The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode - #371 - Elisabeth McKay 

TRANSCRIPT

Elisabeth McKay
You either end up trusting your primary caregivers to some level and you want to please them or to seek validation or love from them, or you decide that your parents are inherently untrustworthy and it becomes an every man for himself situation. We need to understand what inputs created the outputs, but we need not make those inputs be put on the same level as truth.

The more loving and sweet and secure your childhood environment is, the more statistically likely you are to have parents that enable you and entitle you-

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melannie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melannie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Oh my goodness, friends, I cannot wait for you to experience this conversation with Elizabeth McKay. Her book, Your Brain Is a Filthy Liar, completely blew my mind because as we talk about in today's episode, Elizabeth has developed an incredible data-driven algorithm that literally gets to the root cause of all your problems. That's right, the root cause of all your problems, and it's all data-based rather than going off of things like esoteric feelings. I was blown away by the insights I learned in her book and how scarily accurate the different brain types are for both myself and other people, and you're gonna learn a little bit about that in today's episode. We dive into so many things, including how your brain is like a con artist that lies to you all of the time, whether or not you have an abandonment or rejection inner source belief that is affecting everything you do, including your relationships, how to actually define objective reality, the true root cause of psychological issues, what to do if you know somebody with borderline personality disorder, how you can find your baseline and get back to it, problems with conventional therapy, the role of nurture versus nature in who you are today, why you shouldn't pursue both healing and truth at the same time, a lot of information on how to raise children, and so much more.

I cannot recommend enough trying her BREAK Method program. At the very least, start with her free online assessment. For all of that, just go to predictivemind.io and you can use the coupon code Melannie15 to get 15% off if you decide to do any of her programs after your free mapping. So again, go to predictivemind.io and use the coupon code Melannie15 to get 15% off any of the BREAK Method programs after you do your free mapping. The show notes for today's episode will be at melannieavalon.com/brainliar. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about, so definitely check that out.

I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love, and then check out my Instagram Find Me Friday announcement post, and again, comment there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things. As a brief reminder, you can get 15% off sitewide at predictivemind.io. Also, definitely take the free assessment there to start mapping your brain pattern.

Melanie Avalon
And now without further ado, please enjoy this wonderful conversation with Elizabeth McKay. Hi, friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. It is with an incredible guest who has just the most incredible, I don't even know what to call it, a, a system that looks at your, yourself, the, the data that went into your life, your upbringing, the way you view the world, your consciousness, all the things, and uses that data to create a brain type or to as- ascribe a brain type to you which literally explains so much about why we do what we do, the problems that we might experience, both with ourselves, our insecurities, our fears, our relationships with others.

And so the book is called Your Brain Is a Filthy Liar: How Self-Deception Controls You and the Path to Freedom. It's by Elizabeth McKay, who I have the honor of being here with today. And friends, reading this book, first of all, I have it right here and it is completely massive. It is, there's so much information in here, and when I was reading it, I was really, really fascinated because, first of all, there's the overall thesis that our brain is kind of like a con artist, and it does a lot to let us maintain a reality that w- feels comfortable to us. So a lot of self-deception tactics going on, which we can talk about. And then on top of that, there are these, like I said, these different brain types. And reading it through, the situations and the examples were so incredibly specific, and I could see myself in them, I could see others, other people in them, and it just explains so much. Teaser, it has to do with your relationship with abandonment versus rejection, so many other things. But I have so many questions. I think you guys are gonna be pretty mind-blown by this, and I cannot recommend Elizabeth's work enough. So Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here.

Elisabeth McKay
Thank you so much. I'm really excited for this.

Melanie Avalon
I am too, and, um, I also forgot to mention, so there is a online qui- well, I guess it's a quiz. There's an online ... intake

Elisabeth McKay
It's a diagnostic evaluation. It's, I, I think sometimes when people go into it thinking, "Oh, it's a quiz," it's... Then they're extremely overwhelmed.

It's a, it's an in-depth diagnostic evaluation that's gonna take you at least 30 minutes.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. So there's... Thank you so much. There's an in-depth diagnostic evaluation online, and I had the honor and pleasure of taking it. And from there, where you can have a call to, um, discuss the results and figure out your source belief and your, the pattern that is shaping your brain. Kind of eerie how accurate it can be.

So I have so many questions, but first of all, just to start things off, Elizabeth, your personal story. So you talk about it in the book, and it's, it's pretty interesting, like, your relationship with yourself, like, what you th- like what you thought about yourself as far as your, your learning obstacles and your relationship with your father and all these things. So what was your, your upbringing like, and what led you to doing what, the work that you're doing today? Did you have an epiphany one day about it? Like, why, why are you doing this work today?

Elisabeth McKay
I grew up in a very chaotic childhood home, and the interesting thing is I think when people think about chaos and trauma, their brain immediately goes to things like physical abuse, poverty, drug addiction. And on the front face, I grew up in an extremely wealthy, privileged life. Like, from Westport, Connecticut, which is in Fairfield County. It's outside of New York City, and it's one of the wealthiest places in the country. And it's all, you know, large properties, white picket fences, and I think people forget, and then this is one of the premises of my work, is that you're only patterned with what happened to you, therefore everyone can experience trauma, and we can't relate that trauma definition from one person to the next.

So, you know, without... I was not physically abused. My mom did, at a later time in my life, start to struggle with addiction. But I, I was, I led a very privileged life, but that still can be trauma-inducing. My dad was a very high-level attorney and dropped F-bombs all the time, was so quick to full-blown rage, and had the highest standards of any man I've ever met in my life, which I'm simultaneously grateful for because I do think that part of the reason I am who I am academically is because I was pushed to the absolute brink. And I also had a mom who dealt with very extreme borderline personality disorder and then later went on to addiction on top of that. So I had this childhood environment where it was very past- fast-paced, fast-moving. My parents traveled a lot. I had a nanny from the time I was very young, and they would often leave and not tell me they were leaving. So if anyone has ever read my book or they've done my work with Break Method, they've surely heard me talk about this childhood experience, which I think says it all. I was not allowed to do a lot of kid things, so, like, I never, I never had fast food until I was probably in middle school. I wasn't allowed to watch cartoons. Everything was just very focused on academics and activities, and I was just, like, push, push, pushed all the time. And I had never been to Chuck E. Cheese before, and I remember it being this big deal that I finally got to go to Chuck E. Cheese. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I get to do kid things. This is so great." And I remember just going all around Chuck E. Cheese and just being like, "This is the time of my life." And all of a sudden, I went to my grandma, and I'm like, "Hey, where's Mom?" She's like, "Oh, your parents went to Italy. They'll be back in 10 days." And I was like, "Wh- wh- what? Are you kidding me right now?" So they basically got me distracted at Chuck E. Cheese and then slipped out the back door to go to Italy for 10 days.

Melanie Avalon
They took you there?

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah, no, they le- they, like, took me to Chuck E. Cheese to distract me so that they could leave and not have to deal with telling me that they were gonna be gone for 10 days.

So these are the kind of parents that I'm dealing with, where it's like, as a little kid, you, you have two options, which this is also a premise of my work, which I know that you know from reading my book. You either end up trusting your primary caregivers to some level, and you want to please them or to seek validation or love from them, or you decide that your parents are inherently untrustworthy, and it becomes an every-man-for-himself situation. And you become hyper-independent, you start to build self-efficacy, and you start to just take care of yourself. And you don't even look to adults as a sign of any sort of meaningful authority or support because they're just gonna keep letting you down or lie or do something that is going to put me in an unstable situation. So I think everyone can tell where this is going. I went the hyper-independent self-efficacy direction. And I was like, "Cool, I can't trust you guys. You never do what you're gonna... Y- you never follow through on what you say. And you consistently put me in a position where I, even as a young child, was observing what they were doing." And I'm like, "Guys, this is not what you're supposed to be doing as parents. This is wrong." I developed kind of this very early childhood pattern recognition, where I could see that adults were not who they said they were. So it put me on high alert and hypervigilance. And, you know, paired with the things that my parents did do right in regard to activities and pushing me academically, I, I became a very bright, very confident young child. And I didn't trust my parents, but I damn sure trusted myself, and I was able to accomplish a lot in my life. But this is all in the environment of dealing with likely a classic narcissist dad and a mom with borderline personality disorder.

And if anyone's ever dealt with borderline personality disorder, they live in a completely different reality. So I very quickly had to realize, okay, my mom is not... She is not seeing reality the way the rest of us are, and any attempts I make to stand up for myself or to try to help us come into some sort of co-reconciled reality is met with anger or, in some cases, violence. My mom would throw whatever she was holding I've had her throw brass candlesticks at me. I've had her throw, you know, back in the old days, I was born in '85, so, like, you know, we used to have cordless phones that were pretty big and had actual batteries in them. So I've seen my mom shatter probably 10 to 15 phones. And she just- whenever she was upset or felt shame, she would literally just throw anything she was holding. And her behavior was just extremely evasive. I knew that she was sneaking out at night, and then she would I'd wait for her in the living room, kind of like total role reversal. I'd wait for her in the living room as a nine-year-old, and I'd be like, "So Mom, where'd you go?" And she's like, "I was just outside." I'm like, "You weren't outside.

Elisabeth McKay
Your car wasn't here." She's like, "You're wrong. I was outside." And I'm like, "Mom, I know that you haven't been here for hours. You can't lie to me." And she actually would just sit there and try to keep lying to me.

And I bring this up because when you deal with a parent that is in a state of mental illness, you often have one of two options. You either buy into their delusion and you turn on yourself, or you develop very strong pattern recognition and usually photographic memory, and you become an arbiter for the truth. As you can probably imagine, I did the latter. I became an arbiter for the truth.

I doubled down on pattern recognition. I was hyper-aware. I was tracking every single detail. I could map every single word. I knew every single body language that corresponded with every single word so that I wasn't going to jump into my mom's delusion with her because at that- even at that age, I knew my mom was not operating in the objective reality that all the rest of us were. So I also figured out how to walk on eggshells and step around those landmines whenever possible to not get into the weeds with her. I was able to effectively map the patterns of her triggers so that I knew how to sidestep the landmines. All the while having a dad who was a very quick-to-anger person, but that anger wasn't explicitly directed at me. He was just very quick to anger. So I actually had the counterpart of a very supportive dad, supportive with, you know, obviously high standards, but supportive with academics. I was a very dedicated skier, and he traveled all over the place to take me to ski races. We were in the car for so many hours, and I often think back about that and laugh because I have four kids now, and I'm a doting mom.

I'm, like, very dedicated to my kids, but I cannot fathom with my schedule, and my dad had a very busy schedule, like driving five hours to go take my child to a race every single weekend. Like it boggles my mind that my dad did that. But he was very dedicated to me. But ultimately, I didn't... As much as I knew he loved me, I didn't trust him to be a man of his word. I didn't, I didn't trust that he was going to be honest. I also had a really pivotal moment at five where I realized my dad was cheating on my mom and that he had made me befriend the woman, and it actually was the first woman in my life that I really liked. So I remember just feeling this ultimate betrayal of like, "Oh, you little a-hole. You totally did this on purpose. You got me to befriend this woman so that you could cheat on my mom without me knowing it." And eventually, I put it all together, and I was like, "Oh, oh my God." So th- that's, that's what I was raised in. I had, you know, all the money and access in the world, and then also parents that I couldn't trust in the slightest. And then eventually, they had a really brutal custody fight, and I had this other very pivotal experience of being raised in wealth in a wealthy town where everyone had everything handed to them.

Elisabeth McKay
And I went through this period where I could not even pay for a field trip form because I would go to my mom and I'd say, "Mom, I need you to fill out this field trip form." You know how... You know, I don't know if they still do this. I've never had to pay for a field trip for my son. But back then, I felt like every field trip was like $35, like right? You had to write a $35 check for everything in an envelope, right? So I had all the time, I'd go to my mom and be like, "Hey, Mom, I need you to fill out this field trip form." And she'd be like, "I don't have the money. Go ask your dad." And then I'd go to my dad, and he'd be like, "I give your mom $10,000 a month. This is not my problem." So I'd have to go back and forth and back and forth, and finally I'm like, "Okay, well..." I literally eventually would go to my teachers, and I'm like, "Listen, I don't know another way to say this. My parents are a total train wreck. We totally have the money for this. I- if you can get it from them, good luck. Here you go. Here's the form. I forged the signature 'cause that's where we're at right now." And eventually, my teachers just kind of understood that there was just so much chaos going at home because they would just use us as a pawn in their fights. And I became very quickly a mediator. I had a younger sister, and my, the job that I took on was to just constantly manage everybody to keep the peace and to just try to help my sister avoid as many of the traumas that I experienced as possible. So I was simultaneously protecting her, trying to find a way to navigate this dynamic between my mom and my dad, where they were just at war with each other for years. And then eventually my mom wasted all of her money. She got so much money from the divorce and ended up going bankrupt. So then I had to go through this experience in my town where everybody talks of everyone knowing that my mom went bankrupt, and we had to move into a house in like the bad part of town, and none of my friends' parents would let their kids come over to my house anymore. So yeah. Anyways, this is to paint the picture. There was a lot going on, and I had to manage a lot of things. I had to manage the war between my parents. I had to manage protecting my sister, who by the way, is very much like my mom and was just constantly attacking me. I have scars all over my body from how violent she was, so I had to rise above myself to caretake her, even though she didn't deserve it, frankly. And I mean, now we're great friends, and I love her dearly, and she's a phenomenal woman. So I tell all my friends that think I'm funny, I'm like, "My sister's actually the funny one. I'm, I'm like nothing compared to my sister." So she eventually became a phenomenal woman, but back in these years, it's, it's challenging just to kind of demonstrate the level of self-regulation I was able to create for myself as a child. It's really hard for children if you have a sibling, like taunting you and hurting you and doing everything they can to push your buttons.

Elisabeth McKay
I honestly am so grateful for that experience because it taught me how to stay self-regulated even with someone who was constantly trying to get me to lose my mind all the time . And actually, the one time I ever did anything, 'cause I would just take it and take it and take it. One day, and this was after my family, my mom had gone bankrupt and we had to move to this house that was n- in a bad part of town. One day, I grabbed my sister and there, it was like still an antique house, so really there should have been screens in these windows, but there were not. And I held her out the window 'cause I was quite a bit bigger than her. I held her out the window and I was like, "Listen, I literally am holding your life in my hands right now. Don't you realize that I choose not to fight back because I love you and I don't wanna hurt you, and I'm so much bigger than you that even me defending myself would hurt you? Like, can't you see that? Stop it." And I took her out of the window and she honestly never did it again.

Like it was a pivotal moment 'cause I was just like i- I was trying to explain to her with a physical example, "I show you mercy 24 hours a day. Like when are you going to stop?" And she finally stopped. That is the ... And there's obviously a lot more to it, but that's the environment that I was raised in, and then I finally got a chance to go to boarding school. I was a competitive athlete. And for me, going to boarding school, and it's so funny how people think of boarding school. Where I'm from, boarding school is where you go when you crush it, when you do well. And then other people think of boarding school as a punishment, so like, "Oh my God, you had to go to boarding school?" For me, it was like the ultimate win. I was so pumped up. I like couldn't wait to get out of my house. And I actually applied to become a freshman when I was a seventh grader, so I had to take all these tests to skip eighth grade 'cause I just ... You guys, I wanted out of my home. I wanted to get out of there so, so, so bad. And when I finally went to boarding school, I got to have this o- first year of the most peace I've ever had in my life because guess what? In a boarding school environment, there are actual rules, right? Which I loved. I'd never had that before. I'd never known like you wake up at this time. If a teacher says they're gonna do this, they do that. Having dorm parents instead of actual parents was the biggest breath of fresh air because you knew how to operate in the rules. In my family, there were no, there were no rules that you could count on. Anything could change at any point in time, and there was ... All you had to do was basically just try to s- not step on landmines. So now for the first year of my life, I'm like in peace. I'm making friends. My nervous system is calming down. I'm like, "This is great." And then someone's like, "Hey, Busy, do you wanna do mushrooms?" And I'm like, "Why not, man?" I was 13, right?

Elisabeth McKay
'Cause remember I skipped eighth grade, so I'm like 13 with a bunch of 18 and 19-year-olds, and I had a, I had a big, very mature personality, so a lot of the seniors just immediately took to me. And now here I am, 13, and I'm doing psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, and I have a glorious time.

And the next day when I'm still in that state of neuroplasticity from the mushrooms, we decide to go see Fight Club. And I go to see the movie Fight Club in the movie theater, which is showing my age. I'm 41, and I, I'm sure people, and I know that you've read this, Melanie, 'cause you read my book. It's the o- the opening to the book. I'm watching all the buildings explode at the end of Fight Club, and I have this massive realization like, "Oh my God, my mom doesn't know she's crazy." I literally ... You guys, it took 13 years and psilocybin mushrooms to be like, "Oh my God, you guys, I cracked the code. My mom actually doesn't know that she's insane." Can I tell you? I had the biggest sigh of relief and empathy for my mom, and I immedi- at that point, like if I had to stake a flag on the ground of what started me off on my mission, at that point I was like, "I need to know what self-deception is.

I need to know what causes it, and I need to know why people that are mentally ill actually can't reconcile back to objective reality and they think they're sane and they think everybody else is insane." I like, I had to know. I was so dedicated. And I've, Melanie, been on that mission from 13 to 41. There have been a lot of twists and turns in between, but I am grateful for all of the bad things that happened to me as a child because it made me trust myself. It gave me a lot of confidence. I learned how to stand for the truth and use my voice but still always maintain mercy for other people and dignity. I think far too many people that think they're standing for the truth are actually just conflict prone, and they actually just don't like when something feels unfair or unjust. I actually learned from my childhood that this whole life is unfair and unjust, and if you choose to take that as an invitation to point out everything that's wrong, you're not actually standing in the truth.

You're actually, you're, you're s- you're standing in victimhood and you're just fighting to fight. I know what battles to step in that are mine that are beneficial to multiple people. If, if something just benefits me personally, I'm very unlikely to do it. Uh, to me, I tell my students all the time in Break Method that truth can be weaponized based on timing and intent. Just because something's truthful doesn't mean that you're not using it as a weapon to harm somebody in that moment. So I really encourage people, as I've encouraged myself over the years of my career, just because something's true doesn't mean that it has to be shared right now. I, I inquire of myself what is the productive intent of what I'm about to share that goes beyond myself? Because if I'm just gonna share something that makes me feel good 'cause it was the truth, that's a waste of time. That's just actually probably to harm somebody else or to agitate somebody else.

Elisabeth McKay
And these are all things that I learned from my childhood. So for that reason, I have no regrets about anything that has ever happened to me.

The good, the bad, all of it, it's made me exactly who I am, and I sure am glad, Melanie, that I choose to say yes to mushrooms in that moment because the weight that lifted off my shoulders when I realized my mom actually that whole time had no idea she was mentally ill It feels like it reverse aged me like 10 years. I felt like I was able to grab back a piece of my innocence that had been taken from me because it, all of my life felt like a practical joke. And in that moment I realized, no, I actually can have empathy for people that are this stuck, and maybe I experienced this to help free people from it. And I think that is w- not only why I'm here, but I think that is what I have been doing actively for the last 12 years.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Okay. So many things here. I was having major flashbacks with putting the check in the envelope and bringing it in for the field trip. Oh my goodness, so many things.

So I will... Quick question. With your, when you had the epiphany and, uh, with everything with your mom, did you ever tell her this? Does she know that she has borderline personality disorder?

Elisabeth McKay
Here's the thing about borderline, is that even when they're told by a doctor, they vehemently disagree with the diagnosis. So she's been told by a doctor and in court multiple times, but she doesn't believe she has it.

A- and by the way, it's something that I've been able to work with extensively in Break Method and have people who would've been just like my mom come out of it on the other side and be like, "Oh my God, I see it now." And I, I'll walk you through at some point in this interview what that process looks like and why we're able to do it in Break versus why typically people with borderline cannot see it. When somebody is operating in that deep level of self-deception, being confronted with the truth doesn't penetrate at all. Their, because their brain has already weaponized s- a whole other hierarchy or scaffolding of justifications and excuses and rationalizations to actually turn it on you. That is where those psychological mechanisms like projection, deflection, blame shifting, splitting come in. That's how their brain protects the lie. So you just, even if you were really kind with how you expressed it, that truth, and it's, it's unfortunate, that truth doesn't actually break the lie for somebody who's in that sort of psychological mechanism.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm asking for completely selfish reasons, having a really close relationship with somebody with BPD and wondering for, ever since I had the realization about it, wondering if I should even bring it up. I, I will put, for listeners, I've done two episodes that touch on this. One is with Kelsey Packwood. That's a very encouraging episode for people who might know somebody with BPD.

And then also Grace Valentine. She's one of the world's top models. She identified as having BPD as well. So listeners can check out those episodes for some encouraging stories.

Elisabeth McKay
Melanie, knowing what I know about you, part of the reason that you get entangled in this is because you actually are very, you have the ability to be self-contained and be a high performer. People with BPD get extremely triggered by you, but there's a part of them that also wants to be around you.

It's a, there's a very intense dance that happens with borderline personality disorder and people who are all of the things that there's a aspect of them that wishes they could be, but they also wanna fight with you about it. It's the, it's the thing that they love about you most and hate about you most simultaneously, but that fracture is so deep within themselves that they can't... They're either seeing, and that's what splitting is, right? They're, they're either seeing you from one side or the other, but they can't see both sides of you at the same time.

Melanie Avalon
That, yeah, that completely nails it, completely. So, okay. Okay, so quick question about, because you, you just told, you know, the story of your childhood and, and what led to your personal type and your realization about everybody having these different, you know, brain types, brain patterns. So something I was really, really fascinated by in your book, partly because it was the opposite of what I would've thought, which was you have a, you have a section on nature versus nurture because there's this whole debate out there about nature versus nurture, and you're saying it's both. Like, they're very, they're very much both involved.

And the timeline, the thing that, that's, the thing that was the opposite to me was the timeline of it because you s- talk about how the role of nurture is ages, like, two to five from the environment, and then nature from, like, six to 12, it's how you respond to the environment. And I think, I think when most people think about nature versus nurture, they're like, "Oh, nature comes first and then nurture." So I'm just curious your thoughts on nature/nurture and, and kind of, like, going back to the, these examples, like the story you told, or I'm, like, thinking back about, I'm thinking back about my upbringing and how I have two siblings. So in theory, we were raised by the same family, but we manifested so, like, so differently. Yeah, so nature versus nurture, what is the role here?

Elisabeth McKay
Birth order does very much matter there, and we can go into that, because bir- birth order itself, it changes the environment, right? A- and even how parents treat each child, even if technically you guys are in the same environment, parents treat different children differently. And if you start to express different needs, parents adapt differently. Example would be, like, although my sister and I were raised together, my sister had two very different parents than I had. But with my parents, I, I was... I, and I'm sure they would say this, if my dad was sitting right here, my dad was like, "Oh, we never had to worry about you. Like, you just, like, you just did what you were supposed to do. I trusted your judgment." Your sister, that's another story, right?

Where it's like, there's usually, that's very common in a family dynamic, and what often ends up happening, and this... I'll, I'll go back and I'll lay the groundwork and then we'll, we'll drop a pin here and we'll come back. Let's remind me to come back to the protective emotion, 'cause the protective emotion is where we wanna double back into this story. So what's really important to remember is that according to my body of work over the last 12 years, and it is entirely data-driven, we've mapped over 20,000 people, nurture overrides nature every time. So they both are a factor, but your nurture overrides your nature every time. And I think the best way to explain where the nature comes out can be best described with how really some of the best You know, people that are in the g- space of genetics or epigenetics, they will explain that genetics are like a loaded gun, but something has to pull the trigger. Like, uh, genetics don't naturally just express. Something in the environment has to set it off. So somebody could have a genetic predisposition, and if their parents don't act out that same pattern, that genetic line wouldn't express. Therefore, we know definitively nurture precedes nature. Nurture has to actually pull the trigger. That doesn't mean that the genetic predisposition wasn't there, but it, it could have just been there just like how you could have a computer, and you could have 10 different folders, and there could be folders within the folders within the folders. You can use your computer for a year and not know about a folder that exists on your computer because you haven't opened up that file. It's just sitting there dormant. You've not thought about it. It's not part of your awareness. It's just in a folder underneath a folder underneath a folder. It's just sitting there. That would be how genetic predisposition is. It's there, but it's not activated until we click that file. Something has to cause us to go looking for that file and click it and open it so that it becomes part of us. It makes that connection with our, our DNA. So the nurture is, another way of explaining this, and I think this is the best visual for people. If you're going to grow a culture in a Petri dish, there has to be a medium inside of that Petri dish.

Elisabeth McKay
So if you ever look at the Petri dish, there's usually like a, a translucent but slightly kind of brown, yellow medium that is inside of the Petri dish so that you can grow the culture. Your childhood environment is that medium inside of the Petri dish. That is what sets it. That is what it grows inside of.

So whatever you then put into that culture is going to cause it to grow. I'm sure that you saw this part in my book. There are a couple really important things that I wanna drop here. So I firmly believe that every child, baby, comes into the world wanting to experience three things. They want to maintain their innocence as long as possible, and God knows that happens very rarely for many of us. They want to be curious and get to explore their environment so that they can learn differentiation. Who am I? Who are you? How do I... What are the rules of how I operate with you? What happens when I push over a glass of milk? Kids have to be curious to understand how to map the world that they live in. And how often do we get shamed or disciplined for curiosity? Yeah. All the time. Okay, so innocence, curiosity. Kids have an unending capacity for love. And guess what? We lose it.

We actually go backwards. This is why in a lot of my work I talk about the paradox of socioemotional understanding, where s- we think we're growing up. We're aging, sure, but we're actually going backwards. Most children have a sh- bigger capacity for love. They've got their innocence intact for at least some period of time, which is why, by the way, in my body of work I pick two. Most kids have lost a lot of their innocence by two. They have been shamed or yelled at or embarrassed enough by two that that, that is broken. It's gone. And they have this capacity for love that we start to lose because we start to go into that protective response. So when we're looking at brain pattern mapping, brain pattern mapping we track nine markers. The top two markers help us understand how you see the world. It helps us understand, like a glasses prescription being put on your eyes, what do you see in your world? And if we know what you're focused on seeing in your world, we know also what you're missing because our brain does have selective attention. Example would be if I'm very highly attuned to situational awareness, I can tell you everything that's happening around me, but I might have mapped that at the expense of knowing how the person to my left is feeling right now. Because you can't be focused on both simultaneously. People's brains, based on their childhood environment, learn either to focus on situational awareness or relational awareness, but you're not doing both. And it's very rare, and actually, Melanie, I will say your pattern is the closest to the midpoint of those two things that we have on the brain pattern spectrum. You have a pretty even balance of both actually. Very rarely... So your brain pattern is toward the center of the spectrum. The further you go out from that center, the more selective your attention becomes in one direction or the other, either situational awareness or relational awareness.

Elisabeth McKay
And that's going to be a byproduct of your childhood environment. Example would be if you felt reasonably safe in your childhood environment and now you're trying to get love and attention and please your parents and try to get love or validation, you're not gonna have great situational awareness because you're just trying to figure out what, what dangling carrot am I trying to grab from my parents right now? Like, what do I, do I have to perform? Do I have to do a good job at this? Do I have to not be a burden? Like, how do I make you love me? A child that doesn't feel inherently safe in their environment, they can't do that because they're trying to figure out how just to survive their environment, and therefore all of the characters inside of that environment, it doesn't feel like a worthy endeavor to try to get them to like you because you inherently don't trust other people.

So you're, you're distracted by mapping. So you might be aware of people's body language. Like, even in a situational awareness sort of capacity, I know what everybody's body language is doing, but I could give two S-H-I-Ts about what they're feeling. Like, to me it's like, your feelings? Who cares? Why does that matter? I'm trying to keep us all alive, right? But I, I know what your face is doing, but I don't, I'm not going so far as to decide what I think that means about me. That feels like a completely worthless endeavor. Now, on the flip side, if I have low situational awareness and I'm focused on your body language and your subtext, I'm trying to figure out, obviously through projection, what I think you're thinking about me, which guess what? Is entirely gray area, and the worst part, it's actually entirely fabricated. Maybe sometimes you're right, you're probably wrong, and your brain gets locked into trying to figure out what people are thinking about you. And the byproduct of that is that you end up not being present in your environment. You have low situational awareness. I have run this, Melanie, thousands of times. There are certain brain patterns that Do not know how to navigate on city streets. They cannot follow directions. They have no idea where they are. They have no situational awareness to speak of, and it happens every single time.

So there are-- what we've found in the brain pattern spectrum is that when we place you very specifically, I can tell you, you know, obviously, you did the brain pattern mapping session, so I'm kind of going through your self-deception patterns and what conflicts you tend to get into. When you get deeper into the work, certain brain pattern types will say the same thing. They have the same sense of humor. They'll say the same words in the same sequence. If I say something, certain brain pattern types will literally respond the same thing, and they don't know each other at all. How is that possible? It's possible because we are entirely patterned human beings.

Elisabeth McKay
And, you know, I'm jumping the gun here, but I think one of the things that frustrates me most about what I have been able to prove with my body of work is that for my work to be true, which after 12 years and all the data that we parse through, I believe it is, it means that someone or many people that were pushing these theories or models in the mental health establishment had to know it was a farce because they both can't be true. Either behavior is a relationship of input-output and can absolutely unequivocally be predicted or the mental health establishment is correct.

And really, the more you-- if you open your mind and you start to dig into that, the more you realize there is absolutely no consensus whatsoever within the mental health establishment and whoever the powers that be are that control what theories or what narratives we propel, we basically do what keeps people coming back the most and makes the most money, not what actually helps people heal the fastest. And for that reason, I don't actually think that the mental health establishment, if you look back at the initial underpinnings of who created it and why they created it, I don't actually think their goal was to heal people. And I think that's really where we are completely stopped. Like it's 2026, when are we going to ask the question, is what we're doing in mental health actually in the pursuit of helping somebody heal? Do we even believe that healing is possible?

Melanie Avalon
Right.

Elisabeth McKay
I do. I don't think too many people in the mental health establishment that are in these professions, I don't think they believe that a healed state is possible or could articulate to you what a healed state looks like.

I know that I can because if I look at the brain pattern map, I can tell you exactly where you are dysregulated, and I can show you what healed looks like for you, and I can tell you with specificity everything you'd have to do and for how long to get back there. But I don't think-- I mean, again, we're going conspiratorial here. You said that your audience is down with a rabbit hole. I think whatever it is, whatever the system is that we're in, they are deathly afraid of us actually being healed. They do not want that. I know it's possible. I've seen it thousands of times. They lose their power when we're actually healed and we're not able to be manipulated mentally.

And, and I realize I only said two of the nine markers, so whenever you want me to pick that back up, you just, just let me know.

Melanie Avalon
It was really interesting in the book when you were talking about healing and you also said-- I love that you said now, you know, you're all about healing, but also you mentioned the need to let go of needing to heal in order to heal. Is that correct?

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah. So I think my, my quote is, "You can pursue healing or you can pursue the truth, but you can't pursue both at the same time."

Melanie Avalon
Yes. Okay, I was looking for it. I was like, it was healing or something else and, and why, and why is that?

Elisabeth McKay
When we start to go down the road of memory encoding, what we start to realize pretty quickly is that we encode memories based on our age at that time and our emotions at that time. And going back to what originally led me on this journey was to help my mom who struggled with mental illness heal and, and a-also in, in a way help all people struggling with mental illness to come back to that place where they can actually see and experience objective reality. What I realized in doing so for 12 years is that we're all a complete and utter disaster, mental illness label or not. Everyone actually experiences this, and some of us mask it better.

Some of us are able to navigate life without ending up in jail, for example, or ending up addicts on the street. But we all actually experience this deep entrenchment and self-deception that we can't get our way out of. So I actually realized over the 12 years that I thought I'm out here like trying to champion for the mentally ill only to find out actually plot twist, we're all mentally ill and this is actually for humanity as a whole. So in doing this, what you start to understand is that when you are trying to pursue the truth, right, i-imagine in that moment that you become like a detective, right? You're trying to crack a cold case, like I have to know the truth. When you're trying to find the truth, think about what your nervous system state would be in that moment. You would be-- Right? You'd be like suspicious. You'd be hypervigilant, right? And therefore, you're so much more likely to get trapped in confirmation bias where it's like you, you're going on a hunch, but it's so easy to get tricked by that hunch because you just want the truth, right? You're, you're trying, you're thinking of that as a singular destination. "I just have to crack this case." I'll use this example. I experienced sexual abuse as a child, and a lot of it is so gray. Do I think for one moment that me deciding I'm gonna dedicate a year of my life to knowing the truth is actually going to help me be a more healed person? Absolutely not. Because guess what? I can't ever go backwards and definitively say this or that. Unfortunately, we do not have a God replay button and don't-- I can't even tell you how many times, Melanie, I wish we did have a God replay button. The amount of things I would want to go back and be like, "Um, excuse me, can we roll back the tape?" Like I, I mean, even just in, you know, think of a conversation with a partner. How many times did they say something to you that you know you didn't say and you just all, every cell of your being wants to be like, "God, I wish we could roll back the tape." That's so frustrating. So if you think about it that way- Because we do not have a God replay button, are we ever going to know the truth? I feel like that's actually something that I want everyone that's listening to think about. Think about how many cases, how many people are on death row for murders they didn't commit.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah.

Elisabeth McKay
We don't have a real justice system, right? There's no, how can we... If something is behind us, how can we ever 100% know the truth? Obviously, when, you know, when there's cameras and things involved, okay, great, that's, that helps for sure. But for most of us, there's no way that we can ever get there, and one of the things that I do teach people that are in my body of work is self-understanding is a paradox.

The more you know about yourself, the more you realize, "I don't know anything." Like, there's no... The, the more comfortable I am learning about myself and learning what made me who I am, the more I realize all of these thi- like, they're not actually truth at all. And really, I think that's kind of the irony here is that we need to understand what inputs created the outputs, but we need not make those inputs be put on the same level as truth, because a three-year-old doesn't have all the context. A three-year-old could encode a memory that Mommy and Daddy almost killed each other, and if we roll back the tape, that actually might not objectively have been true. But that's what that child encoded with the information that they had or the context at that time. We make things up all the time. That, that's, that is the nature of human beings when we're talking about memory encoding. So when you are trying to pursue healing, I would equate healing to being emotionally regulated and to have your nervous system regulated. Those things are antagonistic to somebody desperately trying to seek the truth. You cannot do both at the same time. Because as you're pursuing healing, naturally when you actually heal, you start to realize these things really don't matter. And, and not only do they not matter the way I thought they mattered, actually in letting them go, I feel far more healed, and I also am, am, am mature enough emotionally and spiritually to realize that there's no way for me to ever know these things with 100% certainty, so what's the point?

Right? It, it, w- I need to... I'm, I'm more concerned about becoming a person that can articulate my thoughts, chase my dreams, love people deeply, stand in the truth, but also know when it's my time to stand back and let somebody be a crazy person. Like not... That, going back to this example of, like, fighting fairness and justice, I've, I've been attacked wrongfully by so many people. What am I gonna do? Mirror what they're doing and get on my social media accounts and do it back to them? Absolutely not, because then I wouldn't be the person that I know I am. So we have to know when to pull back, and again, go back to that idea of showing mercy. We have to know when to show mercy. Some people, they, they know not what they do.

Melanie Avalon
Mm.

Elisabeth McKay
And you can, you know, it's age-old saying, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can't make them drink. All I can do is continually pursue my state of emotional regulation and peace so that I can see clearly, I can discern at the highest level of accuracy possible, and I can keep demonstrating to others what is possible.

And what is possible is n- not living with constant mental chatter. If I'm not thinking, and I'm not talking to God or praying, my mind is completely quiet. I have no mental chatter.

Melanie Avalon
Mm.

Elisabeth McKay
In fact, that's one of the easiest ways for me to know something's up because that is, that is not my natural state. So we are supposed to be free of negative self-talk. We are supposed to have a quiet mind. We are supposed to operate more toward neutrality than most people believe.

This whole farce of like, "Feel your emotions, follow your emotions," that's like, "You just stick with that. Go there," that is honestly one of the darkish tricks of our whole pseudo, like, mental health spirituality thing. Your emotions are a direct response of all these childhood patterns that we learned, and if you don't learn how to question their origin and move yourself away from them, you're just gonna be triggered all the time. It is so hard to trigger me. I, I know, I can tell you right now everything that triggers me. The amount of things that triggered me, you know, even five years ago and prior is, like, 99% more than what I have now. It's like, it's... I have very specific triggers, and unfortunately, the way my life is stacked right now, I cannot get rid of some of these last lingering ones, try it as I may, because they're just... They're, like, situational things that I can't get away from, right? Like, I can't really get away from the fact that I own a lot of businesses. I can't really get away from the fact that with all of that, I chose to have four kids, and that I think that it's really important to be a really great wife, and that I think it's really important for me to cook every meal for my kids. Like, those are, those are things that they're naturally going to stretch my capacity in every conceivable way, and I'm doing those things willingly. So when those things start to burn me out, at least I know that I did those things on purpose and I did it to myself, and I can't blame anybody else.

And I think for a lot of people, until you learn how your brain pattern distorts your reality and causes you to feel justified destroying yourself and others, you won't be mentally free. There's no way to get mentally free without cracking the code on that.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Yeah, I definitely really appreciated that part of the book where you, you talk about reality because I've been, I've been haunted by this for a while, like how we actually can know anything. 'Cause I'm, I mean, if I know one thing, it's that I know nothing, and that, like, f- especially the second that I read the s- like the split brain studies where they would, like, split the participant's brain and the talking part of the brain would just, like, make up complete, complete lies about what the pers- what the person was experiencing. I was like, "Okay, I know I literally know nothing." Like, my bra- my brain could be just, like, making up a story. And so I actually found it really refreshing 'cause you talk about, like, objective versus subjective reality, and with objective reality... 'Cause I, I'm on the, I'm, I'm, like, so obsessed with this idea that we can't really know anything that I'm like I don't even know how we know that this, like, that there's objective reality. Especially 'cause, like, when you're dreaming, you don't, unless you're lucid dreaming You are living an entire reality that you're just assuming is real. You're not even, like, thinking if it's real or not. But, so I like that you were talking about, like, with objective reality, there's a record of it.

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah, a record of physical evidence. Which when you then take that and you start to dip your toe in more spiritual mul- multidimensional waters and even some understanding of quantum physics, obviously we start to see that while we experience something as physical and tangible and material, we know that when we get down to the level of atoms, that's actually not true at all. So, you know, of course, the, the reality is objective. Objective reality for the average human mind construct is real, and it will have an evidentiary record. That is what-- That's, that's the only thing that we can talk about with things like this. So example would be like, you know, what's, what's easy is like, did that person hit you or did they not hit you? Right? That, that ob- that objectively we would have evidence for. There would be a mark. If somebody else was watching it, they would have seen somebody hit the other person.

So, typically, there needs to be something that's more obviously physical to have an objective record like that. What's complicated is, as you said, using the example, and I think even in that scientific study that you referenced, what happens is that through priming associative and non-associative memory, people don't realize that their brain is filling in the words. They're watching lips, but their brain is actually filling that in for them because the brain wants to be efficient. So in its effort to help us, it harms us. And I think that's kind of the key of self-deception is that we learned that these rules keep us safe as a child, but then we transcend our childhood environment, and we accidentally start building the same thing over again because that's what our brain knows as emotional homeostasis. But we don't have to do it that way. So one of the things, this is an analogy I use in my teaching, which is I want everyone to imagine that they're standing on the edge of a massive flower field. I want you to see every color flower imaginable, smell the flowers, feel the air moving through the flowers, and you're standing on the edge of the flower field. Having your brain pattern active is like believing you are only allowed to pick red flowers. There could be ten thousand flower colors on the fields. You are going to walk from point A to point B on that field, and if you believe you're only allowed to collect red flowers, you will ignore everything else out there, and you will end up on the other side of that flower field holding a bouquet of red flowers. And it will only be because that's what your brain pattern programmed you to do, and it hid everything else from you. Everybody else could end up on the other side of the field with other flowers. They could have a whole wildflower bouquet, but if your brain pattern was activated, it hid everything that breaks that rule apart from you. What we do in Break Method is we help you expand that construct of thinking so you can see what you couldn't see before. And that's why with Break Method, I have so many clients that come to me eventually laughing, and they're like, "Oh my God, it's like, it's like magic. Like, I don't-- How did you do it?

Elisabeth McKay
I don't understand how you did it. I'm literally just not an asshole anymore." And like, even my husband is like, "Honey, wow, you've like... What are you doing?" It's like that When Harry Met Sally moment where like, "I'll have what she's having." You're-- If you do it the right way, and I can go into this a little bit more, if you do it the right way and you're not pushing the wrong buttons that get your brain to double down on the self-deception, because I think oftentimes, using the example, kind of going back to, like, what would have happened if you had confronted your mom about the borderline, right? You can't confront self-deception by just being like, "Hey, you do this." It's gonna be like, "No, I don't." And then it's actually going to get even more evasive and tricky with how it's hiding itself. It kind of functions more like a virus. You have to be able to ask the right questions in the right sequence so that you don't show up like an intruder. Have you ever seen the movie Inception? Whoever is crafting the dream, they've gotta be really careful of detail, and they can't make themselves known because as soon as that person's psyche understands that there's somebody else there, they will start to attack that person, right? Then like, remember, like, all those people, that person's psyche starts to send all these people to go attack the person until it kills them. If you push in the wrong way at the wrong time, the brain actually goes onto defense mode, and it doubles down on the self-deception. This is what happens with people who experience mental illness because if you do it the wrong way, example like borderline, that's why Break Method can get somebody with borderline to be like, "Oh my God, I do do this," versus all other types of traditional talk therapy or narrative-based therapy. They're like, "I don't, this is wrong. That's not, I don't know why they would say that about me." With Break Method, they have to see it, and usually they come to you bawling, crying. They're like, "Oh my God, I can see it." You have to go-- It's-- In the very first slide of Break Method, I literally have a picture of Tom Cruise dropping into Langley in Mission Impossible. Does everybody remember the first Mission Impossible where he's gotta drop in? And he's, like, dropping in from the ceiling. There's heat sensors, there's laser beams, right? And he's, he's, like, gotta kee-- There's even temperature sensors, so he can't get emotionally dysregulated at all. And remember at the last second, a bead of sweat drops, and he, like, zips up to the top? Okay, so we have to go in like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. That's how we have to do it. And if you, if the subconscious knows what you're trying to get to and how you're doing it, it literally will set off alarms, and it will double down on the brain pattern rather than receive that it is in error and work with you. So in Break Method, we're able to get the brain to work with you instead of against you. So as you're doing it in the right sequence, most people are like, "Oh my God, I just, I just did it this other way. I didn't have to white-knuckle it.

Elisabeth McKay
I didn't have to force myself." And I think that really is the difference because when people at the core are like, "How is Break Method different than this other thing?" I'm not just pointing out what you're doing wrong and being like, "Don't do that." How annoying is that? You can't go to a heroin addict and be like, "Do me a favor, don't go buy heroin today." How, that's not gonna work. You can't tell a heroin addict, "Don't buy heroin." 'Cause in, in, in a certain part of their mental state, there's a part of them that wants to look at you and be like, "Okay, I'm not gonna buy heroin today." But what's going to happen, something is going to shift in how they're perceiving reality, and it's going to cause this sort of biochemical chain reaction. Eventually, something is going to cause them to go into self-deception and feel totally justified buying a bag of heroin. We basically all function the same way. We have to figure out the sequence, and we have to figure out how to interrupt each sequence so that you suddenly can see clearly where you couldn't see clearly before, and you're able to choose the right action without me having to tell you to do it. I, I'm not gonna force you into it. You are going to do it naturally, and for that reason, people change.

Like, we're talking complete 180, and will come to me like, "Oh my God, I really thought I was married to a narcissist, and then I realized I am the narcissist." "What? It's me." I can't... Melanie, do you know how many times that happens in my practice? It's like a near-daily occurrence where people are so convinced because of Instagram and TikTok that their partner is this classic narcissist, and they're buying into all of the bait. They're watching all the podcasts through confirmation bias that are just telling them the things that make them feel better, and they come to break, and they're like, "Ugh, I am so glad to be free of my, you know, toxic, narcissistic husband. We're separated, thank God." And I'm like, "Listen, there's going to come a point in module three where we may have a different conversation. I'm not gonna tell you where that point is, but if it happens, just know I'm here for it." They're like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "You don't need to know what I mean. Just remember that I dropped this pin, and when we get there, we might have a very different conversation." Almost every time, they come to me on that session, bong, and they're like, "Oh my God, I'm the narcissist." "Can I still save my marriage?" And I'm like, "Yeah, we can." I'm in the business of saving marriages wherever possible, and I really believe that most of what we label as mental illness can absolutely unequivocally be healed. I've seen it with my own eyes. Multiple personality disorders, schizophrenia. I had a client on the other day that was talking about how she... I mean, and this is, it's not even just her. Multiple people I know have gotten off of Western pharmaceuticals after 20-plus years of being on them, where they had tried every other thing to get off of them and couldn't, and they can at the end of break. So that's not, it's not because it doesn't work.

Elisabeth McKay
It's because it does work, and I really think that what separates one person from getting a label or not is actually much more razor-thin than we like to think it is. We, you know, I think a lot of us, we live in this glass house where we're like, "Oh, God. That would be so terrible to X, Y, Z, to have that happen to me or to have, you know, schizophrenia or, you know, bipolar disorder." I can show you with brain pattern mapping, I could sh- I could pull five people that have the same exact... So of those nine markers, they have the same exact nine markers, and I can tell you specifically why two of them have a diagnosis and the other seven don't. And is there that much different between them? No. So that kind of goes back to this hypothesis. In thinking I was trying to help the mentally ill, I realized we're all mentally ill.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm.

Elisabeth McKay
We, we all need this. And every single one of us has a pattern of self-deception that runs the show, and when you can learn to see it and you can learn to correct back to objective reality and see beyond what you tend to justify, excuse, or rationalize, your life can change profoundly and quickly.

This doesn't have to be this long, drawn-out, painful process at all.

Melanie Avalon
It's funny. So, like, the projection example, I, I will go down, like... How do I say this?

Like, I'll just get in the weeds with it because, like, with projection, if I experience something where I feel like... 'Cause, like, the example you gave where, like, the, you know, the person in the relationship realizes that they thought the other person was the narcissist, but they're actually the narcissist. So any time I have an inclination that somebody is projecting onto me, then my next thought, though, is, "Well, maybe that's just my brain wanting to say that to maintain my own reality," so then it's just like a spiral.

Elisabeth McKay
So here, uh, let me drop a little nugget for you. A person that projects onto somebody else, they do not have the marker to stop-

Melanie Avalon
Yeah

Elisabeth McKay
... and take any sort of ownership and even run it through a filter of, "Could that have been me?" So as evidenced by the fact that you actually go through that process, you are not the projector.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm.

Elisabeth McKay
A projector doesn't do that. They, that, that's actually, Melanie, what's missing.

There's a very specific marker that we can see in brain pattern mapping that causes you to stop and say, "Could this be me? Could I have been in error?" And if it's placed in the right spot in those nine markers, you also end up having strong metacognition, which you also had. Because you're able to stop and self-reflect and think forward, but not think forward in a, a panicked rumination style sort of way, so then you're able to make your next choice something that's intentional rather than emotional. Somebody who projects, they're not able to do either of those two things.

Melanie Avalon
Right.

Elisabeth McKay
And you can see it on the data. So just because you stop and think that shows me that you're not actually doing it, so you can give yourself a pass.

Don't stop going through that process. I still, you know, even, no matter what, I always will run myself through, "Let me play back that tape. What..." And I think more than anything at this point in my life, I'm like, "How could... What did I do that could have possibly been misinterpreted that I can now communicate better or clear up? Or what signals can I give somebody?" 'Cause I, I know when I'm really focused on something, I probably look really mad, and I'm for sure not mad at all. I can tell. I know exactly when I'm mad and when I'm not mad. Like, my friend Casey's been with me for a few days, and she's like, "Oh my God, you're so mad right now," and I'm like, "You're right. I'm so mad right now." Like, I, I know when I'm mad. She knows when I'm mad. But a lot of people think that I'm mad when I'm not mad. So what's the answer? The answer is if I self-reflect, I'm like, "Okay, they, they interpreted my signals and body language as if I was mad at them. What's one thing that I can do to stop this?" I can say, "Hey, guys, I need to take a look at something real quick. When I'm really focused, I kind of look like I check out and you guys aren't here. I'm not ignoring you. I'll be back in, like, 10 minutes." Just that one bit of communication for me self-reflecting, being like, "What am I..." 'Cause I'm not gonna be an idiot and be like, "I'm not doing anything wrong," right? I might not be doing anything wrong intentionally. I might not have any malice, but there might be something that I'm doing that's giving the signal of something that someone's misinterpreting. What can I do there? I can bridge that communication gap and say, "Hey, guys," and fill it in. Another example would be earlier in my career, I can feel people's energy fields very strongly, and I would walk into an event, and everyone would come over and wanna hug me and want my attention. And I could feel myself, like, going completely within myself and actually getting really agitated because part of me is like, "I need to teach to all of you guys for the next, like, five hours. I can't give all this out and do that," 'cause then everyone's stuff is in my stuff, and it becomes really hard to figure out where my edges are. So I think in the earlier part of my career, I would maybe look kind of agitated, and I'd try to be nice, but they could tell I was, like, bracing. Eventually, obviously, as I pursued the work and was walking the talk, I would start to go into a room, and I'd be like, "Hey, guys," like really loud to everybody. I'm like, "Hey, I'm so excited to be here. After we're done with the teaching, I'm gonna go and try to connect with as many of you as I can. But for the, my ability to show up here and give you guys myself fully as a teacher, I have to keep myself kind of separated from you guys right now. I love you. Thank you so much for being here. When I'm done and I can close that off, I'm gonna be connecting with all of you guys.

Elisabeth McKay
If anybody wants to do pictures, we can do that after we're done." My reputation changed wildly when I learned that I had to cue that up.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah.

Elisabeth McKay
Because I didn't cu- It's the same. I was the same person before as I was latter, but I learned how to communicate the gap so people weren't like, "Oh my God, Busy's such a bitch." Then they were like, "Oh, Busy's not a bitch. She's trying to conserve her energy that she, she can evenly give us her all before that energy starts to break apart."

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. Okay.

And an overarching question about all of this, so you know, what we were speaking about with, like, the flower field example and only seeing the red flowers and, you know, our brain. I was interviewing Tommy Wood this week. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, and he was talking about how, like, the majority of the energy of the brain is spent on filtering out information. So, you know, it, it just speaks to what we're talking about, about you only see what you wanna see and then the brain supports it.

Elisabeth McKay
And the self, the self-deception is a filter, right? It does... That is, that is the first filter that it's coming through that is hiding a lot of things. An example of this, and this is the one that I usually give on podcasts, is let's say, Melanie, you and I were in a podcast environment, and we're in the same room, and we both have, like, a hot thing of coffee, right? And I told you my mom is the kind of person that when she gets mad, she'll throw anything in her hands. Honestly, same with my sister. My sister's thrown a steak knife at me before because she was mad. And I remember 16, I di- I wasn't laughing at her. I was laughing about something else. She was convinced I was laughing at her. She throws a steak knife at me. Thankfully, praise God, it didn't hit me. But I remember looking at her and going, "Emily Hannah Gold, you're gonna accidentally kill somebody one day. You need to learn how to pull it together." So let's say that instead of being me, I'm her now, and you and I are sitting across the table from each other. What if you said something that really bothered me? I technically would have it in my self-deception schematic that if I got mad enough at you, I might throw my coffee mug at you or throw it across the table. That would, I- if I were sitting there, that would never happen. My brain would hide that every time. I would never think of that. It would never occur to me. But for somebody that is patterned that way, they do throw things. They do say things. They do act like they have no filter. I've seen my sister say things where I'm like, "Are you kidding me right now?" Like, I cannot imagine, even if I thought that, I would never. Like, I would, that, my brain would hide that from me every time, and that's that self-deception filter.

So it's going to filter out anything that does not keep that childhood rule intact, first and foremost.

Melanie Avalon
And so with that in mind, that we can still, at the end of the day, only see what we're looking for, I guess, when we're dealing with our brain pattern, are we just trading one delusional state that makes us unhappy and is, and creates problems with other people and ourselves to a delusional state that feels, like, that does not create conflict with ourselves and others?

Elisabeth McKay
Absolutely not. So you don't... That's only if you pendulum swing, and I think that's kind of the whole key about break method is if we know where you are on the brain pattern spectrum, we know exactly how to get you back to baseline without pendulum swinging to the other side. So I think far too often when people try to do this healing, air quotes, work on their own, they swing too far, and they go to another toxic version. They do go to another delusion, right? Maybe they go from, like, depressed to toxically positive, right? There, there is an actual pattern opposition that brings you back to baseline where you are firmly, squarely rooted in objective reality.

You know you can understand where people are coming from, and even if they are trying to hurt you, you understand who they are and why they're doing that, and you don't have to take offense to it because you understand what objective reality is. So one of the things that I like to think of here is we all, human beings are meant to have dynamic range, and I think far too often we lose our range and we become a one-trick pony. The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. When we're in the process of rewiring, we want you to keep range, but we want to keep range while getting you back toward the center.

What's interesting about you, Melanie, is that when people are actually clustered toward the center of the spectrum, we actually are shaking their lives up and making them a little bit more intentionally adventurous and reckless before we balance out. Somebody like me, we wanna help me calibrate back to the center. We want, we wanna help me build consistency, understand the importance of routine, understand the importance of, like, keeping a clean house, that it's okay to do the same thing, you know, 10 times, right? 'Cause I have a very novelty seek- seeking, like, reckless style, where I just am constantly go with the flow. So my pattern opposition is to, to learn how to become more stable and consistent and for my nervous system to read that as peace instead of boredom. For you, you're already naturally more oriented toward the center than I am. So for you, there are more... I'm very risk-taking. I need to learn how to take less risks and be cool with that.

You need to learn how to take calculated risk and, and learn that you can trust yourself in the chaos and in the risk. So with that, there's a very specific healed place that everybody can get to without pendulum swinging, and I think that is one of the gifts that we're able to give people in Break Method, is that healing should... If you look at healing like a map, okay? So imagine a big, big map of the United States, right? I think when we look at things like mental health labels, like borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, histrionic, right? That's like giving a country, Russia, China, England. Like I'm in China, I'm in England. Like bro, those are big countries. What are you ta- like how, how do you... How...

Elisabeth McKay
If healing is a specific location and all you've been told is that you're somewhere in the country of Russia, how on earth do you get back to a healed state? That'd be impossible. There's no... How can you even generate the GPS coordinates to get the directions for that? What we do is we explain to you exactly what GPS coordinates you are at, and you also know then exactly what the GPS coordinates is for you of a fully healed neutral state. So you now have a prescriptive set of instructions with pattern opposition where you know exactly how long and how far and exactly how many turns to get back to baseline. Because we're not talking in generalities and we're not talking in labels like you're somewhere in the country of Russia.

That's not helpful at all because you could take, you could give me a sample of 100 people with bipolar disorder, and every single one of them could have a distinctly different set of nine markers in a different order, and they would for all intents and purposes be very different despite all technically having the same label. A lot of mental health labels are actually just labeling the bottom four markers that we describe, which just has to do with chronological behavior and how it unfolds over time. So the label itself is only referring to the, the physically observable behavior, but there's so much more to it. We track five markers above that that help us understand how you see the world, how you skew and distort that, what your priority structure is, what your underlying motivations are, how you lie to yourself, and how that impacts you biochemically. If you don't know that top five piece, you really know nothing. You could give me two people that both struggle with opiate use disorder, and unfortunately the way we deal with that in addiction medicine now is you treat them both the same. With Break Method, you would have to treat those two people very differently if one was on the left and one was on the right side of the spectrum. The same protocol for each of those people would be wrong. And the pattern of use could be drastically, just because they both use opiates doesn't mean they use for the same reasons at the same point in their timeline. That's what we do differently in Break Method, is that there's no, you're not just taking a wild guess and pendulum swinging in an attempt to regulate, which is what frankly humanity as a whole does. That's what we do societally. Think about how as a society we go from uber conservative, puritanical, then we pendulum swing the other way. Super liberal, like hippie movement, love is love, and that we just keep pendulum swinging. We don't seem to learn our lesson, which is that there is in fact objective reality. There is in fact a healed state. And if we keep using emotions and feelings to try to navigate our way back to something that is actually very data-driven and frankly more like math, we're never gonna get there.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that's what I was trying to understand was where is the baseline? So the baseline is the human being rooted in objective reality as much as possible.

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah, and I think, you know, example of this would be to be firmly rooted in objective reality, you need to be able to recognize, "I don't know what you're thinking, and I can't know what you're thinking, and all I can do is ask you genuine clarifying questions from a good posture of my heart and take you at face value and then observe your behavior accordingly." For most people, it sounds oversimplified.

There are so many brain patterns that cannot do that. They cannot stop assuming. They cannot stop filling in gaps. They can't, they cannot prevent their brain from hearing something that you didn't say. Those are the most challenging cases, and I'm sorry to say this, but it is really the majority of humanity, especially right now.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. It's, one of my, I think the most freeing things I ever learned was, and it's a hard, it's such a hard practice to do, but no assumptions. So like literally unless they tell you the thing, like just don't assume anything 'cause you can't, you can't know. But we do it all the time with everything.

Elisabeth McKay
And the best is when somebody asks you and you explain what you did or I did and they're like, "That d- that's not what you really meant." And I'm like, "Then why did you ask me?" Either, either show me the honor of, of asking me the question and listening to my answer and taking that at face value or don't ask me the question.

'Cause if you're gonna... And I mean, that's really the truth is that all, and it goes back to that psychological mechanism. If somebody's convinced of something, it doesn't really matter what you say, their brain's going to keep doubling down on the self-deception. And I mean, that's when we know that we're in the territory of personality disorders.

Melanie Avalon
I've also been, I'm always really fascinated. Like I have, I real- I mean, I'm trying to think of an exception. In general, I, I don't have any problem saying I was wrong about something. Like if I was wrong, and I don't mean like, like hurting somebody. I mean, that would apply as well. But I mean like just being like incorrect.

Elisabeth McKay
Like making a mistake.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, like being incorrect. Like thinking one thing and being wrong. And it's like, "Okay, I was wrong." But, and I'm really fascinated by people who just can't. Like cannot.

Elisabeth McKay
Here, here's where it starts, and this is a really unfortunate reality for a lot of us, and this is something that I didn't set out to prove, but that's what the data showed. The more- Loving and sweet and secure your childhood environment is, the more statistically likely you are to have parents that enable you and entitle you. And as a toddler, they're like, "Oh, isn't that cute?" Instead of correcting it. And if it's not corrected between two and five, it doesn't get corrected. So if your parents let you get away with that behavior, and they're like, "Oh, they're gonna outgrow it, they're just a toddler," unfortunately, the data says otherwise.

They do not outgrow it. It becomes actually sneakier and more evasive. They double down on it, and it actually becomes a deeply entrenched part of who they are. And really, personality disorders can almost exclusively be tracked back to that pattern that I just described.

Melanie Avalon
That is so interesting. Okay.

Elisabeth McKay
If I... A- and I mean, I have toddlers. The amount of lies that toddlers say, it's unbelievable. And the way to deal with it isn't to be like, "Why are you lying?" Right? That's, that's a, that's that discipline shame where you're busting apart curiosity. What we need to do is to help a child understand why their brain is projecting that lie, and help them strategically unwind it so that they can step back into the truth. And we don't do that with toddlers because we've been duped into believing that toddlers just do that and toddlers outgrow it, and I'm telling you, that is a bold-faced lie that has generational consequences.

I have seen it time and time again. You have to correct your children. A good example of this would be my daughter Harley, when she did her first soccer game and her dad was her coach. She was probably three and a half or four. She came back from the game. I wasn't there 'cause I was coaching my sons. And I came back and I'm like, "So Harley, did you score any goals?" And she's like, "Oh yeah, I scored five goals." And I was like, "Really? Okay." I'm like, "So if I ask Daddy right now, 'cause Daddy's your coach, right?" And she's like, "Yeah." "If I ask Daddy if you scored five goals, would he say that you scored five goals?" So now she's thinking about it and she's like, "Uh..." Right? So now she's being gently confronted with reality, of having to think, "Okay, Dad was there. Would Dad say that? Am I making this up?" So I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna go ask Daddy." I'm like, "Hey, Daddy, did Harley score five goals today?" And he was like, "No, it was like herding cats. No one scored anything. No one knew where the goal even was." And I'm like, "So Harley, did you hear what Daddy just said?" "Yeah." I'm like, "So Dad says you didn't score any goals. What's up with that?" She's like, "Well..." I'm like, "Listen, was the game fun? Did you work hard?" "Yeah. It would've been more fun, though, if I scored a goal." And I'm like, "So do you think maybe it kind of feels like it just would've been more fun if you scored a goal, so you thought maybe, like, Mommy would be happier if you scored goals?" She's like, "Yeah, I think so." And I'm like, "Well, do you wanna learn how to score goals?" And she's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Okay, why don't we practice this week, and then we'll see if you can score a goal next week? But just know Mommy's happy that you played, and you don't need to make up a lie that you scored goals. I'm just happy that you played, and Dad said that you played your heart out." She's like, "Okay." So think about how many parents would be distracted enough to be like, "Sounds good, honey. So cute. I'm so proud of you." You wouldn't have even stopped to be like, "Wait a second, are you sure?" Or another example, toddler. I have... So my littlest two are Irish twins. They're 10 and a half months apart. The amount of times that I have seen with my naked eye what transpired and, and River, the youngest, is like, "Harley slapped me." And I'm like, "Okay, babe.

Elisabeth McKay
You, did you see that Mommy was right in the corner? I watched the whole thing.

I, I didn't see Harley's hand hit you." And she's like, "It hit me. She slapped me." So we often just wanna get that stuff over with, and we don't sit there and help them dissect what really happened and why their brain is quickly projecting blame or shifting it onto somebody else. If we don't correct those toddler moments, that turns into a personality disorder.

Melanie Avalon
I'm so fascinated by this conversation bec- So I don't have kids. There are many reasons I don't want kids.

I love, I love kids, but I don't think I am, like, meant to be a mother. But one of the things I get really stressed out about thinking about being a mother is, is, like, raising kids and nurturing, you know, a healthy mental state for them in the world. And it's funny, so I will... Like, so I have n- a niece and nephew, and I will get... If I talk to them, I'll, th- they'll, like, tell me stories that I know, you know, are not, are not true, and I get stressed out about it because I'm like, "But that, that's not... I shouldn't, like, go with it." Like, how do I say it?

Elisabeth McKay
Where's the line? How, where, what is the most beneficial thing you can do for a child that's in that?

Melanie Avalon
And it'll be, like, a harmless story. You know, like, "Oh, I did this and this and this." I'm like, "N-" I'm like, I'm so, like, truth obsessed that I'm like, I don't know if I should be like, "Oh, really?" Or if I should be like, "Is that, is that accurate?"

Elisabeth McKay
It's all about the delivery. It'll very much help those children become rational, thinking adults with strong metacognition if you correct it.

So here's an example, and I feel bad to be ragging on Waldorf education, but it just is what it is. So, and I have a dear friend who's a Waldorf teacher, and when I broke this down for her, she was like, "Huh?" Okay, so Waldorf education, I don't know if... I'm sure people that are listening are reasonably familiar with it, but their whole thing is about really nurturing imagination, and they don't even let... They don't teach kids how to start reading until fourth grade because they don't wanna disrupt imagination. There is a, there is a very harmful long-term consequence of this, okay? So imagination, if it's not balanced with learning how to take committed, methodical action, is actually extremely destructive and harmful, and it is actually, talk about setting that cultural, that culture in the Petri dish, it is, it is the, the setting for severe mental illness. Because then you don't... If you're in your head instead of into committed actions where you're able to build emotional resilience and you're able to, like, push a boulder over a hill and see, like, this physical input gets this physical output, you're at a severe disadvantage in our world. And unfortunately, Waldorf education, because of how much they try to nurture- ... imagination over doing or rational thinking, they're setting their kids up to be very disconnected and detached from our physical world, and it becomes very challenging for them to navigate everyday life. So using this example, the, the foil, which is why I think it's so funny that people are like, "Oh, Waldorf or Montessori," they're actual exact foils. They're very opposites of each other. Montessori is very much a doing. It's, it's nurturing self-efficacy. What is my child showing that they're ready for with independence? They try to kind of miniaturize everything. So in Montessori education, they're trying to take adult things and make them accessible for little kids to see how far a child will push themselves with independence to be doing and to learn how to be strong and to show consistent, dedicated motivation toward a, an end goal, right? Imagination and creativity in that is really... Like, of course, like you can still do artwork and stuff, but they're looking to see what you can do with your hands, what you can sustain, what you can build. Waldorf's the exact opposite. Everything's like, it's still sel- you know, technically student led, so like what is the child drawn to? But you've taken away their ability to, to physically do and to see their things come to life, 'cause you're trying to get them to align mostly with the immaterial world. So just for anyone that's listening, that you ever hear people compare Waldorf and Montessori, they are actual opposites. And by the way, if you can't tell, I'm a huge proponent of Montessori education for young children. I think it's the best preschool education you can give your child to set them up for brain, a brain pattern that actually helps them as an adult rather than harms them.

Melanie Avalon
That is fascinating. And yeah, and that nails it. The, my, my stress about, I didn't use the word imagination, but imagination versus, like, truth.

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah, not, not... Imagination at the expense of truth is actually very harmful. You should... Right?

And to me, imagination and creativity, they're actually separate things. I'm a very creative person. I am an innovator. I'm a, I'm a visionary, but I don't get lost in my imagination. There are people that actually get lost in their imagination. There are people that have whole relationships with somebody that aren't real.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm.

Elisabeth McKay
That's what hap- that's the risk you run when you nurture imagination over committed action. And really, committed action forces you, talk about a scientific experiment, it forces you to experience physically observable evidence. Did that work or did that not work? If everything's in your imagination, you can convince yourself that everything's great when it's absolute shit. That's the problem, right?

If you're not physically building something in the real world, you could k- trick yourself into thinking you did a great job. If you're building something that has a physical substance to it, you either did it or you didn't do it.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm.

Elisabeth McKay
It either was enough or it wasn't enough. If you're focused solely on imagination, how do you, how do you do that? It, it, it is the recipe for deeply entrenched self-deception.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Just as a side note, that's so weird that they would not teach you to read because of... Not, I don't wanna say weird, but I find it interesting that they would.

Elisabeth McKay
It's weird.

Melanie Avalon
'Cause reading, like I w- I w- I am and was such a big reader, and I feel like it's the pinnacle of imagination, 'cause you have to imagine everything you're reading in your head.

Elisabeth McKay
From what I understand, the idea, and I feel weird even saying this, it has to do somehow with the constricted structure of language. They want you to think in imagination without constraining it to language.

So example would be like in Waldorf if, if a child draws something, you're never... You're actually instructed as a parent, like, when your child brings home artwork, d- even if it looks like a tree, don't say, "Is this a tree?" Because now you've constrained their thinking to now they're gonna try to think of it as a tree. It's, it's all about construct.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, the Platonic ideals.

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah. They don't want you... The idea is that they don't want it to constrain the imagination.

And by the way, obviously there are kids who go to Waldorf that do read, but the whole idea is that, that they feel like it's something that is led by the child, and it's not something that they put in the school curriculum. And obviously if, if we're talking like a charter school where they have to abide by some sort of state mandates, I'm sure there are Waldorf schools that do this, but if you're talking about real classical Waldorf, they don't.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Fascinating. Okay.

Elisabeth McKay
Sorry, Waldorfies. I really am. I'm so sorry.

Melanie Avalon
So the, the markers, so we only did two out of the nine, so w- what are they in general, like the nine?

Elisabeth McKay
Okay. So there's nine total. The top two have to do with how you perceive reality, and those are those nurture/nature markers. So the first one is a byproduct of your repetitive early childhood experiences that were perceived and patterned by you as negative in some way. Another way to say this would be those are the inputs that countered innocence, curiosity, and love. They shape you.

They turn you into something, and then your spirit, whoever that unique part of you, your, your actual nature then has to deal with that environment. So that is where the nature gets expressed, is in that second marker. Now if you go down a level, so you put those two at the top. If you go down a level, we see three markers that help us understand how you respond biochemically. So this would be a three-part emotional addiction cycle. How we choose to respond at the base level to fear, how we protect ourselves, and then what we're willing to do to escalate when we feel like our protective response hasn't worked. Those are all downstream of our perception of reality. You are going to label something as something, whatever. If this is fear, you're going to respond with fear. A great example of this would be I, shockingly enough, I hate elevators, you guys. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. I have done so much work around this. I am petrified of elevators. I hate it. So I could walk up to an elevator with my husband. He could be living his best life scrolling his social media, not thinking anything about hitting the button. I ca- I have no chill when I have to go on an elevator. I ... my heart is beating out of my chest, I'm sweating, my whole body's on pins and needles. All I can think about is getting trapped in the elevator. Like, I cannot focus on anything else. Objectively, we are both doing the same exact thing. We're both looking at the same thing, either one of us is about to press the elevator button. The difference is what ha- what I've been patterned with has made me think of this as a fear-inducing scenario, and he is in a happy-go-lucky state, no fear present. So I'm going to have a very different emotional response to something like that than he would.

So we have to remember that our perception of reality will dictate everything else. So what we think we are seeing is upstream of everything else, including our biochemical responses and including our behavior. And I think this is one of the biggest misses in the mental health space, is that we tell somebody, "Don't do this behavior, do that behavior," but we're not actually fundamentally the, changing the way they see the world. If you don't change their perception, everything will be white-knuckling and based on willpower. And frankly, most people do not have willpower available to them. So you have to change how somebody is fundamentally seeing something to get the biochemical reactions to actually come on board, which is why with break method, people are able to do things differently without having to think their way through it.

Elisabeth McKay
So top two markers are perception, middle three markers are biochemical, bottom four markers are chronological behavior that shows us what happens for you at early stage transitional and late stage behavior.

Melanie Avalon
Quick question about the first two. So can the thing that happens that is perceived as negative just be an assumption about a positive thing, like validation?

So you're getting validated positively, so you assume if you don't do that, that it's a negative, even if you never got negative feedback.

Elisabeth McKay
So there are intentional and unintentional ways that we receive input. So example of intentional would be things like religion, cultural. "In our family, we do this. Like, we're high achievers. We're into sports," right? Those are all things that your parents are trying to input you with. Even things like being yelled at or disciplined or shamed, those are all intentional. Your parents doing ... They're trying to correct you with intention. It might not be working, it might be going in the wrong direction, but they're doing it on purpose.

Then we have unintentional, and these are things like gaps in understanding. This would be like going up to mom and be like, "What happened to Uncle So-and-So?" "Oh, he's on a vacation." And then there's a part of you that's like, "I think he's dead, but Mom's hiding this from me. Like, I'm gonna fill in the gaps." Like, Uncle So-and-So hasn't been at Thanksgiving for four years. I'm pretty sure he's not on vacation. I had a friend, true story, in ... I went to Jewish sleepaway camp, and there was a girl who I love dear, dear, dearly. And if for some reason she's listening to this podcast, love you. 'Cause, you know, my pattern recognition was off the chain. I think I was only nine. But we're sitting in camp, and she's like, "Yeah, my dad's on vacation." I'm like, "How long has he been on vacation?" I'm putting the pieces together, and I'm like, "Hey, babe, I think your dad's in jail." And she's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "I- I'm just putting two and two together. I think your parents are lying to you. I think your pa- I think your dad's in jail." And then eventually she did find out her dad was in fact in jail. I'm like, "This is so ... Two and two is not equaling four here. Your dad cannot still be on vacation." And you guys, this is the difference between a rejection and abandonment child. She believed it, and I was like, "Nope, someone's lying. Here, I've just cracked the code for you. You're welcome." So in this scenario, what happens is obviously we're, you know, we're talking about this scenario where this girl's buying, buying a narrative because she was given basically false information, right? And her brain's just filling in the gaps. And because that confirms what she wants to believe about her dad, she's gonna buy the whole narrative and swallow it up, and it's gonna make her feel comfy and safe. My brain pattern was obviously different, so I'm clearly not buying this story. I'm looking to poke holes in it, and I'm like, "Wait a second." So gaps in understanding are absolutely pivotal to how our brain pattern is formed. Things that people aren't telling us or things that we're filling in with that age-specific lens that might be right or might be wrong, those very much still become part of our subconscious programming. So we could decide that something happened or a parent doesn't give us information and we decide that that's true, and we could be operating as a 41-year-old with a three-year-old deciding something that actually is encoded into our brain-body-spirit as truth that actually is not objectively true at all.

Elisabeth McKay
And that gap in understanding, honestly, I think for a lot of people, is one of the largest drivers of brain pattern. And I'll give you a quickie little hack that I gave to one of my clients, because if you have kids and you have kids that are deep thinkers and ask a lot of questions, for certain brain pattern types, particularly of the rejection type on the right side of the brain pattern spectrum, sometimes parents unfortunately get triggered when their kids ask a lot of questions, right? So let's say your kid's asking about, "But why? But why? But what about this?" Right? And you're pushing, pushing, pushing. What ends up happening eventually is the parent's like, "I don't know." Like, or, or they feel like they've reached their edge intellectually, and then they actually shame their child or they shut it down. And a kid's not gonna stop pursuing it until they feel settled. So you've now set your kid up for a gap in understanding that's probably going to pattern them for the rest of their lives.

Here's the hack. If you're that type of parent that shuts it down or doesn't have the bandwidth for it or starts to feel personally victimized by the questions, get a big question book. In this big question book, you say, if there's a question that you feel like you can't answer, you look at your child and say, "This is such a cool question. You know, Mommy has no idea how to answer that question. So what I think we should do is we should write that question in your big book of questions, and on a rainy day when we have nothing else to do, I think we should open up that book and we should go do some research together. 'Cause Mommy doesn't know the answer, but I'm willing to help you figure it out." Having a big book of questions can literally change everything about your trajectory in life with your child, especially if you're somebody who gets triggered by questions. So that's, that's the hack. For those of you listening, I highly encourage that. Even, like, what a cool artifact for your kid to have when they're older and they have their big, big book of questions. If my parents had done that for me, I was asking some Deep questions for a three, four, five-year-old. I'm sure I scared the crap out of my parents. They were like, "What do we do with this thing?"

Melanie Avalon
Oh my gosh. So with your kids, do you do, like, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy stuff?

Elisabeth McKay
I'll- I'm gonna put this into perspective for you this way. My daughter Sarai, who just turned 16, we're actually celebrating her birthday tonight, as a kindergartner, they were supposed to pick, you know, a, a figure from history and dress up as the, the figure and do their whole, you know, tell the, the story. Well, my daughter Sarai picked Amelia Earhart, and when we did the research, she stumbled upon the whole story actually being a total sham, and that actually there was a man in the plane, and she wasn't actually flying by herself, and it's this kind of big, like, feminist... It's really like a fairy tale, a feminist fairy tale. And Sarai looks at me, and my daughter has cerebral palsy, so she signs this to me aggressively. Aggressively signing like, "Mom, I wanna tell the truth. Is that okay?" And I'm like, "You- whatever you wanna do, babe." I'm like, "You did the research, so if you are bold enough to get up there dressed as Amelia Earhart and break down the truth of Amelia Earhart in your public school kindergarten classroom, I support you." And let me tell you, I got reprimanded by the teacher. A bunch of the parents were like, "How could you?" And I'm like, "That's the- the truth is the truth, man." If my five-year-old wants to double down on the truth and they're doing it in a respectful way that's well-researched, absolutely, totally support it. And actually, I feel like Zev, who just walked in the room-

Melanie Avalon
Mm

Elisabeth McKay
... I've had this conversation with him. One of his siblings, like, believed in Santa Claus forever, and I, even when my little son River was like, "Do you think Santa Claus is real?" My response is, "What do you think, buddy?" And he was like, "No, but I kind of wanna believe," and I'm like, "I totally respect that." That's my way of dealing with it with River.

But when my kids, my first two kids, where I was a little bit harsher around the edges, they were the ones that were in school like, "Santa Claus isn't real."

Melanie Avalon
Oh.

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah, they didn't, and I mean, even Zev's dad got mad at me like, "Can't you just let them live the fantasy a little bit longer?" And I'm like, "At the expense of what?" You know, I, and I think that's why I've chosen to do it the way I have with my two younger kids, 'cause hopefully, as we get older, we learn lessons and we, we learn to do things better. I perhaps was harsher with my older kids and made them a little bit more skeptical, cynical, which I think, by the way, would serve them well as an adult, so I'm still proud of myself there.

But I realize that there's a time and place for softness with my other two, which is why River, when I asked him like, "I don't know, buddy, what do you think?" He's like, "Yeah, I don't think he's real, but I wanna believe." I'm like, "Okay, cool. I'm down with that with you." Harley, my five-year-old, does not believe at all, and she'll tell you to your face. Harley also is a five-year-old that we try to let her do things independently, and we let her go into the store to order something, and she came back in and she goes... And I'm pretty sure she was four when this happened. She sits down and she goes, "You know, this guy, he was giving me a lot of energy. I, I think I really made his day. Like, really, my presence in that store, I can tell it just really, it just made his day. I'm really glad I could do that for him." I'm like, "You're four? What are what are we doing?" Um, so I think that's part of... And I, I say this to inspire people. Our children are capable of so much more than we've been programmed to believe they're capable of, and we actually handicap them by doing things like, "Oh, isn't that so cute? Oh, they're just a toddler." They, if we actually really nurture those two to five age ranges, we can turn them into phenomenal adults. And I will say, I'm going to toot my horn, I've had so many adults, one of them is in the room right now who's gotten to spend the last week with my kids, meet my kids, and time and time again, people come to me and they're like, "Bizzy, I don't know what you did here," but my older two kids who are about to turn 13 and one is 16, they're like, "I don't know what you did, but these kids are, like, extraordinary." They're, they are standout kids. My son Zev last year, I guess maybe this was two years ago, in the pickup line at school on the very last day, he comes to the car and he's, like, sniffling and crying. I'm like, "Babe, are you okay?" And he's like, "I just really love my teacher." And he comes and sits down. I'm like, "That's the cutest thing ever." And then all of a sudden I see his teacher walking over. She's crying. And she's like, "I just love your son so much. He's, like, the student that everybody wishes they could have. He's just, like, he's such an extraordinary kid." We all have the ability to bring that out in our children if we choose to do the hard work, and the hard work happens in those tiny moments that you would otherwise overlook or just try to white-knuckle and get through.

Elisabeth McKay
If you take those small moments seriously, in particular between two and five, you can have kids that you actually wanna hang out with. I actually wanna hang out with my kids. I genuinely love them. I'm not, like, annoyed at having to hang out with them.

I'm going to do a bunch of podcast interviews in Florida next week for a turnaround trip, and I'm bringing my son Zev with me because he's actually delightful to hang out with, and I know that I can bring him into a professional encounter and people will be as mesmerized by him as I will. A lot of people, if you're honest with yourself, you can't bring your 12-year-old boy to a business meeting, right? You, that has to start young. So take it seriously and just know that kids are wildly more capable than society has led us to believe they are, but you have to do the work.

Melanie Avalon
I'm really fascinated by it because, well, I, I probably made it easier for my mom because when I was three, that's the first time I guess she was like, "Easter Bunny time," and I informed my mother that that was not, it, that that did not make sense, that there was no way that a rabbit could, like, bring-

Elisabeth McKay
Rabbits don't lay eggs. What are you talking about?

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I, like, corrected her and she was like, "Well," she was like, "Just don't tell your friends." What I'm fascinated by is, 'cause I feel like I, growing up, was, like, the m- like, the model child.

Like, I always did everything right and I, I, and, but and my memory of my childhood is very rosy. Like, I really don't have negative memories about it.

Elisabeth McKay
But you're toward the center of the spectrum, that's why. That's why you have that balance.

So it's like you have the situational awareness, you have the strong metacognition. You're, you know, where rejections that are further to the right of you would believe in the Easter Bunny until they're, like, 12 and then be really mad at whoever broke apart that fantasy. You saw that, but you were also in a regulated, stable, and childhood environment, and that's that love and safe pattern that you have. It's like a, a split between the two, which is why you have both. You've actually, you have one of the more beneficial patterns on the spectrum. I already shared with you privately what the areas are that you can improve on, but you know, both where you are and where I am, we're likely to report A really great outcome in our adult lives in general, right? There are certain places where they're naturally well-suited to live a great life. Does that mean that it can't be greater? Of course not, right? There are ways that we can live a greater life. We can learn to express ourselves more and, and, you know, for me, invite more stability, for you to invite more, more play and a little bit more daring, especially to be messy. But I think where you are, the reason you have that experience of kind of being a little bit of both is because that's precisely what your pattern is, is it's a little bit of both. Because you're toward the center, so it's very, very naturally balanced. And for what it's worth, I think that's partly the reason that your brain pattern doesn't actually see value right now at throwing kids into the mix, because kids are inherently chaotic and destabilizing, and your brain likes, it likes the stability that it likes.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I, I, I just think, I mean, speaking about, 'cause I'm much a, like a perfectionist and all these things, I would wanna be the most, like, perfect parent, and I don't think I could do that energetically and do all my other... And I could never be a perfect parent. But the amount of energy it would take to try to be that and do all my other things I wanna do, and this is why I'm so in awe of people like you who are, like, incredible parents and doing, like, all the career stuff. I just, I'm like, it's not, I don't know how I could do it.

Elisabeth McKay
Here's what I'll say to you about that, and I really, what I'm about to say, I really firmly believe it. I think some of the best mothers I have ever seen in my life weren't sure that they ever wanted to have kids, because they didn't need their kids to fulfill something in themselves that was missing. They were very self-actualized and fulfilled in other parts of their lives, and as a byproduct, were phenomenal parents, 'cause they weren't trying to take something out of their kids. The parents that are like, "I can't wait to be a mom," there's usually some identity piece that's wrapped up in that, that more often than not leads to a lot of problems.

I work with a ton of families in Break Method. The mom that couldn't wait to be a mom, that, like, puts all of their stock in being a mom or being a homemaker, they honestly have often the m- the most tumultuous relationships. For the parents that don't feel like they want that or need that, that end up doing it, more often than not, they end up being phenomenal parents. And I will tell you, every single time my parents see me, especially my dad, I guess my mom too, they laugh. Like, we, if we would've taken bets, we never thought you were gonna have kids, and the idea that you have four kids, they actually laugh every time. They're like, "This is hilarious. We never thought you would have kids." And n- actually, no one ever thought I would have kids. And really, the irony is, like, looking back on it, all my friends are just now starting to have kids, and I have a 16-year-old. It's a wild time. So I think I totally appreciate your sovereign choice and where you're coming from. I also just wanna reflect back to you that I think it's badass what you've built in your career and all the things that you're bringing to life. There's no way to be a perfect parent. All you can do is be really present with your kids and be willing to try things differently and be really observant. And there is absolutely a way to be a badass career woman and a badass mom. I've done it four times. And honestly, it's so fun. It's not always easy. It's really hard. It's so fun. And the coolest thing that, you know, I would certainly not describe myself as a feminist, but there is a part of me that absolutely loves that I get to model for my kids that you don't have to be a, a, a homemaker or a caree- career woman. You can absolutely do both, which is why I jokingly made up the hashtag tradwifebossbabe. Just sorry, not sorry.

Melanie Avalon
No.

Elisabeth McKay
I bake sourdough. I love cooking for my family. I also travel all the time for work, and I run seven different companies. Like, you can, you can do it all. I- in particular, I think women have a really, not all of us, but many of us have a very unlimited capacity for things like this. We've just been programmed to believe that we have to choose from one or the other, and I really don't think we do.

But you won't... There's no way to... And I think this is the thing for you, Melanie. Because your brain pattern only wants to do something if you feel like you can kind of somewhat guarantee the path to success and you really trust that you can pull it off, your brain, that's where you go into that isolating avoidance. There's no way to do that with parenting. All you have to do is trust that you're smart, you've got good met- metacognition, and at your core, you've got a good heart, and then you just have to roll the dice, and then you just have to do it. Because I, you get better every time. I've gotten to be a better and better parent. The f- You know? Like, I, this is the joke. By the third one, my daughter Harley, I was such a helicopter parent with my first child because she was special needs and had a seizure disorder, and I was constantly afraid of her falling. And then by the time Harley was born, one day I just noticed that Harley's whole front tooth was, like, broken off. I have no idea when it happened. It could have been broken o- off like three months ago. I don't know. So that's the difference between child one and child three, is like child three has a fully broken front tooth. No one has any idea what happened. We'll never know. Speaking of truth, God replay. We'll never know what happened to her tooth.

Melanie Avalon
Right.

Elisabeth McKay
But she's still cute. She's still real cute.

And on this topic, this is why I really think with things like parenting, I really... It's, like, it's such a strong desire in me knowing that I went from not thinking I ever wanted to have kids to now just, like, how much having four kids has wildly changed my life and who I am for the better. I think there are just certain lessons we cannot learn in this life without having kids. It's like, it would be like knowing that there's, like, 20 grades, and you're like, "Well, I'm just gonna stop at grade 14." Which is cool, and I love that, and I, for some people, they have to know their limits, and I get that. There are, like, there are just so many profound lessons that you can learn about yourself in the hardship of raising kids. And I mean, I've raised special needs kids. I've raised kids navigating through a brutal divorce. I wouldn't take any of it back. All those hard times have made me who I am and made me able to do the things that I do now. And my desire for everybody is to Challenge themselves to stretch their capacity as much as possible in their human life and not waste it.

Melanie Avalon
Well, it's definitely really good to hear that, 'cause one thing I'm thinking of, especially because you're so in tune with how, you know, the early childhood state affects everything and I had I had Gabor Maté on the show and, you know, he's all about trauma, and we had this conversation and he was saying that, you know, if you have kids, you can't w- you cannot work for the first, like, however many years.

Elisabeth McKay
False. I actually vehemently disagree with almost everything Gabor Maté says, but to, to, for the record.

Melanie Avalon
Right when he said that I was like, I was like, "Okay, I'm out, I'm out."

Elisabeth McKay
Xoxo. Yeah, I mean, I, I respectfully I've, I've done it. I know other people that have done it. I, I truly think when you have the right systems in place, it's all... I don't think that you can work and not put the systems in place and get out of it okay, but I, from the time my older kids, when they were little, I had to travel so much for work. But like I shared, the distinction is my parents left and ditched me and had no communication. I didn't know what was happening or when.

I developed really strong routines with my kids where they know when at... We count down the days and have since they were little to the point where now Harley's like, "God, Mom, I know. You know what? Like, I love you. I know you're working. It's fine. I'm fine. You don't have to worry about me." She's five. There's a way to do that and have it be something... Oh, and I, that's what I was gonna say. I love being able to model, especially that feminist little part of me, I love to model that for my, especially my girls, so that they know they can have both. And by modeling it and doing it in a way that creates nervous system safety and trust, I've shown them that it's possible for them. So I very much respectfully disagree with him. I've done it, and my kids are honestly badass, and I know I'm not the only one that's done it. But I think it, it is challenging for a lot of people to find the balance, and that is one of, I think, it's the thing I attribute to me doing Break too. I've always told people I am simultaneously a student and a teacher of this work. I, I absolutely walk the talk. I am constantly doing this on myself as well, and if I hadn't have had access to this, I probably would not have done a great job with that. But you can, you can do it all, absolutely. I'm positive of it.

Melanie Avalon
Well, that's, I mean, it's very, very good to hear and I'm, I definitely champion it. I still... We'll see. We'll see if I ever actually have kids.

Okay, so when people... 'Cause we, we, we, we haven't actually even mentioned... 'Cause I, I think people are probably curious when they take the, and now I'm forgetting what, the cognitive behavioral assessment? Was that what you were calling it?

Elisabeth McKay
So Predictive Mind is the name of it, and it's a, it's a diagnostic evaluation.

Melanie Avalon
Diagnostic evaluation, okay. How many different types are there?

Elisabeth McKay
Well, if you think about it in a complex math sort of way, if there's nine markers, there's a variety of different ways to re- there's obviously a lot of ways to rearrange those nine markers. There's only five primary source belief patterns, so that's what places you on the spectrum, and then there are subtypes within that.

So what we've found is that with over eight billion people in the world, there's really only five primary types of operating system that someone's brain can have. And then when we understand the nine markers underneath that umbrella, then we know the specificity of how that subtype actually shows up in everyday life.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, awesome. And is it pretty... Like, if people were to actually read the book, are most people pretty intuitive with which one they are?

Elisabeth McKay
No. No, self deception is so deep. That's why I put, that's why I put, I believe it's, it's before we get into that chapter where people can do the Predictive Mind assessment. It's most people don't see themselves accurately, so it's very important to use that QR code and do a Predictive Mind session to make sure that the parts of the book that you're really leaning into are accurate of you.

Because often, not, and this is not true for everybody, like, your brain pattern type by way of being toward the center, you're more likely to see yourself accurately. The further you get out to the left and right sides, the more unlikely that scenario is. So it's, it's definitely better that somebody knows definitively before they read the rest of the book. And by the way, as much as, of course, people wanna skip the chapters that aren't about them, and I know that you said this when we first started the interview, you learn so much about the people around you that all... it literally is like cracking the code. You, you thought this whole time that they were doing X, and really you understand, oh, they were actually doing Y, and now I understand why they were doing it. It just, it fills in so many gaps, and when I have, when I do this in particular with couples, the amount of understanding and resolution that can come in one session instead of six months of combative traditional marriage counseling, it's unbelievable. Because all it is, it's literally helping the other person understand the underlying motivations and why this loop is set into motion, and then most people are like, "Oh my God, I get it." It's, it's often that simple, the, the oh my God, I get it moment, and I understand how to do this differently, and then it's just better.

Melanie Avalon
Are we pretty intuitive about matching other people up to the type? 'Cause I found, like, when I was reading through it-

Elisabeth McKay
The, the same is gonna be true for you. You're likely going to be fairly intuitive because that is going to be a byproduct of strong metacognition and self-accountability.

So if you have those two markers end capping, so at the end and at the beginning, you probably see other people fairly accurately. Same rule is true, the further you are out to the left, the less accurately you see people. The closer you are towards the center, the more accurately you see people

Melanie Avalon
Okay. Interesting. Yeah, it was so fascinating 'cause some of the types I would just immediately be like, "Oh, this is this person." Like like, "This is this person."

Elisabeth McKay
What's really cool is when you take... So we train therapists and coaches in our modality, and we, when they get toward the midpoint of their work, they have to watch two seasons of a very specific TV show, and they have three different movies that they have to watch 'cause they have to do all of the brain pattern analysis of all the characters. Once you know this, my husband and I cannot watch any show or movie without hitting the pause button every five seconds, and he's like, "Oh my God, there's so this," and he'll, like, start breaking down all their pattern diagnostics and he's like, "Oh my God, this is so predictable.

They're gonna... Now watch, they're gonna have this fight because of this." So once you know this, it literally cracks the whole code on human behavior, period, which is why we call Predictive Mind the algorithm of human behavior. Once you know it, you see it everywhere. It literally would be like seeing through the Matrix, and all of a sudden you just wanna laugh because everything that you took offense to and everything that made you mad before, now you just see it for what it is and you don't have to engage it the same way.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. No, and it's wild, and I told you this in our call but, and I know other people have said it as well, like, just some of the examples are just so eerily on point that it's... It's just, it's really fascinating, and you can't unsee it, for sure.

Elisabeth McKay
Yeah, people, people get scared sometimes on sessions. I had somebody go totally blank, deadpan the whole time, and at the end I'm like, "So, any feedback? What'd you think?" And they're like, "That was weird." And I'm like, "Weird good?" And they're like, "Honestly, I'm genuinely afraid of you right now 'cause I know I didn't fill out anything on that evaluation that had anything to do with this.

I don't understand how you did that. I'm, like, genuinely scared." That's how pinpoint accurate we can be.

Melanie Avalon
And the way you created this was, you know, or how did you create it? It was like a, a multi-year gathering of lots of data points, and you created the, the, the software, the algorithm?

Elisabeth McKay
So I created the algorithm and the tech side of this. We started creating it in 2022. I actually saw the algorithm, I know this sounds a little bit odd, but I actually saw the brain pattern spectrum one day when I was giving my son, River, a bottle on my couch. I'm just sitting there. I was, like, in this moment of sweet peace, and I'd already been doing this work for many years and, like, the brain patterns themselves already existed, but I didn't... It was like all of a sudden being taken up a few levels and observing it from the top down instead of being in it. I literally just had this instantaneous epiphany one day, and I saw the brain pattern spectrum, and I looked at my husband. I'm like, "Take the baby. I need to get my computer." And I literally brought the whole thing to life visually and I showed it to Gordon. He was like, "Oh my God, babe." And I'm like, "Oh my God. This is what I've been, this is what I've been doing the whole time." And this shows when somebody's inventing something, you're often inventing, you know, let's say a piece of an engine, these cogs over here, and you're kind of pulling together the schematic or the blueprint. But sometimes you're too close to it to see what it is. Then eventually, if you stay diligent and you keep iterating and you keep observing the data and making small tweaks for accuracy, eventually you realize, "Oh my God, I've been building this whole machine. I just didn't know what it was 'cause I was so focused on building each part that I couldn't see the machine itself." And in 2022, literally in one actual moment, I saw the whole blueprint of what I was building, and that's when I started to create the technology.

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. Amazing.

So I bet listeners are super, super eager to... I, friends, I cannot recommend doing this enough. It is life-changing work. And so people can go to the... Okay, we have a, we have a code. So where do people actually take the assessment?

Elisabeth McKay
predictivemind.io is where everyone would go to do that first step. That's definitely the first step that I recommend.

Many people continue on to Break, and the code that we made for your audience is good for both. So no matter what, that Melanie 15 code will work across the board. But I still recommend, even if you're listening to this and you're like, "I have to do Break," still start with brain pattern mapping. You start there. Our team will go through that with you, and then they'll give you your options for doing the actual emotional re-patterning piece of it.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. So friends, go now. Go to predictivemind.io and then after the mapping step, you can use the code Melanie 15 to get 15% off all of the Break Method programs. So thank you so much for that.

Oh my goodness, this was amazing, and we only literally... We could talk for, like, 50 million hours and never even scratch the surface. So was there anything else you wanted to touch on for listeners?

Elisabeth McKay
Just when you look me up, most of my career I've gone by Bizzy Gold, and I am taking on my husband's name, so if you look at both you'll be able to see more of everything that I'm about. And yeah, I try to stay active on my social media, on my DMs, so if anyone DMs me with questions, that's usually me.

And I'm really looking forward to being part of your next step. And thank you so much, Melanie, for having me on, and anytime you wanna do a part two or part three, I'm totally game. And I am, in fact, coming to Austin, so we will be seeing each other for biohacking.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness, yay. Okay. Awesome. That's, that's really exciting. Well, thank you so much.

And again, so listeners, predictivemind.io. The code Melanie 15 will get you 15% off all the Break Method programs, and the book is Your Brain Is a Filthy Liar. And the very last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I am obsessed with gratitude and mindset, so what is something that you're grateful for?

Elisabeth McKay
Oh, man. The thing that I'm the most grateful for is I have had a very close relationship with God since the first moment I remember being alive, and that has gotten me through all of the hardship and has demonstrated to me what life is about.

I feel like from a very young age, I always believed that there was a bigger purpose to life, and I've never felt a day of futility in my whole life, and I'm working with clients all the time that struggle with suicidal ideation and depression. That is caused by a feeling of futility and a loss of purpose, and I have never felt that for one singular day of my life. I've always had a purpose, and I've always been clear on that purpose, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. I, I love that so much, and I actually I feel the exact same way. I am, I am so grateful to have purpose, and when people don't, I'm like, I don't even know how, like, where to start because I, it's just so natural to me, and I'm So grateful for it. Like, so grateful.

But yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This was amazing. Can't wait to see you in real life. Oh my goodness. And would love to have you back on the show in the future, for sure.

Elisabeth McKay
Awesome. Maybe, honestly, it sounds like we could do ... I mean, I don't know how many of your followers are parents, but usually in the biohacking space, a lot of us have a lot of kids .

And I think the, the idea of parenting specifically to generate an outcome in your child's brain pattern, it's ... I mean, obviously I, we didn't talk about this, but we actually have a doctor that's working with me that just met with a bunch of senators in her state because we're trying to build this into an educational curriculum. Because really, as much as this is mental health, it really needs to be embedded in the education system for young children. So that's one of my personal areas of specialty is how we help set the next generation up for success. So maybe, maybe that's a good topic to dive into.

Melanie Avalon
I was literally gonna say at some point earlier during this that this needs to be curriculum. Like this, like this needs to be-

Elisabeth McKay
I agree. That's what I'm working toward. We're, we're working on it right now. The senator loved it, so they're working on the legislation now.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness, that would be amazing. Okay, it's gonna happen. Thank you so much again. Can't wait to see you in real life, and we'll definitely have you back on the show, so thank you.

Elisabeth McKay
Okay, thank you so much, and thanks everybody for listening. I really appreciate your time.

Melanie Avalon
Thanks, Elizabeth.

Elisabeth McKay
Bye.

Melanie Avalon
Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melonie Avalon Biohacking Podcast.

For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What, When, Why?, as well as my supplement line, Avalonex. Please visit melonieavalon.com to learn more about today's guest, and always feel free to contact me at contact@melonieavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.