Dr. Gabor Maté - When The Body Says No In Psychotherapy

[Music] there's one major source of illness and I'm talking about any kind of illness whether that's so-called mental illness or physical illness and that's childhood trauma and this is true what I'm talking about anxiety depression ADHD addiction psychosis bipolar illness or if I'm talking about multiple sclerosis cancer rheumatoid arthritis fibromyalgia chronic fatigue colitis Crohn's disease ALS scleroderma and as I said malignancy as well and that seems like a very bold statement but today I'll be concentrating on the physical side of it when I say physical side I'm talking about the illnesses that are not considered to be mental illnesses as a matter of fact what I'll be telling you and I just I'm just giving you a preview of what I'll be saying is that and it's quite okay I wish you would argue with me both in your mind and also verbally that's the way we get through to the heart of things I'll be saying you to you that just about everything not everything but just about everything that we call illness begins is rooted in compensations and adaptations that have to do with each other trauma and I'll quote you something to that effect just to prove that I'm not totally crazy or if I am crazy I'm not alone in my craziness this is from the journal Pediatrics which is the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the article appeared in their Journal 6 years ago now in February the February of 2012 and the article is from the Harvard Center on a developing child and here's what they say in their abstract growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity stress or instability can lead to shortened physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but you may come but which may come at a significant cost the long-term outcomes in learning and behavior health and longevity and it was what they're saying is that the adaptations that children are forced to resort to in response to early stress help them endure that early the rest and difficulty but those same adaptations become source of pathology later on and even threaten longevity now that article came out just six years ago but that's the perspective that I came to adopt or or understand a long time ago in medical practice norms in order to understand the basis of that we have to consider how we look at human beings so and how we look at disease now Western medicine looks at disease from a particular perspective and you have to understand something about medicine it's science all right but it's also etiology and there's a difference in science in ideology there's a lot of science in it and it's great science but there's also the ology an ideology is a point of view it's it's it's a the German state so Walton strong it's it's it's a worldview that you're not conscious of that you have hidden beliefs that you don't question and people that question the hidden beliefs are seen as outliers or Mavericks and that's an ideology and that exists in all realms whether politics or science or medicine or history or economics or any field of human thought or investigation so there's always ideological biases hidden in any system and the logic of the system operates within those biases now what are the biases of Western medicine well the bias of Western medicine and any of you medical colleagues here want to disagree with me I'll be happy to although I doubt that you will because I just think that if you don't psychotherapy you'll probably agree with me already but but maybe not well the hidden biases are number one that diseases have either physical causes in a sense of genes or external forces like bacteria or viruses or toxins or we don't know what the causes are so the causes are either physical or the disease is what we call idiopathic we don't know what the source of it is that's one bias is that causes are purely physical the second bias is that diseases happen to organs so you have a heart disease and you have lung disease and you have diseases of connective tissue or the liver or whatever and then there's specialties designated study and depth the diseases of these organs but but that except for obvious lifestyle so-called lifestyle mmm proclivity is like smoking or drinking we don't really think that the life of an individual is a whole lot to do with the disease of the organ so you know answer strikes somebody who doesn't smoke we don't know what causes it so we separate the organ from the whole person and then we separate the person from the environment so that the social environment we might acknowledge the role of the physical environment but certainly not acknowledge all of the social environment so in Western medical terms the average physician would not be able to explain to you and this is not for lack of intelligence if people lack of training will not be able to explain to you why is it that the more episodes of racism a black American woman experiences the greater risk for asthma it's just a documented fact nor would the average physician be able to tell you very easily the the multiple times documented fact that children whose parents are stressed are more likely to have asthma as a matter of fact the degree of the child's asthma has been correlated with the degree of mental disturbance on the part of the parent so you go to the physician you get the inhalers but that's all that happens and so Norwood let me just give you another fact which I'll won't explain now but a study in Australia looked at 500 women with breast biopsies were suspicious or at least concern enough was raised that it should be malignancy or not so they had these biopsies and they also had a psychological evaluation and when the results came back and turned out that if a woman was stressed that by itself did not increase the risk of that lump in cancer so those zero effect and similarly if a woman was emotionally isolated that by itself also did not increase the chance of being cancer so Serio effect but if a woman was stressed and isolated the risk of that love being cancerous was 9 times as great as the average and the researchers being scientists the medical scientists couldn't explain this one because they said it's strange what a zero and zero add up to nine well that becomes clear hot zero zero add up to nine becomes very clear if you understand that human beings can't be separated from their environment and what happens inside an individual on a physiological level is very much determined or at least affected by what happens to them on a social level so nor nor would the average physician be able to explain to you based on their training why is it that if you look at lung cancer the more adverse childhood experiences that you have in other words the more trauma you've experienced the greater your risk of lung cancer and this is true even if you cancel out smoking as a factor nor would the average physician be able to say whole lot about the fact that a Canadian study showed that if you were abused as a child your risk of cancer goes up by nearly 50% and this is even after you've factored in or factored out things like smoking and drinking which abused people are more likely to do so these are the questions that we have to be able to answer and it seems to me that that any one of these facts that I just told you which are not in question ought to send the whole profession running to figure out the what's going on in the correlation to physiology and emotions and our social existence but we don't do that because we exclude this kind of information that's the ideological bias and so seventy years ago this year there was a physician called George Engle who called for a different model of medicine and he said he said that the dominant model of medicine today talking almost half a century ago 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 somatic variables it leaves no room within its framework for the social psychological and behavioral dimensions of illness the biomedical model embraces mind-body dualism the doctrine that separates the mental from the somatic and dr. Norman Doidge was wrong on psychiatrists here in Toronto writes on brain plasticity he wrote similarly just last year modern scientific method 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 and molecules so things haven't changed much since George Jango wrote those words and what he called for was a biopsychosocial approach which meant that the biology of human beings cannot be separated from their psychological and social environments no at the same time human beings have always known we've always known that things can't be separated so there's there's always been this tussle you might say between a unitary holistic view of human beings and and existence in general and the dualistic you that separates things so the Buddha said that 2500 years ago he says contemplate the in the interconnected core arising of all phenomena that's what he called it the interconnected core arising of phenomena he said look at Hurley for a raindrop he says and meditate he says meditate and all that conditions that are necessary for the existence of the leaf for a raindrop so obviously I mean trivially obvious you look at a leaf it contains the Sun the light the photosynthesis it contains the earth in the form of minerals and it contains the sky in front of the water so the leaf literally contains earth Sun and sky and he says he says the birth of any phenomenon he says is dependent on the birth of other phenomena he says without the many that cannot be the one without the one that cannot be the many and that was the border 2500 years ago and the wonderful writer Susan Griffin in her really transcendent buck the course of stones wrote that the story of one life cannot be taught separately from the story of other lives who are we the question is not simple what we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationships in society all the lives that surround us are in us so that's the perspective from which I'll be conducting the discussion today well I mentioned that I wrote in that practice for 32 years to offer them with hardcore drug addicts the other twenty in a straightforward finite practice where I helped to deliver a lot of babies and in palliative care where he helped a lot of people die and everything else in between and in those years I found that the people who got sick and didn't get sick they had certain patterns certain characteristics that kept cropping up over and over and again told I I just couldn't ignore it anymore and the the significant difference between in an experience we're gonna found a physician and a and a specialist in that the specialist certainly does know and blessedly so a lot about a certain organ in a certain system I don't know the patient and by that then you see the patient the patient's already sick and usually I already have a diagnosis at least we know what area the diseases as the family physician you get to see people before they get sick so you know what their personalities are like for years before they get sick and also you get to see them in the context of their families including their multi-generational family of origin by the way this is a interesting exercise let me just ask you right now I'm not gonna ask you any personal details about how many of you in the see in the last five years have been to wrestler ologist gastroenterologist a cardiologist and neurologist the gastroenterologist the dermatologist maybe I said rheumatologist any kind of a knowledge is just put your hand up okay great all right now what you end up again if they asked you about childhood trauma one person that's great if they asked you about stresses in your relationship with your spouse a couple of hands about job stress yeah so we have maybe like a five to ten percent and that's really good if they ask you about it I know I wonder how long they took the discussion but it doesn't even occur to them but I'm telling you all of you who went to these specialists were there because of childhood trauma virtually all of you now there are diseases that you can't put into that category there are genetic diseases like there's one that runs in my family muscular dystrophy if you have the gene you'll have the disease it's nothing to do with life or stress is just although that can affect the course of it but whether you get it or not is simply genetic those diseases are extraordinary rare like one in 10,000 of the population will have a disease like that most diseases have little or nothing to do with genetic factors so these are them the patterns that I noticed in my clients and by the way when I said childhood trauma some of you at least internally shaking your heads because you're looking at your life and I never had any trauma but I'll knock that audio in a half an hour so yeah as a matter of fact as a matter of fact I I conducted what I call the happy childhood challenge which I'll tell you about more later because it all depends on how used to a trauma and trauma for me and that that's that's all other lecture but trauma is not what happens to you it's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you and things can happen inside you for which you don't need very dramatic events but trauma essentially is a restriction of your capacity it's a limitation it's a constriction in the body it's a construction in your mental capacity to respond in the present moment from your authentic self essentially trauma is a restriction of your authentic self in a present moment that's what trauma is for which you don't need dramatic events so what were these characteristics that I noticed in people with illness I'll illustrate them by means of newspaper clippings from The Globe and Mail the first one is an article written the first person by a woman who's diagnosed with breast cancer her name is Donna and her husband's name is hi and Harold is the doctor and hice first wife died of breast cancer not Donna the second wife is diagnosed with the same condition and you might think what an unfortunate coincidence well unfortunately maybe coincidences not this guy for particular reason Mary is a certain type of woman it's that simple what type of woman well here's Donna's description of her diagnosis Harold tells me that the lump is small and most assuredly not in my lymph node unlike that of heist first wife whose cancer has spread everywhere by the time I 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 no your psychotherapist No noticed anything so this she's the one that's potentially facing surgery radiation maybe chemotherapy and what is her first an automatic thought how will I look after his needs this would be so tough on him he's already lost a wife to Brett at the breast cancer so there's automatic and compulsive regard for the emotional needs of others while ignoring your own is a major risk factor for illness for reasons I will explain the others are obituaries for also from the globe male from the lies lived column and obituaries are fascinating because they tell us so much not just about the people who died but also about what be as a society value and often and in every single case what I'm gonna read you is presented as a positive thing there's a good thing which is why the expression the good die young they often do for for for reasons that should be clear to you by the end of this conversation and these are the people for was funerals untimely deaths and funerals one of the people show up [Music] mourning this wonderful person so this man was a physician here in Toronto he died aged 55 of cancer and the obituary said never for a day that he contemplated giving up the work he so loved at Toronto's Sick Children's Hospital he carried on with his duties throughout his year-long battle with cancer starting only a few days before he died so consider the scenario where a friend of yours is diagnosed with malignancy would you turn to them and say hey buddy here's how you deal with it go back to work tomorrow and all the while you're undergoing treatment never consider your life never take a moment to see what's stressing you never be alone and to deal with the reality of it just work every day until you drop so there's rigid and compulsive identification with duty role and responsibilities rather than the authentic self is a major risk factor for illness as a matter of fact any identification with anything outside of yourself is the risk factor of illness the next obituary was written by a grateful husband who's died without his wife died of breast cancer at age 55 and this spouse writes in her entire life she's never going to 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 I'm I'm married to my wife ray for 49 years almost now and many times I wish that she was blending with the environment in a manner as I'm sure you have if you have a spouse or a partner but if you're fortunate they didn't do that they didn't do that because what's being described you of course is the repression of anger the repression of healthy anger and the repression of healthy anger actually disarms the immune system physiologically it does when you repressed anger healthy anger you're actually undercutting the activity of certain immune cells this has been shown in a laboratory I said healthy anger and so we have to make a distinction between healthy anger and unhealthy anger and I won't do that now but but be sure to remind me if I haven't made that distinction clear by the end unhealthy anger is rage and in the aftermath of a Rach episode your risk of a stroke or heart attack double for the next two hours according to Israeli in American Studies why because of course in a rage episode you got real adrenaline discharge which narrows your blood vessels increases your but I sure can't make the heart rate of regular and even clots the blood so I'm talking about that's not healthy either so if we have a problem here if we repress healthy anger we get sick and if we and if we give in to unhealthy anger we also get sick so that's the third characteristic is the repression of healthy anger and the last one and the fourth one is illustrated in the bitchery that you'll have to believe I didn't make up it is from the globe mail and this is from a physician about a physician in Ottawa who died also of cancer at age 72 and it said here 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 with 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 want to disappoint either woman in his life Sydney kept having two dinners a day for years until gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions okay and this is a print that is the beautiful thing now this man suffered from two fatal beliefs some when I say fatal I mean literally fatal if you've got these beliefs drop them today if you can if you can't drop them find out why one is that you're responsible for other people feel nor is every responsible of anybody else feels unless you're a parent then you are and secondly that you must not disappoint anybody so then those are the characteristics this automatic concern in regard for the emotional needs of others while ignoring your own rigid and compulsive identification with duty role and responsibilities rather than the authentic self or the needs of the self repression of anger and the beliefs that you're responsible for how people feel and that you must not disappoint anyone now the question is how do these psychological behavioral characteristics translate into physical illness well before I go to the science of it which has been fairly well worked out and part of my critique of my own profession is that we just don't look at the evidence so that we keep talking about evidence-based practice but I'd love to expunge that face on the dictionary because it makes me grit my teeth because I only wish there was evidence-based practice I only wish that in the realm of child development childhood conditions like ADHD anxiety depression all kinds of mental health issues physical health issues I just wish we'd actually looked at the events but we don't this article I quoted to you from Harvard wasn't published in some fly-by-night alternative Medicaid publication it was in a major medical journal it's like a snow listen makes no difference whatsoever and the reason it doesn't make any difference is because of that ideological bias that is as an unwitting and unconscious ideological bias it's essentially reminds me very much of doctors mr. Spock on Star Trek who's the doctor of course he's from Vulcan but they have no emotions right so when it comes to emotions he says that doesn't compute well the unity of mind and body and the impact of emotions and and of social relationships on physiology literally that it doesn't compute in the medical mind and that's why the the the research is just not incorporated into medical practice despite the fact that it's been published and it's not even controversial so let me illustrate my point with one particular illness that fascinates me because it's a well known B has been the subject of a public campaign in a recent past and three we say that we don't know what causes it and for it's almost always fatal and I'm talking about als amyotrophic lateral sclerosis known in North America as Lou Gehrig's disease and it's a degeneration really of the nerves that activate the muscles that move the limbs and also our breathing apparatus and so on so that people with ALS for the most part become paralyzed in the end will have trouble breathing and die of respiratory failure and it's almost universal uniformly fatal within ten years often much faster than that except when it isn't as in the case of the physicist Stephen Hawking who was diagnosed with it at age 21 and was given three years to live and die at 53 years later just earlier this year in the meanwhile having become the greatest or the best known scientist in our world which ought to at least make us think that maybe we don't know everything not to mention other cases that have actually recovered from ALS so a woman came to me for diagnosis and I think we don't know the cause it's cause we're not looking at what's in front of us that's that simple a woman came to me for diagnosis once not diagnosis for second opinion because she had been diagnosed with ALS and she'd been told that this will kill her which it did within a year but she wanted me to tell her or actually more specifically her husband wanted me to tell her that it's not ALS is just stress well I had to agree with the specialist was clearly ALS but it was also stress how the disease began is that she noticed that she couldn't held a pen or the chalk and she was a teacher couldn't hold the pen of the chalk in her fingers anymore because they would slip through so how she compensates for that and she also had began experience trouble walking and how she compensated for that was to get up early in the morning like 5:00 in the morning and of course it took her time to get dressed because everything was much slower and clumsier and she'd get dressed and I drivers after school walk into the classroom with her somewhat troubled gait and I grasp the chalk in her clenched fist and scrawled the day's lesson on the board for the students teach the whole day and repeat the performance the next day and she did that for months didn't ask for any help didn't go for medical opinion until she could no longer walk and that's when no it's an interesting dynamic as to why the husband didn't drag her to the doctor the first day and that has everything to do with their relationship which is illustrated by the fact that after they saw me and her condition worsened and it became clear that she would not live he start to have an affair with another woman which shows you the relationship they had of his neediness anyway they came to my office and you know I had to confirm that you know this was the ls but I started to talk to her about these patterns now this is the kind of thing that physicians would say but some legitimacy this is anecdotal doesn't prove anything well I think n it does do prove something if there's enough for them and it turns out that you never read about meet anybody look after the ALS who's not like that and this has showed up in a matter and no matter what whose life I read about no matter what patients I interviewed my own case studies from palliative care they were all the same it's difficulty asking for help it's refusal this dogged refusal to ask for help then I looked up the medical literature and there was a study done at year University Medical School quite some years ago now in 1970 this article was published a year university medical school and what did these researchers find they found that these patients invariably evoked admiration respect from all staff who came into contact with them characteristic was their attempt to avoid asking for help Heart Study work without recourse to help from others was pervasive there seemed to have been a habitual denial suppression or isolation of fear anxiety and sadness most expressed the necessity to be cheerful some spoke casually of the deterioration or did so with engaging smiles and there was another study which I won't quote do you know which ended exactly in the same direction and then I looked up the bag of fear Lou Gehrig I knew nothing about the man except that he had this disease named after him so this time passes few and few people know about him but he was a great baseball player a teammate of Babe Ruth's a New York Yankees in the 1930s he was one of the all-time greats he set a record for a number of hits by a Yankee that was only broken a few years ago so it really was a durable durable a record but he said another record that wasn't broken for 70 years either was anybody enough of an aficionado to know what that record was anybody here know what record he said he never missed the game yeah consecutive games played and it's not that he was never sick he got sick like everybody else he just wouldn't take himself out of the game it's not that he was ever injured either at one point his hands were x-rayed and it turns out that his fingers had been fractured something like 17 separate times and his teammates would describe him as grimacing like a maddened monkey in agony as he fielded the ball with a broken finger but he wouldn't take himself out of the game and yet on the other hand when a young rookie on the team got sick with the flu and couldn't play and the manager was very upset with this young player Gary says what are you talking about he's got a flu he can't play and took the rookie to his own home but he live with his mother his mother put the rookie into garrix bed Lou slept on the living-room couch while his mom nursed this kid back to health that's just exact you'll never meet anybody with ALS was not like that now at this point the question comes up are we blaming the person for the disease are we saying that they're responsible for their illness the answer is no and the answer is yes nor we're not blaming anybody yes they're responsible but responsible here doesn't mean a sense of blame it simply means that how they live their lives has a lot to do with with their illness the reason is and and and not only that if we bring the question of responsibility we're actually empowering the client we're saying that you're you know this is you've heard this version before of responsible as response able if we're not response able then what the heck are we them are victims so the whole idea is to make people response able and for that they have to be responsible they have to look at well how was I do how was that living my life and how did that contribute to the illness why are we not blaming people though is because these patterns are completely unconscious nobody's aware of it nobody decides to be this way what does it have to do with well for that you have to go back to childhood in every single case so the woman with the ALS the teacher she was an adopted child and shortly after the adoption so so you understand any any adopted child has got a deep sense of rejection and abandonment that just goes with the territory that doesn't mean we shouldn't adopt kids it just means that that's a major factor that then we have to really help to heal and then shortly after the adoption the adoptive mother gets pregnant now what do you think the rest of the story is the adopted child never believes never perceives that she's loved and appreciated and welcomed and enjoyed like the bardugo child and so she develops a coping mechanism I'll take care of myself just love me I don't any needs just tolerate me that's what she survives no remember when I quoted that article from Harvard that is early coping mechanisms then become sorts of pathology later on because those early coping patterns is the problem with them they're meant to be temporary states were meant to adopt these patterns I mean she's familiar with my idea about ADHD which I've been diagnosed with it's a coping mechanism of young infants when they're stressed around them and they can't escape fight back will change the situation ask for help they tune out as a way of coping but then it gets wired into their brain and not goes from a temporary state which is meant to be to a long-term trade and the coping mechanisms become problems when they go from state to trade there's nothing wrong with her coping that way if she could drop it once she no longer needed to be that way but of course that's not how it works these coping mechanisms are unconscious therefore they're not chosen deliberately therefore they cannot be released deliberately either we're not even aware of them the problem is that as children we all face a dilemma so let me ask before I explain the dilemma let me ask a question if you've had the following experience just raise your hand please that you've had an experience of a strong gut feeling about something you ignored it and you were sorry afterwards just raise your hands thank you there's one or two people that didn't put their hands up congratulations that not listen to you gut feelings is already a disconnect from yourself and you just told me the story of your childhood because the day you were born you were connected to your gut feelings at some point you learned not to be the why did you learn that for survival so it's artists two basic needs the one need is for attachment now attachment is the my friend or new UFL defines it is the drive is the biological psychological emotional drive for closeness and proximity with another human being for the purpose of being taken care of or for the purpose of taking care of the other so there's an attachment drive between parents and children between parents whose children are any of any species beginning with birds and upwards it's the biological drive to connect for the purpose of being taken care of or to take out we can't live without it and least of all no no creature beyond reptiles can live without it and least a lock in human beings because we're the most dependent the most helpless and the least mature of any creature at birth so the attachment drive is very very powerful in our brain and it explains much of human behavior virtually everything that you deal with in your offices relate to disturbances of attachments and a lot of the people that you see in your offices they have difficulties because they're still choosing attachment over authenticity and attachment on any it almost at any cost and it's killing them on some level so why do these patterns make you ill well the reason these planners make you ill is because it turns out that as traditional science traditional medicine practices have always known you can't separate the mind from the body you and actually separate the mind from the body except in medical school but not in real life I was in Fort Francis Ontario for a couple days earlier this week speaking to mostly native audience and is the native Medicine Wheel with his four quadrants of mind and body and emotions and spirit and they say that for health you have to have a balance between those four quadrants and traditional shamanic medicine practices Ayurvedic medicine of India the Chi medicine of China all the medicine men and women of traditional cultures have always assumed and known about the mind but they just know the science but they knew it Noby of the science but we no longer know it and so the science has been worked out it turns out that the the emotional centers of the brain are connected with would you say the psyche are connected with the nervous system with the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the science that studies the interconnectivity of these ostensibly separate systems it's called psychoneuroimmunology psychoneuroimmunology or more properly said psycho neural immuno endocrinology to include the hormonal glands as well it turns out that it's not even that these separate systems are connected together they're not even separate systems they're one system with different manifestations I mean think about it first of all evolution begins with a single-celled organism that celled and differentiates and becomes a multi-celled organism but the basic functions of defense nourishment and survival have to be carried on by the organism it's just that now you have different cells that are specialized in certain dooty so the some cells become digestive cells or the cells become brain cells but they all are the same DNA and even as human beings we still begin with one cell at the union of sperm and egg and then we differentiate it and we separate but that doesn't mean we get disconnected and so turns out that the nervous system wires together all these systems so there's a part of our nervous system called the autonomic nervous system which is the part of our nervous system that is not under your conscious control system which is to say autonomous nervous system you can call it as opposed to the voluntary nervous system that allows me to have snap my fingers if I want to there's the autonomic nervous system and that is what in innervates our viscera our heart guts our lungs it's responsible for the tension of our muscles the other nursing nervous system connects the brain to the bone marrow where the red and the white cells are manufactured and it sends messages from the bone marrow to the brain it connects the brain to the hormonal glands to the immune organs to the spleen with the red cells are stored to the thymus where the white cells mature and it sends messages from all of these organs back up to the brain so there's a constant so nervous system is like a giant electrical grid that wires together all these systems and the anatomical connections have been worked out that's one form of connection the other form of connection of course is to the hormones themselves to the hormones from the hormonal glands in the brain the pituitary and the hypothalamus and and then in elsewhere in the body the gonads you know the the ovaries the testes the thyroid gland in the neck the adrenal gland on top of our kidneys adrenal top of kidney these all also send secretions hormone owns two other organs and have an impact on each other they're constantly talking to each other that's the second form of connection the third form of connection is that each of these systems including the immune cells can manufacture messenger substances that are circulated through the blood to the other systems so it turns out the white cells in your circulation can manufacture every hormone that the brain can manufacture so the brain is talking to the immune system and the immune system is talking to the brain so when something happens in one system it happens in the other system but this is rather obvious actually when you think about it which is that the implications are not obvious to us so I could clearly and trivially say trivially obviously change your physiology I could change the physiology or virtually everybody in this room in a split second and I could do so without touching you without giving you any kind of a substance without in any way physically interacting with you what would I have to do I'd simply would have to utter a piercing blood-curdling scream and brandish a weapon at you and your physiology would change like that your hormonal gland will start behaving differently your intestines will stop digesting your lungs would function differently your heart would beat faster your blood vessels would behave differently more blood would flow to your muscles there'd be more sugar pouring on their system so that you could have more energy and you would be ready for flight or fight now that's an obvious example where the emotion changes the physiology in a split second well guess what that goes on 24/7 so that interaction between the physiology and the emotions is constant it's just that for the most part we're not aware of it unless it's dramatic but that's the only difference it's no less constant and any important so stressed in the short-term allows us to escape or to fight back and it's interesting this conversation is interesting for specifically for Canadians because of two historical figures one is the great physical physician William Osler whose name is still remembered there are institutions named after him and Vancouver they give a William Osler memorial lecture every year and they never talk about anything he talked about and so there's and he's the one he was one of the his day it was knighted by Queen Victoria he's one of the founding physicians that just hop Johns Hopkins in the States Baltimore and of course he was also a leading faculty member at McGill University and he was the one who said that that rheumatoid arthritis is a nervous system disorder and he said that before he we had any of the science he just knew it because he trusted his intuitions he also said that if I want to know whether or not a person will survive tuberculosis I have to know not what's in as long as about what's in his mind so there's him and he said that in 1890s and then a few decades later from austria-hungary comes the man known to us his hands sell yes a lyi or give him his Hungarian name in green like me yeah no sure yeah and he's the one that did the research at University of the Mauri all about stress in a laboratory and he's I'm gonna found out that stress in the short term of course helps us escape and fight back been a long term it suppresses the immune system also it's the intestines and causes hypertrophy of the adrenal gland this is a Celia's famous stress triad so the point is short term stress is essential for survival but chronic stress the same hormones of adrenaline and cortisol that in a short term help you survive in the long term kill you so adrenaline which gives you more energy and strength to right or to run in the long term will elevate your but assure constrict your blood vessels and this regulate your heart now there's a condition which is increasing in the population called high hypertension which is to say high blood pressure and for the most part about 5% of hypertension cases are secondary in other words they're caused by some disease in some other organ like the kidney for example or adrenal gland or something but for the most part will be called essential hypertension which basically is a way of saying that we haven't got a clue what causes it and what if I told you that the blood pressure of American black males is much higher on the average than that of whites and they're more likely to develop hypertension much more likely develop hypertension those are giving you clueless to the source of hypertension maybe as to the as opposed to their genetic relatives in Africa who don't have high blood pressure at all and all you have to do is say hypertension a few times the hyper tension hyper tension hyper tension anything spring to mind maybe there's too much tension in these people's lives and of course James Baldwin the American black writer famously said that to be an American black male is to live in a state of suppressed rage all the time that's why the location so in the long term that's what we'll do it in a long term cortisol will thin your bones give you a stupor OSes know when the osteoporosis society does its public education they talk about sunshine vitamin D and weight-bearing exercise they never talk about stress which is the most important cause for example women we've been depressed a much more likely osteoporosis because in depression there's elevated cortisol levels which stain the bones also raise the intestines and medical ideologies interesting ulcers were the one thing where doctors always knew that it had to do with stress until three or four decades ago were in Australian very clever or three Australian scientists found this bacterium called Helicobacter pylori and now if you give antibiotics to wipe out the bacteria the ulcer goes away so there goes the stress theory or it does it because here's a fact that you have to account for at age fifty fifty percent of the population will have Helicobacter pylori in their intestines 50% don't have ulcers at age eighty eighty percent will but 80 percent of 80 year olds don't have ulcers what is it that makes the person susceptible to that bacteria that's the question guess what it's stress so that that hypothesis wasn't wrong it just did it had another wrinkle to it that's all but we're so quick to fit together anything that's emotional we can get rid of it we do and then we hold it oh yeah it's a bacteria it puts a cortisol puts weight on your belly in a way that increases your chance of heart disease and it's suppresses your immune system so let's go back to that Australian study five ten women Zoey effect from isolation zero effect from stress nine times the average if you had both of them well now let's look at stress let's say that you're stressed about something and you've got high levels of cortisol adrenaline in your system and you're obsessing about some insult or a loss or some thing that perturbed you you're in a high state of stress physiologically but you're not alone because if and of you were sitting next to you says hey do you want to talk about it I see that you're upset can we talk about it what happens to your stress levels but what if you isolate it then you might go on for months stewing about stewing in your own stress juices you have nobody to download it to no wonder then the women who were stressed and isolated had a much higher risk of a breast cancer which tells us something that cancer is not the disease of an individual cancer is the result of a biopsychosocial process reflecting your lifelong relationships with others yeah well we can speculate on why you don't look at that piece that's a part of it in that who funds research well the people who fund research and the vast majority search that physicians run across or come across are actually funded by the pharmaceutical companies who have a particular interest in research that validates their particular approach which so happens to coincide with their profits but that's only a part of it it's much larger than that if I have to speculate on the reasons the major ones are that it reflects capitalist ideology because capitalism is all about individual competition every being instead of Els we don't want to think about the fact that they're all one because if we're all one this society makes no sense whatsoever so and every dominant institution and field in any society reflect the interests and the ideology of the dominant group and that's the same through the doctors as well so so partly it's the materialist philosophy that dominates capitalist society individualism not looking at the connections and if you looked at the connections you would have had the election results that you did yesterday in Ontario that's one thing the other thing is that what I'm saying is difficult for people people often perceive themselves as being blamed they're not being blamed but they perceive themselves as being blamed and dr. Christine Northrop who's a women's physician and best-selling author I was talking to her and she said that it's kind of a conspiracy between the doctor and the patient not to talk about such stuff for the doctor is easier to hand out the pill and it's much quicker and for the patient it doesn't bring up uncomfortable questions but the biggest barrier is actually an emotional when I think on the part of physicians we haven't dealt with their own pain we haven't dealt with their own stresses there's a high rate of suicide and depression and burnout amongst doctors somebody once said that if you want to start a call - what do you do while you give people a uniform you have special jargon you isolate them from their families you subject them to authority and leaders and you sleep deprived them in other words you send them to medical school it's a stressful thing and people survive it by shutting people that bill people enter it or like people like me really driven and and you know I will I'll I would have done anything to get into medical school and to get through it and so you really are already driven and then they're nothing education prepares you for it anything I'm telling you not a word this is breed the name of the medical schools and and then there's the emotional defense of the physician against his or her own pain so these are the factors that that I think all go into it they're social and individual now listen if I take more questions I'll take lots of questions I promise I just want to finish this talk so that we can have our workshop and our conversation and so on let me tell you about stress so there's the physiology I've been telling you about the physiological stress response the physiological stress response but that's not all there is to stress so stress is really a triad the three components to the stress one is the external stressor now that's whatever happens outside you so that could be a threat that could be the loss of someone the loss of a job if you're a conservative voter stress would have been the election of the NDP if you're an NDP voter stress would have been in the election as it happened last night which is the advent of mr. Ford so stress is external then there's the physiological stress response which is what I've already told you about the Advanta cortisone all the immune but if I didn't I didn't see him and finish telling you all the connections I'm sorry then you just hold this thought let me tell you one more connection the got brain connection but God is not just a digestive organ the God is actually an immune organ it's got many mean centers and the gut is an organ of sensation serotonin the mega the chemical on the brain that we enhance by giving people prozac for the depression the God has more serotonin than the brain does and so the God is an emotional organ that forgot feelings are actually magnifications impressions that the brain gets and the gutta thighs them so that you can really know that they're there and the God and the brain are totally connected in fact a God sends many more nerve fibers to the brain than the brain sends to the gut and the brain is reading the internal organs all the time so there's that connection as well and there are others I'm not gonna go into but I think you receive the point that this is all one system therefore whatever happens in one that was any others so stress then there's the external stressor there's the internal physiological response and in between them and this is what you've got to work with in your offices is the what we call the processing apparatus and the processing apparatus is that person with their particular interpretations and their understandings and their beliefs no I said I would tell you about healthy anger versus unhealthy anger so let me just illustrate that for you now I need another volunteer somewhere in the side rows so I can have access to you you're not going to leave your seat or do anything in particular yeah you're volunteering thank you okay so I'll come closer to you and what is your name Kerry thank you thanks for volunteering so what I'm gonna ask you is how comfortable are you with the distance between you and I right now if I give you the rest of the lecture from here is that okay with you perfectly right now what if I stood here the ball by the weather to tell you the rules here okay in this particular exercise that chair is your life you can't leave it okay you can do whatever you need to in your chair but you can't leave it so what if I stood here now you still comfortable with this if I give the rest to the lecture from here is that okay with you you good yeah okay so what would you like to do about it but you can't no no this is your life you can't to move you so you're gonna move towards me to get me out of your space very very good and if I came closer what would you have to do you have to push me and as you're pushing me what emotion do you think you'd be generating anger well fear is there but it's the anger that's gonna get me fear is not gonna get me out of your space this is it's the anger is gonna so that's the thing about healthy thank you that's the thing about it you don't know how many times I've done this and people never get to the point of anger they'll say I'll tune out I'll you know I'll make myself small you know so that's sign of health actually the the point is that healthy anger is exactly what Kerry demonstrated it's a boundary defense it simply says you're in my space get out that's all and it's in the present moment once they got out of your space you have no more reason to be angry if you went on he's back I was always doing it to probably do it next week what a guy what a jerk you know and you know that's no longer healthy healthy simply you're in my space get out it's a self-protection in general the role of the emotions is to invite in what is nurturing and welcomed and healthy and to keep out that which is unwelcome dangerous and toxic that's the role of the emotion so with some people sometime will invite even glare great greater proximity you know and others we never want to be anywhere close to them you know and that's the job of emotions that they maintain those boundaries now trick skill testing question what is the role of the immune system it's exactly the same thing it's to maintain your boundaries to keep out what is unhealthy dangerous unwelcome allowing what is nutritious and healthy and then the immune system has been called the floating brain it has a memory capacity it can react and it can learn just like the brain when you're suppressing your emotions you're suppressing your immune system and what happens to anger that you suppress does it evaporate go to the moon what happens to it what does it turn against it turns against you know you've got autoimmune disease which where the immune system turns against you like rheumatoid arthritis multiple sclerosis Hodgkin's disease a cancer so Hodgkins is there as a response also there's a suppression of the in system where the immune system is no longer protecting you but in the case of autoimmune disease the immune system actually turns against you I'll talk about five enlarging effect we'll have a case of it okay hold on if you look at autoimmune disease I'll tell you a couple of facts eighty percent of the people with autumn disease or who women the ratio of multiple sclerosis which is an autoimmune condition of the nervous system in the 1940s in Canada was about one to one you know what the ratio now is so but over three women to every man sorry there's about three women to every man now now what could be possibly the cause of it well we know it's not genetic because genes don't change in a population over 70 years it can't be the climate of the diet because that hasn't changed more for one gender than the other what it has changed the stress levels have changed what has happened is that women have always said the role of being the stress absorbers of their families including their spouses which is my married men live longer than unmarried men but married women don't live longer than unmarried women put that in your pipe and smoke it [Laughter] hence was it the Gloria steinem's famous dictum that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle so but and that role for women has not changed but on top of that women now have taken on an economic role as well since the second world war now that would be okay if the other role was not more shared but it isn't and on top of that there's less support why the less support because there's less connection more isolation more erosion of community neighborhood client family and so on so where you got more stress less support more autoimmune disease it's really that simple is that simple except my profession doesn't get it which also means that illness can be looked upon as a teacher I'm not advocating that people should get sick in order to learn I am saying though that when illness comes along it can be a powerful teacher if you willing to look at it that way so I'm gonna read you a quote from one of my favorite teachers and unfortunately as much as I've told you this so much I haven't told you well here's a quote I like from Susan Griffin who says because we think in a fragmentary way we see fragments and this way of seeing leads us to make actual fragments of the world but the quote I want to give you was even by any ciamis otherwise known as hamid ali who said that your conflicts all the difficult things their problematic situations in your life are not chance for 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 on the right direction unless there's someone breaking 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 is gonna do that is its purpose so we can look at psychological problems relationship conflicts and illness as just problems to get rid of which is what the personality wants to do and I'll say something more about the personality in a moment or we could look upon them as up opportunities for learning and development and growth again you don't say to somebody just diagnosed with cancer hey great this is a great teaching moment but if somebody wants to learn if they start asking why it's a powerful teacher and I've had many many many people tell me with all manner of diseases that boy they recognizing their self in this portrait that I paid painted and it was it helped him so much to deal with their illness and I've literally thought multiple sclerosis Tony that the book actually changed their lives not that the book changed their lives because other people read the book and their lives don't change no book will ever change anybody's life but those that make the less than their own and actually apply to their lives you see here's the thing if you look upon disease not as a solid entity in response to my friends question in the beginning but it's a process and that process is a certain purpose which is your body's saying no when you're not famine is a flare-up of multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis you can really ask yourself where didn't I stay you know just now no more can this teach me and you can actually avoid the next flare-up if you learn the lessons and contrary to what my profession believes that these diseases have a life of their own separate from the end from the individual they don't their processes inside people and the people have the response ability to affect those processes once they get it and they drop the automatic patterns that I've been driving them ok that's really what I want to tell you and there's more but I just say one more thing with the personality and they're not they have all manner of questions so I said to you before that the personality for the most part is a combination of some authentic aspects of ourselves and our defense mechanisms and the whole idea is to help people tease out what is authentic about them who's really them and who's not then and to help them to drop whatever is not them whatever is not you that you're carrying is a he's gonna stress you you know take on too much in your life and this actually pertains very much to the helping professions I certainly know it in myself that the the drive to be needed which is a substitute for the belief that we wanted and lovable can certainly actuate a lot of our interactions with our clients to the extent that we work how much we work hard driven are looming work so these questions have to be faced in our own lives and we talk about compassion fatigue and I'm telling something there ain't no such thing as compassion fatigue nobody ever gets fatigued but being compassionate you know when you get fatigued with when you compassion with others and not with yourself so so what we call what we call compassion fatigue is actually a fatigue of lack of compassion for ourselves so it comes to the personality how it's a compensating mechanism if you can get the attention that you needed as a child you will be wanting to attract the attention now you're gonna be attractive and attractive personality or physically attractive hence the fifteen or thirty billion dollar whatever it is cosmetic surgery industry just because people don't feel wanted in their lives that's all that's about when you want granted the approval for just who you were you'll be consumed by winning approval by whatever means now you'll be a winning personality when you weren't valued for who you were you will be obsessed with measuring up to the people's expectations so they value you if you meet to feel special you might become very demanding if you didn't get the esteem just for yourself you'll be wanting to get esteem by impressing people now you'll be very impressive and none of these will ever meet your needs because you're getting them from the outside if you weren't made to feel that you're important just for your existence you become a helper no you'll be very important if you weren't liked for who you were you'll be very nice what a nice person what a nice person he was if you weren't loved for who you were you might become very charming and so on so that's the personality and so again the our job is the others his therapist is to help people become their authentic selves in the present moment which has to do with dropping all these adaptations not making them wrong because they were not wrong they were very right at the time it's just that they became ingrained they went from a temporary state or long-term trait and now they're constriction and that's what trauma is it's a constriction and so we carry this constriction with us and we never expanded through our frost cells thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Daybreak Therapy and Training

Views: 221,967

Rating: 4.9083853 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Gabor Maté, Mind-Body-Spirit medicine, mind-body medicine, holistic psychotherapy, childhood trauma, trauma-informed psychotherapy

Id: 7V5qn9dkzIU

Length: 77min 55sec (4675 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019