Dr Gabor Maté | Finding your authentic self in an inauthentic world

[Music] it seems to me so much of this comes down to sort of embedded ways of of thinking and refusing to kind of embrace newer ways of thinking so you know as you come along and you explain a more compassionate approach through looking at this idea of dislocation um similar you know parenting is one thing that you just touched on this idea of you know subcultures who sort of have been historically exploited that is the reason that is the root cause of their having a worse addiction problem so really it's always about looking at these big societal problems as a whole that's right if you look at this location which is really a separation from our true selves and separation from our culture and from other people um the more dislocation there is in our society the more addiction you're gonna see and uh if you look at for example england in the um in the 18th century what happened is that you had this gin craze people saw them just drinking gin but what was going on at the same time enclosures were happening people were being forced off the land the communal lands were being taken over by the big landowners forcing people into the cities to work in these dark satanic mills to quote william blake these factories of the arising capitalist economic system total dislocation along with that you had a rise in addiction so that you can never separate these individual behaviors from social factors one of the other things that we spoke about this in fact when you were last here and i know it was the subject very much of your of your last book which was about a failure to understand the connection between mind and body it strikes me that we are doing better at that you know you talk about this dislocation in modern medicine between understanding that what's going on in the body is so influenced by the mind and how adversely that affects the way we treat illness do you think over the last years that is something that we are addressing as a society i wish i could say so um what is true is that there's much more awareness i mean for my new book i collected something like multiple thousands of research papers which have been generated at increasing quantity and quality over the last decades the problem is that that research awareness has not entered clinical practice yet so literally most physicians wouldn't know what the heck i was talking about right now by not through their education the average medical student in north america and i would gauge in the uk as well never gets a single lecture on trauma or its impacts on brain development they get don't get a single lecture on unity of mind and body which is only non-controversial medical fact a scientific fact i should say so there's a little let alone on the social level where we're still fighting this war on drugs which is really a war on there's no war on inanimate objects you can't war on drugs there's a war on drug addicts in other words there's a war on the more traumatized sections of our population so on the one hand we have this incontrovertible and voluminous research information of which there's more and more awareness more groups more and more people are are embracing this new knowledge but that new knowledge sadly has yet to penetrate much of medical practice including addiction treatment and certainly the legal system or social policy so there's a gap this is what i would call a science policy gap and and you say so where i was thinking about that reading your book was very much to do with the treatments that you suggest and we won't have time to go into to ver all the various ways that you look at it we've talked a lot about this idea of showing compassion towards addicts more compassion towards addicts but one of the most important things that you write about is the notion of the power of compassionate curiosity compassion towards ourselves and that's what i was getting at when i was wondering whether you think things have improved you talk a lot about this very interesting idea of mental hygiene and the idea of sort of looking at ourselves much more to examine what's going on to kind of look at the patterns we are following you know examine our addiction see where they come from that is essentially mindfulness which we do talk about and try i think to incorporate in society more today than perhaps we have in the past yes that's true and and and i see that as a really positive trend um but mindfulness needs to be associated or at least allied with deep curiosity and and in and and insight as well and so if you're an addicted person or somebody who's had addictions listen to this conversation you need to be compassionate to yourself you need to say no that's what's wrong with me but why did i do all that what's what purpose did it serve oh it helps with my pain well that's a totally different approach if you're a parent or a relative of somebody with addictive patterns instead of what's wrong with them why don't they give it up you can say well hmm why don't they give it up what is it doing for them what's the benefit and what were the circumstances in their lives that encompassed the whole multi-generational family system that gave rise to their pain and sometimes people say well yeah well how come two three kids grow up in the same family and one becomes an addict and the other one doesn't good question two answers one is no two children grow up in the same family no two children have the same parents because they come along at different stages of their parents lives their parents see them differently and they are different in the birth order so there's different pressures on them number one number two there is such a thing as genetic sensitivity not genetic addiction addiction is not a disease and it's certainly not a genetic disease but if a child is more sensitive then the same events will have a much greater impact on them so the more sensitive you are the more hurt you're gonna be the more creative you're gonna be the more intuitive you're gonna be and the more hurt you're gonna be the more hurt you are the more you have to escape from your pain so the great british child psychiatrist d.w winnicott said once that if a mother could be the same mother to all eight of her children which she couldn't be he said but if she could be they still would have eight different mothers because they would all be experiencing her her through their own particular temperament it's interesting though the sort of idea you bring up actually of sensitivity because one of the things that one of your patients said to you was the importance of having a soft heart uh and we're talking about compassion show the importance of showing ourselves more compassion when we're trying to you know as a cure as a way of getting out of it so it is a careful balance because soft-heartedness and compassion seems to me where you end up as being one of the most important ways to overcome an addiction well um if we want people to give up their addictions if our goal is to help them become fully who they are but they don't have this emptiness that they have to keep filling from the outside they need a lot of compassion and uh in compassion i distinguish on several different levels there's the compassion of just ordinary human compassion which is i don't like to see people suffer i don't like people suffer that's good that's healthy that's natural but it's not enough it has to be deepened by the compassion of understanding where you actually say not only do i not want this person to suffer i want to understand why they're suffering otherwise how can i help them so then you start asking these questions that i've been addressing in this conversation on the third level there's what i call the compassion of recognition where you see that ah they're not different from me i recognize the same things in myself therefore i'm in no position to be above them you know to judge them where two people equal in significant ways sharing the same experience and i i could go on but there's different levels of compassion but it's absolutely essential for for helping addicted people and as one of my teachers h almost says only when compassion is present will people allow himself to see the truth you want people to see the truth they can only do so when they feel safe and if you are talking to people who are listening who are here to support families friends caregivers you have a note to them at the end of your book ultimately it must come from the addict themselves yes so my advice to families parents caregivers adult children friends of people with addictions is that there's three ways you can be in relationship to your addicted relative or friend two of them are insane one of them is sane one thing is one way is you can be in their lives and try to change them that's insane it means that you're codependent and means that you're feeling better depends on them feeling better so now you're dependent on somebody who's dependent that's what codependency means it doesn't work because the basic trauma that we all experience and it doesn't take abuse or terrible circumstances is that we're not accepted for who we were now if you want to approach your addicted client or friend or or a relative with the same i don't accept who you are i want you to be different for me to be happy that's to invite resistance it's insanity yeah the other ways to be in there in their lives is um i'll be in your life and let you walk all over me and i'll sacrifice myself no matter how much i'm hurt by what you do that's also insane is saying if the other person's behavior to themselves is causing you too much pain you can't handle it to say to them look i love you very much i can't handle the pain that i feel when i see you so right now i cannot be in your life that's totally healthy or but the only sane way to be in their lives is to say i see that what you're doing is something you need to do right now why you need to do it that's your own affair but i'm here to support you and and to love you but i'm not gonna take on trying to change you that's the only saying thing to do before i um hand over to the audience for for what i'm sure will be many many interesting questions can i ask you about um you say that people who are coming out of trying to come out of an addiction find often the most difficult of the 12 steps which is something that many people turn to i think it's step number two which is the idea of needing to fill this void we've spoken about a lot over the past hour with something spiritual and with a god essentially and i'm wondering if you could explain a little bit more of that people find that an uncom there are people who find that an uncomfortable idea is that a necessary way of of curing an addiction do you need a belief in a higher power to to be there with you well yes or no the the the top steps in themselves i i find they're very essential steps for a healthy balanced life addicted or not addicted unfortunately they arose out of a tradition of um what was essentially fundamental is christianity so they're framed in those terms and for a lot of people who might have grown up in their religion was beaten down their throats when they were children it's disconcerting and repulsive to be told that now you have to believe in a god in order to heal but if you if you but if you see beyond the language the sense of a higher power does not imply some entity in the sky doesn't have to it can if that's what you believe doesn't need to isolate don't never have but when you say higher power higher than what well there's my little condition the ego with its fears and its emptiness and its self-serving beliefs and of his defensiveness is believed that i'm not lovable that i'm not good enough but there's a higher power in me which is my deeper awareness that there's more to my reality than just that and there's my innate goodness and and conscience and and and capacity to see beyond the machinations of my little narcissistic ego which believes me is a very active force in my mind i confront it every day i deal with it every day so there's something higher than that and that's your higher power if you want to take it to some spiritual level of universal unity connection christ nature buddha nature that's fine nobody can prescribe that for you but yeah there's something higher in all of us than our little egos and that's that's what the higher power means to me there are so many more but so many more things we could talk about but i feel i mustn't dominate um the rest because we've got time now for um the bit that i know you're you want looking forward to getting to which is of course welcoming um other people in to to ask that question so as as as we said at the beginning if you um i mean would you want to pose an initial question again gabor or shall i invite people to pose theirs did you want to ask me you know what i think i've answered that and that's that's just about what does the addiction do for you and i think i kind of preempted that one by giving you the various answers i've received already so we don't need to deal with that one okay so if i could invite you to then um ask your questions into the uh into the chat box then we will pick you to turn your camera on if you want um and uh and then you can ask a question um envision or not if you if you choose um i'm just gonna wait for the questions to come in and and while i do can i just uh um revisit a point you talk about the end about the crux of of of this being authenticity and what making us ill you know in a modern world is that we crave authenticity and yet we can't find it people people are sort of always its roles or labels or a sort of persona that society puts on us and perhaps you could explain a little bit about it can we the the the detrimental effect that that has on on our health essentially this idea that we find it very hard to live as our authentic and true selves well in a nutshell we find it hard to leave is authentic two selves because in childhood that wasn't accepted and celebrated and recognized by a rearing environment our parents were too stressed and too separated from themselves to really embrace our own authenticity so we had to give it up in order to survive so it becomes very uncomfortable to be ourselves in a society that celebrates inauthenticity but if you ask yourself this question that have you ever noticed yourself being inauthentic that you're in a situation and you're and afterwards you said to yourself oh i wasn't really myself or most people would say yes then the question is who's noticing that what in you is noticing that that's your authentic self noticing it the authentic self never was destroyed you just lost touch with it and it can always be regained it's the subject of another book of mine when the body says no which i did talk to the heart to academy when i was in london that the separation the true self imposes all kinds of compensations and behaviors that lead to illness that's a whole other subject which i really can't begin to address here okay so somebody asks what causes certain events or occurrences to trigger addiction in us at a later point in life usually there's some template already in childhood and then the some stress happens so for example which you and one of the functions of addiction is to regulate the stress apparatus inside of yourself so if you infuse animals with the stress hormone cortisol they're more likely to use alcohol and cocaine to soothe themselves because it helps to regulate the stressor apparatus the same with humans so if there's some extreme stress that you don't know how to handle in your life then you're more likely to move into addiction and that's why during the covet situation more people are using substances and more people engaging in addictive behaviors so it's usually there's a childhood template there whether you realize it or not and then some stress in adulthood that you don't know how to handle thank you very much um thank you dr mattei uh for for what you spoke about and your um you know your honesty and candor around your own experiences so i have a background like person in personal recovery for a you know of 12-step groups and i'm also a big fan of your work and i work in the field and sometimes i feel like i struggle to kind of hold the line uh between that kind of what you know what does it do for you question and then the the taking responsibility piece you know like for the you know the impact that it's having on the the life of the individual the life of the people around them and i can always kind of feel a conflict in me sometimes you know especially with that backdrop of personal recovery that i've got and i wondered what your um you know any clinical experience or thoughts you might you might have on that so your goal is mine is to help people take responsibility because if they don't nobody else can so that's the ultimate goal but the question is how do we help people gain responsibility how do we have people gain the ability to respond response ability how do we help people attain that by removing the shame because when people are defending against shame it's hard for them to give responses they'll take on blame and guilt but they will not take on responsibility so there's no contradiction between that question what is it doing for you and your [Music] intention to help people take responsibility and i would say and i'm not going to go into this with you right now but if you and i were working privately if you have a conflict with that inside of yourselves yourself which i understand i would say maybe you haven't quite resolved the issue yet within yourself and that's something you could do okay and by the way any of us that work in addiction you know where our biggest work is right here with ourselves the more we can clear ourselves the clearer we can be with our clients so thank you for your question you

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Keywords: gabor, gabormate, gabor mate, addiction, trauma, sensitive, sensitivity, shaman, hungry ghosts, childhood, childhood trauma, dissociation, taboos, self help, when the body says no, stress, gabemate, gabe mate, gabor matay, gabormatay, shame, selfhelp, traumatic, addicted, illness, stress reduction, willpower, abstinence, addict, adiction, gabormaté, gabor maté, gabormatè, gabor matè

Id: TW8mc6xLtp8

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021