Healing Trauma in a Toxic Culture with Dr. Gabor Maté | Being Well Podcast

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast this is where we explore the practical science of personal growth and if you've listened before welcome back i'm here as usual with dr rick hansen rick is a clinical psychologist and author and he's my dad so dad how are you doing today i'm doing really well forest and i'm thoroughly psyched about our guest today dr gabor mate um i met you gabor in vancouver you probably recall 10 years years ago and i can tell you the thought i had about you at the time sitting there and kind of the table in the front and some kind of panel i suspect and i thought to myself this guy is brilliant and he is hardcore and what i mean by that hardcore was complementary just deep radical penetrating noble not kidding around and so i'm thoroughly delighted to be able to talk with you today including about a book that i think truly is a genuine masterwork that we will get into in some detail so thank you very much thank you very much for being here forest rick thank you for having me uh rick um you'll know that the uh appreciation is um absolutely reciprocal um thank you your work and introducing buddhism in the light of modern science but in a very gentle and um accessible way has meant a lot to me as it has a lot to other people as well so it's also great to be with the father son duo because i work with my sons extensively as well as i did on this book so it's just a pleasure to be here thank you again just would echo everything that my dad said it's so great to be here with you and i'm also very interested in your working relationship with your son of course because we have our own aerodynamic there our own working relationship and to name the new book it's the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture which you wrote with your son daniel and i would love to start with the subtitle of the book which is a big subtitle it's a provocative subtitle and i'm curious what you mean specifically by a toxic culture which is itself kind of a big question but also just what you've been thinking about as you've been in the milieu of writing this book so the book is a combination of um all my decades of medical work and also healing work and also stealth growth of self-awareness has been necessary for me because believe me i would not want to be as unaware as i was a week ago never mind uh four weeks you know 40 or 40 years ago so toxic culture really the concept is very simple and it's actually directly related to laboratory science if you're going organisms in a laboratory and a broth you'd call that a culture broth that's a culture so you're culturing organisms now as we point out an introduction to this book if in that culture broth these organisms were genetically sound but they were not thriving they were falling ill or dying in large numbers you'd think there was something wrong with that culture broth you call it a toxic culture and when we look at our society the increasing rates of mental illness childhood suicide um kids being diagnosed left right and center with one so-called disorder after another rising addictions and addiction deaths the rising of autoimmune illness all the social dysfunction that we see in the united states your country something like 70 percent of adults are on one medication or another either we see it as an individual phenomena which i don't or we see it as the outcome of a broad social cultural economic situation and if that's the case then the culture that we live in according to the product or the results that it manifests is a toxic culture and this is where we have to challenge the the usual medical way of looking at it of as in people's individuals it's all individual organs and systems and in an isolated body whereas the only way to really understand uh human beings is as as rick well knows from the buddhist perspective is from the vision of um interdependent core rising we are biopsychosocial creatures to put it into monopoly medical terms therefore if we're falling ill and not doing well that's not individual predispositions or failures there's something wrong with the culture hence the phrase toxic culture that's really a beautiful summary of a very very big idea and one of the things that really struck me as i was in the process of engaging with the book engaging with the material were the ways in which you situate almost all of it relationally to apply my language to yours i don't want to put words in your mouth here but that's how it felt to me and how there's this major this major focus on the ways in which we we put pressure on each other in ways large and small and therefore also the ways in which the broader culture puts pressure on us yes a respected mutual acquaintance of ours dr dan siegel talks about what he calls interpersonal neurobiology that our brains and the function of our nervous systems are not isolated phenomena but they're related to our relationships and that we affect each other's nervous systems and the brain itself is a social construct or social product from its development beginning in the womb and it's forever affected by our relationships now dan being a psychiatrist he was focusing on the brain and the mind me being a general physician i'm interested in the whole body and i'm simply taking his concept of interpersonal neurobiology which scientifically is the only legitimate way of understanding it and applying it to a biology in general so i talk about interpersonal biology and i'm saying that our physiology from conception onwards and throughout our lifetime is affected by our relationships and um is modulated by our relationships and so that a lot of the pathology that we diagnosed as individual pathology in fact represents our relationships from the earliest days of our our life in the womb toward that it reflects our relationships and how other people act on us and how we act on other people and how we co-create each other's physiology and now there's nothing new about that concept the buddha said as much 2500 years ago and there was a good reason why nietzsche called buddha the greatest of physiologists because the border regard not just the mind but the physiology but traditional medicinal practices have understood this interactive unity forever western science for its brilliance has created cleavages where in life there aren't any so all we're doing is restoring a concept that is age-old but we're doing so in a concept in the in the context of western science because we have the science now to prove all that human intuition is always said my problem with the medical profession or i don't mean individuals in it but i mean as an institution is that it doesn't even follow modern science in separating the mind and the body and the individual from the environment and without regarding the social environment modern medicine actually is unscientific in its practice gabor i'm so struck by your play on the word culture and the notion of the petri dish and so forth and i was also really struck in the introduction you you quote david foster wallace you tell us his story which maybe you'll want to introduce as well you know about about water and and so it's the water we swim in and then maybe on that basis if you don't mind you could contrast a truly healthy culture in the petri dish that's the human biological template and and then contrast it with the culture we often unknowingly without recognizing that we're in water that we live in today well thank you the story that they were the late david foster wallace and he's a very tragic case himself having committed suicide but he was a brilliant brilliant writer and um at a commencement address at the university he once gave this story of two young fish swimming along and an older fish comes along and says howdy boys how's the water today and the two young fish swim on for a while and then one of them turns together and says what the hell is water yeah and the point that waltz is making is that when we're so when we're in the milieu that we don't know any better we're not even aware of it we just think this is reality and we're not more normality and we're not even looking at we're still a part of it that we can't tell the distinction that we're actually in martyr and therefore we're it's too close to us to examine objectively and that's the point he was making about this culture and he actually said that the failure to do that examination can have fatal consequences which is medically absolutely true now in terms of contrasting cultures that's a difficult one but here's what we can say about modern culture is that for all the wealth that is generated for all its astonishing technological and scientific achievements for all the brilliant medical advances that it is that it is promulgated it has significantly misses something about human beings now if you understand human beings if you understand a lion or an orangutan or a whale you can't study them in a zoo or an aquarium you have to study them in their natural environment if you really understand their nature and what they're capable of the same with human beings now if you look at human beings we didn't evolve in cities and in in highly technological societies we evolved out there in nature in fact for millions of years our pre-hominin ancestors and our hominin ancestors and our own species itself lived out there in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups we adapt to that an environment in that environment we develop certain needs and so that the way you judge a culture is not simply by its achievements or by its failures for that matter but to what extent does it honor or disregard essential human needs and that's means from conception onwards so there's certain human needs of the child such as unconditional security secure attachment to the parents not having to work to make that relationship work not having to be good not having to be fast not having to be smart not having to be compliant just being is good enough so so so the child doesn't have to work to make that relationship function the capacity to feel are all our emotions our anger or grief or joy everything which incidentally is what buddhist practice is all about it's about not about suppressing any particular feeling or emotion but to observe it but to allowing it at the same time and number four free play out there in nature that's the fourth need of the child now in terms of adults we also have needs needs for belonging needs for connection need for meaning a need for transcendence a need for competence a need for mastery a need for authenticity autonomy these are essential human needs that evolution has prepared us for so how you gauge the society then is to what degree does it meet the needs of human beings as evolution has prepared them now when it comes to the needs of children we trample all over them in maze we can talk about and when it comes to connection and meaning authenticity and and and and mastery and and the sense of agency in one's life well it tramples on those needs as well of adults and that's what makes the torture culture toxic is that it it does not meet the needs of human beings it meets some needs in the physical sense even that in a very unequal and unfair manner but it does to some degree but the emotional psychological spiritual needs that are just as much a part of us it if anything it tramples all over them one of the things that i've heard you say in the past gabor is that our personality is an adaptation that is essentially a bundle of genuine traits which are true to us on some level yes and conditioned coping responses that arise out of interaction with our environment which points to what you're saying if the environment is problematic problematic behaviors will arise out of it so what are some of the the conditioned responses that you think are more problematic and people's behavior may be for them that are coming out of this toxic culture well so children have certain needs one is for attention just for who they are just attention that's the need of the child that's as much of a need of the child as food and water i'm talking about a developmental need a need for a healthy development now that's the need of the child and attention from adults unconditional attention from adults actually helps to promote the the growth of the brain in healthy ways it's essential for essential brain circuits a child that doesn't get the attention that they need they will be consumed by attracting attention not attractive and uh hence the 50 billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry people are just desperate to be attractive why because they didn't get their needs met a child who [Music] wasn't made to feel important just for their existence which again is a developmental need you really need to matter to your parents not because you did this or that but just because you exist now if you don't get that sense that you're important just who you are you become a compulsive helper and now you spend your life how can i help other people so that they'll be important and you know i know that one it's part of what drove me it's part of what drove me into medical school and drove a lot of my career as a physician does not need to be important it's not only that i wanted to help people i did but i had a personal need to be important and to that degree it becomes addictive um a person who wasn't liked for who they are will become very nice and if i become very nice nice um i'll suppress my healthy anger because i'll be afraid that if i'm angry i won't be liked and then what's going to happen is a lot of people will come to your funeral and say how nice you were too bad you died so young because that suppression of healthy anger actually promotes illness in ways that we can talk about if you weren't loved for who you were you might become very charming but so you have your charming personality and how many of these desperately charming personalities have we seen in public life in entertainment or private life or in politics you know so these personality traits they're not who you are they are substitutes masquerading as you but they're substitutes that you adopted because you needed to be accepted and loved and if you weren't loved accepted for who you were you will develop these traits not deliberately not as a manipulative strategy but as an automatic response and then you think you are my personality i'm this way and i'm that way no you're not yeah no you know you're not that way at all you've become that way it's become your second nature and think of that phase second nature what does that imply um that there's some deeper first nature yeah yeah so a major focus of your work that i think we're kind of wandering our way to here is addiction yeah and addiction as you talk about all the time is itself a coping response and your framework of addiction is a major pushback at least in my view on our common conception of it and in many aspects of the medical model of it so i'd love to uh take a moment here to just let you give your definition of addiction which i think is the best one out there yeah and then maybe we could talk a little bit about how addiction arises out of some of the problems that are structured into our society sure and um that's why i spend you know i'll be we devoted two chapters to the subject because it's so important so i define addiction as manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves but suffers negative negative consequences as a result of and does not or cannot give up despite negative consequences so pleasure craving in the short term harm in the long term inability or refusal to give it up that's what addiction is now first of all notice that i didn't say anything about drugs usually we think of addiction is only related to drugs but actually by my definition it could be yes to substances as was the case with many of the people i worked with as a physician but also to pornography to sex to gambling even to meditation i would say because it's not the external activity it's the internal relationship to it if there's every pleasure relief and craving but negative consequence you got an addiction i don't care what it is sex of course gambling shopping eating work any number of activities but that's what an addiction is um [Music] and as to what it's all about the the mainstream mantra is that whether the the legal misbelief is that it's some kind of a choice that people are making if people are not making a conscious choice what on earth are we doing jailing and punishing them for being addicted so that the whole legal system is based on a falsehood which is that addiction is is a choice it's not a choice for anybody number one number two the medical view is that it's an inherited or at least it's a partially inherited disease about 50 genetically determined it's a disease of the brain number one it's not genetic and number two it's not a disease which i can easily demonstrate for you you've heard my definition relief pleasure craving in a short term harm in the long term difficulty giving up so what i'll ask you two is to tell me if ever in your life i don't care what it was or when but have you ever had according to that definition an addictive pattern in your life so maybe yes maybe no i'm just asking yes okay well here's what i'll ask again i'm not going to ask you what it was or when it was for how long or what was wrong with it i'm going to ask you what was right about it what did it give you in the short term that that you wanted soothing for me okay when does somebody need soothing when there's something that hurts yeah so when there's pain yeah rick what would you say what did it do for you whatever it was whenever it was fine it was i mean in my 20s i partied hard and it was fun uh and uh it was also speaking of situating it socially it was part of kind of my age my group my culture counter culture sex drugs and rock and roll very good yeah and then also i would have to say uh you know as to the analgesic functions of it too in addition to the fun it there's a subtle dimension to this in other words i think there is a longing in everyone somewhere somewhere down for a return to eden you know going back to what's the proper culture what's the proper milieu that is healthy so there was a and for me ultimately it goes into mysterious timeless absolutely transpersonal aspect so a longing for that now wounding around feeling separated from that which was then anesthetized by the intensities of the transports i would experience with sex drugs and rock and roll but then i'd always come back to earth and uh i'm still separate i'm still yeah so great so everything both of you guys said it's absolutely wonderful isn't it when you have pain it's wonderful that you're paint suit when you're separate it's wonderful to belong when you're not having enough joy in your life it's wonderful to have fun in other words the addiction wasn't your primary problem addiction was your attempt to solve a problem of pain analgesia as rick you put it um of separation of lack of sufficient engagement with life so that you have to have fun in ways that created some harm you know in other words again the addiction is not a primary disease it's an attempt to solve a problem and that problem is fundamentally that of some separation from aspects of ourselves which is an imprint of trauma is the way i understand it and so basically what i'm saying is that addiction is a response it's a normal response to trauma when i talk about the myth of normal what i'm saying is that the addiction is considered an abnormality no it isn't it's a normal response to abnormal circumstances and those abnormal circumstances is where you were hurt so much or so separated from yourself so much that you had to resort to some external means of dealing with it so um it's neither a choice because nobody chooses to have pain nor is it a disease it's an attempt to solve a problem and to understand it and to deal with it both effectively and compassionately by the way the two are the same if you're not compassionate you're not affected um you have to understand the sources i feel like asking you i what i think is a dumb question but i'll ask it anyway which is when i think about this pain yeah the pain man the pain body you know eckhart tolle's term but the pain we acquire and then i think about you the emphasis in your book on lower t trauma as it were so the accumulation of pain lower t trauma then i think about my own childhood and life and i sort of wonder or if you can separate or we should separate or we shouldn't separate the sources of those small t traumas that are clearly in the culture like obviously systemic racism or bias of various kinds or wage slavery capitalist pressures of various kinds okay then i think about just the ordinary process in my case of being young going through school kind of shy and feeling like an outsider unwanted unseen not abused or traumatized but just worthless cast to the side we're just the ordinary neurotic you know mishigas in my family my mom my dad their dynamic the spillover do you make any kind of distinction between sources of small t trauma that are clearly connected to large-scale political economic systems and those that are just you know the stuff not that they're any smaller but are simply the stuff in families and and with peers that are not so driven by uh large-scale forces that's a great question and i'll i'll do my best to answer it but before i do is it okay if i come back to you with a question please yeah yeah if it's a psychologist somebody comes to you says dr hansen i'm suffering such and such and i'm having anxiety or i'm having an addiction issue or having relational issues and then you're talking about their childhood then you described your childhood would you say to them oh hey you know that's small t stuff compared to the big thing that people really experience like what about racism and oppression think of all the misery that would you say that to them oh no why would you why would you say that to them well the way you framed it there wasn't how i said it but in terms of privileging or making you know large-scale forces worse because it tends to it would make a person i think understandably feel somehow diminished as if their suffering didn't matter because it wasn't connected to a marxist critique of you know the means of production or something well so let's go back let's let's let's go back if you permit me to what you said about your childhood yeah i would argue that the problem isn't that you were shy or isolated here's a question i would ask you when you felt in pain about that when you felt sad lonely who did you speak to no one now you've got a son here ideally if he's five years old or seven years old and he's sad and lonely who would you want him to talk to me his mom right or some other wise person yeah and if forrest felt as a five-year-old sad and lonely and he didn't come to you and talk to you about it or his mom how would you interpret that how would you explain it i and or his mom were not available or we pushed him away or through our own modeling we sent messages that this is something to handle inside yourself if at all how does that feel preferable i lonely if that were if that were what the five year old were feeling uh yeah lonely um and then and also a kind of internal division you know as if oh this pain is not allowed it's not good there must be something wrong with me everybody else around me looks like they have a happy smiley face they all seem fine i must be damaged in some way i would also add to that terrifying because to be alone as a five-year-old is terrifying okay now so i would say that what you call what you call your small t trauma is not so small t at all okay that's the first point i would make okay yeah the second point i would make is yes you're absolutely right we have to make these distinctions that that that there are people who are subjected for historical economic systemic reasons to degrees of culturally validated trauma i mean culturally normalized trauma that some of us who are grew up more privileged just can't even fathom and this is certainly the true in my work with indigenous canadians who've been exposed to unfathomable deaths of trauma for 150 years you know and and there's a good reason why in canada 30 of the people in jail or indigenous people they make a five percent of the population i was working with the highly addicted segment of the population here in vancouver thirty percent were indigenous five percent of the population if you look at the women jail population in this country it's fifty percent or indigenous women the five percent of the population why is that is because of the unspeakable trauma that was visited upon them for generations upon generations upon generations a delegation of canadian indigenous people was at the vatican last week as we speak um where the pope issued a very paltry very partial very parsimonious papal apology for what some catholics did in residential schools where native kids were sexually physically abused but they died but their bodies are just being discovered and the pope said i'm sorry for for what some catholics did at these church-run institutions for over 100 years we have to recognize that we have to honor it because if we don't we're not going to correct the ongoing sources of it so yes i agree that we have to make that distinction it's only that i i never want to nor would you um minimize anybody's trauma no matter whether we write it with a capital or a small t i'm gabor i felt some anger in you right there and i don't know if you did feel it but it seemed that way and it immediately made me wonder about you know the difference between anger directed internally and anger directed externally it seems like it's so appropriate obviously to have anger like that directed externally and i think about my own you know i think of it as a c minus you know social emotional childhood at that dimension while we had you know enough food to eat and all that but psychologically i'd give it a c-minus there was a lot of anger directed internally that actually was properly uh should have been external including at the culture altogether etc etc let me reflect first of all on your observation did i have anger here um i really care about it rick i have a lot of passion around it yeah and uh yeah when i think of the papal apology and how belated and how partial it was yeah i have anger about that yeah um it needs to be much more than that yeah sure without going on about that particular example though yeah you identified it correctly in terms of anger itself there is healthy anger the anger is part of our brain apparatus the great late unfortunately late great neuroscientist and emotional researcher dr yak panksepp talked about these different brain systems that we share with other mammals and they include love and caring he calls it care care they include grief and panic which is what the infant feels on separation um it includes fear which is an appropriate response to a danger it involves lust obviously is essential for procreation it involves seeking where we are willing to or in in fact called to explore a novel environment seek food seek sexual partners play he says this brain systems for all this these are essential for um human development play is really important for human development and that's another need that's denied in our society but then there's a brain system for what he calls rage which of the anger totally essential healthy anger is when you need to protect your boundaries whether those are physical or emotional so your you know anger is not destructive in fact it it can prevent destruction because if you enter my space somehow inappropriately then when i say you're on my space get out that might prevent a physical altercation but neither of us needs to get hurt but as soon as it's done its job it's gone it was the boundary defense it's played its role no need to hang around that brain system has done its job there is then all unhealthier anger which is actually suppressed rage that's suppressed in childhood and then blows out of you like a volcano as an adult now the repression of healthy anger promotes physical illness because the immune system is totally not connected with but part and parcel of the same system that the emotional system is so the nervous system the hormonal apparatus the immune system the emotional system these are all the same system different aspects specialized aspects of the same system so if you think about it this way the role of emotions is basically to keep out what's unhealthy and unwelcome and dangerous in my space get out or hey come here hug me you know so the the the role of the emotional system is to invite in what's healthy and nourishing and welcome and keep out what is unwelcome and dangerous let me ask you a trick question what's the role of the immune system keep out the things that are dangerous and to let in the ones that are healthy ideally yeah that's how the immune system works it it it recognizes what is healthy and what is unhealthy will attack the unhealthy try to destroy it and let in nutrients and vitamins and healthy bacteria and so on they have the same role now that not only do they have the same role they're the same system they're totally connected interconnected in multiple ways when we're repressing our healthy anger we're also messing with our immune system what i'm saying is that the repression of healthy anger being really nice is actually first of all a adaptive trait that we developed in childhood becomes part of our personality we think that's what we are and at the same time it's a hazard to our immune system and to our physiological health so this is how the mind body unity is just unshakably unified on the other hand if i just the unhealthy rage it triggers the sympathetic nervous system it narrows your arteries elevates your blood pressure increasing clotting factors makes you more important for heart disease and strokes and high blood pressure so on the one hand you have the repression of healthy anger it leads to all kinds of illnesses right this contributes to the onset of these illnesses then you have the unhealthy rage that also is physiologically unhealthy in a way you have a kind of psychological autoimmune illness in other words you know in an autoimmune illness we have the immune system attacking some part or system in the body as alien when in fact it's not and in much the same way when we're when we divide ourselves eternally when we make that terrible choice between authenticity or attachment as you say and we we choose attachment which is the seemingly sensible choice but it's the problematic one long term right at the time we give up our authenticity we divide ourselves we exile parts of ourselves out and then including potentially anger and or we get angry at parts of ourselves that we exile that's the kind of mental autoimmune illness exactly and and just as that anger that you repress it doesn't evaporate it just turns against itself yeah so can the immune system turn against itself and because of the unity of these two systems and uh you're talking the language now our mutual friend i think dick schwartz these uh the internal family system we're parts of ourselves and dick and i have great conversations about this we're very much in unity in fact dick did a study with rheumatoid arthritis which is an autoimmune disease where these parts as you call them their exile that turns against the self a man in rheumatoid arthritis and when they help people um come to realize all this and to relate different to themselves their arthritis symptoms got better and which is exactly what scientifically you would expect except that most rheumatologists don't even know what we're talking about because they're not trained in this stuff we're talking here in part about the value for individuals in terms of their own psychology their own well-being their own functioning quality of their relationships the value for them in turning their critique outward and applying their anger appropriately outwardly and recognizing the ways in which a lot of their own personal suffering and issues is caused by factors outside their front door and i i think that um you know that that connecting of the political and the personal was very alive and well when it kind of come and it came of age in the 60s and 70s and in the last i think 20 30 years has been pushed away almost kind of dismissed like oh you're not supposed to talk about that or you know don't rant about politics but in fact i think it's really helpful for people to realize that a lot of their their suffering related to the stresses and the history that they've had has to do with very powerful forces that are not their own they they landed on them but they didn't make them up that's right and that can be liberating and calming and it fosters self-compassion for people to to to mount that kind of critique of the forces outside them yes and what you're saying really is uh a larger version i might say of um of the question that oprah and bruce perry asked in their most recent book called what happened yeah not what's wrong with you but what happened to you and then and the point i'm making in this book is that we have to ask that question not just on the individual level what happened to you as an individual but what happened to us on the social political economic levels yeah because um given that we're bio biopsychosocial creatures which means that our biology can't be separated from our psychology or from our social relationships shaping those social relationships of forces way beyond individual control it has to do with politics and economics and and historical forces if you don't understand that we don't have a map to understand ourselves so earlier in the conversation we gave uh a parable kind of a first nature versus second nature we talked about the impact of the accrual of stress whether you want to call it lowercase t trauma allostatic load whatever language you want to use around it a theme that runs under your work for me is this idea of something beneath something that is undisturbed something that's true to a person a feeling of wholeness a return to core nature however you want to talk about it and that's really how you position healing and so i'm wondering what do you think supports people in that return to wholeness forever we've talked about our christ nature or our buddha nature our buddha self the atman you know the versus the brockman you know that you know the the these concepts of a true self have been around since you know human thought and human spiritual endeavor but what i'm saying about it is that illness or what we call on us very often comes along as a sign that somehow we've departed from ourselves and so that illness itself can be a call not that i would wish it up on anybody but i interviewed a lot of people whose stories demonstrate that the illness served as a wake-up call of how they had unwittingly in response to childhood pressures when they had no choice in the matter abandoned themselves and the disease was a call to return to themselves and um you know a teacher that i i honor h almost talks about the essential self um dick schwartz who we just mentioned talks about the self with the capital s it's all this it's all the same language and and that that is an aspect an underlying ground aspect of human beings that again this society and this culture really seduces away from in in urging and even pressuring us to find the satisfaction and the meaning outside of ourselves and so many of the products and entertainments and activities that it fosters are designed to exploit that loss of connection to ourselves and to somehow temporarily fill in that hole which inevitably results in a in a crash so yeah there's that part of ourselves and i think this can sound new agey and i hate something like that but and again i don't wish illness on anybody but it's almost like nature wants you to be yourself more than it wants you to survive in other words uh it nature wants to be true to itself is what i'm saying and when we've lost connection to ourselves because of trauma not because we've chosen it disease disease often comes along not that i wouldn't say this to anybody we just diagnosed hey congratulations your diseases here the way i i never say that to anybody what i'm talking about is what people themselves have discovered and have told me which is that through dealing with the illness they become truly themselves for the first time in their lives that they can recall now whether i'd have the courage and the wisdom to do that if it happened to me i don't want to find out but i'm saying is that for these people who had that experience it was that relationship to themselves that they had transformed that's the key factor it seems to be in some ways it reminds me of the research now on psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that it's typically the people who have self-transcendent oneness experiences in which the sense of self falls away and fairly dramatically the sense of reality altogether is present in radiant perfection these are kind of paltry words using your p word there paltry descriptions but still it's the ones who had you know the fireworks experiences of oneness really who tend to have the greatest impact on their intractable history of let's say depression yeah that's right if they can integrate that into their lives yeah yeah they're rinse right you know and they talk about psychedelics in the book and yeah you know you don't need to have psychedelics to have those experiences i mean certainly in the buddhist world you know that um and sometimes it's even better if you don't because then it's more organic yeah more easier to actually integrate into your life but the key question is not just the experience as such but then have you integrated that experience into your life and i can tell you that you know as we speak four weeks ago i had one of these profound experiences with psychedelics working with indigenous people here in british columbia it was transformative and and not just because of the psychedelic plant that we ingested but because of the context of these deeply hurting wounded brave dignified loving people and the environment that they provided you know i was invited to help their process believe me i was helped a lot more than they were helped i believe at least or if i'm fortunate it was the giving and the receiving was equal but i'm telling you so yes the psychedelic but but also that sacred context what's the place for mourning grieving somehow i'm really touched to there just grieving what wasn't present when we were young what grieving a struggle we have to make every day to swim upstream in this culture this that is toxic you know thinking about your own childhood about a remarkable history yourself just the place for grieving mourning the price we've paid so yeah remember i talked about the neuroscientist uh plank step and he talked about this what he called panic grief system in their brain so when we have loss we have to grieve it because grieving means that we come to terms with the loss now if we refuse to grieve or if we don't know how to grieve that pain is just rooted in us it never lets go part of my problem in life rick is that i i refused to grieve i don't know that i refused at any kind of conscious level but i suppose that the fear of it was if the floodgates open they'd be it'd be so huge that i won't be able to handle it a psychologist friend of mine gord neufeld a sometime co-author he said once beautifully he said we shall be saved in an ocean of tears he said that that the tears of grief there's a song by the band you know tears of grief tears of rage and uh the tears of grief are what save us grief comes in waves or in like a tie that comes in and out it's not one it's not a once done and all phenomena but yeah grief means yeah it's gone it's never going to be any different you know and at some point i had to it wasn't that long ago that i realized realized not in intellectual sense which i already had always but in the emotional sense yeah my grandfather and grandmother died in auschwitz in a gas chamber naked probably hugging each other as this toxic gas seeped into the to the room and that happened and that's never not gonna have happened but i don't have to hold on to it and i don't have to [Music] believe that there's something i can do about that it happened and um vanderport the trauma psychiatrist said to me once agabor you don't have to drag auschwitz around with you everywhere you go and when he said it i kind of got what he was talking about intellectually but it took years for me to integrate it in other words that can have happened but the meaning that you created out a lot about life is a result of it you don't have to drag that around what supported you in the acceptance piece of that if you don't mind me asking personal questions a lot of failure for one thing a lot of misery um uh a relationship with a wonderful woman that i've been married to for 53 years yeah a lot of teachers like like like rick and others healing work that i did with myself in my case psychedelic work it's unfairly undisciplined but fairly recurrent spiritual work you know all that all that you know and then and just witnessing what i've witnessed all that all that supported me i'm drawn to ask you a question which is about your relationship with your children because one of the things you've written about a lot is is the ways in which these things can be cyclical where you had an experience when you were very very very young of separation from your parent the circumstances you described which were horrible and are really hard to wrap your brain around in any kind of uh functional way and then raising your own kids and so i'm wondering if if part of your own process here was enabled and supported by being able to form a healthy relationship with your kids ultimately well um so the next book that my son and i are going to write together it will be called hello again a fresh start for our children and their parents and that's the workshop that we give but we give we have that yeah we'll be doing it this october in in omega in new york and we've given it a number of times and this is my eldest son daniel um when i first discovered the meaning of trauma and how it's not personal but it's multi-generational and then i looked at how i parented my kids i really got that i i passed a lot of trauma to my kids and my kids were raised by two very traumatized parents before those parents realized that they were traumatized which means that we never really acted them out uh in one way or another to give you a simple example i talked about how [Music] my mother gave me to this stranger to save my life i didn't see her for five to five weeks what message did i get i wasn't wanted so then not being wanted you go to medical school no i've often said they're gonna want you all the time when they're dying when they're being born and every minute in between that they're in trouble they're gonna want you but they're gonna want you they're gonna want what you can do for them yeah so it's a temporary hit but it doesn't satisfy that basic not wantedness and therefore it's very addictive okay now my kids grew up in leafy vancouver middle class home there's no second world war nothing but daddy is always working because he needs to be wanted what message did they get but then i wanted because i didn't love them but because i acted that's what i acted out and so we that's just a small example of the traumas that we pass into our kid so as our kids were growing up and i began to realize this trauma dynamic multi-generational nature of it i used to say that i'm not worried that they'll be angry with me i'm worried that they won't be angry enough because i wanted them to get in touch with their anger at what they had missed or what they had so it was to the point where they got sick of they don't tell us anymore because they had to figure it out for themselves didn't they no amount of mia culpa and breastfeeding on my part would make any difference to them they had to sort out these dynamics for their own so there's been a huge repair in our family with our three adults huge repair all three of them each in their own way um so for which i'm very grateful and i'm grateful to have long enough to see it happen and it's an ongoing process you know of of maturing together um but there's a lot to make up for a lot as i do indicated in the book and and i don't say that in any sense of guilt at this point i'm just talking objectively that's what happened i'm the dad that yelled at you and the dad that wasn't around i'm the dad that sat up with you all night when you were sick and the dad that played with you and told your stories and i'm also the dad that really hurt you and confused you the guy well for starters i think i'm looking just really lovely yeah go ahead dad oh i'm just looking at your five kinds of compassion and in the in the context here you know ordinary human compassion the compassion of curiosity and understanding the compassion of recognition the compassion of truth the compassion of possibility all of them land here when you tell your story and i of course forrest and i are going to be processing for hours we're going to need some professional help after this interview like what were we thinking for us and obviously we should have been on shrooms or something then it all would have kind of processed it anyway it didn't so in any case they all seem kind of relevant here particularly just the compassion of truth i mean that seems so central to your work gabor i even i thought it you you know i'll acknowledge this in a good way you made me uncomfortable when i met you there at the um panel in vancouver because you were like i said hardcore you were just clearly unflinching and unyielding and truth-telling and truth-seeing and truth-honoring and i think that's essential even to what you're talking about with your own family i like the part of hardcore i like the core part can i be self-core like you know that can be kind of unyielding and not hard sometimes it's true but um the the the compassionate truth is really very simple in in the final chapter of the book i talk about disillusionment and i talk about a series of disillusionment that i've had this time in the realm of politics and people often say well that was disillusioning and i i say to people would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned would you rather believe a bunch of stuff that's not true would you rather see reality but reality is painful sometimes isn't it like um for almost i could name any nation in the world it's nice to believe that my nation is the pure shining city in the hill it's painful to realize that your nation actually is acted in a predatory cruel way to other peoples i i i can i can name almost any people in the world and say that too that's a disillusionment but would you rather know the truth of it or would you rather pretend to yourself so the truth can be painful so there's no compassion in protecting people from from truth no it has to be delivered in a way that that that's loving and gentle and compassionate but um you remember what jesus said he said you will know the truth and the truth will liberate you he did not say the truth will liberate you he said you will know the truth that only the knowledge of truth can free us and this is true both in the personal and the political realm so that's what i mean by the compassion of truth is that you're not afraid to guide people to the truth and you're not afraid of the pain they're gonna experience when the truth lands is often very painful at but it's if it's there it's necessary no there's you know i can temper that by the sufi uh teaching on speaking they say before you say something is it true is it kind is it necessary and these are what they call the three gates of speech so if you can meet all those pass all those three aids then say it if you can't don't say it so i'm not talking about untrammeled shoving the truth in people's faces is it kind is it true is it necessary if it is and if it hurts that's a healthy pain well i think that that is actually in many ways a great summary of a lot of what we've talked about here today is it kind is a true is it necessary and so much if it just comes down to seeing clearly it sounds like seeing ourselves clearly seeing the environment clearly and coming to terms with the things that have happened to us um and the real impacts that those things have had over time in terms of our behavior our lives our relationship with ourselves our relationship with other people and i would just like to really thank you again for taking the time to do this today this was just a wonderful conversation that i'm going to be thinking about for a long time well thank you and um i thank both of you for this close reading of the book which really allowed me to to say what i want to say you know and the biggest gift you can give to a guest is to give them the venue to really express themselves and you've done that beautifully so thank you it's an honor to be with you gabor and really i appreciate you a lot in your work and what you stand in and witness foreign as in this culture and i grew up in the suburbs of los angeles where there was just tremendous artifice and happy smiley manufactured faces and just in your own example and presence and history you know you really stand for truth you really stand in the truth and for the truth and with the truth and truly for that i i'm grateful to you personally and as a human on this planet thank you thank you both very much so today we had the absolute pleasure of speaking with dr gabor mata and i can say completely honestly that this was one of my personal favorite conversations that we've ever had on the podcast and i hope that you got as much out of it as i did we began today's conversation by grounding it in the subtitle of his new book which is the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture and a great way to think about the toxic elements of our culture are present in that word culture itself like the culture that you can create in a petri dish and if that culture is inhospitable to the organisms inside of it if it leads to illness death disease problems of various kinds we would refer to it as toxic and you see much the same in the circumstances that we're exposed to in our modern environments and gabor situates that toxicity in part in terms of the needs we have as humans which come from our developmental needs we particularly have these when we are very young and very vulnerable but when i was reading this book i was really struck by the ways in which he represents our developmental needs as being great proxies for just the needs we have in adulthood and he highlighted three key needs first a deep sense of contact and connection with other people this might be the unconditional love given by a parent to their infant child the child really needs to know that somebody loves and cares about them second and i thought that this was such a big one a security and self-valuing in other words the ability to rest from the work of earning the right to be who you are and i find that language just so powerful and so evocative because the healthy child doesn't need to constantly earn their parents approval they don't need to constantly monitor that they are being too much and if a child is worried about these things is worried that their behavior is putting too much of a load on the parent and that by executing these behaviors they won't get what they need wow that's a profoundly insecure environment to grow up in then third the child needs permission to feel their emotions particularly the difficult and painful ones for our emotions to remain accessible the environment must allow them to be safely experienced that means that the child's expression of feeling can't threaten the attachment relationship with the parents in other words we need the ability to remain emotionally vulnerable around other people and what happens if we can't what happens if we don't those emotions have to go somewhere so we push them down we hold on to them and this got us into a whole conversation about repressed anger and so if we look out at the culture inside of the framework of those core needs what do we see well we see a total lack of connection with other people by and large a extreme disconnection inside of the the cultural organism which some have called an epidemic of loneliness and then we see a sense of personal worth that's almost entirely tied to perception what we can do and be for other people when there isn't that sense of inherent worthiness there can be no rest from the act of constantly seeking the approval of other people in order to approve of ourselves and then what do we see about emotion we see massive repression of emotion where people are absolutely not safe in expressing their anger their hurt or their sadness to other people and this is before getting to any of the large scale massive structural issues that society is grappling with right now everything from our overarching capitalistic framework the the commodification of humans on a global scale disconnection and separation the way in which addiction has been commodified by large companies that are trying to take advantage of the brain's pleasure circuitry the effective sociopathy of those who work in politics and big business a valuing of current profit over the large scale and long-term well-being of people and rampant sexism classism racism and so on and so what are the consequences of this toxic environment well they manifest inside of our behaviors inside of the way that we view ourselves and think about ourselves and therefore the ways in which we manifest out in the world and this led me to a question about addiction which has been a major focus of gabor's work he spent an enormous amount of time working directly with people who struggle with addiction and his definition of addiction i think is probably the absolute best one in the field he defines it simply as anything we do to relieve pain in the short term that has consequences in the long term that we're unable or struggle to stop and a key point of that is that while we normally think about addiction as being substance related really any behavior can be an addiction if it meets that criteria and a critical point about addiction is that it is a coping response it is a thing that occurs in response to stress in other words nobody wants to be addicted they're looking for some form of relief from the pain that they are experiencing and so gabor asks us to ask not why the addiction but why the pain what are the roots of those painful experiences that people are trying to escape and so i would imagine that he thinks of things like the opioid epidemic in the united states as not based on a moral fault of individuals but rather as the almost natural outcome of a damaged society and one of the things that underlies that damage that really creates the kind of lowercase t traumatic experiences that we focused on throughout the conversation is this core conflict between attachment and authenticity we want to attach to other people we want to be in relationship with them but also we want to be authentic to ourselves and that's a kind of social dance that we perform constantly how much do i want to constrain or limit or sugarcoat my views my personalities my expressions with this other person in order to stay in positive relationship with them and this got us into really a very touching and very personal conversation about my dad's experiences as a child about gabor's experiences as a child and the residues and consequences of those experiences through time including how parents influence their children and pass these issues on and alongside that i think really the healing potential that is possible in coming to terms with these experiences coming to terms with the things that have happened to us my dad asked a beautiful question about how we position grief inside of this whole process and gabor had a equally beautiful response to it where he talked about laying down the stone of the horrific things that had happened to his grandparents the horrific things that happened to him when he was a child that he couldn't influence he couldn't control and yet they were impacting him but a major part of that process was about accepting the presence of them and then going through a lengthy lengthy process of coming to terms and this process of coming to terms allows us to come back into relationship with something else a first nature rather than a second nature as we talked about during the conversation maybe something a little truer a little wholer than the way that we are right now and in the book gabor outlines four a's that help us do this the first one is authenticity which is finding our inner voice finding what's true to us again that conflict between authenticity and attachment then second agency which he describes as the capacity to freely take responsibility for our existence yes things happen to us but what can we influence today what can we take responsibility for then third a big topic during this conversation anger particularly re-accessing the healthy forms of anger that are often socially repressed and finally fourth acceptance which is a recognition of the truths of this moment and i'd like to leave you today with a final thought from gabor he frames trauma not as what happened to a person but how it changed them and i think that that's just an absolutely beautiful framing of it because we can't do anything about what happened to us but we might be able to impact how it changes us and it allows us to take a role in small ways over time probably with a lot of deliberate effort in reclaiming our own wholeness so again the book is the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture it goes on sale september 13th and it's available for pre-order right now and i just gotta say it's a fantastic book and if you're interested in the podcast i think that you'll really enjoy it i've included a link to it in the description of today's episode and you can also probably find it pretty easily by searching for it if you've been enjoying the podcast and you'd like to support us the best way to do that is by subscribing so you can subscribe to it through whatever platform you happen to be listening to it on right now and also you can tell a friend about it it's one of the best ways we have to reach more people if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of just a couple dollars a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return things like ad-free versions of the episodes transcripts of the episodes and expanded show notes where i dive into all of the research that goes into everything that we produce until next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 130,595

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Gabor Mate, Healing Trauma in a Toxic Culture, interpersonal biology, healthy culture, addiction, cultural impact, people's behavior, authentic nature, grief, integration, compassion, degrees of trauma, anger, healthy anger, Gabor, psychedelic therapy, indigenous trauma, sacred context, myth of normal, hungry ghosts, scattered minds, healing

Id: T8fdPA8Tt4I

Length: 70min 22sec (4222 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/humulus_impulus]

Legitimately one of the most important conversations I've ever witnessed.

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