Dr. Gabor Maté: The Myth of Normal & The Power of Connection | Wholehearted

foreign [Music] [Music] foreign thank you all for coming out um I hope you can all hear me I am very grateful first of all to AJ organizing this event um I'll tell you there's a deep arrogance in me I've always thought that the world should be paying attention to what I have to say on the one hand on the other hand I'm amazed that anybody does which is a kind of a which goes to show you that uh different qualities can coexist in us at the same time you have different parts and and I'm certainly in a fortunate position now where I get to say what I think and people actually come out to hear it I'm thinking about what I was going to say tonight I am but we look at the state of the world there's a lot of questions being asked these days mostly about how do we fix this or that problem so right now in the United States every three weeks you have the equivalent of a 911 happening in terms of the number of people dying with drug overdoses where's the corresponding alarm Where is the corresponding mobilization of resources whereas the sense of national crisis and people are running around what are we going to do what are we going to do what are we going to do and the North American response to almost anything is how to fix it um my first book on ADHD which was I wrote after I was diagnosed with myself a Canadian title was my own title was scattered minds and you look at the origins and healing of attention divisive disorder and you will look the American Title when it was published in the States was scattered they took off the word Minds thinking that you people saw the Border can't understand that word I don't know what the thinking was but it's a subtitle that enters me because the subtitle they gave it was how add originates and what you can do about it so it's the what to do whereas I was saying no you need a new look so the what to do is always the wrong question and this Society is always asking what to do about this what to do about racism what to do about bullying what to do about terrorism what to do about or economic crisis what to do about unemployment what to do about it whatever that's not the important question the important question is always why why is something happening what is actually going on and without asking that question without pausing without you looking see what is giving rise to any particular phenomena we're never going to get at the right answers the big why for me came when I read a book uh when I was over 11 years old and we're Jewish we grew up in Hungary and and some of you know my history my grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and my mother and I and father barely survived the War I was an infant and I didn't know much about that history and I I knew that this has happened but I didn't know anything about the background now my parents shoved quite high up Beyond where I could reach there was a book called The Scourge of the swastika this was written by a British still a servant who later became a Lord and the British house the Lord and he had served as a I think an investigator or a prosecutor at Nuremberg after the war and this book written in the 50s was the first one to lay out in detail the extent and depravity of the Nazi crimes and as an 11 year old literally my head went into a spin this question of why how is this possible it occurred to me day after day after day after day going to my teenage boy question of why and now when I look at the world today just from the physician's point of view from the health point of view what do we see well we see a society not just in North America but as globalization extends its reach around the world we see increasing levels of certain illnesses certain mental illnesses like ADHD Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder which didn't used to exist in certain countries all of a sudden they have a problem with it autoimmune diseases like like inflammatory bowel disease that didn't used to exist in certain societies not exist in each Society if you look at North America if you look at multiple sclerosis in the 1930s or 40s the gender ratio was about one woman to every man know that ratio is about three and a half women to every man if you look at something like asthma which is rising amongst kids um study in the United States last year showed that the more episodes of racism a black American woman um experiences the greater risk asthma we've known for a long time that the more stressed that parents have the greater let's go the child having asthma in North America millions of kids are on medication now for depression anxiety ADHD and more and more kids are being medicated all the time if you look at something like autism spectrum disorder it is now being diagnosed 40 times as often as it was 30 40 years ago anxiety is the fastest growing diagnosis in North America amongst young people and the usual medical explanations of any of these phenomena just doesn't hold because medicine for the most part sees all these problems as simply biological issues multiple Services being a disease of the nervous system inflammatory bowel disease being Malaysia the gut ADHD depression anxiety addiction these are problems of the brain and for the most part we like to rely on genetic explanations that is the genes that are causing these things or if it's not genes we don't know what's causing them but of course if you just look at that one little fact that I told you about the ratio of women and men in multiple sclerosis you know right away it can't be genetic because genes don't change in a population over seven years and if they did why would they change more for one gender than the other nor it can be the climate nor the diet because that hasn't changed more for one gender than the other something else is going to be going on to get ADHD the fact that many markets are being diagnosed that can be genetic genes don't change in a population over 10 years or five years or 15 years sure there's lots of factors such as the pharmaceutical companies actually pushing certain diseases like ADHD and certain Physicians who got big bugs for researching these so-called diseases and and and and for promoting pharmacological Solutions uh without divulging that when they publish their research that's a well-known fact as well but it's also true that anybody who works with children uh teacher psychologists counselors we know that there's more troubled kids now than they used to be you know at all segments of society so the question of why it's a question of what to do about any of these problems is utterly meaningless it does some kind of a theory with some kind of explanation what is actually going on let me give you an even a bigger puzzle about 13.8 billion years ago so about 14 billion years ago there was no universe no stars no Earth no sun no matter no molecules no atoms no neutrons no electrons no creatures no beings nothing and then it starts expanding and then they get the universe and and these formations called human beings that began with this non-matter 14 billion years ago we love and we hate and we live and we die and we um procreate and we interact and we have complex emotions and we have Compass interactions why like what what makes all this possible and what sets how did the how did that early emanation result in this complex Universe where we have living creatures and you have these living creatures particularly called human beings we've got these complex Lives who do so many things that actually undermine their existence and their health and we do this on a social level and we do this on the individual level and we do it to ourselves and we do it to each other and all the while we're loving creatures and we want companionship everyone meaning and we want pleasure and we want Transcendence and we want to belong to the larger unit we don't know and we isolated we have some spiritual needs aspirations what is all this about well I don't claim to have the answers to all that I'm just saying the why is so important let's begin with something basic if you have a bunch of plants growing in a garden and these plants were not developing the way they should if they were start behaving or or manifesting in ways that are pathological that doesn't further their growth that doesn't ensure that they have the longest possible lifespan that stunts their development somehow if you're a gardener what would you do well you have to ask yourself what can what is the nature of these plants and what conditions does the nature of the plant demand for healthy development and I'm suggesting that rather than looking to diagnose diseases or conditions or behaviors why don't we look at what is the nature of human beings and what conditions are necessary for the healthy development of human beings and what happens when those healthy conditions are not met so in other words instead of seeing human behavior as sort of inherently pathological or healthy why don't we look at it as the outcome of circumstances just as we would the development or mal development of a plant or see an animal so I'm not going to go through all of evolution with you and and scientific prehistory not that I know it anyway but I'm certainly interested in what is human nature and what conditions promote its healthy development and what conditions undermine it and it's from a point of view of how does a culture meet the needs of human beings and how does it promote healthy or unhealthy development that we have to judge any society now we have the uh is it called the GDP the gross domestic product we measure you know in in in in in this system this is what we measure success it's how much wealth in a materialistic Society we measure success by The Possession or the control or the production of matter of materials that's what it means to be materialistic it is materials that matter but is that really the true measure of a human society well it's one measure but is it a true measure of the success of a society can a society be called successful because it produces more matter or controls more matter or owns more matter than than some other Society well I would suggest that an equally important at least is important measure of a society and a culture in a system is to what degree does it meet human needs and how well does it promote healthy human development and to what degree or in what ways does it undermine it so what is the nature of human nature well again in this system It is believed and often taught that human nature is essentially selfish individualistic aggressive and competitive that's human nature and so when somebody behaves that way you say oh well what can you do that's human nature but I believe that to speak of that is to make a rather Elementary mistake which is to take this society as the standard of what humans are supposed to be it's true that we're taught to behave that way as a matter of fact not only we thought to behave that way the most successful people in the society do behave that way that said become successful very often as we all know even to the point of threatening our very existence the the selfishness and the aggression and the desire to own and produce more and to control more is is is is is jeopardizing our our very being so yeah if that's human nature then what can you do that's just human nature but what if that is not human nature what if that is a distortion of human nature what if in fact or nature demands something else entirely and not to look at Human Nature we need to look at how human beings evolved through eons millions and hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands of years and then we have to look at what are the needs of the human child what needs is a human child actually have and what needs is a human being actually have and rather than trying to determine the nature of human nature from our human behave human people behave in certain situations let's look at from the point of their needs and then I think what we'll find is not so much that there's human nature that predicts certain behaviors because there's so many different human behaviors I mean you can have a Hitler oh who tried to kill me when I was less than a year old or you can have a Jesus where are you gonna have a mud and lose the game these are all human beings so what then is human nature how have you understood that it's not so much that there's a human nature that predicts Behavior but what there actually is is a human nature that means that we have certain needs and if those needs are met we're going to behave in particular predictable ways and if those needs are not met we're also going to be even predictable ways so it's not a behavior that defines our nature but our needs that Define our nature and the behaviors reflect the degree to which those needs are met or they are not mad what if you look at from that point of view well what do we find from that point of view and and and and how would looking at Human Nature from that angle lead us to understand physical what we call physical or mental pathology and I say what we call because diagnosis and pathology and so on is just a certain way of looking at something doesn't necessarily reflect reality or it might describe a certain reality but it doesn't necessarily explain reality and we have to make a distinction between descriptions and explanations so what is human nature well I mean what is the needs of what is the need of any human child and it doesn't matter what human child what are you looking at humans living close to the North Pole or the South Pole in the East or the West in Europe or in Africa or Asia or North America or wherever what are the needs of a human child well the essential need of the human child is for attachment now attachment is a biological drive for connection with another human being and it's an essential drive because we thought it we can survive the human being is the the human child is the most immature most dependent and um most vulnerable creature in the universe so with that somebody looking after her or him he just they just don't survive so that attachment drive you can say that's part of our human nature in other words we're born for love there's another words for attachment is love not only the love of the child or the attachment of the child to the parent but the attachment of the parent to the child so attachment is this drive that pulls two human beings together for the purpose of being taken care of or for the purpose of taking care of and of course attachment also pulls human beings together for reasons throughout the lifespan so human beings did not live the way we lived through most of human existence so if that wall in the room represents the beginning of human evolution millions of years ago and if that all over the represents our present day then until this far away from that wall there we lived in small band hunter-gatherer groupings 60 to 80 200 human beings living together and that meant that children were always around their parents always are Underpants there was no separation not just around their parents but on the whole group of adults all of whom acted as as parental figures in a child's life so a child grew up ensconced in a network of very safe attachments safe in the sense that everybody cared for the child number one number two when you lift study hunter-gatherer groups they always carry their kids everywhere the North American Native said the papoose Where They Carried the kids everywhere in Nigeria I think okinia there was a newspaper article about 10 years ago I read rather amusing somebody I think in Nairobi Kenya opened a pram store like a baby buggy store and it wasn't very it wasn't doing very well and the reporter asked the shop owner of all how come you're not doing better business in this big modern city he said well our people just don't understand why they put the kids into a machine and pushed them they carry them everywhere no it's not an infrequent these days to see a parent pushing a buggy and playing with the cell phone at the same time do we think that the kid in the buggy whose parents is on a cell phone is getting the same kind of information about the world as the baby who's being carried on the parents yes or back or belly the third thing um about how to gather groupings and the reason I'm talking about them is because that's human nature that's how we evolved that was our nature so the first thing is that the small groups living together and he had said many adult attachments many adults looking after them protecting and mentoring them number one number two um the kids were carried everywhere number three they didn't let their kids cry oh and I said didn't let them cry I don't mean that they they they they they they they forbade crying you can't forbid a bit of two months old from crying but they wouldn't if they cried they were immediately cuddled here in North America we actually tell parents we teach parents not to pick up the kids when they're crying let's go sleep training we're actually telling parents don't pick up your kids when they're crying at night because we want them to sleep through the night and if you pick them up they'll learn that they can just wake you up in the middle of the night and you know and then you can't go to work in the morning I'll say something with that later so that's the third thing they don't they just let their kids cry the fourth thing is generally generally you want to gather groupings don't hit their kids if they do it's only in an acute situation when the kid is about to crawl into an ant hill and you pick him up and you quickly slap on the bottom teaching him not to do that but there's not a question of spanking as punishment it's very interesting I'll I'll read you a there was a novel published in Canada about the interaction of the European colonists and the native First Nations people this author actually went back to the documents of the time and it's it's a recorded fact that the Europeans were appalled at the parenting practices of the natives because the natives didn't hit their kids and to the Europeans this meant spraying the rods following the child so in this particular novel there's a Jesuit that writes home to his superiors and France and he says about the natives the the sauvages the Savages children and dogs run around without care rolling in the dirt with one another if there's one thing I will never go accustomed to is the Savage's inability to chastise their children in all my years I've never even seen an adult raise a hand in anger toward a child indeed this should be one of the first behaviors you must try to modify so the Europeans were really aghast at the fact that these people didn't hit their kids so multiple adult attachments being being with the adults all the time physically not being hit and not being allowed to cry why does a kid cry I'm still talking about human nature here and what happens to it why does the kid cry well kids got no other way to ask for help but to cry for crying is a sign of distress and what can be the distress be over we're distressed when our needs aren't being met so if we're hungry a baby will cry if the uncomfortable because the diaper is dirty and wet they're gonna cry if they need attachment contact they will cry when the needs are met the child is sued and eased and their nervous system relaxes when the needs are denied the Chug is more riled up when a child is riled up you get stress hormones going through the whole body to the brain stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline particularly cortisol cortisol interferes with healthy brain development when we don't pick up our kids we're interfering with their brain development you didn't have to tell Aboriginal people this but in our modern society you have to teach this and people say oh my God really that's not what my doctor told me they told me and as a doctor I used to tell people the same kind of nonsense don't pick them up let them cry through the night so what I'm saying is that from the very beginning in this Society we're denying people's essential needs for healthy development right from the get-go and haven't even said anything about how we've medicalized birth and people no longer have natural births and that itself is a problem and then believe in a very stressed Society so the parents are stressed and when the parents are stressed the kids are stressed it's that simple because children utterly rely children have no self-regulation so right if you're stressed as an adult if you're mature enough you can regulate yourself you can take a few breaths you can calm yourself down you can say okay slow down let me think about this let me deal with this infant can't do that infants got no self-regulation whatsoever that the only way that the infant can regulate their internal no you know what it's like when you're upset your heart is wasting your blood pressure is up your nervous system is on fire your guts might be churning or stopping muscles are dense everything changes about you same with the infant except the infant there's no capacity to regulate themselves the infant's brain requires the mature function of the adult's brain to regulate it I'm quoting Dr Dan Siegel or UCLA psychiatrist and Child Development expert so the infants brand requires the mature function of the adult's brain to regulate itself but what if the adult's brain is not functioning maturely because that adult themselves never got the right conditions for the healthy development now you have an immature adult brain regulating or trying to regulate an immature infant's brain the self-regulation Never devops and when you stress parents well for example I mentioned asthma when you stress brands that affects the child's physiology because let me step back of it I've followed because with an explanation but let me step back a bit for a minute Western medicine the medicine in which I was trained Japanese to mind from the body so in University in the Western Medical mind um and I'll prove this to you in a minute uh certain questions just don't arise so I'm gonna just ask you in this audience if in the last five years you've been to any kind of a specialist uh gastroenterologist or a cardiologist or a neurologist or a rheumatologist or a dermatologist just raise your hand would you Okay so quite a few people here now raise your hand again if you're ologist of any kind ask you about your childhood relationship with your parents anybody nobody so far okay I've seen they've ever been traumatized did they ever ask you that anybody can ask you how you feel about yourself as a human being what is your self-concept do you like yourself do you not like yourself did they ask you about stress on the job did I ask you about that maybe nobody right because the Western Medical mind separates the Mind from the body and so when you come in with a physical problem that's all it is it's the physical problem the fact that the mind and body are inseparable not only are they inseparable theoretically the Inseparable of being practiced and not only are they Inseparable but you have we actually have the science that shows exactly Inseparable they are it's not like this is voodoo medicine this is up-to-date science despite the fact that the science shows the unity practice Cleaves them into two and not only do we separate the Mind from the body the emotions from the physiology we also separate the individual from the environment but let's go back to the example of the black woman who experiences racism thereby increasing her risk of asthma or the info or the young child whose parents are stressed and therefore they're more likely to have asthma we see number one that emotions can't be separated from the physiology because somehow erase this episode increases the chance that your lungs will be inflamed and your Airways will be narrowed which means the emotion whatever you experienced probably suppressed rage or shame whatever you experienced actually affects the physiology of your lungs and if your parents are stressed that also affects the physiology of the lungs in other words the separation is unscientific and it's untenable in real life but that also leads to another question why are so many parents so stressed these days what's happening culturally and socially and furthermore if you look at that asthmatic Afro-American woman is that asthma a manifestation of her own pathology or is it reflecting a social malaise in which case her lungs were simply reflecting a historical problem in this country in other words the separations are illegitimate and they are [Music] um non-scientific they're ideological rather than real and this isn't a new idea the Buddha said 2500 years ago well he he had he talked about what he called the interconnected core rising of phenomena the interconnected causing of phenomena he was simply saying that everything is connected to everything else he said contemplate all the conditions nearing this then he says look at a leaf for a raindrop leave for a raindrop and contemplate all the conditions near and distant necessary for the existence of that leaf or raindrop obviously if you look at a leaf it contains the Sun the photosynthesis the effect of light obviously without the sun there'll be no leaf the sky from which the water falls that irrigates the plant that then produces the leaf and the Earth the minerals and the nutrients and the materials that make up the substance of the of the leaf so that leaf contains the Earth the Sun in the sky and and Buddha said um no every phenomena depends on the existence of all other phenomena he said without the many they cannot be the one and without the one that cannot be the many if you look at parental stress it's not an individual phenomena either contemplate all the conditions near and distant that lead to that parent being stressed so it so happens that Puerto Rican kids in Chicago have higher rates of asthma than other ethnic groups they also happen to have families that are more stressed than other families are now is that individual family problem what does that reflect the social problem in other words what I'm saying to you is that there's no condition of human beings physical or mental virtually virtually I mean there are some exceptions but virtually no condition of human beings that we call pathology that does not reflect the social and cultural uh background and issue and we can't understand any of this without looking at the larger pictures and it's very interesting medicine is very interesting that way if you go to a dermatologist with an inflamed skin what kind of cream are they going to give you anybody know steroid cream right if you go to a rheumatologist with an inflamed joint what medication are they going to give you steroid very often if you go to a a lung specialist with asthma what kind of inhaler are you going to get steroid if you go to a gastroenterologist with an inflamed intestines what kind of medication are you at steroids oh what are steroids they're copies of cortisol what is cortisol the stress hormone retweeting everything with stress hormones maybe it should occur to us that stress has something to do with the onset of these conditions and that stress is not an individual problem stress is a social problem and so if we're seeing more of this or that condition let's consider that we're looking at the manifestations of something in the culture to go back to Multiple Sclerosis for example why women well what if we understood which is my perspective that is very much a stress during condition and it's very much a disease of people who take on too much stress in their lives unwittingly well let's look at the situational women what has changed from seven years ago women have always had the roles of being the ones who absorb the stresses and um problems with their families including their spouses so when you see the number of women who are getting anti-anxiety or antidepressant medications being many more historically than those of the men does that reflect the weakness of the woman or does it actually reflect the fact that the woman is absorbing the stress of both people in a relationship very often but that's their cultural role and their whole family well that hasn't changed that's still the case but on top of that women are not have to either choose to or have to in many cases play an economic role as well they have to have a career or jobs and so on which should be okay and even beneficial if the other role was shared equally but it isn't we're still actually have the role of being the stress absorbers of their larger families and there's more stress than they used to be because there's less connection now Dr Stephen porges who done brilliant work on the nervous system he points out that safety is not a question of a lack of threat safety is the presence of connection now in this Society there's much less connection there used to be for all kinds of reasons which I don't have to go into but I mean it's obvious and she read my book on addiction you know that there's a particular store in Vancouver where I would show up for classical music in a very addicted fashion and it's a beautiful story you know it really is a beautiful story it it's magnificent large tall ceilings and the staff are so musically knowledgeable and friendly and such a great atmosphere in there all kinds of recordings from decades ago so that you can get anything ever recorded almost and yeah I I spend a lot of money there and in a very addicted way but that's not the store's fault but that store is closing now just news just came out a couple of weeks ago second to last classical music store in Canada I don't think you have any left in the United States because online and digital technology as throwing them out of business now what does that mean that means that that person wants to buy music now doesn't go to a store doesn't talk to a human being isn't in a human environment they sit in the isolation of their home and they push buttons on a machine is less and less connection so what I'm saying is multiple sclerosis women they're all have doubled but there's less connection so there's more stress you know because you know when you when you're um if I stressed you right now for example uh it'd be a very different matter if you were by yourself and nobody to share with than if a friend of yours next to you says hey how are you feeling as soon as they ask you how you're feeling your stress level goes down so the lack of connection leads to increase stress and there was a very interesting Australian study that showed they looked at a number of women who had lumps suspicious for breast cancer so they had to have biopsies and they put his women through a psychological questionnaire before the result came back and after the results came back it turned out that everyone was emotionally isolated that by itself did not increase the risk of the Olympian cancers similarly if a woman was stressed that by itself did not increase the chance of that lump being cancerous but if a woman was stressed and emotionally isolated the risk of that lump in cancers was nine times as great as the average and the Physicians and and the scientists who did the study of course couldn't understand this because they said how does zero and zero add up to Nine Zero Effect Zero Effect nine what but to go back to our example here if you my friend were stressed right now which means there were high levels of stress hormone in your body cortisol and adrenaline but your friend of yours next to you said hey how are you feeling do you want to talk about it your stress will go right down but if you're emotionally isolated and you were stressed then your cortisol level would stay high for a long time and cortisol suppresses the immune system which means that our malignancy is more likely to develop which means that cancer is not the disease of the individual the development of cancer and individual reflects a lifetime history of relationships to family and to the culture and to society which then might explain to us for example why if you look at again black Americans black Americans are more likely to get prostate cancer and more likely to die of it and not because of lack of Medical Care and black women are more like to die of breast cancer even if they have access to good medical care but why is that well maybe there's something about being a minority in this particular culture that is so highly stressful that it deranges the immune system so is it an individual problem again or is it a social problem it's also true that in some very high economically advantaged areas I think in Marin County period for example amongst well to do white women there's a high breast cancer rate maybe they're very stressed in a different way and maybe they're isolated emotionally maybe that's what's driving it so what I'm saying is you can't separate the Mind from the body you can't separate the individual from the environment and the only way to look at human beings is somebody once called 41 years ago an American physician called for what he described as a biocycle social view of human beings which is to say that the biology can't be separated from a psychology and that can't be separated from a social environment and I think if we follow traditional medicinal practices we will take it one step further and we will say bio psychosocial spiritual because we also have spiritual needs I maintain I'm not a religious person in any way whatsoever uh never have been by spiritual I don't mean belief in a god although if that's what it is for you that's what it is that's fine but a sense of connection is something greater than we are and some American Physicians a couple years ago put out a paper where they called for what they call the biopsychosocial ecological point of view we also when we also look at the ecology with which we're interacting and that's obvious because again if you look at women who live in blighted more blighted neighborhoods where there's more pollution in the air when they're pregnant their kids are more likely to have learning problems and behavior problems and so on related to the degree of pollution that they inhaled when they were pregnant so now if we look at human beings from this point of view of human needs which are for connection and that connection is necessary not just for child rearing but also for procreation obviously also for group formation and we did not evolve as individuals we could not have evolved as individuals if we were rugged individuals we wouldn't be it's that simple because we could not have survived millions of years of evolutionary pressure as individuals so what we call Rugged individualism is the very opposite of human nature not not an expression of it furthermore in this Society we make a huge distinction between individuality and individualism there's nothing more predictable than the and and and and and and and stereotypical than a rugged individualist being an individual actually means not just doing your own thing it means me being me being able to maintain yourself while an inter your individuality while an interaction with other human beings so you're connected but you're still an individual that's what it means to be an individual individual basically says I don't care about anybody else That's Not Human Nature so then if from this point of view we look at the rise in mental health what we call mental health pathology the Horizon physical health pathology this is despite the advances of Medical Science which are immense and breathtakingly amazing when it comes to acute illnesses and infectious illnesses but we do really badly with chronic illness autoimmune diseases um cancer for the most part and we do extraordinarily poorly with mental illnesses if we look at the rise or the intractability of these conditions then maybe What's missing is not medical dedication or medical skill but a perspective that connects the dots that connects to dots and if we connected the dots then when you went to see a physician with your asthma they would ask you about the stresses in your life they would ask you what happened to you in childhood how stress were your parents and why is that important because it's not what happened in childhood that's the problem it's what we made it mean for ourselves that is the problem and it will be caring about what happened in ourselves now there was a study this morning I just came in my email today and you study that showed that children who are stressed or abused these children and as young creatures the stress changes the functioning of the nervous system through the activity of the immune system in such a way as to make them more susceptible to the effects of cocaine this is the latest study the same thing has been shown in laboratory animals that if you stress infant mice that changes their immune system which induces changes in the nervous system which makes that nervous system more susceptible to the effects of cocaine in other words they're more likely to become addicted later on so that means that when you went to the the medical doctor uh you would be asked about what happened to you in childhood and not only what what happened to you in childhood but what how does that affect you today let me give you an example so I'm 74 years old now so when I was young and stupid at 71 years old I uh I came home from a speaking trip from actually I was in Philadelphia and I flew home and I was in a good mood the airline had bumped me up to first class and I'd given a good talk and I just saw what a great guy and all this I landed the airport and my wife's supposed to pick me up and I got a text that says still at home do you still want me to come I text back a very terse and angry never mind and I take a taxi home and I come in and I barely even look at her and she asked me questions I sort of grunt and I do this till next day this is that to 46 years of marriage and she said and she finally says knock it off already and I'm able to report with great pride that after one day I was able to knock it off which a few years ago might have taken me a lot longer here's the deal I've been with this woman married to 46 years been with her by that time 48 years three years ago she's an artist in fact that's her art behind you those are two of her paintings and when she's in the studio if any of you do art the artist forgets that there's such a thing as time or that they have a husband I've only known this for four and a half decades what am I so upset about what anybody any idea what was actually going on what's going on so she forgot so what am I so angry about that I won't even talk to her any idea yeah attachment so what about it I was missing the attachment yes but why was I instead of oh I'm home I'm happy to see you what am I angry about and why am I not looking at her so so what's actually happening is is abandonment yeah so I'm all of a sudden an abandoned infant you see and the abandoned infant when they see the mother again no I wasn't abandoned infant because I was a year old I was given to a total stranger in the street of Budapest a Christian woman who smuggled me out to safety and I didn't see my mother this is under the Nazis and I didn't see my mother for six weeks when I saw her again I wouldn't even look at her for several days this is simply the emotional withdrawal of the child it's self-protection it says that our soul my heart was so bruised when I opened when I was open and vulnerable to you that I'm not going to do that again so I closed down I'm sure many of you might recognize within yourself that I mean when you're in a relationship and you perceive yourself or you perceive the other person as having hurt you your response is to withdraw and get kind of sullen and not you know that now what that what is that that's the reaction of a small infant that's that's one way they can protect themselves is not to open themselves again but this is 70 years later but you can imagine that for those 24 hours when I'm not talking to her and I'm caught up in Anger what do you think is happening in my body physiologically high levels of stress now James Baldwin said about the American black experience he said that would be a black male yeah and I'm I'm paraphrasing him because I don't remember the exact words but he said to be a black male is to be in a constant state of suppressed rage which is highly stressful so take a condition like high blood pressure which is more prevalent amongst again black American males well it's got to be genetic no it isn't their biological relatives in Africa don't have high blood pressure the Medical Science says we don't know what causes high blood pressure so our 100 people maybe five who have high blood pressure because of some other condition kidney disease or some hormonal disorder but 95 have what we call Essential high potential hypertension is the word for high blood pressure essential hypertension is essentially we don't know what the hell is causing it that's actually what it means but slow down for a minute what if you said the word hypertension slowly Piper attention hyper oh Piper attention maybe there's too much tension in these people's lives and that is affecting the autonomic nervous system and that is making the blood vessels more narrow and that increases the pressure that the heart has to exert to get the blood to flow through those narrowed arteries and maybe that has to do with economic and social and cultural and racial conditions in this country and and there you know um the the reason I bring up the example of of minority groups like in Canada for example I mean look at addiction where I worked in the downtown east side of Vancouver which is a highly addicted area but 30 percent of the people living there people injecting and inhaling ingesting all kinds of drugs down there and um it's it's more dramatic even the Nintendo line area of San Francisco if you visit it and 30 of the people are First Nations Aboriginal Canadians who make up four or five percent of the Canadian population because they're much more likely to be addicted than anybody else and the reason I bring up these examples is not because there's anything special about these groups particularly but that culturally and socially they've had certain experiences that has imposed much more stress on them as a group than on the rest of the population as a group and I don't have to tell you about the history in this country in my country the Aboriginal people were children were abducted from their families for a hundred years they were abducted they were forced to go to these schools where they were sexually and physically abused and now when they go back to the communities sexual and physical abuse is endemic in those communities and so is therefore his addiction and suicides and mental illness and all this kind of stuff and the point I'm making with these particular examples is just to show again that human beings are bio psychosocial spiritual ecological creatures and you can't separate the individual malaise from the history um from the multi-generational family trajectory and from the culture as it is today all this then concentrates in an individual in physiological manifestations like the immune system problems that affect the nervous system that lead to cocaine susceptibility like the cancer that stressed and isolated person is less able to mount a defense against like the mental illnesses that develop originally really as compensations of course against stress and Trauma to give you a quick example depression is supposed to be this genetic disease really what does it mean to depress something means to push it down I've been treated for depression probably some of you have what gets pushed down in depression your feelings your emotions why would a person push down their feelings because they're too they're too painful they're too much to bear in other words they're pushing down the feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you're not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments so you learn to survive by pushing on your feelings and then 15 years later or 30 years later you're diagnosed with depression now you've got this medical biological problem they give you a pill now I'm not here to form it against pharmacology I've taken antidepressants they've helped me they work sometimes but they're not the answer because the answer is how does that Charter experience manifest in your life today oh well in my case it manifests by when there's any hint of Abandonment even when there isn't abandonment but just kind of something similar to it because I mean here's this woman who I'm relying for socially emotional and physical contact doesn't show up at the airport and all of a sudden my one-year-old infant was abandoned by his mother because that memory is carried in my brain well that's how it shows up okay or the depression is a result of the fact that as a kid given the environment I was in I really had to learn to push down my feelings because expressing my feelings would have threatened my attachment relationship without which I couldn't have survived and that asthma is a function of the fact that I grew up in a stressed environment and I don't know how to regulate my own stress and this Society imposes stresses on me he fabulate belong to a certain group or the multiple sclerosis is there because I learned I mean when you look at autoimmune diseases eighty percent of people with autoimmune disease are women well then you go back to okay because I learned that I had to take everybody else and ignore my own needs I've taken a lot more stress than I could actually handle that's why I survived in this culture in other words if you understand how all these historical cultural familial stresses imposed certain behaviors on you a certain self-view certain patterns of emotional relating no you can do something about it no it's no longer so there's something wrong with me it's just that this is how I had adapted to what happened to me and therefore I have the capacity now as a conscious human being to become aware of all this and to transform myself and that's not easy it's not so easy to transform yourself because of course these adaptations that I talked about originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way we don't know any other way of being except there's something telling us that this is not right somebody's telling us and so we want to find out the truth of things and from that perspective when things go wrong it's possible to see them as necessary and as teachers so there's a picture that I have who lives in California and he writes your conflicts all the difficult things the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard they're actually yours they're specifically yours designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else the part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself you're not going to go in the right direction unless there's something pricking you on the side telling you look here this way that part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance it will go to Extreme Measures to wake you up it will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen what else can it do that is its purpose and from that point of view we can look at uh individual problems like depression of ADHD or multiple sclerosis anything else as a problem to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we're out of sync with our true nature that we're misaligned somehow with actually Who We Are and that's something else is trying to wake us up and we can apply that same perspective when we look at Society so maybe there's a wave Cup going on right now on the social and economic and political level so that we can actually ask ourselves well what is our true nature and what kind of social society and culture would we have if we're true to our true nature which is the same question we have to ask ourselves when it comes to individual problems and the conclusion said that yes there is a human nature and that hearing nature was built for love and contact it was built for it was built for connection it was built for Mutual protection it was built for Mutual Aid and when we rear people and there's a whole society on lines that transgress those needs we're going to get exactly what we've got today which is a society which is increasingly conflicted um increasingly fractured increasingly disconnected and where human pathology uh is despite all the advances of Medicine chronic human pathology is on the rise what medicine medicine does not recognize that the pathologies are manifestations of a life that diseases don't have a life of their own that diseases Express the life of the individual if that individual's life is changed so can the disease in many many cases and furthermore that human beings have an innate healing capacity does the healing capacity in all living beings plant or animal and along with The Wanderers contributions of Western medicine we could do so much more if we actually respect it and evoked and encouraged that healing capacity that's within the individual which is very much connected to the emergence of of the true self now for that you need the truth that means we actually have to look at what's going on and and and there's so much Denial in this Society my own profession is a prime example girls doctor does not hear the information I gave you about asthma they couldn't explain it even though the physiology is straightforward for all the trauma in a society the average physician does not hear the word trauma in all the years of training not that they don't get a lecture it's not that they don't get it of course they don't even hear the word except in the physical sense a physical trauma features are not taught that the human child's brain is still developing and that the condition for healthy brain development is the presence of nurturing and responsive adults and that the schools are not knowledge factories they're places where human development needs to be nurtured that's a very different proposition for an educational system and the courts don't get it of course think they would be here badly it's a choice they're making therefore they need to be punished for some strange reason certain minority groups have to be punished more than the average like in my country five percent of the population is native 25 of the jail populations and of course when you ask the question if the science is as straightforward as I believe it to be and the conclusions are as clear as I believe them to be why don't we just embrace it and follow it and do something about it well that's a the reason for that is obvious because if if this if everything I said it happens to be true which I firmly believe to be true and if it is everything had to be everything would have to change or with each parents would have to change how we treat the young families would have to change but we support young parents would have to change how do we pass laws that would have to change from your first allowance had to change how do we educate people to have to change how we run the economy have to change you'd have to have something different well getting to that something different has to begin with an inquiry and I hope I've said enough to encourage you to continue on that path of inquiry thanks very much [Applause] [Music] foreign because somebody in the family's got a problem and you're here to help them but I'll be telling you throughout the day is that actually each one of us is here for ourselves [Music] there's tremendous healing possible [Music] anybody ever really all foreign yes they can be

Channel: Wholehearted

Views: 768,158

Keywords: wholehearted.org, wholehearted publishing, dr. gabor mate, gabor mate, the power of connection, the myth of normal, healing trauma & addiction, masterclass for healers, compassionate inquiry, in the realm of the hungry ghosts, scattered, hold onto your kids, when the body says no, rae mate, aj foxx

Id: X0cODqqYyi8

Length: 69min 8sec (4148 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2022