Cory Richards
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I'd gone from getting straight A's to basically failing everything. And so then that was the first time I was medicated with SSRIs. And then about, God, I'd say about a year later, eight months later, my mom was like, hey, can we go to primary children's hospital and sort of try to get a handle on this? And I knew something was wrong, so... or something was off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So I, I agreed and we went and there was sort of this evaluation. I remember the therapist so clearly. I remember like Enya playing in the back. I remember the smell so vividly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
and um and then as we were leaving this guy his name was ivan came up he's like oh we've just had a bed open up and i was like what so i thought i was leaving and then i never left your mom checked you in she checked me in and i mean that's got to be a very disorienting experience to be that young and be hugely disorienting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I think what's so interesting is that at that point, there's a splintering of stories, her story and mine. So my story becomes one of abandonment, right? Her story is one of love. I'm trying to help my child. Both those things exist concurrently, but they are conflicting, right? And resolving that both individually and collectively over time is incredibly difficult. hard.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It's very hard work to do. After that, I was put in a long-term institution or care facility for eight months. I ran away three times.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Heavily medicated. Heavily medicated. I was on, it was actually there that I got diagnosed. And again, I'm very much like you. I don't love diagnoses because I think they come with
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
tremendous baggage huge stories especially in mental health there's a story of brokenness that's inherent in mental health issues something is wrong well it's so stigmatized right yeah in our culture and the labels really are kind of just descriptions of symptoms they don't they're just a container cause or why or yeah what's going on they're just a container for a set of behaviors right right but but they come with the story of
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
dysfunction, illness. I mean, we call it mental illness. Right. Or we have that implies something. And it's a very hard story to get out of. And like we were saying earlier, now we're in this culture of like we're owning it sort of in not necessarily a healthy way. Right. And that actually perpetuates the stigma. oh, I can't do that, I'm ADHD.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Or I can't, you know, my triggers prohibit me from being in this environment. So that's hiding behind it and further stigmatizing it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Or work alongside or turn into a superpower. During that time, you know, I ran away from this place three times. And the last time, my dad, who's very big on agency, was like, great. You can run away. You can do whatever you want, but you can't come home. And how old are you? I was 15 at this point. And some people would say, well, that's the worst thing a parent can do. Child abuse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Child abuse, right? Quite frankly, I fault them in no way for that. They were scared of me. I was erratic. I wouldn't listen. Really, home was just a bed. and a source of food, and then I'd leave and do whatever I wanted. So there was a learning that rules in every way are arbitrary, and I just broke every rule because I had no respect for them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I remember watching them change the locks on the house and just being like, well, now what? For the most part, I was kept off the street by family, friends, and friends But there were times that I was in chapter eight in the book, profoundly dark experience that some people would categorize as rape and some people, the way I describe it as a much different interpretation of that. Mm-hmm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
But all that to say that there were things that happened that almost certainly... To you. To me. Or there were things that happened in my life. I try to stay away from the language of to me. Two or four. Yeah, yeah. Like, this happened, right? Yeah. And they had an impact. And that took years to... Like, this sort of quasi-homelessness took, I don't know, two years to really resolve.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And then I ended up in the hospital again when I was 17.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Sometimes, like if I, especially when I was running away, the medications would just run out, you know, like I was actually still, I would take them because one of the stories that I picked up is that my mind was dangerous. And if I didn't take the medications, I was going to go crazy. That was so deeply ingrained in me that I didn't want to go crazy. I didn't want to scream at trees.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So I kept taking them. And I think that was actually a great benefit that I had, that I had picked up that story that I was going to go crazy. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
and out of that environment, even though I dropped out of high school, I'd gotten my GED by that point. But I think living in an environment where it was not the deeply ingrained tapestry of my home life was so beneficial. And it was there that I sort of rediscovered climbing and I discovered photography and started to go down that path. And that was, again, that's where it became healthy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
That's when it was generative.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I love drugs. And I still love drugs. But I have a very different relationship with them now. For me, actually, I would say that the vast majority of my maladaptive behavior was focused mostly around drinking and sex. Because I was so...
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
desire to have me in your life, even if it's like that, you know, even if it's very short lived thing. But I, I think that was actually, those were my behaviors that really kind of were the most detrimental drugs again, because I had this story of, I was going to go crazy. We're a little bit more at a more tenuous relationship with them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So those alcohol and those drugs you were more afraid of because you felt like they were... Alcohol I wasn't, but more psychoactive drugs like psychedelics and cocaine, all those things I was much more reticent of. Later in life, of course, I've used psychedelics as part of my mental health journey, and that's been wildly generative.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It did until it didn't. So part of it was being with my aunt and uncle. I got three jobs. I started saving money because I wanted to go climbing. You know, I wasn't at school. And that was such a beautiful observation that photography was really a way for me to try to interpret and understand the world that I was moving through.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
One of the things that I write in the book is that there was a sense that if I looked hard enough at anything or anybody, I could see my own reflection because there is a shared experience, not just with other people, but with the natural world in the entire world, entire physical world that we live in. There is a reflection of ourselves that exists.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I think photography was a way to try to see that and anchor myself to the world. Also, it gave me a very real voice, meaning that coming from a place of feeling like I really didn't matter that much and I wasn't wanted, there was no belonging, to have my name printed in ink on a page with my expression sort of was this proof that I had a place in the world. And I loved that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I also used that for validation. Over time, it became maladaptive in its own way because I was mistaking validation for love or external attention for love, which is not the same thing. I mean, that's like the likes on Instagram, right? Oh, look at me. Everybody loves me. And you're like, that's not love, bro. But then the physicality of it also was trying to, I think,
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
get out of my mind and marry somehow my mind and my body. And it was a way to get all the angst out. And then it just got harder and harder and harder, meaning like the climbs got more and more difficult. Then I got more and more attention because then I'm getting sponsored. I'm going on bigger trips. And I was just filling myself with that. But it becomes much more dangerous, too. In what way?
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Just more dangerous climbs. More dangerous endeavors. You're going to higher altitudes, harder ways. And that is sort of its own swelling of hubris and ego that allows you to escape what's actually happening inside, which is also driving it. So you don't want to resolve it because you want it to keep fueling you. There's the fear that if I am actually somehow healthy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Exactly, exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Chasing pain away, getting their heart broken. I mean, look at the vast majority of amazing art is all about getting your heart smashed, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I actually think all art is an expression of love. But oftentimes it's coming through the lens of pain. But in my mind, it's love trying to be expressed. And so the reason we create during pain and crisis is because the love feels suppressed. It feels pushed down. And so art is the expression of love coming through you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
who you are yeah and i imagine in some ways it was very healing to do that for you it was healing i mean the photographs putting the photographs in a book putting them into bipolar as a collection was very healing. The memoir, The Color of Everything, the way I often refer to them is they're actually one book. There's the internal exploration and then there's the external manifestation of it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And so they're really companion books where one, you get to see how my mind was interpreting the world around me, but the other one, you get to see what was really happening underneath it and what was at many times driving it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Well, my friend, Dr. Luanne Freer, she was the one that actually sort of was like, I went to Everest in 2012 and she was like, and got evacuated. And she's like, I think you had a panic attack. And this was after the avalanche. My point in bringing that up is she never climbed Everest. She just created the Everest ER.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And that was her life for years and years and years, was creating a medical facility to care for climbers and Sherpa, high altitude workers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Okay, so just so people know, there are 14 mountains in the world that are above 8,000 meters. So 26,240 feet, roughly. Five of those are in Pakistan and the other nine are in right on the border of Nepal and Tibet. And then there's one down in India.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
The air blast of this avalanche just took us. I took a photograph after this of my face. Ended up on National Geographic cover. Right. And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil that I was living with. Corey Richards is a world-renowned photographer and climber.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
After all those peaks were climbed in the early 80s, there was this crazy idea and it was really the Polish doing these sort of nationalist expeditions to start climbing these peaks in winter. So it's like, okay, now we've done it. Now we've been to the top. Now let's try to go there in a much harder way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So all nine that are south of Pakistan had been climbed, but over, I think, 26 years, 16 expeditions had gone to Pakistan to try to do one of the winter ascents, and they had all failed. And so in 2010-11, I was invited by an Italian guy, Simone Moro, and a Russian guy, Denis Zarubko, to try to do one of these peaks, Gashabrum 2. And that is the 13th highest mountain in the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So we ended up climbing it in this very short weather window. about a 12-hour weather window. And then we got hit by a storm on the descent.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Winter is like this. We got up on the summit day. We're at 6,800 meters. There's three of us smashed into this sardine can of a tent that's really a two-man. We're sleeping head-to-toe. I mean, it's incredibly cramped and tight. We wake up in the, well, at 11 p.m.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Oh, my sleeping is like, yeah, no. That's like trying to sleep at, you know, an ACDC concert. So we got up at 11 and, you know, I had my altimeter and my thermometer hanging from the ceiling. It was minus 51 centigrade in the tent.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Without the windshield. So that's like minus 60 Fahrenheit. It's terrible. But I loved it at the time. I absolutely adored it. And we start climbing through the night, you know, six or eight hours later, we're sort of, it was almost as if it just happened. We were on the summit. It's almost like I blacked out, you know, and then the weather came in.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I think on the summit, it was registering at minus 80 without the wind chill.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Well, you're wearing these huge down suits that kind of look like spacesuits.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And you've got a ton of layers on, but it's tricky because if you, if you, layer up too much, you start sweating, which makes you cold. So if your feet are sweating in that kind of temperature, your toes are going to get frostbitten. And it's very, very... It's tenuous too. You have to be very, very careful because if you say you drop a glove or a mitten, I mean, that hand is gone.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You can't handle stuff at that temperature. It's kind of like grabbing dry ice. So we got to the summit and I didn't know this, by the way, at the time. I became the first and I still am the only American to summit any of the 8,000 meter peaks in winter. So we start descending and this storm hits us and it just starts dumping snow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And we got back to Camp 1, and we had a, you know, it's relatively flat, but it's this huge glacial valley that's just, if you look at pictures of it, it looks like sliced bread. These crevasses just kind of, as the grade gets steeper, they just spill over. I have video of it. Where like the snow is up to our waist. And I heard above us this sort of crack. Sounds a little bit like thunder.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I know what's coming. And I turn and I look. And the cloud ceiling was very low. And then the air blast of this avalanche just took us. And then we're in the snow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I mean, it's just like being in a washing machine. It's very violent. It's very loud. Your mind goes absolutely crazy trying to make sense of what to do, how to make it stop, how to not die. And yet it's flooding with memories at the same time. So the idea that your life flashes before your eyes is accurate. But in my experience, it wasn't poetic. It was just random shit going through my head.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
But a million thoughts in a second. So you're living this elongated timeline in a very short timeline. I just remember being angry. And then I remember just kind of resigning to the fact that I was going to die. And there was nothing I could do about it. And then stopping and realizing my face and my head were kind of above the surface.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And then my first thought was, well, Simone and Dennis are dead because there's no way all of us survived this. Your climbing partner. My climbing partners. And there's no way I'm going to dig them up. I don't have a shovel. And the snow is going to come packed very quickly. I could pull the rope that we were tied to to see if I could get down to them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
My thought was, well, there's no way I'm going to get to them in time. Were your hands free? One hand was free. And so I started kind of thrashing and flopping like a fish trying to get out of it before my body heat would actually kind of freeze me in a sort of a cocoon. And then I heard Simone's voice. And it was so confusing because I was like, you're dead. Right. You're dead.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Like there's no way you're alive. Yeah. And then I felt him on me. He was more in the periphery. Somehow when he was leading, he was ahead when we got hit. And somehow I ended up ahead when we stopped. We'd gone over several big crevasses. There were huge chunks of ice in the snow. So any one of these things could have killed any of us. And then I heard Dennis's voice too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So somehow we had all survived. And really that is because the impetus of the force was actually the air blast in front of the snow. And then we got hit by a little bit of the snow. And that's how we all were mostly on the surface. And then- Because you were kind of ahead of it in this. Yeah, yeah. Because we were on basically flat ground.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So what happens is it slides off the steep ground and the snow starts to slow down, but it actually amplifies the force of the air blast. And so we got thrown about 500 feet. And then I felt Simone's sort of hands on me and digging me out. What happens in those moments, the way trauma works is basically it stores a memory. So trauma is not the event itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It's the mind storing the memory in the hippocampus. And when it's very traumatic, it then triggers the amygdala in this loop into your sympathetic nervous system. And so that shuts down your prefrontal cortex. So you have no logic and reasoning. And you're just living in this recycling loop because your mind is telling you everything is a threat. That's what we call PTSD, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And that recycling system becomes so problematic that then we search for any way to slow that down, to zone out from it. That's why there's so much substance abuse in people with PTSD. That's why there's anger. That's why there's violence, because you're trying to express- through it, then by virtue of that, it becomes sort of a life path that you can't get out of.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
There's two ways to rewire the brain, only two. One is through intense experience and one is through repetition. And so that's why when people have these intense experiences, it changes the brain entirely. And then oftentimes the only way out of that is repetition, which is much, much harder. So what do you mean by repetition? Meaning you have to change your neural pathways.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You have to change what's going on in your head by repeating new patterns over and over and over again to get out of the trenches of... the shift that happens during a traumatic event. You can also have profoundly intense experiences that are very positive that change the wiring of the brain. For example, psychedelic use can facilitate that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
That's why people have this big blowout experience and all of a sudden they're freed from years of addiction because they had a positive intense experience.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
navigate a new way out of all those what happened well yes is the answer to that question both all of it when we have complex post-traumatic stress which is you know deeply ingrained repetitive traumatic experiences say for example like my childhood it's much more likely that you'll have a ptsd episode when when something big happens like that so what happened was
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I took a photograph after this of my face.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Right. And this story blew up well beyond the climbing world. And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase, which was very, very positive and generative and changed the course of everything for me. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil that I was living with. And so I started to unravel internally.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
there was the hyper stimulation of the external world, which was something that I knew how to navigate because of childhood. And yet the trauma inside started leading me down some very, very dark paths, specifically with substance abuse. And after this experience, after the, after the avalanche, but it was subtle and then it kind of grew. And then it, there was anger. There was a lack of memory.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
There was, um,
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You went into a darker... Well, I wanted that. Again, they existed concurrently, right? So I wanted intellectually... The new lease on life. But what I was experiencing internally was, why is this getting harder? Why is this actually louder in my brain? So I used the external success, again, to quiet that down. But internally, I was like, give me anything to make this stop.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
just like give me anything and when you say this can you kind of describe what this feels like it's like an internal hum that never goes away it's like a it's like the way i describe it in the book it's like the the the edges of the world become fragmented and sharp and yet there's a dullness to your perception and ability to function it's like living in a haze
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
where you've had too much coffee, you've gotten yelled at by somebody that you love. It's like all the worst shit, and so you're stuck in these rumination loops, having conversations and arguments with the person that cut you off in the Whole Foods parking lot. But it's like all the time. It's just so deeply uncomfortable. It's like jagged edges.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
In your mind that is ceaseless and constant and will never, ever shut the fuck up. You can't find a moment of calm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Well, the photographs were made in, you know, throughout a life of very, you know, this disquiet. And the memoir is all about the journey to find the quiet and where I found some of that, which is not to say that I live with a very quiet mind, but it's about the process through which I've found...
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
ways to regulate and and to manage the dysregulation and to manage the highs and lows but again like it's not as if it just is is an instant resolution or or it all just goes away i just went through something recently where i was like just got my heart absolutely smashed and it was like i feel good i feel good i feel like you know, in the past three months there were the fires.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Nine of my friends lost their homes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. I left a relationship that I had been in for a year and a half. I, my dad died and then I, I fell madly in love and then it got, and then that just, ended super abruptly in a very confusing way. And, and so you look at like the kind of dysregulation that that causes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Right. And then you're doing four of them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. And then you think, well, I've really done a lot of personal work. And then there's this vacuousness after all of this loss. And it was instantly back into these these patterns, these pathologies. And so in some ways, it's like- You mean the narrative in your head? The narrative in your head and the behaviors and not necessarily substance abuse. It's different.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It's a different expression now, but it's just like, wow, I'm grabbing for anything to calm this. And it's a good barometer and roadmap for, oh, this is still where I need to do some work. Because it's easy to be regulated when things are going your way. it's much, much harder to stay regulated when the world falls apart. And that's usually where you see your markers for growth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You see what I mean?
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
They tell a story of brokenness.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. That's one way of putting it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And so like, for example, this is like the ACEs scale, the adverse childhood experiences scale, right? Like, so if you have, you know, it's basically a questionnaire of one to 10. Did you have this happen in your childhood? Did you have this happen?
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Exactly. Were you ever hungry, right? Did somebody ever hit you so hard that there were marks, right? And the more you add this up, there's this profound expression of both physical ailments and behavioral ailments, right? So like, I don't know the exact figures, but you're far more likely to be a smoker. You're far more likely to attempt suicide. You're far more likely to
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Right, I mean, it's crazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Get divorced. One of the things that's so beautiful that you're talking about, and one of the things that we miss, is also the integrated system of the heart. Because the heart is not a metaphor. As we're learning so much more about it, there's mirror neurons in your heart and your mind and emotion processing in some way starts in the heart.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And then, you know, the signal for it travels up your vagus nerve and then it starts this bilateral conversation between your mind and your heart. So it's not just this metaphor. So in my mind, wellness is the integration of the mind. the body, and the heart. And there's those three components that when they're working in concert, you are stepping into a place of more holistic wellness.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
But you're absolutely right. It's an inside-out and an outside-in job, and it can work both ways, right? And it does work both ways.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And there were many modalities outside of therapy. That was one, right? But in my daily life, there are some very basic things that I try to hit. One is journaling, like literally mind dumping. And it's not, I'm not trying to write well. I'm not trying to be pretty. It's mind vomit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And it's purging. Yeah. Purging. I do that in the morning. If I can just get to it, vomit what's going on and you just get it out.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You get it out. You just kind of purge or vomit. It's a mental suppository. Yeah, exactly. Basically, it's just.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It's so powerful and consistency is key with it, right? Doing it regardless is great, but consistency is really.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I wake up in the morning, I meditate. One of the things I've really learned is to remove the roadblocks. If you think that meditation has to be sitting up straight with your legs perfectly crossed, trying to get a blue light shooting out of the top of your head, you're missing the point. If you remove all the roadblocks to these things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So I wake up in the morning, I prop myself up in my bed a little bit, and I meditate. I don't try to sit up straight because I've found that that means I won't do it. Then I go to the gym or I do my sort of morning pages or, you know, those can happen whatever time it happens. But by then, you know, by the time nine o'clock rolls around or eight o'clock, meditated, journaled, exercised.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Exactly. It sets. And so again, I, I've tried to be the guy who does it at five o'clock and then you do that. That's fuck that. Like that is a hurdle, right? And then you'll feel the sense of failure when you don't hit it. And then I have other pillars, which are community. I do a lot of men's work now where it's, we call it the tree house.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And we are just a group of people who are committed to our own growth and the growth of other men through the messy work of
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
change and accountability and that provides the structure for one of the other pillars which is community right so spending time with other people dan buechner who started blue zones has done a lot of research on this he's a dear friend and a mentor where it's like spending a lot of time with people is actually healthy people is really good for you you know and then creativity
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So you hit that creative, whatever it is, doodle for 30 minutes while you're on the phone. Just be creative in some way. Giving. And that could be simple. That could be listening to a friend. Not trying to fix it, just listening. That is a huge gift. So I try to hit all these things. And then diet, of course.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
i try to get enough food i try to bias protein basically for for muscle function and get plenty of greens and veggies in and kind of stay away from sugars and bad carbs and you notice that those adversely affect you when you do go off the i'm just foggier yeah
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
foggier and i don't feel as good in my body uh i feel lethargic it doesn't mean i don't love them i mean give me some pizza right you know like just being mindful of that and then with supplements again it's my supplement sort of regimen is very very basic it's vitamin d it's omega-3s it's you know, maybe some probiotics at different times.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I also supplement with like a super greens thing in my, in my protein shakes and fiber because I have naturally high cholesterol. So when you're eating a lot of meat and you have naturally high cholesterol, you got to be careful, but it's very simple.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I would say it has, but it's by virtue not only of the actual chemical reaction in my body and what that's doing and the reduction in inflammation, but it's also the consistency. Being consistent with things in your life in general
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
creates a foundational sense of um stasis yeah because it's reliable it gives you a sense of agency yeah and not being not being at the effect of the world but being in charge of your world agency it's so interesting you say that agency is everything how do you mean like you said it puts you in control and it takes you out of a state of this is happening to me to this is happening
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I get to choose my response to it. When you're not an agency, you're reacting to it. And you're always looking backward. Not having agency is living in a place of blame. Yeah. So it's backward focus. This happened to me. And that's always in the rear view. That are victim blame. Yeah, victimhood is like, we're fostering victimhood right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And that is, we are a culture right now that is rewarding victims.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Well, it's the extraction of agency. Yeah. You know, it's like we get to just be in the trauma of it and we get to sit in it and we get to stay victims. I'm not saying that when terrible things happen, there's not a place for being a victim. You are a victim of something happening. There's a time and a place for that. The goal is not to get stuck in it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
When I was writing my book, and I say this in the book, I started writing from a place of victimhood. Look at how hard my life has been, right? And look at what I've overcome and look what, I'm a survivor. And then I realized, oh my God, even claiming that I'm a survivor keeps me chained to the trauma because I'm still always in reference to the thing that happened.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Versus there's data and then there's the stories we create around it. The data is the event. And then there's the stories that we spin up to find meaning and navigate life with that. Right. But we have to be very careful about the stories we're telling. That's right. And right now, as you point out, we are stuck in a story of this happened to me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
But when I look back now and I look at the relationship with my brother, I look at my family, I look at being institution, I am literally profoundly grateful for it. Mm-hmm. And that's the shift.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Exactly. I literally would not be sitting here with you had all that stuff not happened.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
A lot of it was really writing the book, but that something happened concurrently with that where I did start doing more psychedelic work. And as I was writing the book, I was confronted by my own words, looking at them in black and white on a page. As I became more aware of my heart, my actual heart, I became more compassionate towards the external stimulus of my life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Because I started to see that like Mandela or like Viktor Frankl, when you start to see the world as a collection of complicated, contradictory beings, there is a necessary extension of compassion. And it also happens internally when you start to see yourself you take agency and you start to see that you are full of contradictions. You are full of polarities.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
We are all hypocritical at different times. And the more we're in search for survival, the more binary we become. That's a natural response of the brain. In writing the book, when I was confronted with my own stories, and I was coming more into contact with my heart, I realized that I could reframe the stories. I could abandon the narratives. I could literally rewrite them on the page.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And what a powerful experience to do that as an exercise for people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Well, and I saw, I literally, one day I had this sort of revelation. I love reading. One of my favorite books is The Power of Myth, where Joseph Campbell talks about how there are basically... archetypes of humans and there are stories that we consistently tell throughout history and half, right? And I started to see, there's this moment where I was like, oh my God, it's all a story.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I'm in charge of that. I have the agency to imagine, reimagine and unlearn the stories that I've learned in a very conscious way. And it doesn't mean lie to yourself about it. It doesn't mean these things didn't happen. It means that my interpretation of them and the meaning that I'm giving them is my responsibility. And I have control and agency over that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And so you step out of the blame mentality and into the gratitude mentality where you see that the shape of you And all of your contradictions and complexities, all of that beautiful mess is yours to own versus somebody else's to control or a memory to control. And there's so much liberation and freedom in that moment. Consciousness is storytelling.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. I mean, it's been an interesting journey because I think so often there's a natural... tendency to try to solve external problems through external means. And that can be very, very healthy at times. And it can also be very maladaptive. And I think for me, initially, it was a very healthy expression because it gave me a way to anchor in the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And that has been, my life has been defined on some level by polarity. And there is, in the hermetic teachings, that's one of the principles.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Nice, dude. That was great. I'm going to keep that one. In the hermetic teachings. teachings, which are basically underlie all religious philosophy, one of the principles of the seven principles is basically based around polarity. And so the idea is that every truth is simply a half truth. And until you incorporate the other half truth, which naturally exists,
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
you are living in half truths, which are falsehoods, right? And so part of my journey has been to become more compassionate towards those seemingly paradoxical relationships and allowing myself to expand to include both sides of everything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And that extends to myself, meaning that like the highs that create things would not be the highs that create things without the lows that balance against them. And so to say that I want only one would betray the law of polarity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Discovery demands discomfort. So if we're trying to constantly avoid the things that make us uncomfortable, we will no longer discover. And another one of the things that I talk about oftentimes is that certainty kills curiosity. So as soon as you become certain of your story, certain of anything, you're done growing. There's no more exploration. There's no more discovery. You're done. It's over.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
So grow your capacity for discomfort, lean into the things that are hard, lose your certainty, take agency and grow. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Well, and it's funny that I opened the book with a Rilke quote, which is let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going. No feeling is final. It just, you know, the idea to avoid suffering is, there's a lot of that right now in the mindfulness wellness community where there's almost like a, it's spiritual bypassing where you're like trying to almost escape the necessity of pain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You're just like bypassing it. No, I'm just going to be mindful. And I think it's a misinterpretation of non-attachment.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It gave me a way to try to counteract some of the stories that I had learned about myself in my adolescence when I was really going through sort of the introduction to a mental health journey. That's a nice way of putting it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah, great book.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I mean, the one thing that I, I still have tremendous amounts of questions and especially right now in my life, it feels almost more confusing than it ever has.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yep. Right. So no E C-O-R-Y.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah. I mean, I was institutionalized and then I was on the street and then I, you know, I dropped out of high school. And so when I rediscovered climbing, cause I started when I was five and then I lost it. But when I rediscovered it, it was very much. a way to anchor. And then photography as a sidecar to it sort of gave me a voice.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I think, but in many ways, it was more an examination of self. Initially, that was, I think, a very healthy thing. And then over time, it became less healthy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It never really does, at least in my experience. It never fully helps you resolve that internal turmoil. It gives it a vehicle to express, but it doesn't necessarily resolve it, if that makes sense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Oh, by leaps and bounds. Mental challenges are always the harder thing in my experience because they're more complicated. There's this very hard reality of climbing mountains or descending rivers in Africa. It's a container. And there's the physical world that you're moving through where in your mind, it's a whole universe unto itself. So the barriers and boundaries in there are much more...
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It's very clear. It's very delineated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
It's just nebulous. Yeah. Like, how do you even define growth? The only way that I've found to define growth is messy. It's not clear, and you're backsliding, and you're regressing and devolving at times, and that feels like you're going backwards, but it's always forward motion, but it's just messy. It's just a messy, messy process.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
I mean, in some ways it was almost amplified by those environments. Because when it's so quiet externally, you're made aware of how loud it is internally, right? And so I could find moments of calm and I could find moments of peace, but oftentimes that was when I was engaged with doing something very hard because it demanded a reduction of that noise inside my mind simply to survive.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
You get very focused. It's like not dying. Exactly. How to not die.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Whether it's a metaphorical mountain or not, anytime we're in survival mode, we're going to have an element of flow. And that is because we're uniquely programmed to survive. The funny thing about survival that I've found is that it's reaction-based. versus resilience, which is a response, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And so the shift from reaction to response, I think, is part of that internal growth because as somebody who's dealt with bipolar and these difficult mental struggles, it's very easy just to default to a reactionary thinking. The other interesting thing about that is survival is not values-based. Like when people are in survival mode, they'll do crazy shit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
When people are in a resilience mode, it's slower and it's underwritten by value. And the values are actually guiding it. So that shift into a resilience mindset has been one of the most important things I've done. And I would say that climbing and photography was actually mostly survival.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And not having the tools to, you know, not having the infrastructure. Judith Herman, who's a Harvard psychologist, in 1995, she basically said, look, all psychological dysfunction is really one diagnosis, which is trauma. It's all an extension of trauma. I mean, for the most part. Trauma has become a buzzword now and everybody's learning about it, which is so important.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And at the same time, there's this overcorrection where we're sort of believing that by knowing our trauma and being able to voice it and explain it, that that is healing it, which isn't the case. In fact, it becomes a new narrative that I've observed stops people. Self-identify with it. Exactly. We reinforce it by telling, oh, this happened to me. This is, and now this is my new story.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I did that for decades.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
Very early on, I realized I had a loud interior landscape. And I remember that from a very, very young age. And by virtue of that, there was a sense of isolation where I was almost trapped in my own mind and thus engaging with the external world felt difficult. And there was a sense also of like on the outside looking in. Now, I think that's pretty human.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
as i grew into adolescence there was a lot of violence in my home and it was it was between my brother and i he was only two years older but to me he was like he was my adult you know my parents were loving they did the absolute best they could but families are
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
crazy intricate the dynamics of families are wildly complicated yeah you throw a bunch of humans with unsolved tasks into a small container and daily basis yeah see what happens and so that violence it was it wasn't as simple as brothers beating each other up it was it was rage-based violence and rage i would actually say was the more traumatic component of that
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And it was his rage that perpetuated it. But then I learned also that when he beat the hell out of me, I got attention. So for many years, from my parents, we both did, right? So it was a means of having our emotional needs met, both of us. But then because I looked like the victim, the attention that he was getting was very detrimental to his sort of sense of wellbeing and self value.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I learned that, well, if I feed into this, then guess what? Like I get all the attention. I get all that soft attention. But ultimately, it didn't work. It just amplified the violence. And then I remember I was 12 and I just had this moment this night. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't just I was so unsettled.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
And I was I was in my family's den and my mind just sped up to the point where I couldn't track anything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life
my thoughts and it was almost it was just these almost flashes of of black and white and the only thing i could remember is i could track it to my heart beating the noise was so profound and i remember just sort of collapsing and pulling at my hair and trying to make sense of it and it was at this time that you know i was a smart kid i went to high school two years early