Dr. Gabor Maté on The Connection Between Stress and Disease

good evening ladies and gentlemen I am honored and thrilled to introduce you tonight to the renowned physician dr. Gabor maté a one of the world's leading experts in trauma child development addiction and the relationship between stress and disease please give him a huge welcome [Applause] thank you thank you very kindly for this welcome my thanks to John Gordon and the how to Academy and all of you for coming out tonight we're gonna plunge right in I'd like to speak to you about 50 minutes to an hour and then take some questions so the title of this talk is why we get sick and really what we're looking at is two questions basically one is what is disease number one and number two how do we understand the human beings relationship to illness which really comes through the heart of what is humanity really now in our Western medicine which I was trained disease is seen as a pathological process that involves a disorder of cells molecules organs and different body systems and so we have specialists to deal with every system every organ in the body the Jesus fish second scene secondly as a fixed entity that just exists on its own so we talked about I have cancer and the assumption is that there's such a thing as cancer then there's an eye that has the cancer but there's no unity between myself in a cancer or I have multiple sclerosis and multiple sclerosis has certain qualities and certain trajectories and certain prognosis associated with it and that's the nature of the disease and that's separate from Who I am because I have multiple sclerosis but it's something other than me so disease is an entity and thirdly Western medicine in which I was trained sees illness or the old person is somehow a random victim of either genetics or external invaders such as bacteria or virus or toxins or possibly as even a culpable instigator of their own pathology by certain so-called lifestyle choices like eating too much drinking too much or smoking this is a illnesses scene in 2017 a fellow Canadian physician dr. Norman Doidge also an author writes about brain and neuroplasticity said that modern scientific medicine has taken a fundamentally materialist approach and it is analytical meaning that it divides wholes in two parts it often proceeds by reducing complex phenomena to their more elementary chemical and physical components viruses genes molecules and that's how it is and this isn't a new perception about Western medicine in 1977 dr. George Engel an American physician internist and psychiatrist said that the dominant model of medicine today is biomechanical with molecular biology it's basic scientific discipline and what I'm trying to say to you here is that the critique that I'm gonna make tonight of Western medicine and in providing an alternative it's not new actually people have been saying this for a long long time so here's George Engle saying that the dominant model of medicine today is biomechanical with molecular biology it's basic scientific discipline it assumes disease to be fully accounted for by deviations from the norm of measurable biological variables it leaves little room in its framework for social psychological and behavioral dimensions of illness the biomedical model embraces mind-body dualism the doctrine that separates the mental from the semantics and let me just give you three medical facts here and and and and you'll see immediately how inadequate and insufficient the Western medical perspective is in explaining these facts that I'm about to give you the first fact there is a study that was done in the United States last year was just a two years ago now that show that the more episodes of racism an American black woman experiences the greater the risk for asthma now you can't explain that on molecular grounds you just can't a legality let me give another fact in the 1930s and 40s the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis which is a inflammatory degenerative disease of the nervous system was a one to one in other words for every man there was a woman diagnosed you know what the ratio now is it's three and a half women to every man but that immediately tells us it can't be genetic because the genes don't change in a population over seven decades or even ten decades or longer number two it can't be diet because that doesn't change for a population it didn't change more for women than for men nor can it be the climate is something going on and whatever it is it can't just be biological now what's interesting is that when you look at how you treat asthma if you give to open up the airways and to suppress inflammation that happens in the asthmatic airway you give inhalers or medications by mouth which are copies of adrenalin and cortisol adrenaline cortisol other stress hormones of the body I'll talk about them later they're secreted by the adrenal gland in response to a threat so there's a drone and cortisol so we're treating asthma with stress hormones how do we treat multiple sclerosis if you have a flare-up of your multiple sclerosis you're gonna get an infusion of the stress hormone cortisol if you've ever been to a dermatologist with a skin flare-up some kind of chronic psoriasis or eczema most of the time you're going to get a steroid cream a copy of cortisol if you go to a Rheumatologist with inflamed joints or connective tissues guess what they're gonna give you steroids cortisol in all autoimmune diseases I could go on so here's the clinic good the interesting question we're treating all these conditions across medicine with stress hormones but we're not asking ourselves a simple question is it possible that stress may have something to do with this the onset of this condition has something happened to the body stress apparatus that we have to give people now larger quantities of stress hormone to keep them from having symptoms and of course it's in the case of the the racism induced asthmatic attack we can see that obviously emotional factors must be playing a role here and not just emotional factors because the the black woman who experiences racism isn't an isolated particle responding to nothing in the environment she's affected by a social circumstance a social economic political circumstance and so George Engle in 1977 called for what he turned a biopsychosocial approach for medicine and he said the boundaries between health and disease between well and sick are far from clear and will never be clear because they're affected by cultural social and psychological considerations that was 1977 and that was a new either in nineteen forty another American physician said that social and psychic features play a role in every disease but in many conditions they represent dominant influences and that mental factors represent an active force in the treatment of patients as as active force in the dreams of patients as chemical and physical agents and that was a new either because back in Roman times the Greek physician Galen already pointed out that women who have who are depressed are more likely to have breast cancer and now we have the actual studies to show why and I'll refer to them later so what I'm saying is that this awareness this this this is intuitive awareness that that you can't separate the mind from the body and you can't separate the individual from the environment it's not new in medicine what is new is the lobby of the science to actually prove it and what is remarkable and lamentable at the same time is that despite the scientific evidence medical practice still doesn't take into account and let me show you to what degree doesn't son ask you a question raise your hand if in the last say five years or so you've been to a restaurant - true and thorough largest a cardiologist and neurologist or dermatologist any kind of neurologists just put your hand up okay great no thank you now put your hand up again if they ask you about any stress in your childhood one person that's fantastic one out of 15 under would you hand up if they asked you about any trauma you experienced the same person you went to a good doctor if they ask you about your relationship with your partner or spouse if they ask you about how you feel about yourself as a human being the same person and if they ask you about any stresses at work and I'm telling you that's how bad it is because every one of you I would say well I don't be too dogmatic maybe only 98% of you who went to see one of those specialists went there because of those factors that they never asked you about and that's what might want to talk to you about now so I was 20 years in Family Practice before I did addiction medicine and for seven years I I did palliative care work looking after terminally ill people and so in my experience I began to notice that there were certain patterns sister who got hill and who didn't get ill and these patterns just kept reasserting themselves over and over and over again until they became inescapable and in my awareness and what these patterns were a little straight for you by means of some newspaper clippings from the canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail for which I wrote a medical column for a number of years and these stories from the paper illustrate aspects of what I call the disease prone personality the first is a first-person story written by a woman called Donna who's diagnosed with breast cancer and she goes to her doctor and she she's describing the experience of the diagnosis what you need to know is that her doctor's name is Harold and her husband's name is high the highest first wife died of breast cancer and not Donna the second wife is diagnosed with the same condition and Donna writes help tells me that the lump is small and most of surely not in my lymph nodes unlike that of heist first wife whose cancer had spread everywhere by the time they found it you're not gonna die he reassures me but I'm worried about hi I say I won't have the strength to support him now anything what's wrong with this picture so here she is diagnosed with the potentially serious condition and her first and she's the one who might need radiation surgery and or chemotherapy and the first thought that she has is how will I look after my husband's emotional needs so this automatic and compulsive concern for the emotional needs of others while ignoring your own is a major risk factor for disease for reasons that I might tell you the other segments our site for you now are obituaries and obituaries are fascinating because they tell us not just about the person who died but also but will be as a society value in or another and will be violent one another is often what kills people you've read the expression the good die young they often do and there's a reason for it so many of you are relieved having heard that this is a physician who died at age 55 in Toronto never for a day that contemplated giving up the work he so loved at Toronto Sick Children's Hospital he carried on with his duties throughout his real um battle with cancer stopping only a few days before he died again if a friend of yours is diagnosed with a malignancy is that what you would say to them go back to work and keep working till you drop so there's this rigid and compulsive identification with duty role and responsibility rather than the needs of the self is another risk factor for illness for reasons I'll explain the third obituary the second obituary I've read you is about a woman called not only this is written by her grateful husband and she died of breast cancer at age 55 and the husband writes in her entire life she's never gone to a fight with anyone the worst she could say was phooey or something else along those lines she had no ego she just blended in with the environment in an unassuming manner now my life ray I think is in the audience and we were married 50 years this year and believe me there be many times when I wish that she would blend in with us you know in an unassuming manner as I'm sure many of you have will have partners or spouses of any type but if your partner must stay healthy they will not blend him at the environment and really what's been described here is a repression of healthy anger and the repression of healthy anger we know suppresses the immune system and it's literally the commonest characteristic that I've seen in people with malignancy and autoimmune disease when I say repression I mean that they don't even lost a lot himself to experience the anger and the final the betrayal I read you is you'll have to really take my word for it that I copied this out verbatim from the newspaper this is a man called Sydney it was the physician that aged 72 of cancer Sydney and his mother had an incredibly special relationship a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives until her death as a married man in young children Sydney made a point to have dinner with his parents every day as his wife Rosalynn and their four kids waited for him at home he would walk in greeted by yet another dinner to eat and to enjoy never wanted to disappoint either woman in his life Sydney kept having to tears a day for years until gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions and this is presented as a wonderful example of loyal loyalty to the parent and what is actually being described here is a poor man who suffered from two fatal beliefs some nicely fatal I mean literally fail one is that he's responsible for other people feel and to that he must never disappoint anybody I'll give you one more example which is actually a British one it's from the TV series the crown which I'm sure many of you have seen it's a wonderful soap opera but the Windsor family and as you know the the current Queen's father King George the sixth ascended to the throne in 1936 when his brother Edward abdicated to marry his divorced American sweetheart he was his name wasn't George the name was Albert Bertie he did not want to become King he did not when his mother Queen Mary told him about the coming abdication and I'd be up to him not to assume the royal throne he writes in his diary I'm sorry when I told her what had happened I broke down and sobbed like a child she says he said he didn't want to do it now in the in the crown in the TV series there's a conversation between his mother Queen Mary and and his wife the now deceased Queen mother Elizabeth and the mother says no of course he died of cancer he was a smoker in he died of lung cancer there was a British surgeon in the 1960s called Dave Adkisson who noticed just like I noticed and as many citizens have noticed these patterns in their clients and he noticed that he was operating on people with lung cancer and of course the more you smoke the greater the risk of lung cancer in a Bertie or King George who became King George the sack six was a smoker but kissin also noticed that these people were also suppress their emotions particularly their anger and he did some studies and actually found that the more you suppress your emotion the less cigarette smoke it took to trigger the cancer in you now going back to the crown so here's the Queen Mother a quick King George's Albert's mother talking to his wife and in heesu she says the mother says one can only be thankful for the years one had with him so wonderfully thoughtful and caring an angel to his mother wife and children I honestly believe he never thought of himself at all he really was the perfect son I want to be the perfect son in the British royal family don't think about yourself don't think about yourself so I think that what we need is a is a broader view of Medicine and so the perspective that I'm going to present to you here is along the lines of what George Engle called a biopsychosocial perspective which simply says that the biology of human beings can't be separated from their social and emotional processes dynamics and environments well it can be an interesting example from the animal world in an ant colony or a bee colony there's the Queen right and the Queen's job is to produce the eggs and she's bigger and and people being her food and she really as the center of the hives solicitous attention and you think there's something different about the Queen no genetically she's the same as all the drones it's just that because of the demands of the hive she develops the characteristics of the Queen and if you take the Queen out of the hive of an ant colony for example the drew one of the drones will develop into the queen biologically they will change in other words the biology of the individual what really reflects the needs of the group and that's also the case in in human life so three years ago I had the pleasure or two years ago they were being been written in London presenting at the breath of life conference and one of the coal speakers was the great trauma psychiatrist and my friend of mine dr. Bissell van der Kolk and and Bessel says in his book the body keeps the score our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness but in a deeper level we barely exists as individual organisms our brains are built to help us function as members of art of a tribe and that's not you either because if you go back 2,500 years to the Buddha he said he thought the Buddha thought about what he called the in the interdependent co-arising of phenomena he said that every phenomena arising relationship to every other film you can't separate anything from anything else and he said contemplate the nature of interconnected core arising during every moment when you look at a leaf or a raindrop meditate on all the conditions near and distant that have contributed to the presence of that leaf or raindrop the birth and death of any phenomenon he says are connected to the birth and death of all other phenomena the one contains the many and the many contains the one without the one there cannot be the many without the many that cannot be the one and so the perspective I will propose is for you propose here for you is that biopsychosocial perspective and from that perspective illness is not an entity in itself it is actually the manifestation of a person's life in a certain context which many factors contribute but the psychological cannot be separate from the physical and the physical and the psychological aspects of the individual cannot be separated from his or her social connections and existence and therefore from the culture that they live in and if we're going to be fully inclusive about human beings I'll have to bring in another dimension which of course is heresy in medical terms which is the spiritual one and so basically we're biopsychosocial spiritual creatures and spiritual simply means that there's more to us than the little ego that many of us are hung upon and which rules this particular society the second point I'm going to make for you is that dizzy disease is not a fixed entity it's a process and that process is not separated from that person's life so that all the multiple sclerosis will behave is not simply a characteristic of the disease it reflects what's happening in a life of that particular individual which is by the way why we're seeing three times as much in women right now which I'll talk about later but it's a process and if it's a process that somehow manifests who are we living our lives then we can actually perhaps do something about it and I'm not here trying to give you an alternative to Western medicine which has many wonderful achievements to its credit and can do miraculous can perform miracles really as as we all know but there's something missing and what's missing is that we don't know from the rest of medical perspective how to promote the healing process within the patient himself or herself over themselves and from that perspective illness is not just meant to be battled it's meant to be come to terms with understood inquired into as to what its messages and from that perspective illness is the potential teacher and and that invites and actually necessitates an inquiry now let me give you another british medical fact Stephen Hawking the physicist who died what three years ago not two years ago in his mid seventies of ALS amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or known in Britain as motor neuron disease do you know he was diagnosed at age twenty you know um he was given to live two years he should have died well over fifty years ago something didn't figure in the equation did it otherwise he would have succumbed a much longer and many people do succumb of course but I know I I know people like Hawking who have long survived ALS and have done even better than he did in terms of physical functioning so the disease must does not have a life of its own it does manifest the life and functioning and and and social circumstances of the individual let me talk to you about another British person I could talk about ALS as an interesting example but I'll leave it for now let me come to multiple sclerosis and there was a person who I was very interested in because I'm a lover of classical music and and and I'm ranged in the lives of musicians and that there was the Great British jealous Jacqueline Despres who died of multiple sclerosis in her forties and I'm gonna play a piece of music actually a couple of minutes of the her recording of the Elgar cello concerto and I'm recalling now so I may not be quoting it exactly but it's a remarkable recording made acting when she was 21 or 20 years old and her sister Hillary who was also a musician not as gifted as Jackie was said that Jackie's ability to capture the emotions of a man in the autumn of his life was one of her remarkable and inexplicable capacities well it was remarkable what it wasn't inexplicable now Elga wrote this concerto in the aftermath of the First World War and he was really despondent at the carnage and he said at the time when he wrote is that everything nice and fresh and clean as far away we'll never return and Jackie looked at portraits of Elgar and it always made her sad and and she said to her sister Hillary he has such a beautiful soul and that's what I sense in his music now when Jacqueline Despres played the cello for audiences when she came to Canada in Toronto the audience cried she was that moving and her performance and and when she was on stage it's like a wall that always stood between her and other people all of a sudden dissolved and then she became vibrant and she her body moved around and her blonde blonde hair swayed and flew in the air and she just puts so much emotion into her playing so they call that her cello voice but she was never able to express her emotions in real life in fact she tried to fit in just to be the person everybody wanted her to be her sister said that she was always the Jackie that circumstances demanded oh that's totally typical of everybody with multiple sclerosis why and you might think at this point it well she she didn't actually want any more than King Albert wanted to become King George no more than that did Jacky want to become a cello virtuoso Chien meets somebody who give up the cello because I can't do it because people would be so disappointed in me she said she actually was afraid that it would kill her and it did when she was seven or eight years old I forget exactly I read the Hilary's account of this she said that to her sister Hill don't tell our mummy this but when I will go up I won't be able to move for a walk that's exactly what happened by the time she was in her 30s it's very interesting here because sometimes people have this intuitive feeling Jonathan Swift the great satirist and writer author of Gulliver's Travels who died with severe Alzheimer's dementia said to a doctor friend of his as they were walking outside one day looking at this tree losing its leaves and and and so it said I should be like that tree I shall die first at the top there's something in us that knows Jacqueline du pre went to Russia to study the cello in the land of music she was raped there she comes back to England and says to Hilary Hilary don't tell her mommy this but I was raped in Russia now notice both times don't tell her mommy this she doesn't want to hurt the mummy's feelings or upset the money and you might think at this point I'm blaming her for the disease I'm not blaming anybody for the disease because these patterns that are describing are not conscious on anybody's part nobody chooses them deliberately but there is a sense but there is a responsibility hereby responsibility I don't mean in any sense guilt or blame I mean in the sense that if you actually look at who gets sick and why yes there's certain patterns and dynamics certain beliefs that they hold about themselves in a relationship to the world that actually I'm not going to say causes the illness but but but contributes significantly to the onset of the illness and furthermore there's another meaning to the word responsibility responsible which is response able we want people to be responsible and I can tell you I know people with multiple sclerosis who wants to become response able once they look at the flare-ups and what stresses led to the flare-ups and how they unwittingly contributed little stresses and learn how to prevent the next flare-up their disease actually significantly mitigated and that's what I mean by responsibility I mean response ability so they had what Jackie called the cello voice or what's called her cello voice now in this particular recording you'll hear that voice but but interestingly enough there's another recording of the same co-chair go bye-bye Despres some years later which her sister heard after her sister's death it was the last recording made by Jacqueline to frame Britain before she could no longer play the cello and an axillary was listening to this recording she she said suddenly I stopped she said Jackie was slowing the tempo down I knew what she was doing she was speaking in her cello voice she was playing her own Requiem recording a play you know is the one that was made by the 21 or 20 year old excuse me a second here Jacqueline to pay you I wish I could pay him a few more minutes of that but run out of time if I do question is why do people do that why did the subject's themselves where they try to please others why did they try it why don't you try to be the Jackie that circumstances demanded this is where there's no blame whatsoever because Jacqueline Despres was born to a mother who was while she was still mouth filled with her baby lost her father whom she was very close Jacqueline's mother's father died the the role that Jackie was thrust into as an infant was that of the mother's emotional support she had no emotion it was distance of her own and these early relationships that we experienced them iike more templates for our personalities and they become the templates for how we interact with the world and the key point here is that there are two basic needs that human beings have one is for attachment now attachment is absolutely essential for human our survival attachment is actually a biological drive it's an instinct to be close to another person why do we have that drive because without it we can't survive the human infant is the most helpless most dependent least capable creature in the universe and so without an attachment Drive that calls that infant to come close to the mother to be taken care of or to the father to the parenting figures and without an equivalent attachment drive on the part of the parenting figure to be close to the baby there's no survival of the infant reptiles can get away with it birds can't mammals can't at least awoken human beings so the attachment drive is like a gravitational force that pulls two bodies together for the purpose of being taken care of or to take care of the other so that attachment drive is not negotiable can't survive without it nor could we have survived as individuals as we evolved from our pre hominid ancestors and over millions of years 100 thousands of years people had to attach to each other in small groups in order to survive so that's just a basic need but we have another need that's also important in the long-term and that need is for authenticity an authenticity means knowing what you feel and your guts and being able to act on it now as well now let me ask you a question I'll ask again for show of hands just please raise your hand if you've had the experience of having a stronger feeling about something ignoring it and being sorry after registration well again you know that's how important it is that's how important it is and when you think of human evolution or think of any animal out there in the wild today just how long is an organism a creature survive out there in the wild if they're not in touch with their gut feelings so we have these two important needs attachment and authenticity Auto the self being in touch with ourselves no that's fine but what if you're 2 years old and your mother doesn't give you another cookie before dinner so you do what a two-year-old does everyone get another cookie you throw a tantrum and then you get the message good little kids don't get angry you might even be punished Jordan Peterson the Canadian so-called psychologist says that it says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves so the message that the angry child gets is not that good older kids don't get angry but the angry little kids don't get loved know what I said what I told you was that the attachment drive is not negotiable if I get the message that my healthy anger which is just expressing on feeling is unacceptable and threatens my attachment relationship because I'm going to lose the parent if I do it what if suppose I'll do what do you think is gonna get sacrificed the attachment impossible in every case the authenticity is gonna be a sacrifice and now we become separated from ourselves and so when you raised your hand in answer to this last question about God feelings what you're really telling me is that sometime in your childhood you learned that it was safer for you to ignore your gut feelings than to pay attention to them and I'm not saying that your parents meant to teach that to you I don't thought for a moment that they did their best but that was their best because the way this society raises children and stresses parents the result is a lot of people are completely disconnected from themselves and who are not in touch with their feelings now I'm gonna pay another song that illustrates that as the saddest song I actually know and you've probably heard it before but maybe think about it from this perspective it is meant to be a love song but it's actually anything but a love song okay well I can't make it work and I'm not gonna suffer at it so it's it's it's the song anyway you want me by Elvis Presley many things you know I'll be strong as a or the week is a baby anyway you want me that's how I'll be in my hands or in your in your hands my heart is clay to do with it as you will you know anyway you want me that's how I'll be that's the lyrics this is thought to be a love song but it actually is is the absence of love song and if I would have played for you because his voice is so sad when he sings it but any case the point is that the personality that we develop is not actually a reflection of our two cells very often it's their defenses against the loss of love and so it's not us an illness comes along when we're not being ourselves when you don't get the attention that you needed as a child as an infant you'll be consumed by attracting attention and now you're gonna be very attractive how many times have you passed the mirror without wondering if you're attractive enough you're just looking for love if you didn't get the approval that you needed as a child just for existing just for being we were you really want to be winning approval all the time you'll be a winning personality if you want value do you want to measure up if you wanted me to feel special just goes for who you were you might be demanding in which case you want for the leadership of the Conservative Party if you if you weren't esteem for who you were then you might want to impress people if you weren't made to feel important for just who you were then you go to medical school like I did and you want to make yourself important if you weren't like for viewer you're gonna be very nice so that people will like you so that you can have this simulacrum of love if you weren't loved you'll be very charming and people say what a charming guy or what a charming woman this person is but all of this demands that you suppress your own feelings now how does that lead to illness at least it illness because it's very stressful all this to be playing a role it's actually stressful and there's always the fear behind it it's fear driven and fears of state of being in stress now the stress hormones if I were to scream at you right now and-and-and-and frighten you you would have a stress response by the way just to indicate how inseparable the - from the body that's so simple it is I could change your physiology in this room I could change the physiology of 1,500 people in this room without touching them simply by generating a credible threat to fight a weapon for example and screamed at you your physiology would change in a split second that doesn't just happen in extreme circumstances it happens every moment of our lives that our physiology responds to our emotions now if I were to stress you right now to induce fear in you like that your adrenaline levels will go up and your cortisol levels go up because what happened is that the fear center in the brain would communicate with the hypothalamus in the brain which is the apex of the autonomic nervous system and also for hormonal apparatus and then messages through your autonomic nervous system would go through to the entire body and then hormones would be released and then your adrenal gland would respond by secreting adrenaline which gives you more energy more strength more speed for the flight-or-fight response that you don't have to generate and you'd have cortisol released as well which gives you more sugar so that you can be more energetic again in the escape or struggle response to stress so in the short-term these hormones save your life in the long term they kill you adrenaline a secretor of a long period time elevates your blood pressure and narrows your blood vessels makes you more prone for heart disease or strokes we know this cortisol in a long term depresses makes you depressed actually it means your bones osteoporosis it can also eat your intestines and get put fat on your belly in a way that promotes heart disease and also it suppresses your immune system so people chronically stressed we know have diminished activity of their immune system so for example people who are bereaved and then after a strong a close relationship of course depending on our level of social support they have but the more alone they are the more likely they're going to be have a high level of a stress response and you can measure activity of the immune system is being diminished now Britain I understand a couple of years ago actually appointed a minister of loneliness that's how endemic loneliness has become in our society and people only get sick faster and they die quicker of their diseases after a bad divorce it's even worse the the the the suppression and and disturbance of the immune system according to studies and this diminished activity of a group of cells called natural killer cells natural killer cells attack malignant cells and attack foreign invaders a George Bush the I'm talking about George Bush Senior was not deceased but he survived his wife Barbara by I think one or two years the day after her funeral she was hospitalized with a blood infection she that was an accident pierre-yves meant deep the immune system in Australia there was a study they looked at 500 women with breast lumps that needed to be biopsied to make sure it wasn't malignant and before the results were in the women underwent a sucker's were quite psychological questionnaire and what they found was that if a woman was emotionally isolated that by itself didn't increase the romp but the chance of the lump in cancers if a woman was highly stressed around the answer to that lump that by itself also didn't increase that Johnson chances are lumping cancers but if a woman was emotionally isolated and stressed the chance of the lumping cancers was 9 times as great as the average and the researchers being medical scientists who think from up here they couldn't figure this onna because they said how does 9 plus and part of 0 plus 0 add up to 9 if to 0 effect here zero effect there what's happening well of course it's obvious what's happening is for example in the front row person at the very aisle seat here if you're very stressed and you had these high levels of stress hormones which were affecting your immune system and if you're all along with it for months you might be in trouble but it was a friend of you're sitting next to you and says hey friend hey sweetheart hey buddy you seem upset you want to talk about it what happens your stress hormones your nervous system relaxes your heart rate decreases your intestinal muscles in the gut relaxed and you and your stress hormone levels go way down we're biopsychosocial creatures and so these patterns of emotional self suppression they promote illness in part because they leave us completely alone because whether we're alone on does not depend on how many friends we have and again I'm quoting Bessel Vander Kolk he says social support is not the same as being merely in the presence of others the critical issue is reciprocity being truly heard and seen by the people around us feeling that were held in someone else's heart and mine but if I'm suppressing Who I am nobody's ever gonna see me and I might be very nice and there might be a thousand people who love me but none of them know me and I'm totally isolated the beauty at heart and that's what's going on let me talk to you briefly about stress and I'll have to bring this still close fairly soon there's so much more I would wish to tell you stress is by the way there's another mechanism by which stress and early childhood negative experiences lead to disease which is simply through inflammation so we know for example that the more trauma our child experiences the greater level of inflammatory particles in their bloodstream as adults you can measure inflammatory proteins in the bloodstream and the more stress you had as a kid the higher they're going to be and the more stress you have there's another structure I mean the information just coming in all the time it's hard to even keep up with it there's a structure called telomeres telomeres are structures at the end of your chromosomes like the shoelace that has a glue at the end to keep the strands together telomeres keep the chromosome together telomeres shorten with stress they are suffered with age so children who were traumatized for example of shorter telomeres which means that they're chronologically older than their peers and so there's many mechanisms by which stress affects the body that way but let me talk to you about stress for a moment so stress has three components and this is maybe that takeaway there's the external event called the stressor so depending on where you stand on brexit the the defeat of the referendum would have stressed you or perhaps the success of the referendum is what stressed you so there's no universal stressor it depends on individual of what they perceive and experience a particular event so their first component of the stress reaction is the event okay the third and final component of the stress reaction is the physiological stress response with the adrenaline the cortisol and the nervous system and the guard and the heart and really the whole body but in between the external event and the physical reaction is what we can call the processing apparatus and the processing apparatus is you and I with our particular interpretations or beliefs usually unconscious interpretations unconscious beliefs internal emotional dynamics that we have no control over that's the front row become conscious of them so the really the whole point of this talk is to become conscious what was happening inside us now I can give you a personal example I believe I have my wife's permission to tell the story I'm going to tell you something incredible going back to say 20 years ago my wife's name is Rae and let's say I would ask her to sleep with me one night and she'd say no and I know that for many of you this is totally unbelievable but Archer here it did happen occasionally and the question is now how does a man in his 50s a successful physician national commerce or for prestigious newspaper head of the palliative care unit in Vancouver Hospital how does this guy respond to and his wife of at that time 30 years says no not tonight well in my case I would curl into a fetal ball wish that I was dead and next morning I couldn't even look her in the eye and what's that all about well of course you'd say it's about abandoned and in rejection but I was being abandoned or rejected she just said not tonight for any number of reasons but it's really about is that when I was one year old and some of my life history may know this I was given to a total stranger by my by my mother and I didn't see her for five or six weeks and this was to save my life in wartime Hungary in january of nineteen December of 1944 I was just under a year old John Bowlby the great British psychiatrist and and researcher of attachment talked about the infants with a young child's response when the mother doesn't show up this is these studies were done here in Britain the first response of the infant of the child actually the young child is anxiety when the mother doesn't come come back the second response is depression kind of gives up life is not worth living without the mom and then the kid starts acting normally he'll eat again he'll interact and play again and when the mother does come back this is what this happened when kids were hospitalized and the mothers were told not to visit because it's too upsetting for the kid who could see the mother come and go which is wrong but this is how they did it the child is physiologically stressed her heart rate goes up but she won't even look at the mother and ball because this defensive detachment it's a self-protection the message is I was so hurt when you abandoned me that will not make myself vulnerable again to that same degree of pain and these reactions get programmed into our brains so much so that five decades later my wife wano loves me very much has been through all kinds of stuff with me says Norman knight and I go into the physiological mental response of the infant and I want it on look at her until I become conscious that this is what's happening when I become conscious I can say to myself well okay I'm just telling a story to myself the story of rejection or abandonment is just a story then even if I was being rejected abandoned I'm not a helpless infant anymore but you see we all tells us all tell us all tell ourselves these stories and these stories often run our lives and to the extent that they're unconscious and to the extent that we keep suppressing ourselves for the sake of attachment for the sake of being accepted and loved and respected and accepted by others and we're disconnected from our true selves to that extent we're stretching ourselves and to that degree we're actually making also sake and from that point of view illness comes along to teach you something now I'm not inviting you to get sick to learn this lesson nobody wishes that on anybody else whatsoever what I am saying is that when illness does come along and then there's many many people now and for my next book I've talked a lot of these people when they did get sick rather than just simply see it as a calamity to battle against they also saw it as an opportunity to learn and what people keep learning over and over again it's how they had not been themselves the illness came along to bring them back to themselves that's what they keep learning so again I'm not suggesting that anybody should reach Western medicine although sometimes you may want to depending on the circumstances but the point is that nobody should be a passive recipient anybody else's care we need to regain a sense of agency is the sense of agency of actually making the decisions and actually looking at our lives and our patterns and our dynamics and really being courageous about that and being open about it and being supremely curious and not judging ourselves or God I failed I I was too nice I pushed myself down no but ask yourself okay why was I doing that and do I really need to do that am I still really that infant a young child who needs to choose attachment over authenticity and yes I may lose some friends who have you are used to me being this particular way and that's what they signed up for but my two friends will celebrate me for finally being myself the Canadian stress researcher hand cellie ate himself from hungry like myself and he coined the word stress the way we use it today he said that in the modern world stresses are mostly emotional he said and the biggest stress of all is trying somebody trying to be sending other than who you are so if this takeaway lesson here it's get to know who you are and be who you are thank you thank you so my next book which will be published here in Britain in two years we've called the myth of normal illness in health in an insane culture which kind of speaks for itself we do have I would say 10 minutes for questions so I think there are mics is that how it's gonna work people will raise their hands and the mics will come to them yeah there's a mic right there if you a question feel free to ask and I do ask you to ask questions rather than make grant statements leave that to me hi hi where are you sorry just in front of you in front of me in front of you at the back okay yeah yeah all right thank you for your talk it was great I just I was wondering really because you were talking about obviously people who've been stressed out and their telomeres might have reduced and in babe I have inflammation in the future and so on is that something that you think can be reversed or once the damage is done that's it no once the damages is not it and I don't talk about in terms of damage the true self the authentic self is never lost if I deserve a interesting word that we use when it comes to illness or addiction what's the word that we use when people get better they recover what does it mean to recover it needs to find something well if you find it means they could never be lost in the first place so I think that healing is always well I don't say always I mean at a certain point people are diagnosed that terminal stages were nothing they're gonna do is gonna relieve them of the burden of illness but often often often often becoming conscious becoming him some agents in your life to make a huge difference if we only supported people in doing so well let me go back to this question of women and multiple sclerosis which I may have left I just recall as I hope and then the issue in your mind why do I think this gender ratio is burgeoned I look that way because women have always played the role of being the emotional stress absorbs or absorbers of their environment so they tend to take on the stresses of their spouses and their families they still play that role for the most part but on top of that since the 30s and the 40s they've also taken on an economic role but they have not given up the other role it's not that they haven't given a nap society hasn't relieved them of it the men haven't stepped up for the most part to share that emotional burden so women are still carrying that but now they got the economic role as well and they're doing so in the context of less social support because there's all kinds of reasons why didn't this neoliberal economy and Ana stress culture people are more and more isolated so you've got more stress more isolation of course you're gonna have more autoimmune disease and so about 75 or 80 percent of autoimmune disease actually happens to women and I believe all that can be reversed if we become conscious okay next question yes thank you what are practical things that we can do to become more conscious and regain our authentic selves well a good therapist if you can find one not that easy necessarily practices that makes you more aware so you really pay attention to yourself some mindfulness practices practices that put you in touch with the body certain kinds of yoga I don't I don't mean Bikram yoga we go to sweat and get into great shape and I'm nothing against that but that's not gonna help with this stuff so anything that makes you more conscious of your body your emotions those are the practices I'm just following the mics around hello over here on your right am i right oh yeah in green I'll stand up okay yeah yeah just about the repressing anger how can you give us tips about how to express anger in a healthy way right that will not cost you your job or your relationships people may be stuck in the job where there's a lot of anger built up on an everyday basis and you may not be able to express it yeah I got it so just keep standing from it okay let me just do an exercise with you okay I mean let's just demonstrate with anger anger with healthy anger is all about if you if you want to volunteer is that okay okay thank you what's your name Emily Emily thank you so Emily if if I for the remainder of the evening for this question period I stood right here is that okay with you that's fine that's fine so the distance is okay now what is over to come and stand right here is that this and still okay with you that's okay you know what if I moved right in so I'm just right in your face it'd still be okay it's a bit it's a bit weird a bit weird okay and what if I stood on your feet now okay so what would you do about that um I'll step off my feet but by the way well the one rule in this experiment is that you can't move you have to stand in your spot that's your life you can't leave it okay you have to stand your you have to be on new ground that's your life you can't leave it but you can do whatever else you need to do so I'm moving into your space what are you gonna do well I might push you back here then you might push me back eventually thank you very much and when you were pushing what emotion do you think they'd be generating for myself if you were pushing me one sorry Ronnie anger yes exactly so that's a healthy anger is it's a boundary defense that's all that it is it says you're in my space get out okay their fishing is unhealthy anger the rivers banana healthy anger and healthy anger is that healthy angers about the present moment I'm in my space right now and you don't even have to call it anger just called healthy aggression you're in my space get out it's when you don't do that that the unhealthy anger builds up until you either totally suppress it which gives you get sick or you explode image gauging I get fired okay but if you actually when the boundary invasion happens you stood your ground said no sorry this is not then that's how you deal with it that's what healthy aggression actually is okay you see the difference now by the way the role of anger then healthy anger I'm okay you see the headlines freak accident kills they're all healthy angers to maintain your boundaries to keep in to to keep worthless unhealthy and unwanted and unwelcome they're all the emotions in general is to keep up with some healthy naina welcome and to let in what is desirable and and and welcome so somebody else in another circumstance you might want them to be very close with you so emotions keep out what's unwanted an onion toxic allowing was healthy what is the role of the immune system it's the same thing now we know that the immune system and a hormonal apparatus and the emotional apparatus and a nervous system are not separate systems if there's a new science that studies the unity Vanessa knew I mean maybe fifty years old and it's in it's called psychoneuroimmunology so the study of psychology has delineated the actual physiological connections between the nervous system and the god an emu system and the hormonal apparatus cardiovascular system which simply means the men we suppress any part of it including the psychic apparatus we actually affecting the other parts as well and that's why it's so important to know the distinction between healthy anger and an out the anger because when you suppress the unhealthy means suppress the healthy anger you're actually affecting every aspect of your physiology okay I'll take one more question I'm never sure to take many more but which is enough time hello yeah in the mid like at the right side right your left side sir my left side ok ok can you stand up I'm standing okay good alright please go ahead thank you it's a similar question really but around you're talking about these deep very visceral responses like from age one type event yeah isn't it feels isn't there a chance of sort of if you let that happen in an environment that can't support it that's a dangerous thing to to risk doing but you you don't know how to sort of train the environment without risking that that's okay we'll look um I'm not talking about necessarily expressing your emotions every time for example if you're never having a debate and you strongly disagree with me but I was standing there with a gun in my hand you mean I wish to express the anger you are really at that moment you know I'm not talking about neccessity expression is is discretionary it's the experience of it whether you repress it automatically and compulsively and whether you keep going back into situations where you get triggered in significant ways and you have no opportunity to deal with it that's the real issue so in a given circumstance you may or may not choose but I'm talking about choice and the question is how much choice do you really have when you're doing this automatically and compulsively because you program to do that by childhood now I'm not saying we shouldn't be nice to people I'm not saying we shouldn't be compassionate unhelpful I mean I actually think that human nature is but is by its very nature of social and and compassionate rather than individualistic and aggressive and unselfish what I'm talking about is how conscious are we in other words if I have if I can choose to help others I may do so a lot of the time but if I'm compulsively driven to help others because I want them to love me that's what the problem is so I'm not necessarily talking about how we express things I'm talking about her experience things internally and how much choice we actually have over our experience that's what I'm discussing here if you all bear with me I'll take one more question and it'll be it yeah wherever the mike is and gosh you know I mean I just wish I could spend a day because I mean this is really deep stuff and and there's so much more to say about it I I hope you I hope you can now accept that I've given you kind of the surface of something yes please go ahead I double or I wanted to ask if you can talk a little bit about postpartum depression depression yeah yeah sure I mean although it's not quite the subject tonight but that's fine a depression is something I absolutely dealt with in my life and what I'm saying to you and this is I'm not gonna prove this right now is that virtually everything that happens to us later on in life begins as a coping mechanism in childhood so you know I've talked about these coping mechanisms to maintain our attachment relationships and so as a result we suppress ourselves now if you look at the word depression itself what does it actually mean to depress something it means to push it down and depression something is pushed down what is usually pushed on and depression it's anger and the problem is when we pushed on one of our emotions it's hard to experience the others and now there is this joyless negative hopeless experience of depression it does begin as a coping mechanism in childhood when the environment could not tolerate your emotions so you learn to push them down and then later on you'll be diagnosed with depression you might ask am I saying depression is not physiological sure it is but the part of this process is that these early experiences don't only affect their emotions they also affect our brain physiology so childhood stress is actually will have an impact on how much serotonin is gonna be available in my brain serotonin being one of the mood chemicals so when you take fluoxetine or prozac you're elevating your serotonin levels now I I am my personality kind of a depressive so that's my baseline you might think this Jolie's fellow how could he be depressed but your honor that's gone my baseline that's my default setting less and less as I learned to deal with it and I'm but I know that I'm challenged in terms of serotonin but that does go back to early childhood because early childhood actually programs the brain physiologically and as one becomes more self-aware and self-compassionate you can reverse that so yes the depression also begins as a child coping mechanism and the issue in depression like in illness in general is to become ourselves and with that I thank you very much for your attention [Applause]

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 350,056

Rating: 4.8889041 out of 5

Keywords: Gabor Mate, Dr Gabor Mate, When The Body Says No, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Hold On To Your Kids, Scattered Minds, Stress, Lung Cancer, Childhood Trauma, Jordan Peterson, Parenting

Id: ajo3xkhTbfo

Length: 76min 45sec (4605 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/IndependentRoad5]

I love Dr.Mate, thank you for sharing.

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