Dr. Gabor Maté - Compassionate Inquiry

[Music] you're watching the first video podcast of in conversation the podcast of Banyan Books and sound I'm fairness Raleigh and I'm honored to be here with Gabor Amati he's a renowned expert on trauma addiction and stress best-selling author and speaker and he beautifully and very modestly weaves together medical research his insights for professional practice as well as his own story and we're here to talk about his method compassionate inquiry so this psycho therapeutic method compassionate inquiry how did he develop it it auto sort of necessity as a family physician I was dealing with people with physical illnesses whether it be neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis or autoimmune diseases like Crohn's disease or colitis or chronic fatigue or irritable bowel syndrome or cancer chronic asthma or on the other hand mental health conditions like depression anxiety addictions or childhood developmental issues like ADHD and after some years of practice said it was impressed upon me just by my observation that none of these issues whether physical health or mental health could be separated from people's life experience and most often their childhood experience and the emotional patterns that they developed all their lives and as that realization of the unity of mind and body and and the inseparability of people's life experience from their health conditions dawned upon me it became obvious that to help people wasn't enough just to help with the physical side of things so somebody's depressed it's not enough to give them an antidepressant if somebody's got rheumatoid arthritis it's not enough just to give them an anti-inflammatory or something to suppress the the autoimmune process the I shouldn't deal with their emotional lives which means spending time and talking with people now ideally I would have had people to refer to so I ideally I could have sent people to psychotherapist or the psychiatrist to deal with those issues because nothing in medical school trains you for that problem is on each side of Vancouver where I worked people couldn't afford psychotherapists for the most part and the psychiatrist's are not trained to do this kind of work at all they're mostly trained to make diagnoses of illnesses and to treat them with medications but they really don't much learn how to talk with people and especially how to listen to people with some exceptions what I'm talking by and large therefore by default I began to spend time listen to my patient myself and at the end of each day I would slide a couple of half an hour or hour-long sessions just for people to come in and talk and so through that process of listening to my patients and talking with them and doing survey inept therapy in the beginning but inept only in the technical sense the fact that I was listening and we interested in people already made a big difference for them and then in the process of doing my own therapy having to deal with all the issues that were by setting me in my 40s and beyond so my own personal growth and then for my various books on mind-body health and stress and addiction and ADHD and other issues had to do a lot of research we got to absorb and become familiar with a lot of information so all that personal work and professional work and research led me then to develop a certain way of looking at things and from that way of looking at things arose this method of asking the right question at the right time [Music] that's what I ended up calling compassionate inquiry in response to a request after people have marched me work at workshops or in therapy with people they would say well could you teach us your method and I would say I don't have a method to teach I just do what I do until people have seen yeah I know there's something here that you could teach and I still wasn't sure whether I had anything to teach or what there was just something that I knew intuitively how to do until somebody actually kind of painted me into a corner and said okay you got to do this and I said okay and so they set up this today's session in Toronto which I was initially hoping that I was literally hoping that nobody would sign up because then I wouldn't have to expose my ignorance but 350 people did sign up with another hundred and awaiting this therapists and health care workers mostly and so we did it and it was very successful and and I realized since then there is something to teach here there's a method here that people will apply it in their own way according to their own light so go into their own gifts and they may have approaches or gifts that are different from mine but there's something also very objective there that can be taught and that's what I've came to come to call compassionate inquiry what do you feel are the therapeutic or healing benefits of just being present with other people I mean you've seen it in your work yeah so you can really speak to it well there's there's a man whose work has taught me a lot and he says that relationship is therapy so that which is very different from the Western idea of therapy because in Austin the idea of therapy it's more about the inside of the therapist very often let alone the psychiatric model which is about diagnosing somebody and and and and and having a model of a disease that you're trying to treat where's another way to look at it is that inside all of us there's a healing force is a healing power there's a healing capacity and which is true of all creatures all organisms actually it's not infinite in other words you can want people so badly that they'll never recover physically for example but there's still a healing force inside everybody that attempts to heal and so then the question is how do we promote that energy in a healing process and the biggest aspect the most important aspect of the healing process by far is the degree of safety that individual experiences with you and safety is not a question of whether you're threatening them or not safety is actually how well connected they feel with you because an infant if you take an infant and we're all wounded in infancy and so many other problems we deal with go back to very early in life so for an infant safety is not a question of the absence of threat because in the average home there's no threat in the sense of saber-toothed Tigers or enemies but but the lack of a threat doesn't make an infant feel safe for the infant to feel safe he or she has to be held by the parent hey all that not just physically but emotionally and it's not safety that healthy development takes place it's because of that lack of safety the lack of being held emotionally that underlies the source of all trauma and virtually all pathology is for as I'm concerned not all pathology with virtually all that also means that for that healing developmental force to be encouraged and invited then activated inside the person they need to be held they need to feel very safe so so when I talk about safety I'm talking about the connection listen to you talk about safety I think of it sounds very close to how I would define love what's love got to do with all this well I don't have to have loving feelings towards the person I may or may not but we're not talking about love on the feeling level taking that hand the Buddhist teacher says that to love somebody you have to understand them so in this case love shows up as a unconditional determination to understand that person so they can understand themselves and so that means not only do you not judge them but you also don't allow them to get away with judging themselves when I say don't let them get away with it I don't mean that you punish them or you attack them for it but you point out when they're not being compassionate towards themselves so it's loving a sense of holding somebody and understanding them regardless of whether you have an emotion of love are there or not that's secondary the primary is the the commitment to holding the space for them unconditionally and and and being determined the committed to understanding them or or mirroring them in such a way that they can understand themselves so much of it is about mirroring of what's actually what am I seeing and then the person can decide for themselves whether they recognize themselves in that Mayor or not and as mirror involve reflecting back the kind of language that people are using so that people become aware of maybe how we use language oh that's an essential part of what I do that I reflected people the kind of language to use I'm fine I think if I can think of an example right now well I can give you one example it's a woman I saw many years ago for depression and I asked her pose her relationship with her mom like at some point I asked her that she says we were this close her world revolved around me know that unconsciously told me everything I needed to know because in the real world I'm gonna ask you Farah what is the metaphor from like what the image is something revolving on something else where does that come from yeah and so what we was are on what they were through those are in the science you understand that yes so that was okay what is the source of heat and light what is the source of life yeah so when a woman tells me that the mother's world revolves around her was she telling me that her mother relied on her to be the Sun in the warmth and the nurturer there was a total reversal of roles it was an unconscious metaphor and in order to be that for her mother she had to repress her own niece she had to push them down hence the depression which simply means pushing down so that's the metaphoric example but it's very clear people's language is always revelatory Sigmund Freud said that there are no random events in mental life so sometimes I say to somebody but this is the word you use they say oh that was the wrong word I say no that was exactly the right word to express what was going on inside you deeply but let's just look at the meaning of it so yes we do reflect a lot on people's use of language and you you know your ability to be able to see that is quite remarkable because not everyone wouldn't necessarily be able to have that insight so how do you help people gain the ability to interpret what people say in a way that can help is insightful in that way well they it helps that I used to be an English teacher so I really like language and the meaning of words but but as a but if the method it's not that difficult because as soon as somebody uses a metaphor you can say well what is the actual source of that metaphor and they'll tell you everything about the meaning of it so that thing about the earth and the Sun is doesn't take a lot of deep thought to figure out you just okay that's a metaphor what's the matter for about it and then then right away you get the actual meaning of what they're saying to you so that's a school you can develop just by paying attention to metaphor the rather than just letting it go because of course the coin on a conscious level what the woman was saying is that mom was my mother really loved me and she did everything but that's what she was saying consciously but it's the unconscious meaning that really you have to reflect to people and in this case all you have to do is look at the metaphor so if you just have an ear and so he's using a metaphor look at the actual meaning of it rather than the intended meaning of it and that's going to tell you what's really going on in their mind the actual meaning yeah so if I can think about all you said so far being present with people really listening and paying attention to cues mirroring and reflecting back what people are saying are there tell us about the compassion well so compassion is this a number of different levels but the essence of it is that you really are there to support the healing of that person support the process of that person becoming whole or recognizing their wholeness which is what healing actually means and so that means non jor no judgment I mean I was talking to somebody yesterday who was therapist is forever telling her well if she's gonna be that way I'm not gonna see you and and and he will actually explored sometimes in very angry tones well he's got an issue the issue is not with the client issues with himself because he goes if he gets triggered he could compassionately ask himself okay what is it what is being triggered in me or he can become compassionately asking why would that person say that or behave that way but to move to judgment and move to aggression is not compassionate so compassion simply means a willingness to accept you the person exactly as they are and with a view to promoting promoting their healing now I can give you a more nuanced five level definition of compassion but I'm not gonna do that here I'll do that when I teach the course but so profession exists on different levels but that's the basis of it and and so it really means that presence with acceptance and with our judgment and with an intention to promote healing and I I know from listening a little bit to a video that you did that you also talked about fierce compassion that sometimes it can be difficult to hear to hear or to have reflected black back something that we might not want to face mm-hmm so can you tell us a little bit about when it's important what compassion looks like in the different forms you know Ram Dass was a very well-known teacher he talks about fierce Grace and he had a stroke about 20 years ago and just yesterday I was talking to somebody who is close to him and they were saying that after the stroke Ram Dass became the person he always talked about before the stroke in other words the stroke actually taught him to be more himself then when his body was functioning totally well and he called that fierce grace but something happens that may occasionally NAT the moment but actually promotes your healing and your wholeness and your and your and your in your development so fierce compassion means it doesn't mean that you are there to make the other person feel better you're not there to make me feel better you're there to to quote somebody else you're there not to make them feel better but to make them very good feeling and and that means dealing with whatever's there and that means in this case first compassion is that you're not afraid of the pain that might come up for the person when they're facing the truth and I don't mean that in a confrontational sense but the fact is the reason that all of us have problems is because we haven't looked at and dealt with the pain that we carry so if I'm gonna be a clear mirror and if you look at that mirror that I'm holding up for you you're gonna see your pain and you're gonna feel your pain well I have to be okay with you feeling pain I can't be there to protect you from pain I'm not there so that when you leave my office or the session with me you feel better I if you do that's great and I think there's something about the truth that actually doesn't make me feel better people feel better but that's the secondary outcome the primary outcome is that people are in our help to recognize the truth about themselves which gives them much more freedom in their lives to what extent do you have to be comfortable or good at facing or witnessing your own pain to be able to be in the presence of someone else facing their own pain well see that's the whole problem with a lot of medicine a lot of psychiatry and a lot of therapy as well is that the practitioners haven't dealt with their own pain yet therefore they get very uncomfortable with the pain of others and I want to manage the other person's pain rather than to allow the truth of that pain to guide the the person's path so it's all about symptom control and and and and making people feel better now that comes from a good intention but it's not a helpful one and I really do think that so when people come to these seminars very often they they come believing they told us all the time but I thought that's coming here to learn a method or to learn about trauma or learn about some didactic matter but really what I did is I learned a lot about myself and and then I'm told that because of that I'm so much more able to be present with my patients and that the work has become much more effective as much because of what I've learned about myself as because of the method that you thought so the method is really helping people to do the work that they need to do so that they can be present with other people and be with them as they do their own yeah and the inquiry is to see what is exactly that's in our way of being present with me you know when I look at my unsuccessful interactions with people when I was wanting to be a helper if there was something in me that was in the way and [Music] well I can think of one example that every tweet that I led where there was somebody there with a neurological condition which I knew was based on repressed emotion but I was so intent on teaching that person this insight I was so attached to the getting this across but I wasn't really paying attention to what was that person experiencing of it what was that person experiencing with me at that moment so what was in the way was my own ego or my own attachment to an idea or my own attachment to being right or to put it more broadly if I was that insistent and compulsive about helping her face her pain it's because there's something in me that I had some pain in me that I hadn't faced yet so that's so that's what's in a way internally so that's what I meant earlier when I said that it's a matter of constant attention to one's own process in interaction with the other and I imagine that process is not only valuable in therapeutic settings and professional settings but immensely in in all of life and how we relate to life I wouldn't say that the reason I wouldn't say is because my family hates it when I started putting on my therapeutic had in my relationship with them you know they didn't ask me to be there my friends don't ask me the therapist my family doesn't ask me to be their therapist they want me to be me they want me to be the father or the spouse or the friend you know so there's a bit of a temptation that I've succumbed to at times more than at times so compassionate listening is always a good idea but compassion inquiry is not always a good idea well that's a really good distinction to know yeah that you know there's a consent involved that people consent to wanting to ask those questions and be with someone who's gonna absolutely and that's important even in the midst of the process so that if I'm gonna take it a step further I will usually ask for permission what I'll say in the beginning as soon as it gets the console for you would you please let me know you know so that you the consent does not only have to be there in the beginning it has to continue to be granted and this is a game where it's important to pay attention to the cues that you're getting from the other you know as we as we bring this interview to a close in all your years of practice what is the essential thing that you hope your work will inspire as people listen to you and move forward in their own work it's that there's a reason for everything and that every human behavior every human thought are you an emotion of human reaction doesn't matter what it looks like on the outside reflects a desire to be loved or to love and as Marshall Rosenberg who teaches nonviolent communication said very often we make these communications he calls that the tragic communication of a need so there doesn't matter how people behave or speak underneath it there's some basic human need that human need was at some point frustrated in early development and that person has been all their lives trying to have that need met doesn't matter how they behaved even if they behaved in the most aggressive and and and and and inhuman an obnoxious fashion there's always a reason for it so that means when somebody comes for help and somebody actually comes to help then you have to go to see that knee then that in that real human being underneath the words that underneath the behavior in other words you have to see the person more clearly than they see themselves that's and then not so that you can deliver your opinion to them and have them accepted but so that you can mirror back to them their true selves well that's a tall order and a lifelong process and there's more questions that I have I wish I could keep going but it's really been a pleasure thank you thank you [Music] you've been listening to in conversation a podcast of Banyan Books and sound canada spiritual and healing resource since 1970 [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Banyen Books & Sound

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Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018