Men on the Path to Love
Relationship coach Bill Simpson offers stories and wisdom, to inspire men be the best version of themselves in relationship and live the life they love.
Men on the Path to Love
BONUS: Healing Through Connection & Nervous System Safety with Dr. Matthew Lederman
In this episode, you'll hear my conversation with Dr. Matthew Lederman. With over 20 years in medicine, Matthew shares his journey from traditional physician to connection-centered health innovator after discovering how addressing his own emotional disconnection resolved persistent health issues. He shares how our nervous systems influence every aspect of our health.
Whether you're struggling with health issues, relationship challenges, or simply feeling disconnected, this episode offers insights on how to create more safety in your nervous system to live the life you love!
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Hi and welcome to the Men on the Path to Love podcast bonus episode healing through connection and nervous system safety with Dr Matthew Lederman. In this bonus episode, I'm joined by Dr Matthew Lederman, board certified internal medicine physician and connection-centered health innovator. With over 20 years in medicine, dr Lederman has seen how disconnection from our bodies, emotions and relationships fuels chronic suffering. Through his work blending plant-based science, lifestyle medicine, polyvagal theory and nonviolent communication, he helps people return to a state of safety, presence and connection. He's the co-founder of Connectin, a coaching platform that uses AI and self-assessment to help people reconnect with themselves and those they love, and he's the co-host of the we Be Parents podcast with his wife, dr Alona Pooldate. Matthew is here to share how healing the nervous system can transform not just our health but our lives. So stick around. You just might learn something. It's the Men on the Path to Love podcast. Welcome, matthew, to Men on the Path to Love.
Matthew Lederman:Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, great to have you today and you've been on quite a journey and I know with your experience in trauma-informed care and especially in non-violent communication. I work as a mind-body educator and therapy practitioner at a trauma-informed health clinic and so I see a lot of men there and you know we've got men that have you know, especially in the underserved community, who've been through a lot of violence and you know a lot of struggle in their lives. How did you get into all this in terms of your work?
Matthew Lederman:For me it's always been about optimizing healing and whether it was my journey, you know, to become a physician or to get into nutrition, it was always I was trying to help myself heal and grow. And then I continued to have some health issues that, until I got more familiar with connection, self-connection, dealing with vulnerability and feelings and all that good stuff, I had continued health issues that improved once I started making these changes. So it was a necessary tool for myself, for myself, and then once I saw the impact in my own health and wellbeing and the impact on my family and my life in general, I started bringing that into our practice as life coaches and healers.
Bill Simpson:You know, I can certainly relate to that, you know, with my journey was similar. It's like I was conditioned just like most men are, you know, and not really expressing my emotions, not knowing anything about self-compassion and all those things. And once I got in touch with that and got in touch with my own feelings, my own vulnerability, understanding, empathy and all that, it absolutely shifted and that's part of why I'm in my third career here as a relationship coach for men. What has your experience been with men over the years in terms of what we both went through and how you are with your patients?
Matthew Lederman:I enjoy working with men, I think men, whether it's men or more women I think humans are designed to be compassionate, connected, caring, loving people, and it's just the way we're conditioned, the way we're socialized, the way we cope with trauma that starts to disconnect us from our own hearts, and I like to think of it as a lot of men have guarded hearts, yeah, and learning to identify that, accept it and then how to sort of come out from behind that shield and then practice doing so, is essential. And intimacy between men. It can be very uncomfortable for people at first, sure, sure, but it's the key to healing and to me, ultimately feeling fulfilled and optimizing well-being.
Bill Simpson:With my experience at the health clinic and the men that I see, I don't think they realize at first the health connection to their mental health. It's hard enough getting men to come in for their physical health, right, you know, we just put it off. We put it off we don't want to hear any bad news, but to see how getting in touch emotionally makes a huge difference in the healing process.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, it's remarkable, the evidence now coming out about the impact of mental health and connection and relationships connection to yourself, whether you actually know what you're feeling and can meet your needs, and how you can communicate when you don't want to do something but still do it in a way that's caring and connected. Right. That is a major indicator on health outcomes. I mean they looked at I think it was HIV and the ability you know and AIDS, and one of the big factors of outcome was just things like you know. Can you say you were loved as a child? Can you know, do you help people even when you don't want to? And that's not a good thing. You don't want to force yourself to do something you don't want to. You want to connect and then connect with that person and then meet your own needs while you're caring for other people.
Matthew Lederman:But we've been taught to suppress our needs to maintain attachment. So one of the things that was exciting for me was that when I learned nonviolent communication and I'm one of the few physicians that's actually a certified nonviolent communication trainer and I would think it would be more popular but that nonviolent communication allows you to be authentic and honest with what's really going on inside of you in a way that brings you closer together. So a lot of the work that I do with couples is just sort of share my let them borrow my nonviolent communication skills so that they can stop suppressing, because most people will not say what's really on their mind because they don't want to have a fight with the other person or they're worried it's going to make the other person feel badly and that is a huge, huge weight and it really affects your health.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, because you're holding that in, you're suppressing all that you're really feeling and not expressing it and obviously not getting your needs met because you can't communicate that.
Matthew Lederman:Yes, and now the science is showing us how that actually works. So it looks at pro-inflammatory cytokines and it looks at the different hormones that are released when we suppress or don't share our authentic selves. It looks at the autonomic nervous system and the blood flow and it looks at gene expression at the immune system level, expression at the immune system level. So all of that is affected by things like hey, are we feeling lonely? Are we isolated? Are we disconnected? Do we have meaning and purpose? But now we're actually able to show that that affects all of those things. And it's not just a nice to have because it sounds nice, but it actually is essential to your health, your physical health especially.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, and I think that's so important for men in particular to hear, because, as I said earlier, we tend to brush off getting our health in order. And I'm thinking too, matthew, it's hard enough as men, as we've been conditioned right, and add any adverse childhood experiences they may have had. How does that come into play with your work?
Matthew Lederman:So to me it's another way to measure trauma and work that needs to be in areas that need healing. So I look at it as we all need healing and there's different things that we endured as children and throughout our lives, and can we bring empathy and safety to to each of these people as they explore those things that originally were they shut themselves off from because they couldn't explore them with empathy and safety in the past. So if we but the nice thing is, the body wants to heal and if we create a safe, empathic environment for people to, to sort of rest in, then they can ultimately redo those experiences in a way that integrates, that stops the block and allows flow, in a way that supports healing.
Bill Simpson:And I'm thinking about the man that comes into your practice or my practice, and that's a big feat in itself how do you create that safe environment for him to be able to open up, to even acknowledge that he had been through traumatic events or anything like that?
Matthew Lederman:One of the way I mean there's lots of ways to create safety and build trust. I mean it does listen how I respond. They very quickly get a sense that I'm just trying to be with them. I'm not trying to fix them or advise them or tell them, analyze them. It's about presence and sort of loving, attention and empathy and through that their body helps us know where to go next. So each person is a little bit different but I don't try to heal them, I try to help listen to their body, just like as a physician, with helping someone heal a broken bone. We don't make the bones heal, we line the bones up and then their body heals the bones Right, energetic experiences and sort of how they're thinking and how they're approaching then, once you align those, they can start to heal on their own.
Bill Simpson:You know, thinking about the energy work that I do at the health clinic in helping people who've been through trauma, the whole polyvagal theory. Can you explain that to my listeners as to what that's about and how you incorporate that?
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, so polyvagal theory is really helpful for people to understand. It's a little bit challenging to learn at first, but at a really high level it's basically saying that we experience our environment they call it something neuroceptionception where it's not even what you're thinking, but you're taking in all this information around you sounds and sights and and even your thoughts and then that is helping your body determine if it should increase sympathetic tone, which is your fight or flight response. Right, and the way it does that is by lifting what it calls the vagal break, which is why it's called response. And the way it does that is by lifting what it calls the vagal break, which is why it's called polyvagal theory. It talks about the vagus nerve, which is a nerve coming out of our brain, sort of extends to the rest of our body and when that break is on it helps us turn down the sympathetics, which is our fight or flight, and shift into that rest, digest, feed and breed that type of response.
Matthew Lederman:So your body is constantly assessing the environment and trying to determine are we safe or is there a threat? And if there's threat, we take the safety break off and go right into sympathetic drive, fight, flight, freeze, faint. If we are not safe, there's meaning that. Or if we are safe, meaning there's no perceived threat, it puts the brake back on and says, okay, now you can rest, digest, feed and breathe. And it's this constant balance. Every second of every minute, your body is assessing the environment and then eventually, over time if you've been in a high threat environment based on how we grew up, your nervous system sort of tunes almost like a guitar that's tuned too tightly towards this hypervigilant state where basically your safety brake doesn't go on as easily and it doesn't go on as fully. So you have more sympathetic fight, flight, freeze, faint, drive at baseline.
Matthew Lederman:And then we can retrain that through messages of safety that we teach people how to experience and how they think and how they talk and what they do. And you can retune that guitar to experience a stronger vagal break to put your system into safety more effectively, to come off appropriately and not come off all the time. So if you hear a bang, it's not a gunshot, it's just a noise, and then you can do. You see I'm saying so then you don't have to go into flight or flight and that that process allows us to understand that you need safety for your gut to work properly. So you need that vagal break on and that message of safety to get communicated through the vagus nerve into your gastrointestinal system. And that's why people, for example, who are in high levels of threat, they'll feel all sorts of, they'll have all sorts of gastrointestinal disorders, because and what they need is, you know, don't just throw vitamins or probiotics or medication on them. You need to help their nervous system shift from threat physiology back to safety physiology.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, because otherwise it's just going to still be there, right? If you don't address the other side.
Matthew Lederman:That's the root problem is that there's so many nervous systems out there right now that don't feel safe and when you are isolated, you know when you are isolated, when you don't have authentic connection with other people, when you are not comfortable sharing what you're feeling and needing because you think someone's going to get angry or pull away from you. All of that puts your nervous system into a what we call threat physiology, which affects and wreaks havoc on all these different organs and organ systems, like your gastrointestinal system. That requires safety to function properly.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, and I can imagine too a lot of the men that I see and patients that I see at the clinic who are, like I said, the underserved community. They're surrounded by violence every day. There's stress and violence within their own home and in their neighborhood. And then I think about, I don't know, say, people that live in Ukraine or maybe Israel and Iran now, with all the threat of war and the bombings and all that going on constantly in their lives and they're brought up around that. That's in pretty deep. How long of a process on average, is it to someone to finally get to that place where they feel safe after all the trauma, all the PTSD they've been through?
Matthew Lederman:Well, that's where you have. It depends what type of changes they make. So big changes lead to big results. So if you change your environment and you change the people that you're interacting with, or at least how you show up with those people, if you're changing the work you do or how you show up at work, because you don't even have to change your job and your friends you have to change how you show up in your job, how you show up with your friends, and if you change what you're watching, how many people are watching?
Matthew Lederman:I mean, my wife and I were just surprised by when we changed the type of television we watched from, you know, violent. You know there's this bad guy and a good guy and the good guy has to beat, kill the bad guy versus shows that are more heartfelt. Or do I, you know, my in a city environment where there's honking and yelling and all sorts of messages of threat all around me? Or do I get more time in rural areas where there's trees and nature and comfort? So it really depends what messages of safety you're giving your body throughout the day, and I don't think people realize how many messages of danger or threat they feed their system minute by minute, every day.
Bill Simpson:Sure, yeah, not only their physical environment they live in, like you said, like the media, the news is probably constant and they don't even realize it. And then, once they're conscious of it and that's the key here, I think, is to be conscious of what they're actually feeding themselves, because they may not even realize they're just adding on top of their stress already, right, right.
Matthew Lederman:And that's to me. If you start making these changes, people will find it's nice. It changes pretty quickly if people make big changes when we work with people. It changes pretty quickly if people make big changes when we work with people. We write about this in our sub stack articles. Each week, we write about a topic and how it applies in my life and then we tell people there's ways to take these steps and incorporate them into your life. And it's amazing, even if you don't change every minute, minute, you can have moments where you feel safe and feel the difference, and then that fuels continuing to make new changes. So I think it's really important that people you don't. It's not all or nothing. It's starting to bring messages of safety back into your environment and as you do that, your body starts change.
Bill Simpson:It's like one step at a time. You know it's a process.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah. And if people want to make a bunch of changes right up front, I mean, it's the same thing as making diet change. Yeah, you can change a couple of things and you're going to feel better in those moments. You could just change one meal and you'll feel and you'll notice a difference after that meal. Or you can change all of your meals and all of a sudden you're like wow, and within weeks you know there's huge differences. But people that do it slow and steady and over time make all the changes. To me that's even that's better for those people If the other option was to make a bunch of changes for two weeks and then fall off the wagon. So you really have to know who you are and decide what works best for you. But you know the progress is dependent upon the changes you make.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, they have to be willing to and committed to the process. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned your Substack articles and that you mentioned going through something and then how you got through it. Can you give us an example of that?
Matthew Lederman:Well, for example, one of the things I wrote about one of my favorite articles was when I was dropping off a car at the Newark airport and the guy came up to me and he had a big smile on his face. He said how's it going? And I said, wow, you know, I was taken aback. Your energy was so warm and caring and I really felt that in that moment and by taking a minute to just connect to that energy and that experience, my body felt better. And then I told him how he impacted me in that moment and I said, hey, I want to let you know that really, really changed me. You know, just in that 30 seconds it really shifted me in my body and I just appreciate how you came up that way, cause some people come up and they look like they're unhappy to see me when I go to return my car and he said thank you so much. And then he gave me a card and he said hey, if you don't mind, would you just, you know, email them and let them know about this experience. It really helps me out. I put the card in my pocket. I was like I'm a busy guy, I don't have time to do it, but I decided to say, yeah, I was home, I found the card. I said you know what, I'll take five minutes during a break. But when I wrote the email, I reconnected to that feeling and I said, oh, felt really good again.
Matthew Lederman:So I got another hit of this joy and this connection with this person in this moment that he wasn't even there anymore and I felt again a shift in my body and that's that sense of safety, that's your body feeling safe in that connection, and humans were designed to be connected. So I sent that email off and then I got an email back a couple of days later from his boss and they said thank you so much for writing this, this letter. It really made a big difference and we shared it with the rest of the team and I shared it with this guy who you know, who you helped you and she was really grateful. And then it helped a bunch of other people because they got to read the letter and they were all excited and she was really excited. And then, when I got the letter back from her again, I got another hit of joy because I said, wow, it helped all these other people too. So you see how we feed off each other and that one little smile that took him 20 seconds rippled into all of this joy that spread out.
Matthew Lederman:But it required me to connect to the joy, take it one more step and deliver. You know, share some more joy. And it sounds a little bit corny talking about joy that way, but at the same time I did it and it really felt wonderful in my body every single time. Even telling you the story Now, I have a smile on my face and I get another hit, you know. So why not do that more often? And it's a, it's a practice. We are, we are. We default to finding problems and threat. We have to work at finding joy and celebration.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, and just to add to that ripple, I've got this big shit-eating grin on my face hearing you tell that story, because it just opened up my heart to say, man, that's what humanity is all about. I mean, that's what we've got to do, and that's one little thing. And if people can just remember that you know that this story is amazing. Just to do those simple things, those simple acts of kindness. Look at the ripple effect it had. It's just amazing.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, and you can't soften into that if you're constantly looking for who's screwing you and talking about what, what political person you hate, and complaining about how the world is a terrible place and and and all the news does right now is try to tell you about all the awful things that are happening, who's to blame for it and how to hate more and I'm like, yeah, it doesn't.
Matthew Lederman:It doesn't make my but it doesn't help me in any way because it's not like you know, I I asked people that. I said, when you watch the news like, well, I want to be informed. I'm like great that you're informed, but how does that make your life any better and do you contribute in any meaningful way with that information? Right and everybody says no, yeah and we're talking about ripple effect.
Bill Simpson:It's the same, no matter what energy you're putting out.
Matthew Lederman:If you're putting out this hate and fear, then you're ripple affecting that, you know, yeah, yeah so what I say is it's one thing to watch the news and then go do something constructive with it. It's another thing to just stew over your hate and then think about it over and over again, about how much you hate and how unsafe we are.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, and then say a couple is watching that news, and then maybe they're on the same page and the the story's over. News is over, but they're still going on and on about it. Yeah, and all this negative energy, and and then, if they're on opposite ends of the opinion and there goes an argument, oh boy yeah, there you go so yeah, so so it's.
Matthew Lederman:It's not that I'm saying to not feel your unpleasant feelings, but it's a choice to stew in them. So I liked in NBC we nonviolent communication. We say feel the feeling. Hey, when I, when I hear about that story on the news, I feel really sad and a little bit helpless and I even feel some anger because I want, I want people to treat other people with more care and kindness and feel that, and you can mourn that.
Matthew Lederman:But once you're done, then stop. And the stop for me and for me stop stands for I take a second. And the S is I'm safe, the T is there's time, there's no urgency, there's no emergency. And the O is hey, everything is okay for me right now, in this moment. So there's safe, there's time and I'm okay in this moment.
Matthew Lederman:And then the P is notice something positive. And I'll look outside and sometimes I'll see a beautiful tree, or I'll see my wife, or I'll look at my kids and I'll smile at them and I won't just be, it's not intellectual, it's got to be a felt experience and I'll feel the love towards my daughter and I'll say oh, I just, I'm just so happy looking at you right now and I'm so glad you're in my life and she'll look back at me and smile big smile. And I just said I just stopped and I shifted my energy and it's a choice. So I'm not saying to not feel things, don't be a Pollyanna and pretend those don't exist, but feel it and then choose how you want to spend your energy after you're done feeling it.
Bill Simpson:I appreciate you saying that. I love the acronym and that's it. If we are stuffing on those feelings or not allowing us to have them or, like you said, being Pollyanna and like affirmation, you know in a way, well, you're not acknowledging the pain, you're not acknowledging the suffering and the emotion that you went through and then, once you feel it, allow yourself to accept it, and then then you go to the affirmation or the positive feeling that you get, yeah, to to counter that, instead of stuffing it and moving on.
Matthew Lederman:I love that. It's like when people worry about something bad happening.
Bill Simpson:Right, I'm like if you worry about it.
Matthew Lederman:Right, right, and I'm like that's okay to think about it. If there's no action to take and you're just imagining, then why not imagine it's a wonderful outcome? And they'll be like that's silly, that's not going to happen. I'll be like, well, hey, we don't know what's going to happen and it may not, but at least every time you think about it until the actual event, it's as if you had an amazing outcome. So if someone has an amazing event happening a week from now and they think about it 10 times between now and the event, you just had 10 wonderful experiences because you thought of the best possible outcome. Now, maybe the event is a terrible experience still, but now that you had 10 wonderful experiences and one bad outcome, On the other hand, if you're thinking about that experience a week from now, you think about 10 times between now and then. And they're all terrible outcomes. You just had 11 terrible experiences. Why not have 10 wonderful and one bad versus 11 bad? You know, just do the math.
Bill Simpson:Yeah.
Matthew Lederman:So it sounds a little silly, but try it and you can choose what you imagine about. In fact, the reason we have imaginations, in my experience, is it allows us to heal in a way that you can't without imagination.
Bill Simpson:And that's the power of the mind and the power of healing through the mind, and all those things you're saying Exactly. Yeah, it's great.
Matthew Lederman:So people think it's a little silly. But you can choose how you want to spend your energy. And when you think about miserable experiences and terrible outcomes, your body can't tell the difference between what's really happening and what you're imagining happening. But similarly, if you imagine something wonderful, your body can't tell the difference whether it's real or not, so it gets all the same. You know pleasure chemicals flowing throughout the body. When you imagine something wonderful, it's a beautiful thing.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, it really is. And the challenge for a lot of people, and myself included, and us as humans, is, you know, we're so used to going down that negative slope and it takes effort to bring that kind of responding to your subconscious in a way to, you know, see the positive versus where the glass half full versus half empty, kind of thing.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, it's a habit and it's a pattern and we can change those. But it does take a little work because right now we're choosing to continue the habits we developed up until now. It's not a choice when we go to our default state. It's just old habits. So why not replace them with new ones so that our new default is different?
Bill Simpson:And I apply that to relationship as well, my old relationship patterns you know okay let's see how that works for you. Okay, now that I'm aware of them, all right, now I need to change those patterns, and I can because I see the impact that it's had on me.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, I mean, it's so, it's so important, and I think if people are resonating with this, you know, like I said, we talk every week. We put something in our sub stack about it's free to help people. Just take one concept Do you see how I'm? I mean, I'm struggling all the time and it's that awareness of it's not that I get it right, it's that I'm aware and I'm doing my best to get back on my my path. To me that it's. It's like meditation.
Matthew Lederman:Success in meditation is not not focusing on your breath all the time, it's being able to bring yourself back to your breath when you lose focus, exactly, and that, to me, is the same, the same with this work around joy and connection and creating these new habits. So I think that you know we, we talk. We have a podcast too I don't know if you know that called we Be Parents, and it's all about helping parents bring more connection into the family, more nonviolent communication in the family. That's great, and it's all about helping parents bring more connection into the family, more nonviolent communication in the family.
Matthew Lederman:That's great, and it's the same thing. It's just practice. You don't have to parent the way you were brought up or the way your parents parented. That's just default behavior.
Bill Simpson:You can make new choices.
Matthew Lederman:Exactly, you can make new choices and create new habits.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, that's great. Choices and create new habits yeah, that's great. Well, I feel like I could talk to you for the rest of the evening. I know we're on a time schedule here. Matthew, tell us more about how we can get in touch with your practice and your podcast and Substack all those things. Yeah, thanks.
Matthew Lederman:So if people go to Substack and they look for Connection Docs, so if people go to.
Matthew Lederman:Substack and they look for Connection Docs, they can find us, or Dr Alona and Dr Matt you'll find us. And then if you go to WeBeParentscom, you can find our podcast. It's on all the major podcast apps and, yeah, WeBeParentscom, and those are really the two places. I mean our website is ConnectionDeparentscom and those are really the two places. I mean our website is connectiondocscom if they want more information about that and working with us. But if you're really looking just to get more of a taste of this work, the Connection Docs Substack and the we Be Parents podcast are great places for free content.
Bill Simpson:Awesome, and I'll make sure all those links are in the show notes so everybody can Thank you.
Matthew Lederman:Thank you, I appreciate your support.
Bill Simpson:All right, dr Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to share what you're doing. I really love what you're doing out there and I just wish more doctors were embracing what you're doing, because I know there's the white coat syndrome and you know the guys who come into my clinic and you know they don't get that trauma-informed approach, they don't get the nonviolent communication approach. It's very cut and dry and I just wish more doctors were doing this. So my hat's off to you.
Matthew Lederman:Oh, thank you Bill.
Bill Simpson:I really appreciate it. And that's a wrap for this episode of the Men on the Path to Love podcast. I'm Bill Simpson, your host. Thank you for listening and thanks again to my guest, dr Matthew Lederman, and, as I mentioned, you can find Matthew's contact information in the show notes and if you have any questions, you can reach me at my website, menonthepathtolovecom. And hey, I hope you got something out of listening to this podcast and if you did, please share the link to this podcast and share the love. And until next time, keep your heart open and stay on the path to love.