Why Success Doesn’t Make You Happy (Psychiatrist Explains) with Dr. Anna Yusim

Anna Yusim

And we think that if we have more achievement, status, money, power, fame, even love, whatever that is, that we’re going to be whole, but actually the opposite happens. The more of it that we have, the emptier we feel. Yeah. When we think of addiction, we think of addictions more as addictions to a substance, like to a food or a drug, alcohol, but very rarely do people think of psychological addictions that you can actually be addicted to money, power, status, et cetera. If it’s all easy peasy, you could do it on your own. Oftentimes, this is the hardest work that you will ever do. It’s hard work to identify what needs to be seen and then to actually uproot it from your life in a sustained way.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical epitherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. Today’s guest is Dr. Anna Yusim. Now, she is a board certified psychiatrist, executive coach, and a bestselling author of the book, Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life.

She’s educated at Stanford and Yale and now a clinical assistant professor at Yale Medical School. She bridges neuroscience, psychiatry, and spiritual wisdom to help high performers, from CEOs to Olympic athletes, to the average show like me. She helps us align purpose, potential, and inner peace. Dr. Anna, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Anna Yusim 

Thank you so much, Dr. Lorne. It is such a pleasure to be here with you today.

Lorne Brown 

Now, I’ve had an opportunity, full transparency. I’m on chapter nine of your book because we just got connected really quickly, loving what I read so far and can’t wait to, even after our podcast, to go back and read. I saw there’s a chapter 10 unconsciousness. That’s my favorite theme and I haven’t gotten there yet, but maybe we’ll talk about it here today. But you’re special to me in that you’re trained Western medicine. So you’re trained as a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists are trained to give medications for symptoms, mental health symptoms. But when I went to your website, by the way, everybody check out her website, Annayusim.com. You’re practicing integrated psychiatry, holistic psychiatry. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you talk about this mind-body approach and you can’t just look at one little symptom, you have to look at it holistically. But when I was reading about you and how you approach it, this mind body cannot be separated.

I was thinking, I don’t know if she knows this, but she’s basically practicing like a Chinese medicine doctor.

Anna Yusim 

It’s really interesting that you say that, Dr. Lorne, because I often refer my patients for acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and many other healing modalities that are very mind, body, spirit oriented. And so yes, on one hand, I do know that, and it’s also been a huge part of my life. I’ve been doing acupuncture for ages. One of my best friends, Dr. Catherine Souslov, we did residency training together at NYU in psychiatry. But after the first year of psychiatry residency, she decided, you know what? I’m actually meant to be a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner. So she left psychiatry residency and became an acupuncturist. And so she got me very much into that like many, many years ago. And since then, I’ve been very interested in the thinking of traditional Chinese medicine. And one of the most interesting ideas of that is that any disease that exists in the physical body actually first begins at the energetic level.

And at the energetic level in such a way that you could actually sense it and figure it out through the pulses in the meridians of the body and fix the energetic imbalance and hopefully prevent the disease from taking place. So I’m super interested in the way in which your and my professions overlap.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. And just your thinking of the mind and body can’t be separated. Stuff on the physical will affect the mental, emotional, and stuff on the mental, emotional will affect the physical. That’s Chinese medicine. They don’t even call it mind and body. It’s just the mind body. It’s one. And so when I was reading your book and learning more about you, I was like, oh, that is totally how you see this human organism. You don’t separate these parts out. You treat it holistically. Now, because you’re training Western medicine, why I was excited and am excited to talk to you and have you on here is it’s the credibility factor. We’re going through what I think is a paradigm shift right now. And people, high achievers that I get to see in my practice, I see a lot of lawyers and executives, entrepreneurs, women going through perimenopause or in the menopause stage of their life, and they’re struggling a bit.

And they’ve done the things that they thought would make them happy. Maybe the relationship, the income, the job that they always wanted, but yet something’s missing on the inside. And the reason I wanted you to be on here is there’s shamans out there, there’s yoga teachers out there talking about spirituality, but it kind of gets dismissed because you’re like, well, who are you? How do you have an authority to talk about this? But you’re trained. You went to Yale, Yale School, you’ve gone to med school, Stanford. And so the fact that you’re talking about spirituality, I think it allows people to open up and listen because, oh, she’s done the track that is on the material level, the Western level. You’ve done this stuff, you know this, and yet you’re still gravitating to this other aspect, this Eastern understanding. And so that’s one of the reasons why I wanted you to come and talk to our audience because you’re kind of living in both worlds and it seems like you’ve training in both worlds, and that’s what we need right now.

Anna Yusim 

I completely agree. And as I was training to go to medical school, I had no idea that ever my, first of all, my life or certainly my professional career would move in this direction. I was trained as a hardcore bonafide psychiatrist, did my undergraduate in biology and philosophy at Stanford, went to Yale Medical School, and then did my psychiatry residency at NYU. And then interesting and unusual things started happening in my life that completely took my life in a different direction. And that was when, in trying to make sense of those unusual things, which I’m happy to tell you about, that was when I started integrating these other ways of thinking and being in order to explain to myself what was really going on in my life. So for instance, towards the end of my residency, I remember I started becoming more interested in this concept of soul, right?

So psychiatrist has the word psyche in it. Psyche can be translated as either mind or soul, but so technically I’m a doctor of the mind or a doctor of the soul depending on who you ask. Now, being a doctor of the soul, nobody, not once in any of my residency or medical school training, taught me about this concept of soul. They never even mentioned it. And so I was towards the end of my residency thinking, I’m a doctor of soul, but I don’t even know what the soul is. And I’m like, there’s other cultures where people really focus more on the soul of healing. And I started going to lectures, and started understanding this. And I remember going to a lecture at my synagogue and then coming back home and feeling pulled, almost pulled to go into this ice cream shop. So I’m sitting and eating my ice cream and this woman comes up to me and says, “I’m a psychic.” And she has this young child next to her, “I’m a psychic.

Can I have this message for you? Can I give you a message?” And she looked relatively innocuous. I’m like, “Sure, give me your message.” So this woman sits down and starts telling me all of these truths about my life that she has no possible way of knowing. Many things certainly aren’t written, maybe written in my journal, maybe, but all the way down to certain details, like the name of the guy who I had a crush on at the time, who she certainly had no way of knowing any of this. And after that experience, it just left me dumbfounded. What just happened? What was she tapping into? How did this woman know these things about me? And what does this say about this model of the mind that I was taught in medical school? So it’s experiences like this that led me to think broader and deeper.

Was that just an anomaly or does the mind work a little bit differently than I’ve been taught? Does information exist not just within the content of my neurons, but actually in another place that certain people can tap into in some way and what is that place? So I went down that inquiry and it was those kinds of experiences of which I had many after that experience that led me to then think a little bit more broadly about healing and the mind.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. And being a medical doctor then, what does science tell us? Because that’s kind of your model, right? It could have been a fluke. There could be reasons why she knew things that she should not know. And from your experience, no way she knew things that she just could not know. And in the Western model then, can we repeat this? I believe, I mean, I know at the Noetic Institute of Science at IONS, I know the SSE, the Society of Science Exploration, they study this stuff. Are you familiar then with other research showing that people can do precognition or people can read your thoughts and where are these thoughts then if they’re not in our mind? Because you know what I know about my listeners? They’re open to this, but they may have a conscious or unconscious program that they don’t want to look foolish or naive or stupid, but they want to believe and they need somebody like you to give them some evidence so they can have some permission to be open to learning more about this.

Anna Yusim 

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so thank you for allowing me to speak about this. And I think that there’s so many different questions in this regard. One is the question of what’s really going on and two is the question of what’s the mechanism underlying what’s going on? And three, what are the implications of human beings having certain capacities? And there’s so many different directions in which I can take this question, but first let’s start with saying that these are incredibly interesting, provocative questions that many people are seeking to answer in all sorts of ways, often quite scientifically through research studies. And you’re exactly right that Dean Raden and the folks at the Institute of Noetic Sciences are doing amazing work with this. Dr. Julia Mossbridge there is doing incredible work with this. We at Yale have people like Dr. Al Powers. He’s doing some very interesting work, which I’ll tell you about.

First, let’s take a step back. So what exactly, when this woman gave me these messages about my life, what exactly happened, right? Was she reading my mind? Was she getting some sort of downloads from another far off place? Maybe this mysterious zero point field or what some people call the Akashic records. Is there such a thing as the Akashic records? Is that Carly Young’s collective unconscious that we can all tap into? What are these arcane places that people can access information from? And in another way, was she tapping into a deep intuitive ability of her own that actually we all as human beings to some degree have? And if indeed it is a deep intuitive ability that she happened to be born with this gift, then how does that ability work? So oftentimes this intuitive ability that this particular woman has, and I got to know her, she was a psychic and she was trained from a very early age to develop these psychic abilities.

She had no formal education, but she was a brilliant psychic and able to almost read other people’s minds. So what was she tapping into? And the way that she would describe what she was tapping into is that she has a higher self and she has spirit guides and she would get messages and she would get these messages in a number of different ways. Often these ways are called the clairs, all the ways of intuitive knowing, clairvoyance. When you get a message by seeing something in your mind’s eye, you see a picture or a clairaudience that you hear a voice telling you the answer to something or clairsentience that you know something by virtue of a strong emotional feeling or feeling it in your body or claircognizance that you know just because you know you don’t even know how you know, but you just know.

So these are the channels that were open for this particular woman. And I mentioned Dr. Al Power’s research at Yale. So Dr. Powers studies the specific phenomena of claireaudience or the hearing of voices. Now in my profession, psychiatry, there’s a disease where people hear voices and that’s psychosis or schizophrenia. It’s a very devastating disease, the prognosis of which can be very poor and often leads to a lifetime of medication. Though there are some people who’ve overcome, we never say that you can’t get off medication, we never say that you can’t heal, but nevertheless, it’s often known as a devastating disease. Dr. Powers was studying how hearing voices in that population of chronically ill schizophrenics is different from hearing voices and individuals who are self-proclaimed psychics and hear these voices for the greater good of themselves and perhaps their clients. So voices that are controllable and helpful as opposed to voices that are devastating and sometimes called command auditory hallucinations, telling people to harm themselves, harm others, et cetera, right?

What’s the difference? What’s the difference between the neural chemistry of one group versus the other? So these are the kinds of questions that are being asked at Yale to understand this particular intuitive capacity. And so at Yale, I’m a clinical assistant professor there and we’re starting a mental health and spirituality program and eventually which will be a center. And what we’re going to do with Dr. Powers is we’re going to change the question. Rather than the control group being the voice hearers, the psychics, we’re going to make that the experimental group to better understand how the processes of clairaudience work in their mind and to really go as deep as we can into that. So this is one person doing such research. There are so many more and I’m so happy to talk about all of them.

Lorne Brown 

Well, I want to unpack this even more. Dean Raden, by the way, a plug and Julie Mosbridge, both I’ve had on the Coherence Podcast. And Dean said the following, because some of the questions we know, but we don’t know why. And he says, because I had him on, we’re talking about manifestation and consciousness. And I would say, and why, and why? And he would have an answer and answer it. And then eventually says, if you ask that enough, we currently will come to a place where we say we don’t know. We know sometimes something will work before we can understand the mechanism. And so this is what my sense is from reading your book, the four Claires that you mentioned, it seems like science is accepting that this is something that exists and they’re just trying to understand it better. But it is not my understanding that you believe that people have these abilities or that some people can tap into this from your own experience and from what you’ve seen in the research.

Anna Yusim :

100%. And I believe that all of us can develop that ability, those abilities within ourselves. We won’t necessarily be as talented as people with this inborn ability because I do believe there’s a strong genetic basis and that there’s also a certain vulnerable period early on in people’s life where if you develop those capacities, they can blossom. Whereas developing them later on, it’s a little bit more challenging. But yes, I do believe that this is an inborn ability that can be understood and studied scientifically and we are developing the means, but we do not yet have the means fully. And the means could be within our Newtonian scientific universe in a more linear model of reality. And it could be in a more quantum understanding of reality to which we’re only now beginning to transition.

Lorne Brown 

Now you said something about the voices. We’re talking about schizophrenia, for example. So I would say I believe I’ve had my own experiences. So I’m a believer in that sense because of experience, although parts of my brain constantly says, are you sure? But one part is the harm. Somebody once told me or shared with me that if you ever are getting messages and it tells you to go harm yourself, you’re not tapping into the source. So I just want to check in with you because some people do hear those voices. I wanted to clearly state, because people may go, “Oh, I’m hearing this too. I’m being told to do this. ” From your philosophy, from the science, from what you subscribe to your belief system, people can get messages, but so far the messages are not about harming either or harming self. Is that my understanding?

Anna Yusim

Well, yes. Okay. So this is a way in which that question is often asked: how do you tell the difference between your intuition and your fear? How do you know if something’s coming from a place that you’re supposed to listen and heed the guidance or a place that’s your own darkness that we all as human beings have, our own ego consciousness, which could be any manifestation of ego, including fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, rage, all of those things. And your answer is a good one, meaning that if the end result of you acting on the guidance is going to be to contract you, to make you less, to make your world smaller, then it’s probably not from a good place and not from a place of higher consciousness and your higher self. If however, the end result of the action that’s being purported would actually expand you, enable you to go against your nature, to push against your boundaries, to become a better version of yourself, then that’s probably coming from your intuition.

Lorne Brown 

I want to know more about your influences like you’ve studied. So we know med school, medicine. I think I’ve heard you’ve studied or are familiar with Course of Miracles.

Anna Yusim

I love A Course of Miracles. And I studied that for a while and Marianne Williamson’s work with that. I think it’s very powerful. And one of the most powerful concepts is that often a miracle is a shift in perception. That’s one of my favorite concepts of a Course and Miracles. And let’s say one more thing about Course and Miracles. The coolest thing I think about Course and Miracles is that the person who essentially downloaded or channeled the download for Course and Miracles was Helen Schickman, who was a professor at Columbia, who was a scientist, a psychologist who got this download and then got out of the way, let the download come through. But this is how so much inspired information can come through in the most unexpected ways to the most unexpected people.

Lorne Brown

Now, she did that. What year was that decade that she did that? Do you remember?

Anna Yusim 

I don’t remember exactly, but it was within the last hundred years, I believe. Oh

Lorne Brown

Yeah, for sure. I thought it was the 70s, maybe late 60s. I can’t remember, 70s, 80s

Anna Yusim 

Yeah, I think that that’s right. 

Lorne Brown

I think that’s right. The reason I bring it up, you have to check out this book if it’s still in print by Vernon Howard called The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power written in the 60s. So one thing I was pretty certain on, because when I learned the course of miracles, I had read in the 90s that book, and they’re the same. And his book is before the Course of Miracles, which I’m sharing that truth is truth. It has existed for a while. But when I say the same, the principles are very … They’re aligned. So anyways, this material’s been around. And then when I was sharing some of my thoughts and processes to a friend whose Buddhist name says, “That’s Buddhism, that’s 2,000 years old.” So truth is truth, truth has been around. So Course of Miracles, Eckert Tolle, that’s his book, right? Course of Miracles, that’s what got him.

So those are the principles there. I think you’ve done Joe Dispenza retreats.

Anna Yusim 

I’ve done a lot of Joe Dispenza retreats and it was amazing for me to experience the healing power of a collective field and how magic happens in that field for so many people. And I’ve known so many people who’ve had miraculous recoveries in those retreats and including some of my patients.

Lorne Brown 

Maybe we’re at the same one. And then I studied Kabbalah in the late 90s, and then I just did another course recently. And I understand Kabulah, you’ve studied that as well.

Anna Yusim 

I did. I did. That was actually my entry point into spirituality, and this was towards the end of my residency training. So right when my psychiatric training was coming to an end and my spiritual training was only about to begin. So it was very interesting how things happened in my life and the right timing. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. And the first teacher was Kabala.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. So now it’s always nice for the audience to know your influence, right? Have you had your own personal experiences? So you have the ice cream shop where somebody came in and they read you and a quick tangent, do you subscribe to the idea that the brain is like a receiver and this information’s there? That’s why this person can pick up on this and other people. Is that kind of or-

Anna Yusim

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

Yes. Have you had other experiences besides the research that you get to read and be part of, but have you had other experiences that has brought you into this, what I call inner work or conscious work?

Anna Yusim 

Absolutely. And you mentioned that in my book that you’re on chapter nine, it’s in chapter nine, 10, 11, and 12 that I talk about all my personal experiences with spirituality, of which there have been so many, including with my patients. So first and foremost with my patients, and it’s gone both ways where patients have had dreams about me of something they could have no way of knowing, and then the dreams are correct and accurate. And then I have dreams about patience also of things I have no way of knowing and the dreams are correct and accurate. And those are things that have happened prior to my writing the book. But I feel that continuing on a spiritual path, this becomes not anomalous experiences that are distinct parts of your life. This becomes your life. You have more and more synchronicities that start to define the way that you see the world and the way that your life shapes up as far as the people who come in at a given time, the doors that open, the doors that close.

And I think that in our interaction with the divine and our guidance of the divine, there are two primary ways in which we can interact. One is through intuition, through the clairs, which is the internal way that we can connect to spirit. And I mentioned the concept of soul before. I believe that our intuition, that still quiet voice within, that can only be heard when the other much louder voices of reason and emotion are temporarily quiet. So intuition is the voice of the soul. And when we can tap into our intuition, we have the best, I guess, connection to divine guidance, and that’s the internal way in which we can be divinely guided. The external way is through synchronicity. Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence. This is a term coined by Carl Young in response to, or in our understanding to two situations that are temporally related, but not causally related, such as I think about somebody and then they call me.

My thinking about someone didn’t make them call me, but yet the fact that they occurred close together makes those things meaningful to me. Or I have a dream about somebody and then bump into that person on the street the next day. My dream didn’t cause me to bump into that person, but to me it was a meaningful coincidence that those two things corresponded. And so synchronicity is the external way of getting divine guidance. Intuition is the internal way. And to be clear, in order to have good relationships with both intuition and synchronicity and divine guidance, you have to have a very grounded foot on the ground relationship with reality. If you are psychotic and you see all the billboards that’s talking to you and all voices and everything you hear is talking to you, everything’s a synchronicity, and then nothing’s a synchronicity. And the same is if you are hearing voices of schizophrenia that’s untreated, the same thing, also not divine guidance, but an illness.

And so I think that synchronicity and intuition can be very powerfully used for guidance, but coupled with a grounded and healthy mental state.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for that. And now I want to tap in, I’m going to channel my listeners. And I’m saying that jokingly, I’m not a channeler, so using that word figuratively, not literally. So many of the people I see … Oh, by the way, I was that person too. So I’m speaking for myself. I have a friend, speaking for myself. Thinking of my high achievers, and they have constantly overachieved, and we’ll cut to the chase as if they’ve overachieved many of them because there’s such an emptiness inside. So they’re looking for it externally. There’s this void inside, maybe I’ll get it through a relationship, maybe I’ll get it through more money, maybe I’ll get it through more work, and it doesn’t seem to fix it. To me, your book, Fulfilled, is for this person where you’re like, “I did everything I thought I should do.

I got a medical degree and a specialization. I have kids. I have a partner. I’m doing everything, but something’s not right.” So your experience, please, because you’re an overachiever, look at what you’ve done and your clients and then really tie into this work with Fulfilled because my belief system is you’re not going to get it outside of you. It is something that’s going to come from the inside. And I kind of wanted you to unpack that for our listeners, please. 100%. For those that are struggling.

Anna Yusim 

Yeah. And just like you said, Dr. Lorne, that was my story as well, right? It’s so many of our stories as overachievers that we continue to achieve and that achievement can be with achievement and accomplishments, or it could be with money, status, power, or doing all the right things, milestones, whatever that is. Whatever we believe society is telling us that we should do, we are doing it all. And then why don’t we feel happy or fulfilled inside? And then you ask yourself, “What life am I really living? Is it my life? Am I living an authentic life? Or am I doing what I believe I’m supposed to do without ever really having checked in with myself?” And so let’s also be clear, we live in a society where we have the luxury to check in with ourselves. Not every society has that luxury. Not every society is able to look within and say, “Am I being authentic?” And that we have the choice to make different decisions as to how we live our lives and the professions that we move forward with, whether we have a profession or not, who we marry, not everybody has those choices.

We have so much choice and with choice comes great responsibility. But when we continue to achieve without thinking about it, one of two things could happen. One of those things is that we continue to achieve and achieve and achieve. And the more that we achieve, be it money, power, status, fame, whatever else, the emptier we feel. And what I- Oh, can

Lorne Brown 

You say that again? Because that was my life and so many people listening, I think that’s an important point to highlight.

Anna Yusim 

Absolutely. Absolutely. So what can happen oftentimes is that we continue to achieve because we’re not sure how to feel better. And we think that if we have more achievement, status, money, power, fame, even love, whatever that is, that we’re going to be whole, but actually the opposite happens. The more of it that we have, the emptier we feel. And I think that what happens then is that we become victims of a psychological addiction, psychological addictions to money, power, status, fame, accomplishment, whatever else, it doesn’t fulfill us. We think that it should, but it doesn’t. And I’m also not saying that any of these are bad things. Of course, they’re in moderation and some people, and even in excess, money, power, status, all good things, enjoy, pursue them. But when the more of it you have, the emptier you feel, that’s when you start to question, is this perhaps a psychological addiction?

Yeah. When we think of addiction, we think of addictions more as addictions to a substance, like to a food or a drug, alcohol, or we think a behavioral addiction, like to exercise or video games, but very rarely do people think of psychological addictions that you can actually be addicted to money, power, status, et cetera. And in the same way as drugs fill a void for people, so does money, power, status, et cetera. And so what is your relationship with that which you’re looking to bring into your life? Does it make you feel whole and does it make you feel whole in a sustained way or does it actually undermine you at some point and do you need to change your relationship with that?

Lorne Brown 

And from your experience and the people you work with and coach as well, it’s not just your medical practice, but coaching, this turning inside then is what we’re asking people to do, right? It’s an inside job doing the internal work. You have to be willing to feel uncomfortable when I’m looking through your book and your exercises because you have to come alongside these uncomfortable feelings, observe them and be with them. You come up against your shadow. So when you do this or when you work with people, is it all easy peasy or do people come up against Instance and come up against these feelings. So it does require some courage. It does require willingness to feel your uncomfortable feelings.

Anna Yusim 

If it’s all easy peasy, you could do it on your own. Oftentimes, this is the hardest work that you will ever do. And the people that often come to me for this work are brilliant, amazing people. This is hard work. It’s hard work to identify what needs to be seen and then to actually uproot it from your life in a sustained way. This is often the hardest work that you will ever do. And it’s also so interesting. So today is March 2nd, which is the full lunar eclipse, the blood moon, but also the Jewish Holiday of Purim. And both Dr. Lorne and I are fasting. Today, I’m drinking coffee fast. You’re doing, I think, a full fast. It’s something that you do for this holiday. But this is a festival or holiday that is all about lifting your masks. And actually, part of what you do for Purim is you dress up.

And so part of the work of doing and getting to the root of what you need and who you are is lifting the mask, being able to get into true authenticity. Honesty, the greatest form of honesty with others, but first and foremost, with yourself. And that means embracing your shadow. And what is this shadow? The shadow is that disavowed part of you that at some point in your life you were told is unlovable and unacceptable. And so you disavow it. And you often move it outside of your consciousness in such a way that you’re not even aware. And you’re not even aware. And it comes back because what we don’t own owns us. And what we resist persists, it comes back in other parts of your life and ends up undermining you. So owning your shadow, integrating your shadow is a huge part of the work that I do with my clients.

Lorne Brown 

I wrote a whole blog post on this from the Star Wars show called Picard. I don’t know if you ever watched Star Wars, but the data and lore, the twin robots, one is Dart, the Shadow One is light. And there’s a whole thing about him that only became whole and complete when they stopped fighting and he actually became whole and complete when he fully accepted the shadow. So just a sidebar of integration here. Now, when you talk about being authentic, because it’s that idea of accepting that aspect of yourself, right? Because when you reject it, you said, I want to use a few of the words, what you resist persists. And what I’ve heard, you don’t have a secret, a secret has you. You said something about owning. What’s the owning one?

Anna Yusim 

Yeah. What you don’t own owns you.

Lorne Brown 

So I’ll share with you, through observation in my practice, at the time of this recording, 26 years into practice, but early days, it became apparent to me that somewhere around age 40 with my clients, a majority of them are women. I do a lot of reproductive health, perimenopause, menopause, but somewhere around 40 plus or minus five years, people had wake up calls, as in whatever they were doing before to keep their symptoms and life at bay did not work. It would work for a week, a month, and then it would show up again or show up somewhere else. My reasoning is that we have things that we come in intergenerationally, which I’ll ask you to say whether you agree or not through the science. So trauma, stuck energy is what we call in Chinese medicine, cheese stagnation. It comes intergenerationally or gets imprinted on you as a child, not by choice, but based on your gender, socioeconomic status, where you live, who your teachers were, gets imprinted on you.

And as a survival mechanism, it gets stored because you just don’t have the capacity to deal with it. So it just gets put away in the cells.

Anna Yusim

100%. In such a deep way, Dr. Lorne, that resonates. And so whenever I think about causes of symptoms that patients come with, I always think about the biopsychosocial spiritual model, that everything has biological causes, psychological causes, social causes, spiritual causes. And what you’re talking about, that the issues are in your tissues, those are the biological causes. And that is genetic propensities. Those are environmental toxins that may be stored in our bodies and in ourselves from our whole life. That’s our exposure to EMFs, of which we’re only beginning to understand the true effects of that. This is the diet that we eat, this is our exercise, and then there’s psychologically intergenerational transmission. And this is our epigenetics and also certain patterns of how we were raised and our unconscious defenses and the way in which we process emotions and the habits that we have. And then socially, our support system, the important people, all of which gets imprinted in ourselves and spiritually, our relationship with the divine, that also has biological antiseasons.

And at Yale, Dr. Mark Potenza, together with Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia are doing these really interesting studies on trying to identify which brain region spiritual experiences reside in. If spiritual experiences reside in certain brain regions, they also reside within certain cells. And so it’s super interesting. So I completely agree with what you’re saying, and I think that that’s part of the multifaceted nature of how we carry everything in our mind, body, and spirit.

Lorne Brown 

So the second part then, because this is somatic work, when the issues are stuck in your tissues or in Chinese medicine, the energy is stuck in there because emotions, energy emotion, that’s what emotions are, and they get stuck in your body. The work to do it, my understanding is a lot of it’s somatic and it’s bidirectional. So there’s talk therapy, like you can talk about it, but there’s body therapy. That’s why breathwork or acupuncture or EFT, emotional freedom technique, the somatic work I think is very important to get it out of your tissues. And I’m curious about your take on this because I say to my patients, most of the time you can’t think your way through this. So for people like me, I want to have peace. I don’t have peace and I want peace. I have this underlying anxiety. I feel empty. Great, I want this.

But this is not something you can just sit down and do. There is a process and you have to trust the process. So when I was going through your book, the writing exercises, you talked about it’s simple, right? It’s simple, not easy. Psych K has this beautiful intention before we do. Psych K is another one of those energy psychology techniques. This work is simple, powerful, effective, and playful. And the simple part is anybody can do this, but it’s not easy, otherwise everybody would do it. Like you said, sometimes you need support. So I want to hear a little bit more than, again, for myself and for our listeners. This is not something you can just think your way through. This is stuff that you have to get into. I talked about that noise, these old programs, these undigested emotions that are stuck in your tissues, there are ancient techniques which modern science like yourself are bringing into the clinic or through coaching sessions to help on a somatic level, body level, have these released.

And so can you touch a bit on that, that it’s a bidirectional?

Anna Yusim 

Definitely. Definitely. And so I also believe, this is one of my main criticisms of the current state of Western medical psychiatry, the majority of psychiatry, right? That the current psychiatric paradigm is twofold. Psychotherapy for the mind and psychopharmacology for the brain. What’s missing in this paradigm is the body and the spirit. And the body is exactly what you’re saying. The fact that the mind body is actually one that they’re so connected and that so much pain, suffering, hardship, et cetera, exists in ourselves and in our bodies. And actually working directly through the body enables ways to release certain things. And I also want to be clear, everybody’s very different to different degrees for different people. There’s some people for whom the existing paradigm of psychiatry works beautifully, helps them to overcome and heal or helps them to do that to some degree. And I have certainly seen that for thousands and thousands of people.

And then I also have seen where the current psychiatric paradigm is limited and insufficient for people, despite their best efforts and doing everything that psychiatry says they should do, they still have symptoms and they’re still stuck because there are other causes and other sequelae and other pathways that aren’t being tapped. And all of the somatic processes that you describe, whether emotional freedom technique, somatic experiencing, anything and everything is a huge part, I believe, of psychiatric treatment. And when I think about the body intelligence that needs to be taken into account in order to have a full psychiatric paradigm, we should also focus on nutritional psychiatry, which is our diets. We should focus on exercise. We should focus on healthy sexuality and pleasure. We should focus on longevity and fertility, and we should focus on metabolic psychiatry, and we should focus on inflammation, all these other things that have been shown to have … And the gut-brain relationship that has been shown to have a huge impact on mental health, but isn’t necessarily part of the primary dialogue.

Lorne Brown 

For me, in my world, this is how we’re trained. I just keep smiling when I hear somebody like you that’s trained like this. I call you Doctor 2.0, and that’s who I have on my podcast. You mentioned Dean Raden, I’ve had Lisa Miller, all these medically trained people that are practicing holistic. I just think it’s nice how the East and West are coming together. It gives me so much hope for medicine and the health of our world. Well, you didn’t talk about it, but you talked about sexuality, having good sexuality and health. And I was thinking about relationships. I got to talk to Dr. Anna about relationships. Again, the women I see come in either wanting to grow their families or wanting to be symptom free in their perimenopause, menopause phase. But what I have found interesting is that the majority of them end up having a hit on their partner, as this is a big stress point for them.

So I want to hear a little bit about the spiritual work around relationships and what they serve, meaning, so relationships aren’t here to make you happy. They’re here to make you conscious. And we hear through Buddhism, through suffering, we can awaken. I’ve added to the quote that relationships aren’t here to make you happy, they’re here to make you conscious. And when you’re conscious, you are happy. You just don’t need the relationship. The relationship isn’t your source of joy anymore. It’s your spiritual connection, so you have joy. And the relationship is this pleasure, it’s temporary, but whether the relationship is there or not, your happy question’s high, you’re good. And it just adds to it. It’s not like you don’t enjoy it, but it’s not the source of your happiness. But if you would love to unpack that quote as well as how relationships are your mirror and an opportunity for your growth, I would love for that to come from a psychiatrist who’s also a coach who does spiritual work because you have a holistic view of this.

Anna Yusim

Sure, sure. And there’s so much there. I feel like I could answer this question for the next 15 minutes, but I’ll give a few thoughts on this. So in Kabala, they also said that if you’re looking to grow, there’s two ways that we can live life, right? There’s the path of comfort and complacency and the path of growth and transformation. And if you’re choosing the latter, you can only do so much of it on your own. Eventually, you’re going to need a relationship partner to continue your growth. Now that’s one cabalistic view. Some people may agree, some people may not agree. And it’s true that we think that we are drawing in what we want, but actually oftentimes the mirror principle says that we are drawing in not what we want, but who we are. So if you want to draw in the best possible partner, become the best possible partner.

The qualities that you’re looking to draw in, develop those and cultivate those in yourself. And as far as the relationships not necessarily making you happy, but making you conscious, I think that that’s true. And also, part of our purpose here is growth. And you can think of purpose according to Plato versus purpose according to Aristotle. Some people, Plato, believe that it was about happiness, but some people like Aristotle believe that it was actually more about purpose and meaning. And sometimes meaning, even if it doesn’t make you happy, is deeply important for growth because we have to overcome it in order to truly have meaningful, purposeful lives. And that’s the case with relationships. Hopefully, there’s certain places where people will draw the line with respect to relationships. So the only time I will tell someone you have to leave is if there’s actually clear abuse, sometimes neglect, but usually abuse.

And that unfortunately happens, and that’s not purposeful or meaningful. If you are being abused, you need to leave and that’s on you and it’s a very big responsibility. Now, for other situations, you oftentimes when you meet somebody are given a gift. And at the beginning, in the love infatuation phase, you’re giving a lot of free energy with a lot of joy without you having to work very hard for it. And then afterwards, the relationship goes to become a normal relationship and the person falls off the pedestal and becomes a normal person with imperfections and mistakes that they will make in the relationship. And then you have to work back to get to this space of ultimate infinite love and many people, and sometimes the relationship makes it, sometimes it doesn’t. And it’s really, like you said, finding someone with whom you could do that conscious work, who’s turned in the same direction as you, as far as their life goals and what they’re looking for out of the relationship and is willing to do the work with the same capacity as you.

There’s a lot of mismatches in all those ways. And we see all of those. I see all those as a psychiatrist. I do a lot of couples therapy, but ultimately a good relationship can be your greatest source of support and a bad relationship can be the greatest undermining thing in someone’s life.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for that. And it’s an opportunity for growth and nobody’s suggesting that your relationship is not supposed to make you unhappy. It was just that it’s not here to make you happy. It’s here for you to grow. Echotoli has a quote that you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. Buddhism says pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And so when I work with individuals and for myself even, that’s the whole idea is what, not that it’s to me that idea it’s happening for me. What’s the opportunity? What’s being mirrored to me? And as you were sharing what you’re looking for in a partner, to me, it’s as if what I’m looking for in a partner is what I’m missing inside of me. So how do I cultivate what I heard? How do I cultivate that inside of me? Then you’re not needy. I don’t need them to be a certain way for me to be happy because I have that love affair with myself.

I have that acceptance and I am loving. I’m connected. If I may, I’ll share my metaphor and use it as you like, but I feel like we’re all walking around like glasses of water with water in it. And as you bump into people and they give you water, you’re like, oh, I really like them. It feels good because they’re giving you water. But the person who keeps giving you water is like, oh my God, I feel so empty around this person. They’re a drain, right? I don’t feel so good. What we really want to do is turn on the faucet above our glass. We want to tap into our higher self, get tapped in. So our glass is constantly filling up and overflowing. So when somebody comes to take your water, you wouldn’t even notice they’re taking your water because as they’re taking your water, yours is continually filling up and overflowing.

Does that-

Anna Yusim 

I love that. Absolutely. I love what you’re sharing and I think that that is right on so many levels. And I also, yeah, I agree and I feel that ultimately in filling your own cup, you’re doing a favor for the whole relationship. And it also makes me think of what Henry Grayson in his book Mindful Loving said in that one person through their own consciousness can change the whole relationship. And so often I will have one person come to me, not the couple, and the person’s very distraught by the state of the relationship. And so I teach them the concept of holding space, being able to, with their consciousness, tap into the best version of what they see in their partner and to give a few minutes a day to that. What does that person look like? What does that person sound like? What does that person smell like?

And actually invoke their feelings. What does it feel like to be in the room with that person and to give a little bit of time and space to the best version. Because oftentimes in our mind, our partner will be not what we want them to be, and then we’ll devolve and not see the best, but see the worst. And then through our thoughts, we actually reduce the person. So we can, through our thoughts, uplift the person. And that’s a very powerful concept of holding space.

Lorne Brown

I want to add to this demeanor part. And again, my teacher really helped me with this. Gila Golav, if you had a judgment like doing the kind of the Byron Katie work, going through the inquiry, and I would say, if my partner’s needy or being manipulative, should you go, “Who?” And I go, “My partner, who?” And the whole idea is, okay, where am I rejecting the needy part in me that when I see it in somebody else, it’s triggering me. And so again, this idea of they’re your mirror, they’re a chance for growth. And then adding to Ekar Tolle, he talks about relationships that when you do this conscious work, you either, because you talked about the abusive relationship, you leave in love, the relationship. So it’s for your highest good. So you leave in love or you come together and the love expands, right?

But love is still there either way. So you can, and Eckhart Tolle said he says, you can remove yourself from a situation consciously. That would be leaving an abusive relationship or you can consciously change or improve the relationship by being a really good listener doing your work. And if you can’t do either, he says you can still be at peace in an unhappy situation. So I still think it comes back to your book, fulfilled that regardless of your job, regardless of the relationship that you feel fulfilled. And the key here is mentally, you can have both. You cannot like the situation and be fulfilled.That’s the message I’m getting from your book. If you do this inner work, the external world will do the thing. You may be able to manifest and do some influencing to it, but the world will do the world and you get to choose that your free will is you get to choose how you perceive and give it meaning, but you can be at peace even if the external world doesn’t match up to your desires.

That’s the kind of thing I’m getting from your book. 100%.

Anna Yusim 

Absolutely. 100%. And the reality is that we’re not always going to be happy. We’re not always going to be happy with what comes into our life, with the circumstances, with other people, et cetera. And we want to get to a place within us that we can have peace no matter the circumstance, that the circumstances don’t have to be perfect for our inner peace to be undisturbed, that we can have peace in our heart even when there’s chaos on the outside.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. So you cannot like the situation. And then I’ll add then, the peace is that soul part you’re tapping into because it’s very nature is peace and joy. So when you’re tuned into that, you experience peace. When you tune into the external world and give your consciousness to that, you get to experience that and now you suffer.

Anna Yusim 

Absolutely. And it’s very easy to do because right now there are so many things that we can give our consciousness to. There’s so much polarization, there’s so much discord. We’re in the midst of a mental health crisis. You can point your finger to 80 million things that can take away your energy and reduce your vibrational frequency, reduce your joy or reduce your peace. And it’s also completely rational and logical too. People for whom this is happening are not irrational. They’re not illogical, but there is another way. You could be doing something about those things and taking concrete action, advocating for what you believe to be right and be very involved and to still have peace in your heart. It’s very difficult when you are in the midst of a war, but it’s possible.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, that’s the key. It’s possible. And you have a book called Fulfilled. And so for those that are looking to tap into that piece and look, again, the book is simple. It’s just, you have to trust the process and do the practices. By the way, I was that guy that would read all the self-help books, but didn’t do the exercises. And so I will share with the listeners to save you a couple of decades of time that knowing is not enough. The knowledge is not enough. It’s the application of the knowledge that’s going to give you the transformation. So I encourage you to pick up a copy of Fulfilled by Dr. Anna Yusim and not only read it, but at each chapter she gives you a tool and exercise to do to practice those. Dr. Anna Yusim, thank you so much for joining me on the Coherence Code Podcast.

Everybody, go to her website, annausum.com. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. She’s all over social media, so we’ll put that in the show notes. She has coaching, she has her clinical work. What’s the program now that you’re doing at Yale? That’s pretty cool that

Anna Yusim 

Teacher- Yeah, we’re starting a mental health and spirituality program at Yale.

Lorne Brown 

And there’s that. We’re going to put that all in the show notes. And if you go to her website, she’s got blogs on there, interviews on there. There is a wealth of resources on her website. So I want to invite you to go check out her website as well. Anything else you want to share before we wrap up?

Anna Yusim 

Thank you so much, Lorne. That’s wonderful. We are having a 20-person retreat in New York City on April 11th, and if people are interested to be a part of that, they can contact me directly.

Lorne Brown 

Excellent. I’ll put April 11th, 2026, because I never know when somebody is listening to this. Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Co-Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.