Dr. Gabor Maté In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts | Addiction Interview | Joe Polish

[Music] let me read some stats to you there will be 47 new addicts in this room out of the 331 that are here now that statistic comes from a 2017 US Surgeon General's report that one out of seven Americans now face substance addiction that's not counting the ones who are already an addict like myself the financial cost is also astounding it costs our economy over seven hundred and forty billion a year how many of you know someone who has an addiction raise your hand okay look around the room keep your hands up that's that's a lot I mean more than half the room at least now I'm not gonna ask you how many of you have an addiction although many people come up to me and say I'm in recovery so this is why I want you two to meet and hear what dr. Gabor Ma Tei has to say and we're gonna do I'm gonna ask him a few questions and then I'm gonna open it up for some of you to ask questions to gab or dr. Mattei was born in Hungary and survived the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis he and his family then emigrated to Canada in 1956 where he has specialized in neurology psychiatry and psychology as well as a study in treatment of addictions a DD many different diseases and illnesses gab bores books and articles are considered some of the best ever written in the area of addiction and you know you got to read everything that you'll you'll see just when I think when you hear me talk to him you'll see how bright he is even if you have no personal connection to addiction you certainly have a financial connection and based on this statistic that I gave you there's a very good chance one in seven that someone in your immediate family will struggle with addiction in the near future so you need to know the best sources and how to think about this to make good decisions now this is something I'm reading here just to give some context however I think addiction is one of the most misunderstood mislabeled we currently penalize and we count punish the pain out of people and there's many people in the room here that have behavioral addictions which this doesn't even address and so I'm going to ask I'm gonna ask Gap war about this and several other subjects and so please welcome my good friend dr. Gabor Matta thanks sir okay can I make something clear by the way yes I just need to correct a couple of things I didn't specialize in neurology and psychology psychiatry I wouldn't know very much if I did I was a family physician worked in addictions and all kinds of other fields but that that bug bio seems to be taken off Wikipedia and I don't know put it on there but second thing is I'm not doing burpees stierson burpees three months ago I decided to do thirty six thousand five hundred push-ups a year that's 100 a day and as a result on December the fourth where am I speaking events are over for the year I'll be having a hernia surgery so no burpees alright awesome well first off it's it's great to have you here and like I'd mentioned you weren't in the room when I first said it is this is the first time I've ever brought someone like you and talked about this subject at a business conference like this and the reason I did it is because some people may not see the relevancy but I want us to be able to describe to them what it is and there's much that I can ask you about I do want to let's show them the relevancy okay what is addiction let's write so a addiction is complex but it's manifested in any behavior any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves but suffers negative consequence in the long term and can't give up now notice any behavior I didn't say drugs most of the time we think about addiction we think of substances and that certainly is one important target of addictive behavior but I said any behavior that could be gambling could be sex could be relationships could be internet could be Facebook could be shopping as in my case could be eating could be work any behavior that you gives you temporary relief pleasure but so you suffer negative consequences you don't get a destination and let me ask you this question according to that definition how many people here will acknowledge that some time or another in your lives you've had some kind of an addiction sometime okay that's how relevant it is okay and if I'm going with that stream let me also ask you guys another question for which I'll ask some of you to just put your hand up and shout out your answers I'm gonna ask you not what you're addicted to or when or follow along I'm just gonna ask you what did you like about it what did they do for you what did it give you in a short term so who would tell me relief from relief from pain thank you anybody else sorry okay control control gave you the grief from pain give you control what else love somebody said escape from anxiety thank you what else what's that loneliness it dealt with lonely okay let's look at these things now escape from pain pain relief sense of control relief from loneliness what else do people say anxiety is that really for anxiety in other words inner peace so right away when you understand that you get that the addiction wasn't to a problem your diction was your attempt to solve the problem and the real question is how did that problem develop how come it's seven billion yuning's in the world I felt lonely how come you lack the sense of agency control Authority in your life why were you in so much emotional pain and everything you've said the loneliness the lack of power love control the anxiety these are forms of emotional pain so my mentor and addiction is not why the addiction but why the pain and this is what we can talk more about it but you and I both know the the current model of addiction is either the legal one which says it's a choice that people and therefore we have to punish them for it or it's a medical one in which case it's an inherited brain disease but it isn't deeded over those things where it actually is is an attempt to solve a human life problem lot of emotional pain loneliness distress anxiety whatever it is and the real question then is what happened in my life or your life Joe or everybody else's lives here that we incurred pain and then how do we deal with our pain because the addiction itself magnifies the pain it multiplies it it it increases it exponentially so it begins in pain as as Eckhart Tolle the spiritual teacher says addictions begin and pain and they end in pain yeah well it was on this stage last year that actually for the first time publicly told about not only my drug addiction which I you know for several years ago the first time I started talking about and then a drug addict and what was that eyo kids cocaine was it it was cocaine yeah well I mean Ecch when I was between the ages of 16 18 it started with I would get high every day and smoke pot I would take pills speed I would snort crystal meth I would snort cocaine and there was one day I remember where I when one day I was freebasing I was on LSD I was smoking cigarettes drinking alcohol taking mushrooms in snorting Crystal Method all in one day and okay I mean like I was in bad shape in youth now gabor when I was in Vancouver you toured me around were you actually a Vancouver's East Side because they treated some of the worst addicts on Vancouver's East Side for many years and during that time you know I did a lot of drugs and then I got I moved away from the environment started exercising ended up getting a job in a mental hospital as a mental health tech and I would take the patients that were there for addiction to a a I would drive them to a a meanie in any meetings and I would sit in on those meetings never realizing later in life how much relevance had had but the core addiction was a sexual addiction because I was molested as a kid my mother died when I was four I was molested as a kid I was paid money not to say anything between the ages of 8 to 10 and it wired in my head that sex is not an intimate act of love and oneness it's something you get off if they finally interrupt there was something else here too so I'll talk about myself and I'll talk about you so one of my addictions has been to work in fact that's a continued challenge for me if you look at my travel schedule and so I got a certain message from the world I was born in Budapest Hungary in 1944 Jewish parents two months before the Nazis occupying gree so I spent the first year of my life with my mother under Nazi rule and who and she was in terror the whole year as you can imagine parents killed in Auschwitz and so on my father was away in forced labour the message I got from the world is that the world didn't want me not because Hitler didn't want me because I didn't know Hitler's but my mother was unhappy and children are narcissists in the developmental sense they take everything personally so when the bad things are happening it must be about me and if she's not happier on me take note on the spiritual teacher says that the greatest gift parents can give their children is their own happiness because the children take that personally it's about us we must be created creatures so when my mother is unhappy and depressed and in terror I get the message the rule doesn't mommy and then I one year of age she'd give me to a stranger to save my life so I don't see her for a month I get the message there what doesn't mommy know then in Canada 30 years later 30 odd years later I become a physician but one way to deal with not being wanted is to become a doctor it was not good not that I don't want you all the time they're gonna want you when they're being born they want you when they're dying and they're gonna want you ate a baby every point in between and the beeper is always going this is before cell phones of course and the beepers always going and you're getting validation every moment and what it is is a compensation for the sense of not being wanted that I've never dealt with now in your case you got a message as well that you're wanted through your body you're wanted to your body you by you're wanted when you're sexually available that's the message you get what are you gonna do so especially if look at men who are sex addicts and women who were sex addicts there's no such thing as a monster with a name for a nymphomaniac that's just a slander but it really is is women or sometimes men who have learned that only through their bodies and only to the sexual act or they actually wanted well that's really addictive because we all need to be wanted yeah and that's I think that's also what's behind it absolutely absolutely so you know and I lived with so much shame even though I started making money I always had that that that deep shame in that secret life and I just struggled in the you know the thing that became more apparent to me was I was in a you know I became financially capable of joining like a high profile group and I joined a high profile group for people that were struggling with sexual addictions and in that room were billionaires famous athletes politicians Academy award-winning actors and actresses you know men and women and I saw people that the world admired in their most broken states and I realized wow you know that whole saying that which is most private is most public that so many people struggle with this and that's why I've now wanted to use the platform that I have in business to go out and try to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment and right now the criminal justice system is treating addicts when it needs to be something else well if you'll if you look at the criminal justice system it's really based on this idea that as I said earlier that addiction is a choice that somebody makes if somebody's not making a conscious choice what I'm doing punishing them you don't punish people because they're suffering and they're trying to escape from their pain you help them right instead of making them criminals and number one number two it's very arbitrary as to what we decide is should be legal or illegal because give me a thousand heroin addicts who inject four times a day in a quantity that does not lead to an overdose and give me a thousand people who smoke a pack a day and another thousand to drink heavily guess which thousand is gonna be the healthiest and the longest living at the end of 30 years by far their own group so by far and I'm talking medical facts here so by some are not saying that the heroin should be legalized and sold in corner stores like cigarettes but I am saying that the decision to criminalize it is utterly arbitrary and there's nothing to do with either science or logic or humanity right I mean you know you cannot punish pain out of people and I mean I have some stats here that I've heard you say that you know every month 9/11 happens actually the according to the President's Commission on addiction on the opioid crisis and by the way even when we talk about the opioid crisis it's a rather arbitrary mmm determination not because it isn't the crisis I mean it is according to the president's own Advisory Commission every three weeks you have a 911 happen in the United States as a result of illegal drug overdoses and we're just talking drugs we are talking all the other religious talk and illegal drugs I'm never talking alcohol or cigarettes or everything else we're just talking overdoses and and and now it's hitting the white middle class it's actually helping to lower the life expectancy of the white middle class male for the first time in a long time but it's been hitting our aboriginal population for a long time it's been happening there for decades if you vote on the Native reservations in Canada or the u.s. suicides or overdoses they've been happening in epidemic proportions for decades we just don't think that's so important now that it's happening to to our to us or the people that we now it's a crisis and then if you ask the question well why is it that the aboriginal population has got this tremendous rate of of addiction and again that's a very distinct question because this whole idea that addiction is a genetic disease flies out the window when you look at the aboriginal experience because the aboriginals in north america had actually access to potentially addictive substances long before Caucasians came here they had access to tobacco they had access to alcohol in New Mexico that access to stack attack substances like peyote and they even knew these substances haven't even used them but how did they use them they used them ceremonially not to obtain and diminish their consciousness but to raise their consciousness they used it to connect spiritually with creation they use it to create community and in contact and culture the addictive use is just the opposite the other use is to escape from pain and it's alone and it's not communal if the problem was genetic why weren't they addicted before the reason that they did now is because the severe trauma that they've suffered over hundreds of years they're near extermination and I don't have to give you all the details I'm sure you know it all same thing in Canada so what I'm saying with addiction in short is that every case of addiction originates in trauma and that trauma could be overt like in the case of the Aboriginal population the children in Canada being taken away from them Center residential schools for hundred years where they were sexually abused and beaten up and their culture and the language was denied in British Columbia in 1960 I know a woman was four years old in 1965 in my province of British Columbia who has four years old was taken to the residential school where she spoke her tribal language and the punishment was that they stuck a pin in her tongue for a whole hour a four year old and then she sits there for all hour and she can't put a ten in her mouth because it'll cut her lips and then a sexual abuse began so then I might look at Vancouver's Downtown Eastside which is North America was concentrated area your drug used to be a more drug addicts there in a few squirrel bug radius than anywhere on the continent it's a shock to people even come from Detroit in New York the Vancouver 30% of our clients don't air our First Nations or Aboriginal people they make a four percent of the population why because of the Syria trauma that they experienced and and and this is the one piece the trauma fees that you and I are so aware of what that addictions the I was talking to a colleague of mine Jamie where are you Jamie you hear someone new she's a physician from Detroit dr. Jamie help you in the room she's I think she's in the genius lounge okay alright yeah yeah so she works in the emergency ward at Detroit Hospital and she graduated in oh five four medical school in Michigan and after honey lectures on the emotional trauma to give receive not a single one honey lectures on how the human brain develops an interaction with their arm and with the environment did you receive not one which is the same with me when I went to medical school for yard years ago and so what I'm saying is that the the medical world are totally miss to understands the problem and don't get any training in understanding human psychology and the same thing is true of many of the programs where people go for addictions so they never deal with the core issue they only deal with the the the behavior of addiction but the behavior is only a symptom yeah well let's get and I want to touch on ad D because right I have been diagnosed with a DD you have how many people in the room would admit or think they have a DD right and I've heard you you mean you talked about in your book scattered that a DD is a response to trauma yes it is what does that mean well first of all let me let me make a point that occurred to me when you're talking about your marijuana use and your cocaine use those are typical self medications for a DD because the marijuana calms down the hyperactive mind and if you get treated for a DD what do they give you they give you a stimulant which elevates dopamine levels in the brain or what do you think cocaine is it's a stimulant it elevates dopamine levels so the point I'm making is that a lot of addictions are actually stuff for specific conditions like in your case now a DD everybody again the medical man turned a DD and I was diagnosed in my 50s and and to my children were diagnosed afterwards that not the medical mantra is that it's a genetic brain disease well it isn't genetic and it's not a brain disease when you look at the tuning of the absent-mindedness of a DD why do we have that capacity to tune out do you think nature gives us that capacity we all have the capacity to dissociate to tune out why well it's very simple if I were to threaten you right now stress you abuse you verbally you would the number of options available to you one would be to get up and leave which is called flight or you could stand up and assert yourself and tell me to stop which is called fight and if you couldn't do either given that 20 hundreds of people are here there's about 400 between both rooms okay so you're 400 people here you could ask for help so those would be the functional options but what if you couldn't escape because you're too small and powerless what if you couldn't fight back for the same reason and what if there's nobody to ask for help then what would you do well you wouldn't do anything your brain would go into an automatic dissociative mode to protect you from the distress so what this is actually San adapt ation to over money stress now if you put me back into my first year of life and there are times in the first year of life when every second like in this space of time a millions millions of connections are being made in the brain what's happening my first year of life my mother is stressed the the day after the German army marches into Budapest when I am 2 months of age she calls the pediatrician to say would you please come and see gob of course he's crying all the time and the pediatrician says well of course I'll come and see him but I should tell you all my Jewish babies are crying now why choose babies Jews babies crying well not because I know anything about Hitler or Jena side but because I'm picking up on my mother stressed there's a quote here from one of my teachers that I'd like to repeal if I can find it and it's it says that the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in immediate environment the child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension of agility and pain in the body of the mother of anyone else he's with if the mother is suffering the baby suffers to the pain never gets discharged so let's say what do I do them and my mother is depressed and stressed and terrorized how do I deal with it can I fight back escape and ask for help from whom I tune out but then the tuning up becomes programming to my brain and then 55 years later or 50 years later I'm diagnosed with ADHD ladydi now what I'm saying is that it and I wasn't abused nobody abused me I just had a depressed and and fearful mother and being a very sensitive in a more sensitive you are the more you pick up on that so in in those abd and if you look at it's an adaptation it begins an adaptation which later one becomes a problem so I'm not saying it's great I'm saying that it begins an adaptation which then becomes a problem that's the nature these early adaptations which children employ not consciously to protect themselves from stress actually become problems later on now if you look at the question of why between 2002 and 2013 I'm being approximate here the rate of a TD diagnosis in American kids has gone up threefold what's going on what's going on is that the parenting environment is becoming increasingly stressed for all kinds of reasons I mean the parenting environment is stressed the kids are stressed and how do they cope with it they do now when the brains are developing now they're getting diagnosed and medicated and all this mental health crisis and we're not looking at is what is it about the environment that actually Foster's or ferments that that responds in children and I'm only talking about a TD we could talk about anxiety because people who are addicted often self negate anxiety they self-medicated with work with sex with TV with distractions and of course with drugs and the new york times magazine two weeks ago at an article about the burgeoning rate of anxiety in american teenagers and and and apparently a third now of teenagers and adults in the United States suffer from anxiety and why but if it was genetic it won't be increasing because genes don't change in a population over ten years or twenty years or even a hundred years what's happening is that the conditions in which children are growing up is get ours getting it more and more stressful and that has to do with the stress on the parents and that also has to do of course with the workaholism of the parents like in my case you know the world thought I was great I was out there delivering babies and helping the dying palliative care and everything else in between but what-what of me did my children receive not very much because I was always trying to validate myself out there in the world so then I pass on my trauma to them but I pass it on not genetically but through the conditions that obtained in my home and my kids were small yeah Wow we'll take a few questions in a moment because addicts or in active addiction people lie they cheat they still can they have symptoms that are much different than say like like an actual disease like cancer and so they cause trouble they cause a ruckus there that's are self-destructive how does one how do you how do you interact with someone that's caused so much grief in your life I mean in my worst stages of addiction I was a pain in the ass and so how does one hold compassion when there's a family member a husband a wife a child you know friends that are just causing so much trouble how do we take that framing because I'd love to have people leave here and have a whole different perspective on how to interact with addicts how to think about it because through this we can make an incredible impact in in the field of helping people with struggling with these with trauma well and just as you in my case when I was in my addictive phase and my addiction was besides to work it was for shopping and I show up compulsively for classical music and how can I be addiction you just love music no I didn't I love the music yes I'm passionate about it but it's a shopping I was addicted to I had to get more and more and more and it doesn't matter how many CDs I bought next day I had to get a whole bunch more and and I and of course in the process of spending a lot of money and of course the one addiction justified the other because I was think I worked so hard I deserved to give myself some pleasure that's what clever the addicted brain is it just it justifies everything and I lied to my wife about where I was going to the store again but it was like I was liking having an affair I lied and I cheated and so on so what do I say the families so there's two major things I say to families one is you have a decision to make there's two rational choices and one irrational one the rational choice is number one what you're doing causes me so much pain it's so much stress I can't be with it I love you very much but this is too hard on me and I'm not willing to expend my energies trying to self care for all the stress that's been caused for me by your behavior so I can't be with you that's a perfectly rational choice or you can say I love you very much and I understand that what you're doing whatever it is comes out of your pain and this is the only way so far you've found to deal with your pain so I'm not gonna judge you I'm not gonna control you and I'm gonna try and change you I just hope you come to your senses at some point but I'll be with you and I'll be supporting you emotionally and so on that's another rational choice what is completely irrational and dysfunctional is to stay with somebody try and change them to cajole them to convince them to bribe them to beg them to - to coerce them to change that's what's crazy making don't ever do that it's one of the other that's the first thing the second thing is given my understanding of addiction that it isn't in the individual brain disease but actually is a function of a child's experience a person's experience in a family environment and particularly in a multi-generational family environment where trauma is passed on from one generation to the next unwittingly but it is I was I did not mean to traumatize my kids but I did and parents do then we recognize that the addiction that's manifested in you didn't begin with you it's actually an expression of multi-generational family dynamics and so what it actually is is that recognition allows for an opportunity now let's all heal together so that you stay to the Attic thank you for being a sensitive one who's manifested for all of us what's been hidden in the family and then we haven't known how to deal with or haven't even realized it was there and so now it's time to hear the whole family system and we invite you to join us if you're ready and if you're not ready we're still gonna carry on that path of healing for the family because it's so important but we're not gonna judge you whether you join us whether you don't so that's what I would say the families and you know I should mention my book and addiction is entitled in the realm of hungry ghosts and there's a chapter on families in there saying just what I said here yeah I mean gap wars books are amazing it I'll ask you at the end to get about websites and stuff Abin beggin since you're up at the mic if you could please yeah Joe um thanks for being vulnerable you know you said when you were kind of under the influence of the addiction you were pain in the ass but it wasn't about the addiction thank you let's try to be funny right now no one observation is this word addiction and the the term addict yeah it feels it feels like there could be a word you know I'm very interested in words and symbols and yeah and call things that could make it easier to relate to well look the problem is with words is that they become used originally they're quite accurate but then they become pejoratives so you know in in Psychological terms stay that word like neurotic just referred to a certain state of mind but then it becomes the pejorative don't be so neurotic a not addict actually or is originates from a perfectly good latin word and addicted and then the victus was a person who was assigned to somebody else as a slave because they weren't that and it couldn't be the said that bad so the word the original of the word addiction itself originates in slavery it's a really good word because the the addict is a slave to the to the habit and in itself there's nothing wrong with it except that it becomes a pejorative and an in a stigma and there's so little understanding of it so I quite agree with you I've said this before that if I could pass a law I would but every time a politician or anybody physician anybody talks about an addict they would have to say not the word addict but they'd have to say a human being who suffered so much pain that didn't know how else to escape from it but through this particular behavior outlaw the word addict and every time you want to say I to get to say what I just said that would change the conversation it would also be very accurate yeah it feels like what's coming to me as maybe I'm like compulsive soother yeah or compulsive self soother or something and yeah that's okay again you know the problem is that it's not in the words that we use but in Harvey view people because pretty soon unless the view of the addict changes then any phrase I come up with you can work with would also become pejoratives so it's the fundamental attitude that needs to shift yeah okay yeah thank you thank you thanks how do you treat it yeah boy what's the best I mean we're currently I think we're so much as as a society in the infancy stages of even beginning to really understand this as a whole I mean if you controlled everything how would you treat this well take a very well tragically well-known case right now Harvey Weinstein who clearly had an addiction to sexual predation and of course there's all kinds of justified outrage at the system that allowed him that that enabled him to carry on for so many decades and people are angry with him it's just totally understandable but if you came to me for treatment I would not begin with any kind of a judgment that we did it was bad he already knows it I would ask him like I asked you guys what did it do for you what did you get from it that was missing from your life and what was missing from your life how did you lose it what happened to you in other words whatever else you do first of all you have to accept these people as they are and not judge them and understand that there were slaves to something inside them and they didn't will in billing them makes them self slaves number one number two something happened to create that compulsion and that something happened that's something that happened that created the compulsion was rooted in pain and so in other words you have to treat them with compassion and you have to actually get to the core trauma rather than just dealing with the behavior and the problem with all the many programs Betty Ford and elsewhere people go to before all these high-end expensive treatments rarely do they deal with the try and even in the 12-step programs they rarely deal with the trauma they just that's David Smith was a physician in San Cisco who founded the Haight Ashbury clinic back in the 60s he said to me once that the medical profession is trauma phobic where who soars the whole of society were stunted by trauma and the manifestations of trauma which show up in a culture from politics to every other field and yet we don't talk about from right so try out treating the traumas that you were dealing with the trauma yeah yeah yeah Gabor you were referring to trauma that's passed from generation to generation yeah and if I inferred correctly from your saying it was based on the behavior so the behavior the trauma gets passed through by the behavior the parents to the children then that results in addiction but I keep reading about this field of epigenetics where there may be an actual biological change so how sure are you that there's not a biological max mechanism well it's not it's not there's no contradiction so you're quite right so epigenetics for those of you that may not know the word epi means on top of the genetics epigenetics so it turns out that genes are turned on and off by the environment and and that happens early in life so that even two people with the same genes if they have different experiences they'll have different outcomes because in one case the gene was turned off the other was turned on so the the trauma is passed on both behaviorally and in in the pain that it induces in a child that's clear because I can tell you that but what I haven't said much about I referred to it was that if I look at the circuits in the brain that are affected by anxiety or ADHD or addiction or any other mental health problem these servers develop an interaction with the environment you see the human brain is the least mature of any mammal the horse can run on the first day of life we can't do that for year and a half and that's because we're born with large heads come speaking I already at Birth the head is the largest part of the body and the female a human female has their autos in there will pelvis compared to a horse because we have to walk on two legs so narrow pelvis large head we have to get out there prematurely and that means that most of our brain development eighty to ninety percent of it occurs after birth and not before very much affected by the emotional environment so that those in these are not just behavioral problems they become physiological problems in the brain based on what happens in the environment and on top of that then what you say is also true there are a gene functioning is also affected by trauma multi-generationally and so that you traumatize grandparents and that still affect the genetic functioning of their grandchildren so that's true as well so it's all these things coming together the question I have for you Kapoor I appreciate everything you're sharing yeah I have three daughters that are there they're my daughters but they're my stepdaughters reason for 25 years they've got a their biological father has been non-stop alcoholic since they were babies and he's finally at a place where it's catching up to him and he's just been through a couple of trips to the ICU and the expectation is he's not gonna probably not gonna last another year yeah and he's their daddy in terms of they've got some broken holes in them shredded because of him I've been their father up raised them nurture them but there's pieces of him that they need and my concern is he dies this year and they've got these huge holes not to mention they've already demonstrated some capacity for following the same track so yeah well so first of all what do I do so okay good so thank you first of all how old were they when you came into their lives three five and seven sorry three five and seven 2007 so that means that they have some very stressful years before you came along in the divorce especially with an alcoholic there was a lot of stress in that family and only that their mom his depressing general rule is that we always marry people at the same level of trauma that we're at so that means both the mom and the dad were traumatized people that means they passed on that stuff onto you onto the kids then you came along and became the stepfather to so having said that though the brain can develop new circuits even later and really later on in life and that's called neuroplasticity for which I always say thank God for neuroplasticity because I'm 73 now and I'm not wished to be as stupid as what as I was when I was 71 you know so thank God that the brain can change so first of all they'll experience a loss when their father dies and maybe some grief but there's nothing wrong with grief that's a healthy natural response and as long as they have enough support and connection and contact in the world attachment love they all deal with the grief the whole inside of themselves is not going to happen because their father dies the hole that's inside of all of us happens when it's kids we don't get our needs met and then we try and hold that feel that hole desperately that's what my book is called in the realm of hungry ghosts which is a Buddhist term we're all trying to fill this desperate hunger inside I mean ever can well that they're gonna have to work on themselves so you can be of support to them and be totally understanding and supporting through their grief and and so on but the hole that's inside all of us only each of us can hear for ourselves with support from others by really connecting with our genuine internal selves that's never been lost and that's why the word recovery is so interesting because when we talk about recovery what does it mean to recover something what are you do it the way you do when you recover something you find you get it back I mean you ask people when you've recovered what did you get back they I've got back myself so the andromeda is a loss of self and in recovery there's action with itself and that's up to each of your daughters to take that on that connection with yourself but human compassion is support such as you can provide can go a long way to giving them a space the way they can do that so pretty much just be supportive and pray and be supportive and don't be alarmed the don't-don't-don't project the father's tragedy on to the kids and don't don't catastrophize their future just see them for the great people that they are who put a hole to feel inside of themselves that's all yeah thank you okay you're welcome I wanted I have this question that I had written that I wanted to ask you because I know at least six people there in in this room myself included if someone was raped or molested as a child as I was how do you interact with your perpetrator if you still know them well first of all let me say something else people often think that the trauma was the rape it wasn't hold were you and and I'm not saying it wasn't traumatic but I'd hold women it happened to you that I can remember started around eight okay and how long did it go on for a couple years who would you speak to about it no one that's what's the trauma if I mean if you had an eight you a child and some even looked into the wrong way just once would you want him to do that talk to if you're the father you yeah if your eight-year-old child had such a horrific experience and he didn't talk to you how would you explain that to yourself I don't know well you weren't available for them and they already knew that they weren't available for them so that original trauma was the loss of the parenting contact because I have to guess that your parents were traumatized and they just weren't emotionally there for you yeah absolutely I mean you know and it's this way you sustained a trauma so so the the rape then comes along as a secondary trauma the first drama was the loss of protection and connection and safety in the world now in terms of how you interact with them in the present that depends precisely on where you're at if you haven't dealt with it yet if you haven't healed if you haven't recovered if you haven't connected with yourself then whatever comes up is legitimate if you angry with them if you hate them that's legitimate why wouldn't you if you don't want to see them and stay away from them that's legitimate and in fact at any time whatever you decided legitimate however what you'll find is that the more you hear the more comfortable will get yourself a the less of a psychological threat to become to you because your whole and okay and yourself they're not gonna dis regulate you they're gonna make you feel bad about yourself just go they show up and you might even and I'm not making this another thing that you should but you might even find yourself getting to a point of compassion for them and I've seen that happen as well when the recovery is so complete that the person actually have compassion because because the perpetrator I assure you was another traumatized person in my case absolutely yeah I've worked through a lot with this individual and you know I do have a lot of compassion because I know what happened to them same thing happened to them right and it's it's sad and in in a lot of ways I'm asking the question I I'm doing thankfully better in my life with my recovery than I ever have it still is hard at times it's still very hard yes I know there's people in this room though that are just livid and just outraged and and I know and that's perfect isn't it that's the anger of the the the helpless child and and that's the anger that they that they took that they turned against themselves are their lives and one of the ways you do that is to the addiction you know so so and the depression I mean what is depression if you look at this is interesting again somebody talked about words what does it mean to depress something it means to push it down when a kid experiences anger but they can't express it because they're expressed it is too dangerous then they push it down then they become depressed so that anger then turns against itself so if the anger is coming out of them that's great but I hope to get some help with it so they can channel it in a healthy way rather than because could just keep exploding and rage actually puts you at risk of a heart attack and a stroke so you might as well take that healthy anger and or that rage event and and find some channels for it and deal with it so but there's no reason not to be angry at the perpetrator if that's there that's nothing more than natural let me also mention so we got dr. Jamie Hope who knew gab or I met her a few months ago Vern Harnish who I believe is in the room what's doing a scale up summit and it was a business conference in me and Dean grazioso he spoke for about an hour and 15 minutes or so I think it was and there's a thousand people in the room the average business owner was I think worth like 20 had 20 million dollar business and Verne's like an amazing guy and I we spent you know most of the time talking about business I think I spent two minutes talking about addiction and it was early in the the two-day session John was there and over the next two days after I I just mentioned for a couple minutes about addiction nine out of ten people that came up and talked to me their questions were not about business they were about addiction and I was like wow it really dawned on me just how prevalent this subject matter is and that's what really kind of put me on this like you know bringing you here today and by the way if I haven't said it yet I'm just so grateful that you did thank you very much yes I appreciate it thank you and I met Jamie and she told me she works in the ninth busiest hospital in the u.s. emergency room in Detroit and she has this incredible compassion for addicts and we totally hit it off and have become dear friends since and so this is dr. Jamie hope the first thing I actually wanted to say was thank you for doing this you wouldn't necessarily expect this at a business conference but to see successful influential strong people talking about truth talking about what it's like to be human because we're all human in this room and bringing it out in a way that is socially acceptable that is such a huge thing there are probably people in this room who have suffered trauma and haven't really faced it or spoken about it so the first thing I wanted to do was thank you guys what you do matters this is so huge thank you after lunch when you were doing your interview with a Kyra you we had talked about respectable addictions versus drugs in which we stigmatize and you had some really interesting insights and I think a lot of people in the room could relate to that when you were talking about that yeah so well again I mentioned that so that my both my addictions the work was very respectable it got me nothing but praise and income and it created deep problems in life luckily my family you know and then my shopping addiction well he's a lover of classical music is not wonderful you know but but some of the respectable addictions and I say this somewhat hesitatingly but I'll say it in anyway in front of a business audience I have to do with profit and power where for some people nothing is ever enough and it's not and it's not because they're bad people but because they're trying to stuff a hole inside themselves and then that can cause serious such as we're seeing with the environment and climate change and other pollution and other issues you know so these these or an addiction to power like I'm just reading a biography of Napoleon and Napoleon was a genius he really liked to talk about genius netter and I that was a genius for you in so many ways but he was also totally addicted to power and even in exile he said I love power and he called Paris's mistress well a lot of people died because of addiction because of addiction to power and yet you know he's a hero he's respected whereas the the substance addict who shoots up heroin in the back alley is is ostracized and and and discarded from society so yeah there's the respectable addictions and then there is these arbitrarily chosen addicts on whom we project all our disdain and our all our self judgment basically the stuff we don't like about themselves we projected onto these other people yeah and I will say then this would be our last question from Hugh is I had a genius network member that I when I started talking about addiction in the genius Network meetings some people loved it other people like what the hell is all this I didn't come join genius networks are clear you talked about addictions and this one guy literally dropped out of the group because he didn't like me talking about addiction and then he came he contacted me a few months later and he's like I'm gonna be in Phoenix can we have lunch yeah we get together for lunch and then he's like I'm so sorry I my daughter we is a heroin addict I'm a workaholic I it just was too close to home and and he's like in I gave him some suggestions and you got her in the treatment and now she's doing I just want to plant a seed today that's why I brought Gabor here I want to plant a seed some of you totally are in this conversation others are like it's it's getting worse the world is I mean you just look at the opiate addiction we need voices we need people of influence that could share something that is helpful because you cannot punish pain out of people in the criminal justice system and you said in in one of your talks that if you wanted to create the perfect system that would keep people addicted you would create the exact prison system that we have in the United States and and it's true it's very simple I mean if you if you look at your own addictions those of you and most of you raised your hand and when you gave it up for a while and then you relapsed what usually happened that caused the relapse usually something stressful happened so as your way of dealing with stress so it follows that the more you stress people the more you entrench them in their addictions so create a system that our societies and punishes and torments people and exiles them from society you're just making sure that they're gonna stay addicted that's all yeah you couldn't as I as you quoted me you couldn't create a better system to keep people addicted then the one we have right now yeah here hi hi Hugh from Cape avoid I had a yeah you know you if you read the internet and stuff you'll come across all kinds of horror stories of people doing all kinds of stuff but one that really kind of got me was this story or this trend of people of a certain age in their late 30s early 40s you figure out they're never gonna get married or settle down they start marrying themselves quote/unquote and they start buying themselves wedding dresses and starting having these weddings for one one person and they invite all their friends to come and celebrate their wedding to themselves which to me okay that to me it's extremely narcissistic and kind of like almost deluded and that does really bother me because we're all kind of narcissistic diluted to one point what happens it doesn't record it it divorce themselves exactly exactly and but what what was interesting to me it's not so much that because we all do crazy stuff but it's more like they expect their friend or their friends come along and kind of help them validate that delusion because they don't wanna hurt their feelings they turn up the wedding like even though it's kind of awkward and stuff and this this kind of this idea where we where we almost almost society kind of gathers together to help other people reinforce their own addiction their own delusions it's kind of like is there like some kind of uh is it the internet doing it or are we just starting to get more kind of collectively crazy and helping other people be crazier it seems you know I wouldn't be so harsh about that this wouldn't be I would say if people like John Lennon sang in one of his songs whatever gets you through the night yeah and maybe it is harmless you know yeah you know if people gonna be crazy in their own way let that be crazy in their own way though we're all crazy in some ways yeah okay let them be crazy and on particular way and if they if it gives them some temporary relief or joy let them enjoy that and once they figure out that it doesn't work then they'll move on that's kind of what I hope you were going to say to be honest okay yeah thank you right yeah thank you so what didn't I ask you that I should have if anything cuz I could go on for a long time but we're on we're on the clock but there's so many different areas well I don't know that there's much that you didn't ask me that you should that you should have I what I was really hoping to do here in conversation with you is just to get across just how human is for this phenomenon of addiction is and and and if we approach it at understanding and and curiosity but the person who's experiencing it or in our own case real compassionate curiosity for ourselves then we can actually deal with the problem yeah one thing I'll mention is oh yeah semantics yeah I want to distinguish two kinds of trauma so there's a word trauma then it's what we call developmental trauma and we have two very great examples of it in the United States so what is trauma do it separates us from ourselves we lose ourselves like we said it also gives us a very negative view of the world so if you have a negative view of the world then we act accordingly we are defensive and we're grandiose and we're aggressive so there's a man who said that the world is a horrible place no I'm not commenting any on anybody's politics here I'm talking pure psychology okay I'm not talking about policy foreign or domestic I'm talking about mine States please understand that so however you voted in this last election don't take offense please but the man who said that the world is a horrible place as the president of the United States that's the world he lives in why does he live in that world because he could we'll go up in a family that taught him that his father was a domineering rageaholic tyrant who demeaned his children his brother drank himself to death and this man develops all these issues like attention problems and grandiosity and psychiatrists have diagnosed him with narcissism and all this kind of stuff which are not false there are the outcomes of trauma so there's our overt trauma and we live in such a traumatized society that these people actually rise to the top but his opponent was even more interesting I don't know if you saw the Democratic National Convention and when Hillary won the nomination there was a video narrator the but his her life by God himself Morgan Freeman you know how many of you saw that video about her life no there was something very interesting in that video that I saw no comments on whatsoever this anecdote comes from Hillary and what happens is that and it's expres nted is an example of wonderful character building strength building parenting what happens is that the four year old Hillary runs into her home to her mother afraid because neighborhood kids are bullying her threatening her and the mother says there is no room for cards in this house now you get out there and you deal with it and this is presented as this made me tough and this made me a fighter and it is a character building now the men the actual message to the child is not that there's no room for cards in his house because the four-year-old a five-year-old who runs to mom is only doing what any mammal will do any young man will do when they're threatened does they'll go to their protective figures it's not cowardice it's just natural attachment the message is there's no room for your vulnerability in this house you have to be tough you have to suck it up now jump 65 years ahead and the presidential campaign and there's a famous scene where Trump is looming all over hovering all over Hillary and she doesn't say a thing she's just sucking it up and then she develops pneumonia remember during the campaign she had pneumonia how did the wolf find out that she had pneumonia because she collapsed and her security people had to pick her up but she didn't tell me about it she didn't talk about it because she learned in an early age to suck it up and her and she mustn't be vulnerable so what I'm saying and that's what's called developmental trauma where not when something bad happens to you but when the good things that should happen don't happen and the good thing that didn't happen is the mother should have scooped her up instead of oh boy you're really scared aren't you that's what didn't happen and so I'm saying is that is that over trauma and there's lots of studies on how over trauma if those of you are not similar with the adverse childhood experiences studies the AC studies where they looked at 17,000 Californians most half of them university graduates and the more adversity there was in their childhood meaning physical sexual or emotional abuse death of a parent a divorce can be addicted apparently mentally ill violence in the family neglect of a pen being jailed for each of these adverse experiences the risk of addiction goes up exponentially and you can download your HTE score just by going to the Internet it'll give you a lot of insight about yourself but there's that other kind of 12m which is the developmental trauma which doesn't happen because bad things happen to you but just because you weren't held in the way you needed to be held so that's the final thing I wanted to tell you great thank you and for people to read your books watch your videos I mean I'm gonna put a lot of gabbar's work on genius recovery comm which is the educational platform we're creating and we'll have them featured in the documentary the stuff we're doing with artists for addicts you your books you know when the body says no in the realm of hungry ghosts scattered I know you have a new book coming out in my head yes in your head okay hey it's all in our head it's on the heads on God so how do people find more about you well on my website is dr. Gabor maté a calm er er yeah dr. gabbles also you can just google me on you to a lot of my lectures are on there they're free so both of it my website and on YouTube great thank you so much my pleasure thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Genius Recovery

Views: 132,137

Rating: 4.8798218 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Gabor Maté, Gabor, Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Book, Addiction Expert Interviews, Genius Recovery, Joe Polish, interview, addiction, recovery, drugs, mindset, change

Id: VvQYwOlx0HY

Length: 63min 7sec (3787 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018