a compass, you know, have the golden compass and can have so much more information and even a kind of steadiness about the way you go along with things.
