#12 - Corey McCarthy: Overcoming trauma, dealing with shame, finding meaning, changing the self-narrative, redemption, and the importance of gratitude

The Peter Attia Drive

Peter Attia, MD

Health & Fitness, Medicine, Fitness

4.7 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2018

⏱️ 147 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Corey and Peter met when they visited North Kern State Prison in California together as volunteers for Defy Ventures. Peter was moved by Corey’s remarkable story, who is a former inmate himself, and realized he had to have him on the podcast to share his experiences with a wider audience. You’ll almost assuredly take away something very important from listening to this episode. Understanding how your experiences can define you, what forgiveness means of both yourself and others, and how good people can do bad things, are just a few of the takeaways.

We discuss:

How Corey and Peter met through Defy Ventures [4:00];
How Corey’s prison experience has shaped his life story [13:30];
Corey’s early life, and the traumatic event that changed everything [16:00];
Early adolescence years, beginnings of addiction, and overwhelming shame [23:00];
The 5 ways to classify wounds, and the relationship between trauma and addiction [39:00];
Turbulent high school years, the struggle of parenting a troubled child, and more trauma further shaping the self-narrative [46:00];
Post high school years, spiraling out of control, and giving up on himself [1:02:00];
Navigating prison life, and why a desire to change often isn’t enough to make it happen [1:19:00];
The turning point and eventual road to recovery [1:48:00];
12 step programs: Pros and Cons [1:54:00];
Final days in prison, getting released, and routines Corey has kept [1:54:00]
Corey’s new perspective on life, takeaways from the visit to Kern prison [2:12:30]; and
More.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia.
0:10.0	The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,
0:15.7	along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working
0:19.6	with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast
0:23.8	is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality
0:28.3	more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's
0:32.5	episode and other topics at peteratiamd.com.
0:41.7	In this podcast, I'll be speaking with Corey McCarthy. I haven't known Corey very long. I first met him
0:47.1	in April during a trip that Tim Ferriss and I took with a number of friends to North Kern State
0:53.5	Prison, which is a maximum security prison in California about an hour outside of Bakersfield.
0:59.0	We did this as volunteers with DeFi Ventures, and if you haven't heard of DeFi or more
1:04.4	importantly, Catherine Hoke, you should definitely go back and listen to her interview with Tim Ferriss,
1:10.1	which was done probably in January or February of this year, and we'll link to that here. DeFi is
1:15.3	a program where volunteers like us go into prisons and participate in helping with teaching prisoners
1:24.2	certain skills in life, but I got to tell you after just that one trip there, I've come to realize
1:31.1	that the volunteers get more out of that experience than the prisoners do. It's hard to really explain
1:37.7	what we experience there, and on the drive home, there was about six of us in an SUV that had a
1:44.0	five, six hour drive back, including Corey. It was clear that it was going to be very difficult
1:48.7	to articulate what we went through with people who didn't share that experience with us, but
1:53.9	in particular, I was really moved by Corey's story. You see, Corey himself was once an inmate,
1:59.4	and he was invited on this trip by one of my good friends, and he asked, hey, you know, I know this
2:05.5	is kind of a small group of your bodies coming with you and Tim, but could we invite Corey? And
	...

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