Gabor Maté: A relationship between mental stress and physical outcomes?

gabble what a opportunity to sit and talk to you today I'm um I'm ready to listen and to learn more about your your amazing work thanks for having me um this wonderful book uh the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture taught me a hell of a lot I mean it's a hearty book it's almost an encyclopedia of mental emotional and physical health let's perhaps start with the toxic bit because I think most of us have an understanding that we live in a toxic culture but as you say it's been completely normalized so we're sort of numb to a lot of it how would you describe that our culture as being toxic well a toxic culture can undermine People's Health by two ways by one by doing bad things to them that are hurtful um or it can deprive them of human needs for healthy development and this one does it both so in terms of deprivation of needs the way we gestate babies a lot of women being very stressed during pregnancy that already has an impact on developing infant the way we birth birth has been completely medicalized so that the natural birth process that is meant to be a a bonding experience in infant and mother is largely interfered with and made into a difficult and almost pathological process that has an impact on mother infant relationships then the way young families are kind of sequestered on their own and stressed so that the stress of the parents invariably get absorbed by the children then the parenting advice that a lot of young mothers and fathers get about how to treat children completely undermines children's needs for acceptance love unconditional belonging being understood having their emotions respected these are largely unknown qualities in this culture so we get the very Beginnings wrong which is hugely important because the human brain develops in interaction with their alignment being in Europe and much of the development happens in the first three years so we get the first three years along we have a lot of catching up to do so that's one way the other way of course are when people are actually treated badly such as in child abuse which happens all too often such as in parents still spanking their kids which has been shown to be as deleterious as a more harsher forms of abuse in terms of long-term impact on children um such as the emotional physical abuse that many children undergo then uh again there's the stress on parents which again like for example economic stress on Mothers translates into physiological stress markers in children so the inequality the uncertainty in this culture in Britain the rising rates of poverty the rising inequality um there was an article in the guardian just the other day that there were about 300 000 deaths attributable to austerity policies then there is the questions of race and gender women for example develop autoimmune disease at much higher rates than men do about 70 to 80 percent of autoimmune disease happens to women and why is that is that purely due to if they've chosen to be a mother if and the stress is there or is it just something about how it is it's not it's not an automatic outcome of mothering but it is an automatic mother outcome of mothering in a context that puts all the emotional stress and pressure on women so women in the sculpture are very often expected not just to look after the children but also to absorb and look after the emotional needs of their spouses while denying their own and those are powerful triggers for physiological stress responses and the fraying of chromosomes and the turning off of inflammatory genes so that's why more autoimmune disease amongst women it's not a biologically determined issue it's a cultural issue based on the role that women have to play in furthermore of course when you add to that for example the pressures of race you expect even more immune audio immune disease which is exactly what you find so that if you're a woman and of a minority woman your risk of autism disease is that much higher so it has to do with stress yeah um so I could go on then there's the stress of political culture the rancor they are still the the lack of power that most people experience a lack of power loss of control are significant markers in fact triggers for stress there's so many things about this culture that for all are technological and medical advances actually undermine health than not to mention the utterly inadequate education of Physicians who simply are not taught about the scientifically demonstrated of mind-body unity so when they look on illness they look at purely biological parameters and all they try to do is to somehow improve or mitigate the biological effects of long-term stresses but they don't understand the relationship between stress trauma and Physiology a relationship that's scientifically not in doubt but in medical practice is completely ignored so there's so many factors I know I mean I've got a thousand questions from from what you've just said I guess we'll start where where you've just ended up there talking about how you know science has established this relationship between stress and a physical outcome yeah but the medical world aren't acting upon that and you put something in the book about you know simple ways that this could be rectified even on a GP level would be if someone comes in with an ailment a problem to say how was your childhood but but those questions and we we all know that doctors are you know stressed underpaid don't have any time so this is not possible and the ultimate of the education that's the main problem I mean it's true doctors are very stressed Bunch um a study of medical students sure that the highest level of empathy for Physicians occurs when they just begin their training wow and and that's because and also another study of Medicals to ensure that if you look at the chromosomal markers of Aging medical students age faster than their age-related cohorts so medical training is very stressful often traumatic and um Physicians are not expected to take any time for their own mental physical health they're not trained in understanding the mind-body unity they're taught nothing about trauma and it's highly demonstrated impact on the physiology of illness so they're first of all over stressed secondly partially traumatized thirdly deprived of essential information and then fourthly expected to do a lot in a very short period of time so let's go back one step from someone having to appear in front of a doctor yeah we're on a global level not taking stress seriously enough we again it's something that's been completely normalized everyone's stressed everyone's racing through the day everyone's dealing with these normalized toxicities we need to deal with that with more seriousness and go how much stress am I allowing into my life and some of it does I guess fill out of our hands at times especially when I guess it comes from past down trauma and that will depend on where you live in the world which culture you you live in ETC but we're not we're not taking it seriously enough and it feels like there needs to be a global effort to reduce stress but we're so far from that happening because it seems a lot of these toxicities and stresses you follow the route back and it ends up at money someone's making money out of your stress yeah well if you look at the scientific literature and what triggers people's stress its uncertainty uh conflict and loss of control which pretty much characterizes life under globalized capitalism yeah for a lot of people around the world So when you say we need to make an effort to reduce stress when I'm actually arguing is that stress is a very function of the particular system that we're living under so that yes we can do a lot individually to recognize stress and to reduce it and um and not to generate more stressful results as best we can that's entirely possible and even necessary but then there's also these broader conditions I mean it's hard to tell advice like a Canadian health expert said if you don't want to get sick don't be poor don't get out don't don't live near a railway line don't get a job in a toxic industry and go lots of vacations to Sunny climbs yeah you know that's the structural problem it's Society we've got to dismantle it which is this is insurmountable I'm arguing that these are structural problems yeah the toxicity of this culture is that by its very nature it generates these pressures on people so that disease is not an abnormality it's a normal response to an abnormal set of circumstances yeah or like you said you know it's very shocked to read the direct correlations between certain illnesses and circumstances for instance if you look at racism a huge proportion of people that have dealt with that end up with asthma and that is a direct um attack on the inflammatory immune system that's right that causes the asthma well or a recent study that came out after the book was published four weeks ago that after an episode of racism because the serious disturbances of the immune system you know so that these emotional stresses socially engendered have significant physiological consequences so again women of color are Muslim like to have autoimmune diseases than anybody else in Canada where I live the rate of rheumatoid arthritis amongst indigenous women is six times that of anybody else this is amongst the population that never used the autoimmune disease so it's as you say it's these stresses that set off inflammation in the body and again a Canadian study men who had been sexually abused and childhood have tripled the rate of heart attacks those adults um women who sexually abused at much higher rates of endometriosis which itself is a debilating condition and is a risk factor for um ovarian cancer and a recent study from Harvard showed that women severe PTSD symptoms have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer so that you simply can't separate people's emotional lives engendered by social circumstances from their physiology but of course the average physician is just not introduced to information at all yeah they're looking directly at the physical outcome rather than the causality of that problem so what option do people have to to look at their own inner healing from the past perhaps generational trauma if it's indigenous peoples is that the option well the options are both personal and social so on a social level one can easily and I do make some very straightforward recommendations which is which are at least theoretically are far from impossible in practice um system militates against them for example you could introduce strong education into medical schools the average medical student doesn't hear a single electron trauma even though as a British psychologist Richard Bento points out a member of the British Academy he said that the evidence linking childhood adversity to mental illness and adulthood is as strong as the evidence-linking cigarette smoking and lung cancer wow and despite that the average medical student and not even the average psychiatrist has got any clue about the traumatic basis of virtually Elemental illnesses so we could introduce trauma education we could teach medical students about the elegantly and voluminously demonstrated mind-body Unity which shows that our emotional lives are inseparable for our home from our hormones from immune apparatus from our nervous systems so that when you're dealing with physical health you cannot ignore the whole person and then we need to have what has been called a biopsychosocial view of human health which means that the biology of the human organism is inseparable from the psychological and social environment and it's very simple Concepts more than adequately demonstrated by the research literature completely unmentioned in most medical training which is almost unbelievable you could introduce um the the modern science of brain development to teachers which shows that the human brain develops in interaction with the emotional environment from a neutral to adulthood which means that the most important job of the schools is not to teach kids what year um Wellington won the bottle of Waterloo a bottle of Waterloo I keep saying the bottle of Ireland it's the Battle of water but but the most important job is to help develop healthy human brains yeah and health human brains develop under conditions of safety and our conditions of emotional contact and those kids or the brain development is spontaneously healthy that will want to learn about history they'll want to learn about mathematics they have a Natural Curiosity they're a joy to teach so their problem is not to cram them full of information on one hand only then to discipline what we consider bad behaviors but to actually help the healthy development of the brain which has to do with the gain safety and the emotional relationships and furthermore in education When the Children when a child does behave in ways that are not acceptable instead of making a villain under and punishing them like the London Daily telegraphs are just introducing reintroducing caning into the schools not that long ago they had this brilliant suggestion that we should traumatize children as a way of discipline and we could actually try to understand the emotional dynamics that lead a child to be in certain ways in every case that child is an emotional pain and that pain has to do with the loss of their emotional needs and their lack of being understood by the adult world I mean are these are huge social structures that that need to be dismantled and and reinstated with you know completely different mindset and completely different foundations are you hopeful that that will happen like are we gonna have to get to Breaking Point to see this change or are we already at it I wonder if anybody's going to Define breaking point I mean yeah in the United States there's a rising tide of childhood suicides and they keep wondering what's going on here well they're not looking at her children are raised then the stresses in line in society in in Britain in universities there are high rates of depression than ever used to be so I I don't know what anybody would consider a breaking point I think we've already had it right here yeah the question is are people as individuals willing to wake up and then are we willing to as a society to do something about it and as you kind of hinted earlier in this conversation there are powerful interests that like it the way it is because they get to profit then they get to hold on to power so that creates a real challenge for anybody who's looking for a genuine shift towards more Humanity yeah it's so huge that I think most of us feel a bit terrified about all of it but we have to have some hope that there will be changes because I think you know I'm a parent I'm certainly scared of of the world that I'm you know raising my kids in but also when I bring it down to the very very personal level of being a mother and I've certainly felt those pressures that you've spoken about and I had a particularly stressful sort of exterior circumstance happened while I was pregnant with my first kid and I've constantly worried about the impact that's had on my son because I I know that I was under a lot of sort of mental pressure and stress and I have felt sick about it and I think I feel you know I I've Loved learning about these theories from your work and and the other books that you've written but it terrifies me because I think every day that I'm parenting my kids oh my God how am I I've totally messed up their life today how have I psychologically impacted them today it's it's terrifying well if I may say I wouldn't be really advise you to approach your parenting tasks from a position of fear that's going to tell on your kids as well yeah I mean this child that was that you carried when you were stressed how's he doing he's doing all right he faces challenges certainly um I mean you know it's certainly a risk for learning problems in a child later on and yes attention problems and and and learning difficulties you know so that's true on the other hand how old is he nine yeah well you've got lots of years to work with yeah you know as a father I used to project a lot of my guilt and anxiety onto my kids that doesn't help them right they need to be seen for who they actually are I'm pretty sure if I met your son I'd find it pretty lovely young fellow yes and most people and most people would say that you know so when you look at them Through The Eyes of your own anxiety and perhaps your own guilt you're not really seeing him yeah so I would I would work on that aspect of your of your relationship because he doesn't need you to no I I absolutely no he doesn't and then looking at these um again normalized methods that we've seen probably in the last 50 years with for example leaving a child to cry it out rather than sue them when they're going to sleep all these I think most parents enter Parenthood they may have read several books or listened to podcasts about Parenthood and gone oh God what technique do I apply here do I do the crying out or do I and and everybody seems so emphatically sure with their methods and they are because they're cut off from their instincts and intuitions and the mind can make up anything but let me ask you this when you even think of letting your child cry and not picking them up what do you feel in your heart it's a horrible feeling yeah horrible well that's your mother against it and people in the society are constantly advised to ignore their instincts yeah I mean there's a printing Instinct not just in us but in all mammals because without the parenting care the in the million infants just doesn't survive you try and tell a mother gorilla not to pick up their kid when they're distressed you'll see what mother rage is all about you know so but as human beings we become denatured you can cut off from instincts so experts so-called can tell us all kinds of nonsense and um in this world that worships expertise so-called people are intimidated rather than paying attention to their own gut feelings in there or what their own heart is telling them and so part of the the art of parenting is just to get back to a parenting instincts yeah I mean your work has been massively relieving to me in that way because for instance my daughter who's seven will sometimes still awake in the night and I've been either my husband or I will get into bed next to her and then she goes back off to sleep wonderful and for a while my husband and I were like oh God we've got to get out this habit you know how do we how do we you know sort of get her to feel more confident and independent in the evenings and reading your work I was like oh we don't we can just stay in the bed with that I'll guarantee you that by the time she's 17 she won't win no no we won't fit in with her so it's only a matter of development but you know what that really is the Vestige of human evolution because throughout Evolution eons of evolution kids didn't sleep separately from their parents of course yeah in fact they couldn't because they didn't have the rooms you know to separate into so yeah you're doing the right thing by because it's again safety and being responded to you know some people say you're coddling the job no you're not you're meeting the child's needs you can't you can certainly spoil children but spoiling usually means that you're trying to compensate through physical gifts what you haven't provided emotionally yeah yeah you can't give a child too much love you simply can't it's impossible in fact one study showed they looked at a whole bunch of mothers the research is rated most of the mothers is good you know caring and some super moms these are the kids the mothers that really just doted on their babies and just flood on them with care and love and a few mothers were just not adequate they had their own stuff so they couldn't be there for the infants when they looked at the population of kids 30 years later the ones that function the best were the ones that got this abundance of caring and love so the conclusion of the researchers was that you can't love kids too much yeah number one and number two that we need to protect the relationship in parents and children which I don't right away thought is itself a sign of cultural toxicity because why do we have to protect something why is it under threat that we have to protect it in the first place yeah I'm so interested in this and I I've talked about this in this space but in other spaces too because I I keep coming back to it on a on a very personal level knowing that my grandmother who had had a particularly rough time being evacuated in the war had my mum very young wasn't mentally equipped to be a mother um I love my grandmother very much but she she wasn't able to give my mum that love and that support and you know me and my mum have more recently really started to talk about that and seeing the hugely detrimental impact that sat on her mental health which she's very well aware of and we've talked about the studies about that in Finland where the children of those mothers they were evacuated when they were children they are doing less well from the point of view of mental health yeah really just a British study sure that you know doing the luftwaffe bombings of Britain um some kids were evacuated to be strangers in a Countryside to protect them from the stress yeah and the danger of bombing others stayed in the bomb shelters in the underground with their parents here in London those who stayed with their parents despite the bombing were emotionally immorality afterwards yeah then the ones who had been evacuated that's that's so important the parent latasha's relationship is to a healthy human development yeah it's um it's remarkable and I think a lot of it is very very relieving in terms of breaking out of all of these rule books and these parenting guides that tell us you know we need to leave the kid or whatever I think is it's deeply liberating on a again a real daily level as a working mum myself I think I have really struggled with parts of this um you know I can feel it a visceral need to be with my kids because I also want to work if I'm completely honest I love what I do I need to work to keep everything running as it is um and I felt very torn and on a real day-to-day level say my daughter even now will sometimes go oh mum come and snuggle me on the sofa and I'll go I actually can't right now because I'm cooking and then as soon as I've made dinner we need to get the homework done and you are on this sort of routine throughout the day with your kids due to perhaps their schooling your work and I feel a discomfort about it but I also don't see a way out to stick to that but also I think for women to be able to show that we can be CEOs leaders business owners how the hell do we navigate it and and feel okay about what we're doing well yeah as you guys your daughter um you might genuinely not be able to date a time to respond when she's asking but what you can do is to compensate for it yeah so later on when you have a free moment you initiate the contact and say you come here oh I'm constantly kissing her face the whole time okay okay great so then then then you're actually inviting and providing the contact when you can yeah well that's good then you're doing what you need to do yeah you're doing what you can do in terms of women's position in the world one marker of what's happening is the rising rate of multiple sclerosis amongst women so and multiple sclerosis for those well City Physicians Physicians are listening here the person the first is Right multiple sclerosis was a French neurologist charcoal in the 19th century and he said this was a stress-driven disease no since then there's been all kinds of research linking stress and Trauma to multiple sclerosis so since the 19th which information by the way just doesn't penetrate the medical schools so if you go through see a neurologist with your multiple sources flare up they're going to give you the cortisol which is the stress hormone to relieve the inflammation but they're never going to ask you about stress in your life or your childhood trauma and yet I know I know lots of examples of people who actually take on their stresses and traumas and the disease gets a whole lot better having said that since the 1930s the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis has been increasing so that what I mean is that it used to be almost equal now it's three and a half women to every man wow yeah which immediately excuse me tells us that this is not a genetic condition because genes don't change in a population over you know a few decades it's not quiet or diet or climate because that hasn't changed more for one gender than the other what is it it's stress so women have always had the role of being a emotional shock absorbers of their families including their spouses yeah in fact doing covet the New York Times had an article called societies shock absorbers about how women took on the stresses of their families and their spouses and they felt guilty when they couldn't protect their husbands from stress so that's a a general not biologically determined but dictated by a certain patriarchal view of women's position now in the meanwhile for two reasons women have also went to the workforce since the 30s in many cases out of economic necessity in other cases because as you say people have a desire a need and the right to express themselves and and and not to be constricted in their range of Endeavors in this world which all would have been fine if the stress rule had been shared by the genders but it hasn't been so now you got double the stress oh yeah you have to make it out there yeah and you're still doing playing the same role at home and as a third factor which is the increasing rates of loneliness and isolation so uh loneliness itself and the atomization of communities and the breakup of um extended families means that women are more alone now with the parenting task and with the straps stress task well you get more stress less support more disease we have these nuclear families that we've again normalized that 100 years ago yeah you would have had Grandma's aunties cousins everyone involved but let me deal with that let me tell you what an amazing study that some Geniuses conducted just a few years ago it's good you're sitting down because you fall over with amazement if if you weren't you know what they found out and I don't know how many phds it took to figure this one out but they did research that showed that grammar grandmothers are good for grandkids and and even more even more astonishingly they found out that the close to the grandma that lives to the grandchild even better can you believe that I think we probably could have worked that one now over a cup of tea but again you know out of necessity or people I guess meeting Partners from other parts of the world or country we are tending to move away from where we grew up where the rest of our family dwells and again all of this has been normalized and we're probably not looking at the the cost that it has on our mental health and you know I I don't live particularly near my parents and my husband's mum died a long time ago so we certainly haven't had that very close-knit sort of community feel raising a kid like most people I know who have moved away from the family area and I don't think we really and I think yeah loneliness is such a big part of it and it's probably why all of these you know parenting blogs exist or mum blogs or mum websites because people feel like who do I turn to I don't know what to do I don't know how to navigate this because I don't have the matriarch to speak to or whoever it is in my community to get that comfort from and I think women are expected certainly as new mothers to just sort of crack on with it and go yep come on you're all right crack on with it you're sleep deprived you're carrying such a load your whole life has changed within a moment it's yeah and you're largely alone with it yeah you know I mean what you mention those initiatives for one websites or blog mums I mean those are healthy adjustments yes to an unhealthy situation for sure yeah and this is you know these are some of the things that people can do once they understand what the problem is their initiatives people can take on the local level um I know in Britain I don't know if there's still extend but some years ago they appointed the minister for loneliness I don't know they still have a minister if I don't ask I think we do but but really that's just um and playing with surface symptoms yeah I mean what governments don't look at are the social economic drivers of loneliness and under the neoliberal regime since Thatcher and Reagan and their you know other party followers in the say parties they belong to even the opposition parties there's not a whole lot of difference and so social economic conditions Rising inequality Rising stress are continuing to drive the epidemic of loneliness that these governments are not going to look at because that's not in their interest to do so they'll fiddle with the effects and maybe introduce some good programs but they will not deal with causes no not at all but I think today what it's so liberating I think for everybody to hear oh it's okay that I'm not dealing with this life very well because this is extraordinary in terms of stress lowneness all the things that we've just listed yeah and I think most people think oh God why am I not coping there must be something wrong with me I must be flawed in some way to not have the strength to cope mental physical emotional strength and you know that sorry the politicians will reinforce that message because uh Tony Blair as I quote him in the book was always talking about this is like diabetes and conditions like a b2c and he said designer epidemics these are the products of a million individual decisions the heck they are you know the junk food that people eat is very much the result of a very well good argument that conspiracy and the part of their food companies to make people addicted to sugar salt and fat people soothe themselves they stress they sue their stresses by eating greasy Foods uh sweet sweet foods which temporarily act like a drug in the brain why are people stressed that has to do with social conditions um so governments will decry the effects of their policies but they will not look at the sources of those effects yeah in their own actions so then it is left to us the responsibility is on our shoulders either to form communities and and try and create change or to make incremental change in our own lives I guess but the mineral governments will keep putting the fingers fingers yeah the individuals think it's your fault you made the wrong decisions you know and this this whole myth that's another myths of this culture is that we're sort of separate solar cells um without looking at actually the interactions of our brains with the brains of other people the internet you know I talk about interpersonal biology or biology is very much shaped by our relationships those relationships happen in no context that context is the community any extended family or the multi-generational family that we live in in the context for all that is about our culture so again we're a bio psychosocial creatures and the whole tendency on their capitalism to individualize everything and then to make individuals culpable for how they're if you're not succeeding you're just not a good person yeah you know it's so toxic it's so toxic and it's so huge it feels like every Big structure needs to be dismantled and reinstated for us to find some pieces it's Bonkers and you know a lot of these uh disconnections that you've talked about are due to trauma and that could very well be ancestral trauma and that will be dependent on where you live in the world culturally the environment you're brought up in because of course indigenous peoples would have experienced a very specific trauma a specific time decolonization whereas for the rest of the world it could be for any number of reasons the structures we find ourselves in but one of those one of the results of that trauma is that disconnection from ourselves from other people from nature a full disconnect and I think again that's been totally normalized not necessarily talked about but it's just like you say the individual living its individual world with an individual phone and vibing this information how do you even start to notice if you are disconnected I think is the first point because some people won't even know that they have that disconnect due to their own trauma yeah um well first of all I'm glad you mentioned the digital stuff because this is called the social media but it's all the anti-social media because I mean everywhere you go you see people um absorbed in their cell phones not looking at each other at all yeah and those Communications on social media are very catered and uh [Music] artificial Communications because see right now as we're sitting here talking looking at each other you have a certain expression in your face you're not in your head you're interacting you know you're interacting with me yeah you know I'm reading your body language and you're reading mind that there's a human interaction going on that doesn't happen nope on social media so this so-called social media this connectivity actually is the language and Technology of disconnection you know you take something like Facebook I mean even the name itself should tell you what it's about yeah presenting a face to the world I concocted face yeah and if people like us quote unquote they don't like us they don't know us no but we're putting all of our self-worth in other people's hands constantly that was the bit that I actually posted on social media a quote that you'd put in the book about that that we are quite literally handing over yeah the whole of our self-worth too it might not be on social media it might be to our friends our work colleagues yeah whoever it is but unless somebody else is validating Us in some way we don't feel like we can just own that self-worth or or have an understanding of who we are and that's been absolutely normalized because you can quantify it on social media oh how many people liked this picture I mean normalize how many quote-unquote friends do we have yeah yeah yeah well so let's do a question about how do we reconnect well we have to get that we're disconnected and we have to first of all really going to turn into that now people do that by suffering unfortunately some people do it by Grace they say this is just nuts it's insane what we're doing here but a lot of people have to suffer first so when people suffer depression or anxiety or they noticed their total focusing or they have physical symptoms of all kinds that's that can serve as a wake-up call that something is out of whack with our lives and a lot of people will make the intuitive leap almost automatically not that um they know the science behind it but they just know that something is wrong with their lives and unfortunately the way we constructed as human beings we do have to suffer a bit most of I don't recommend suffering it's just that the way it seems to work is that something has to happen to wake us up yeah and in your case it might be um you know finds living highly stressed State and you start worrying about your child or if another person it might be a relationship breakup it might be an illness it might be a period of Sleepless anxiety um just a sense of alienation boredom and just a sense of whose life am I leading anyway um could be troubles with one's children so there's any number of ways that life is a way to poke Us in the ribs and say oh you ain't going the right direction but then we have to make change and humans aren't particularly great at that because there's risk or fear well then we first have to ask what's going on yeah I mean before we come to that's another tendency I may say of this culture as well here's a problem what do we do about it well I don't go there immediately if there's a problem let's really understand it yeah because it's someone to understand it's from this compassionate inquiry into the sources of our difficulties that the answers will emerge not by here's a problem how do I figure out what to do about it yeah but here's a problem how do I understand it and from that understanding answers often very much emerge almost spontaneously I mean you've just mentioned compassion I think self-compassion is again hugely lacking on mass with all of us and I spend a lot of time talking about this because I can identify large periods of my own life previously where I've felt like that and as you state in the book another um of the hangovers from trauma is shame and I have absolutely drowned in shame at points of my life and of course it extinguishes all self-compassion yeah it's eradicated entirely so you can I in that moment was perhaps looking at the problems but I didn't have the self-compassion to then deal with it I just felt like I was drowning in the problem so can you switch on self-compassion is it practice how do you believe we we can again on mass cultivate self-compassion well will be noticed when it's absent so like for example when you're judging yourself more harshly than somebody else then you would somebody else for the same dynamic oh I'm not being compassionate to myself here no don't judge yourself for lacking self-compassion that itself would not be compassionate there's no just just notice it and get curious about it you know it just takes compassion of curiosity and usually we can peel these layers one by one if you just keep asking compassionate questions like your lack of self-compassion um have you met a one day old baby that likes self-compassion oh babies are just pure love aren't they yeah yeah so therefore it's something that's not natural to us yeah it's something that developed and so you know at some point even that guilting yourself played a positive role in your life otherwise you wouldn't have taken it on yeah so you know I don't know your political background but in general when children are facing difficult circumstances um their natural tendencies to make it their own fault because children are developmentally narcissistic you know they think it's all about them excuse me when things are going badly they think it's gotta be my fault no that is a positive no that may seem like a heavy burden and it is but it does have a positive um side to it which is if it's my fault maybe I can do something about it family if I'm smart enough and active enough and compliant enough or good looking enough or Adept enough or or giving enough nice enough maybe I can compensate whereas if the child believes that the world is just chaotic and doesn't know how to love me and then the parents are just not available that's not tolerable so it's actually protective of the child yeah to develop this sense that was all my fault but God if I work hard enough maybe I can reverse the situation so even that self shame one can be compassionate towards and see that at some point it actually came along to Playa positive role of helping me survive yeah so we've naturally got these capabilities Society just sort of knocks it out of us as we as we get older we're more indoctrinated by everything we're imbibing you I know you've shared this on plenty of other podcasts and certainly in your book but you talk about in the book your own manifestation of trauma you grew up in Wartime hungry didn't grow up it's been my first year it's been your first year there so you injured in that very short time hunger dysentery when seeing your mother's own distress from a baby's eye view can you talk to us a bit about how that manifested and I know it was around your 40s that you started to actually have this awareness that there was a manifestation of that trauma yeah well manifested in a number of ways um so both in the professional realm and also in my family life in my personal life it led to all kinds of Suspicion distrust and easily wound ability in my relationship with my wife because what I didn't realize that was being triggered or Old Wounds I sustained as an infant but my mother just wasn't available for me now it doesn't mean she didn't love me but emotionally she could not possibly have been available under the Nazis and in her parents exterminated in Auschwitz My Father William forced labor and I've been under threat and me being ill I mean all she could do was ensure of survival and even that she couldn't be sure about and at some point she gave me to a stranger just because I wouldn't have survived where we were living so I can only interpret that as an abandonment and if my mother is so stressed it's my fault and clearly I'm just not good enough um so that then also means in my marriage when my wife isn't as available to me as like her to be I have the same sense of Abandonment and the same pain and it react to the same kind of withdrawal and coldness or perhaps rage so that's what it means in terms of relationship in terms of my parenting because I have there's no video that was attuned with me to actually get my emotional realities as an infant and a young child not because my mother didn't love me or my father when he came back from Forced labor when I was a year and a half old not that he didn't love me but they didn't get me emotionally they were way too stressed for that and traumatized so I didn't get my kids emotionally I just didn't see them for who they were I saw them Through The Eyes of who I wanted them to be not through oh here you are this is who you are I want to get to know this and to love this person so that was lacking and I was also irritable and the fight you know life and I created a very emotionally unsafe environment in our home for all the love that we had for all the dedication that we poured in that direction and gave them there was also tremendous volatility is my son between my co-wrote this book Daniel writes he used to have this nightmare of the floor disappearing from under his feet not knowing whenever the emotional atmosphere would become very unsafe and he would fall through the cracks that's in the personal Realm in the social in in their work Realm when as an infant you don't get the feeling that you're important that you matter which is which depends on the parents attentive attitude towards you where they really see you and hear you and validate you my parents couldn't do that so I get the sense and then my mother gives me to a stranger well that can't be very important I don't matter well you compensate for that by going to medical school and becoming a very good and busy and always available and never um unavailable physician then you get it to be very important and you ignore your own family and you ignore your own health so these are the ways that those early torontos that show up in people's adulthood in their parenting and their relationships in their work I I always hugely appreciate you talking about that because I think sometimes when we read books from whether it's doctors experts world leaders thought leaders we can feel a bit like oh my god well they know everything and they're absolutely nailing it and doing it perfectly and I'm not I'm this little human who's getting it all wrong so I think I've always really appreciated that in your work that you are coming from such an honest place and that you've had that obviously acute self-awareness to to look at your past and to write some of the things that you felt a discomfort with how much it's just very interesting hearing you talk about you know your determination I guess that sprung from that feeling of I'm not important as a child or as a baby how much of that do you think still drives you today you know you're a globally well-known respected um thought leader and Doctor how much of that is still driving you to to keep working to keep writing books to keep talking I don't think it's totally gone um it's much less of a motivating dynamic in my life than it used to be but honest to God today as I said today I have to question myself because who in our white mine would sign up for a seven-week book tour when they're traveling from one place to the other and talking multiple times a day you know so if you'd asked me two days ago and when I was just feeling really good I was like no it's not a problem anymore today was my cracked voice in the cough and you know I haven't given three interviews and two long talks yesterday I have to question it you know um but it's not nearly so important as it used to be yeah yeah well I think again that's liberating to hear that we you know we have to question ourselves every day we're never going to reach a point in life where we go I've totally fixed all the issues and problems from the past I'm working completely from a place of self-compassion and heart this is an everyday Endeavor and an everyday question which I love because it completely rallies against this much newer notion in the well-being World whatever you want to call it that you can be fixed fix yourself and all these weird words like or phrases self-optimization it makes me feel very uncomfortable this is every day forever that we have to ask ourselves these questions and have the awareness teamed with importantly self-compassion so we don't look into the past and beat ourselves up and feel terrible about things we have to find a piece absolutely um and the only reason only other piece I was going to add is that part of the toxicity of this culture is it rewards that kind of unself-compassionate Behavior yeah you know I get to be a respected doctor well remember enumerated [Music] you the more you ignore your kids the more the world will think you're wonderful because you're going to put more attention to your career and being out there and informing people you know and and yet you know you're depriving yourself and your family of yourself I'm not saying you're doing that but the more you did that the more successful you might be by the standards of the world so that's a part of the toxicity again is rewarding the wrong kind of behavior yeah people constantly go how are you oh I'm so busy I haven't had a day off in two months that is a badger as a badger absolutely like wow that's amazing whereas if you were to answer not much just kind of hanging around people would go what that's well it's all right for you we'll have some snarky remarks but again we've got it oh God it's so wrong there's so many problems with society and there's certainly a lot of toxicity that I think we all know is there and I love that you're sifting it to the surface there's no skirting around the edges we're looking at it we can properly examine it yeah and that is the only way we'll be able to start to form hopefully new ways of of dealing with life in every way because this book is all encompassing it covers it all and um thank you to you and your son for compiling all of this information because it's unbelievably fascinating and it's a complete honor to have you at my house today to talk gabo mate thank you so much thank you

Channel: Fearne Cotton's Happy Place

Views: 97,737

Keywords: Fearne Cotton, Happy Place, Happy Place Festival, Fearne Cotton's Happy Place, Fearne Cotton Happy Place, Wellbeing, Health, Fitness, Yoga, Celebrity interviews, fearne cottons happy place

Id: 1fPQ7Oc44SU

Length: 51min 26sec (3086 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023