How Our Childhood Shapes Every Aspect of Our Health with Dr. Gabor Maté | FBLM Podcast

so Datsun might say it's a huge pleasure for me to be talking to you today I've been following your work for a good period of time now and it's had a huge impact on the way that I look after my patients but if I'm honest it's also had a huge impacts on the way I look after myself and I want to thank you for that there's so many things that we could start talking about well I think the place I'd like to start is something I heard you say once which is addiction is not a choice yeah I think most of society probably thinks that it is a choice and so one if you could clarify that the whole legal system is based on the assumption that people are making a choice to indulge in addictions and therefore the decisions they make that flow from that are conscious and deliberate and therefore of course what they need to do is to be punished for making such a choice it's basically the same attitude that a lot of people take towards child rearing when it showed us something we don't like we punish them this is our idea of children well with adults the punishment is called jail or legal sanctions the assumption is totally false there's no scientific basis to it and having worked with addicts really seriously caught people who've been entrapped in the cycle and shoals of addiction but with all the consequences like HIV homelessness loss of health wealth teeth beauty personal relationships I never saw any instance of anybody having chosen to become that way and having had my own addictive behaviors that can also tell you I never chose I never woke up one morning and said my ambition is to come and become an addict so it's an entirely shallow behaviors the view of human beings and what we need to do is to look at the deeper reasons if what something appears to be a choice it's an unconscious one and we still have to look at what is it that would drive a person in that direction conscious choice has nothing to do with it which means to say that the legal system has no logical basis to stand up yeah it's amazing how we have decided as a society that some addictions are criminal but some are okay know heard you talked about that many times in the past I think that makes you think of a line in your menu in your new book well I say new it's been out for over ten years I think it's been a best-seller all over the world but we've got it now in the UK in the realm of hungry ghosts and in the introduction you say all drugs and all behaviors of addiction substance dependent or not whether gambling sex the internet or cocaine all of them either soothe pain directly or distracts from it hence your mantra the first question is not why the addiction but why the pain and I think that beautifully sums it up you know in in that you you're liking you're likening addiction to drugs potentially to you know sex gambling alcohol maybe shopping so I thought no shopping addiction and I can tell you that the what happens in my brain when I'm indulge in my shopping addiction is exactly the same that happens in a ban of the cocaine addict in other words there's an excitation of the reward incentive and motivation circuitry and what the addict is after that temporary change in brain status really what it is all addictions are an attempt to regulate an unbearable emotional state internally but you're trying to regulate your internal state through external means and that's what an addiction is so temporarily you get a change in the state of your brain in a change in your physiology you can do that through drugs you can also do to gambling or internet or sex or shopping but essentially after that same revitalization of your incentive and motivation circuitry of your brain and so from my perspective there's only one universal addiction process that dominates all addicted people the targets of addiction may be different the internal effects are much the same yeah and and I'm sorry I should add when you look at the the sources of it the states that people are trying to escape are straights of emotional distress states of emotional pain enhance why the addiction not why the addiction bobeye the pain so some people who are listening to this or watching this right now might be thinking yeah I get that all sounds fine for those people who are addicted but I've caused some NOSSA Dixit so anything so you've got you've got a rather beautiful definition I think off addiction which I think will be really helpful to sort of go through at the starts here so that people listening can actually figure out if it does relate to them or not well when I speak to a room of people and asked the Munir addicted most people who only think of drugs so some people put their hand up then I give them my broader definition of addiction and know everybody puts their hand up and that definition is that an addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves but suffers negative consequences in the long term and he was going to be able to give it up so any behavior not just drugs the key hallmarks are craving pleasure relief in a short term negative outcomes in a long-term inability to give it up that's when an addiction is and that could be to drugs nicotine caffeine alcohol the legal the lethal and legal substances or it could be to heroin cocaine crystal meth and to know cannabis any number of other substances but it could also be - sex - gambling - shopping - eating to work to exercise to the Internet to gaming to pornography to political power to the acquisition of wealth to the hoarding of objects anything and buy and when you give that definition and you ask people how many here would acknowledge some addiction in their life sometimes the vast majority of people would put their hands up which means to say that addictions are on a continuum it's on a spectrum and they distributed dispersed throughout all of our society and so that the identified drug addicts make up only a small narrow segment over addicted population so really the whole way we we think about addiction the way we criminalize various forms of addiction really needs to change to a much more a more compassionate way of dealing with it but also really trying to understand what's the root cause because if you know I totally subscribe to your theories and I know and I think that ultimately if the root cause of all addiction or all the dictor behavior is the same how do we tackle that and where does that come from what is that root cause so once you're asking that way addiction will by the pain no you have to forget that it's a choice because nobody chooses to be in pain and you also have to forget the medical ID there it's an inherited brain disease yeah actually have to look at people's lives now in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in Canada where I worked for 12 years with a highly addictive publish and these people had multiple addictions cocaine alcohol cannabis opiates of all kinds cigarettes in every case they suffered with HIV with hepatitis C they would die of overdoses suicide infections of all kinds and these people every single one had been heavily traumatized in childhood all the women I worked with over 12 years had me sexually abused all the men had been neglected or beaten or emotionally abused I'm talking about not as severely addicted population which is also what a large-scale study shows that the greater the childhood adversity the greater risk for addiction in adulthood now the more severe the childhood adversity the greater the risk of substance addiction and injection use however if you look at my own case I wasn't beaten I wasn't abused and I found you a virgin I wasn't elected but I was a Jewish infant boy during the war and hungry and spend my first year under the Nazi Nazi regime you can imagine that there were circumstances slide a very unhappy stressed terrorized mother and shouldn't gonna be hurt in two ways shouldn't begin children can be heard when bad things happen to them that shouldn't happen that's the abuse that's the violence in the family that's the parental addiction but children can also be heard when their needs are not met now I just need for an attuned empathetic emotionally responsive mother she couldn't be that not because she didn't love me not because she didn't do her best but simply she was to terrorize she was too depressed the lack of that joyful attuned loving mother who I shouldn't say loving because she loved me tremendously but her love couldn't be translated into responsive behavior that alone was enough to hurt me so in other words the source of addiction is always some kind of a childhood hurt either because bad things happened that shouldn't have or because the good things they should have happened couldn't happen because of the parents emotional states both of these are enough to hurt the child in a way to driving them to self-soothe through addictions so so do you think your own experience of trauma really as a young baby not even the Charlie's a young baby yeah has impacted your own health your own behaviors and therefore ultimately where you are today which is one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction do you think that has been instrumental in you getting to where you are today having to deal with the impact so that has been instrumental I mean everybody as an adult it was a successful physician you know I was much in demand funny practitioner I was head of a palliative care department at a major hospital I was a national medical columnist or Canadian newspaper in my 50s and internally I was driven workaholic depressed affected by ADHD anxious and unfulfilled and unsatisfied and it's when looking at those dynamics and wondering well what the heck has happened to me here and what is the gap between my external persona and my internal experience of myself that's when I began to deal with trauma not to mention as a family physician and you're never talking about this before we get to see patients before they get sick the specialist only see them after they honest has been diagnosed I get to see people for the girl I get to see people in that context of their multi-generational family background so we have a much broader view of who gets sick and lying so both through my medical work and having to deal with my own stuff I began to realize the central role of trauma and shaping people health or illness yes inside since I've been studying trauma myself but with the work you do but just other things I'm reading around it it would he helps me understand my patients and their behavior is much better they start to you can start to tap in now as to what they're coming in with the more you think oh that's what's going on behind that's not the symptom they're describing but but why are they making those choices and some of you may not know gay but I I few years ago I did a series of documentaries on BBC one called doctoring the house and what I would do on that as I went to live alongside families who had health problems they were already under GPS who audience specialists they were all taking medication pretty much already and they still weren't getting better and they were so struggling so I went in to sometimes I'd stay the night in their houses I'd live alongside them really get to understand you know what choices they were making with their lifestyle sure but also I'd get to see you know various dynamics in the family the sort of thing that would never come up in the consultation room even if you asked that question they would never even think to bring those things up for you it just starts to spot things and little dynamics and I found that with every single family pretty much now if I if I reflect back on all those families I stayed along sides I was very fortunate to get really good health comes with them all after about six weeks but there was a huge emotional component behind a lot of the illness now just to be clear I'm not saying that it was in their head at all they had proper physical symptoms that were that they were struggling with and obviously that in some ways can make people feel down a little bit about themselves because I'm not feeling so good but I really got this strong sense that when you start to look at their lives and their upbringing and how they saw themselves it was just it was uncanny how many times their emotional health was absolutely tied into that physical health well so when the books are written which will be published in Britain a few months is entitled when the body says no the cost of hidden stress and I'm making the case precisely as I heard you articulate just now is that my console chronic illness and whether it's colitis or Crohn's disease multiple sclerosis ALS or motor neuron disease in in England malignancy chronic psoriasis eczema chronic fatigue syndrome the physiological symptoms which are not in people's heads in a sense that they're imagining them but it very much originates in people's heads in that it has a lot to do with certain relational and emotional patterns that they adopted in childhood in other words what I'm saying is that because of childhood programming people impose certain unconscious stresses on themselves and those stresses because of the unity of mind and body which unfortunately is not taught or recognized the new medical schools but which scientifically is not even vaguely controversial because the immune system and the emotional apparatus and the hormone apparatus and the nervous system are part and parcel of the same system so when something occurs emotionally which it does on a chronic basis that as an impact of undermining people's physiology turning their immune system against themselves or suppressing the immune system so I absolutely agree that people's emotional patterns which reflect not individual choices or mistakes but multi-generational patterns in the family those emotional patterns translate into physical illness and and and and and if we can address those emotional dynamics we can actually have an impact on the physiological course of their illness which is again not something that anybody in medical school will I will tell you because there's this unfortunate separation of mind and body that you and I are trained in yeah absolutely key one of the key things there for me was that yes you're not putting blame on people there's no blame yeah and I think that's really really a key point to that maybe we can discuss now because a lot of people may be hearing that feeling you know maybe I've done this to myself or my mother did this to me for example and that's not what you're saying at all is it well this is interesting conversation I make the distinction between blame and responsibility blame says that you did something that you could have done otherwise and so you're there for you at fault that's what blame says responsibility says yes you do this to yourself but not consciously or deliberately you did it because you're programmed to do it by your own childhood experience which in turn was programmed by your parents childhood experience so there's nobody at fault everybody does their best but we do past these unconscious patterns on and you don't blame people for having unconscious patterns you try to make them conscious of it so they can take responsibility for it so there's no point there's no responsibility without consciousness and so and and there's no blame so I don't blame anybody for their illness I don't believe their parents either but I do say these unconscious patterns they're being passed on and these unconsciously emotional dynamics have an impact on your physiology that's all and if you want to have an impact on your physiology you better get conscious you have to realize what have you been doing unconsciously so you can stop doing it or do it differently so it's a matter of liberating people from these ingrained patterns for which they're not to be blamed so in my role there's no room for blame whatsoever but there's room for helping people to become responsible for helping people being response able being able to respond to their circumstances and without awareness none of us are responsible yeah I think if I think to my own life and my own health journey over the last few years and I guess what's really changed for me over the last years you know I've done a lot with my lifestyle of them and my nutrition my sleep and those things have been great and they've really helped me but over last years I've really focused on my emotional health you know I see a therapist pretty regularly and I can always feel when I've got something new some some deeper layer that started to come out you know I have it I have a session or I go through some sort of therapy and I I feel good I feel oh yeah I've got it now I get it I get it why I do this and it changes your behavior certainly but it's always as a as fu as you do that there's multiple layers it's like peeling back Alera the-- you know it's peeling back layers of the onion and newer things keep coming out which just mean really rewarding for me because you talk about addiction and I I think back to my my own life and various things I've done at certain points you know I don't think anyone who knows me well maybe my close friends but but most people probably wouldn't think that I've ever had an addiction because we have all these connotations about addiction you know you know it's like you know being on a street corner or being a drug addict or something but but everyone around me would know that I've got an addictive personality yeah and I used to think that that was my personality that's the way I was born what's weird that as I start to process my own emotional baggage and I start to clear it I'm no longer has an addictive person as I used to be and that's why we nee I kind of feel I feel so strongly about the work that you're doing because I kind of feel that that wasn't my personality that was the behavior I had chosen to soothe something that I was missing so I would I would put it I mean I agree with your concept I would you should use a different language or under so that was your personality but it wasn't your person it wasn't who you were the personality itself is a defensive structure that we develop as a way of dealing with our so much of what we considered to be a personality is actually an overlay of one or two cells and so these were in choices in childhood for example with my ATV the tuning out I never chose to tune out but when I was an infant under the conditions that I described being a Jewish infant under the Nazis I had plenty of stress on me and hard as an infant they would stress that they can't change they tune out and then a tuning art becomes programming to my brain and then swimming years later I'm diagnosed with a DD there wasn't a choice that I made it was an adaptation so I was what I would say about the personality including what you describe is your addictive personality it wasn't you it was an adaptation that you took on it's a way of surviving your shelters the way of soothing your pain it's when we got older that we realized that there's something more to us than a personality that the personality is actually a defensive cover for who we truly are and as we started like as you described your own process you go through therapy and you go through layers and you realize oh that's not actually me yeah and I'm fear without it then you realize that what we thought was the personality was actually just a defensive cover and and once we stripped that defense off and we find it no longer necessary we've become much more to ourselves much more to to ourselves so become much more balanced and happier in our lives so yes it was a personality but you are not your personality that's why I would formulate it yeah no I love the way you put that actually it really well he helps me think about in a slightly different way and something came with my mind there which is you know and we were chatting a little bit about this before we got on air about medicine and how how reduction is it has become the practice of medicine and I think like something like high blood pressure for example I think of as an appropriate response from the body to the signals that it's been given absolutely and I think there's an analogy there with what you're saying which is if you if you're surrounding my stress as a young baby whatever that stress is your brain is gonna adapt to that it's an appropriate response to the signals that your brain is getting it's that fair to say that's right so so my next book is going to be entitled the myth of normal illness and health in an insane culture and when I seen in culture insane culture I mean a culture that doesn't meet human needs so if you take a condition like the high blood pressure for which what's the medical term for high blood pressure hypertension hypertension alright and and and doctors of course say our colleagues say well there's a few types of hypertension for which there's a cause like kidney disease or some kind of hormonal disorder but for most part we don't know what causes high but the essential hypertension got essentially of his business if you don't know what the heck we're talking about that's what that means just take the word hypertension and slow down a bit hyper tension hyper tension hyper tension maybe there's too much tension in people's lives you know and if you actually look at the rising rates of hypertension it's got to do with social pressure and social stresses and I know that usually when I take care of myself I have the blood pressure of a young person but there's been times in my life when I've been driven by stress and I've had the blood pressure ranges in the in the in a risky end of the scale so so for me my butter sure was up it's a real warning buddy you've got too much tension and I was you better do something about it all we do in medicine is we hand out pills or we tell people to lose weight but we never address the sources of your tension in their lives and I'd say that most hypertension and so for example if you look at a black black American males they're much higher risk of hypertension then say white American males always say it's genetic note isn't their budget or relatives in Africa do not have high blood pressure right so it's an artifact of being a black male in essentially a racist society and James Baldwin the American writer once said that being a black American made us to live in a condition of suppressed rage all the time yeah well that's the pressure age will drive your blood pressure so high for the ill health yeah yeah so so high blood pressure is a great example of a socially induced physiological condition which is mediated through our emotions and the impact our emotions on our autonomic nervous system in our hormones yeah it's I mean I've never really thought about the term hypertension like that before you know hypertension in it and it makes such sense yeah when we think about it like that you mentioned this new book you're writing talking about how we've got I think it's an insane society around us yeah and I think of I think it's stress you know that I mentioned to you I've just spent a few months locked away why see a new book on stress called the stress solution and I feel strongly boats when we talk about making changes so a lot of people when they try and improve their hell they try and improve their lifestyle okay which is a pretty reasonable start but many people I find can't do that well they do it temporarily for a few weeks a few days a few months maybe but then they revert back and there's a doctor I've always been intrigued as to what is some patients keep coming back and what is some patients with the same so-called problem get better with it with the same course of treatments and I always think well if they keep coming back I'm clearly not getting to the root cause of the problem and the more I think about your work although people talk about you in in the realm of addiction and trauma I think your work doesn't only explain diction and trauma it explains all human behavior and bevel has profound implications not only for trauma not only for pain not only for addiction but actually the whole of the health landscape well thank you and again in my various books I've written about that it just so happens that it's my addiction book that's being published right now first the name and when you get down to it it's very simple either you raise human beings with whose needs are met or you raise human beings in a way that they don't meet their needs when you don't beat people's needs they have to adapt in artificial ways those adaptations become a source of illness later on there was a very distinct article in the Journal of Pediatrics which is the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics published in January 2012 there was an article in childhood development generated by the Harvard Center on the developing child so specific as you get and the inner abstract they say that human environments that because of scarcity or stress trouble young children cause these children to make adaptations which are net psychological and physiological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a long-term cost to health behavior and longevity in other words the way that young children adapt to stress early on helps them survive that early stress but in the long term those same adaptations become sources of pathology so if you if you look at my own tuning out so the tuning out that I did as an infant under conditions of severe psychological strain is an adaptation it helped me as an infant survive the year where the situation was utterly impossible but that same tuning art gets programmed into my brain and now I'm diagnosed with the medical condition ADHD decades later so what was an act was adapted in my circumstance because maladaptive later on I'm suggesting that much of the illness begins with that fact that is a necessary person the adaptations however which then stress us later on and so that is a real so what's common to my work is that I look at the sources of adult functional dysfunction in our formative experiences and you know that's not controversial if you look at a Gardner I mean if a gardener looks at their plants they know that how they treat that young plant will have a huge impact on me on the adult plant anybody who is in animal husbandry will realized that how you treat the young but it's a dog or a horse with a huge impact on the personality and behavior of that animal later on why don't we get the same thing in your veins it's the same principle so it's essentially very simple yeah it really is isn't it when you break it down so there yeah like that it's super simple we need to we need a society that really supports children and babies and mothers and parents at a young age absolutely and then I guess what comes to my mind is and you may know the stats on the side don't but we here in the UK we always are talking about Scandinavia and we talk about how they are really prioritizing those early years you know they give a lot of maternity leave a lot of paternity leave and you know yes they may have high taxes but it seems to me that their society there has prioritized family and bringing up children whereas that anything with quite as good here and I but I don't thing was bad as the u.s. when a really good friend of mine he married an American girl and she maybe after that she gave birth to her first child she might have been back at work it might mean something like four weeks or something yeah something obscene like to meet well it sounds obscene to me absolutely and a child in daycare yeah and I'm wondering what if you could talk about that a little bit how society is set up now and then what that is doing because you mentioned your mum's clearly that's a huge torment I mean that's hopefully the sort of trauma that most of us aren't experiencing but are there similarities in terms of what that's doing to the child oh absolutely so the United States which to hear their politicians is the best and most glorious country in the world which itself by the way is interesting like if you made a person if your neighbor was always telling you how great he was and how he's the best and everybody wants to be like him what would you think of him yeah you think he's got a grandiose personality disorder and he's compensating for his little sense of deficiency oh that's the United States and they have a lot to compensate for and what you say about child care is absolutely true is that they have a barbaric child care system a barbaric maternity system where women and often poor women are welfare I have to go back to work after a few weeks of meeting birth now if you look at human evolution or look at an ape culture the ape mothers hold their babies for months there's no separation the child actually develops by being held by the mother and human societies until very recently were organized around children being around the parents really all their lives certainly through a childhood and adolescence there was just no separation what we do in our culture more in the States then elsewhere but increasingly elsewhere as well we separate children from their parents in other will be depriving them from the natural conditions for healthy development now there was a study last year with two years ago comparing the crying of British German Canadian and Danish children lo and behold Danish kids cried much less than these others what was the difference the parents were around much more and the parents were much like you to pick up the kids whenever crying that's what made the difference though that crying child is an anxious child when the child is crying it's not just a benign thing the child is crying because they're stressed when they're stressed their brains are suffused by stress hormones adrenaline cortisol adrenaline cortisol interfere with your physiology interfere with healthy brain development so just the fact of holding a child which was and historically and prehistorically the standard is an essential aspect of Chaudron which modern societies have denied and as a matter of fact I don't know what it's like in England but in North America we actually advise parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying at night we told them not to pick them up help we sleep training the kid by not picking them up you know would be denying the charge needs for connection and what's that doing to the child do you think well it does a number of things one is to give the child a message that his emotions don't matter and children take everything personally it's not true that babies don't have emotions and it's not true that babies are tabula rasa where you can write anything you want babies have certain defined emotional needs and when they get the message that they're not important that's the message they're gonna imbibe unconsciously non-verbally and you can see that behavior in the adults you know the person who comes into your office and says doc I'm sorry to bother you I'm sure you have many people much more important than me but I have it this little problem you know what kind of Charter Day it yeah number one so it gives that would be me going into the doctor okay or in in just various assets my life and you know the people pleaser yeah always doing you know always yeah no problem you know the amount of times I think just on a social thing he'd be that way do you want to go guys wherever you end up somewhere you just don't want to be in you're in a restaurant you hate the food in bet it's cool guys no problem and it's sorry I don't mean to trivialize what you're saying it's an oasis you're not realizing it would you actually the illustrating you tell me exactly what kind of infancy you had yeah and physiologically what does it do the baby's crying and again is stress hormones now one of the things that Aboriginal peoples don't do is let their babies cry when I say it's not that they're forbidden to cry they picked them up they don't even put them down to tell you to but should they cry they pick them up immediately we in our society we actually advise people at the babies cry when the baby's crying it's because they're stressed when they're stressed again their brains are suffused by stressful that interferes with healthy brain development yeah I mean what about this whole idea that you know we're quite isolated now you know many of us have moved away from where we grew up we don't have friends we don't have a family network around us so an often to parents of working yep so you've got this really stressful situation where everyone's trying to do that the best that they can they're trying to you know make enough money to feed themselves the house themselves I was trying to spend enough time with their children yet they have no support so there's a huge amount of pressure then that goes on to the kids but also on the parents yes and I think I saw you talk last night at the Tabernacle in London it was it was a you know an amazing talk and you mentioned a little bit about hunter-gatherer societies and how for the bulk of human evolution we have lived and raised our children a certain way what if you could expand on that well again human means some version of human beings have been on the earth for millions of years they've been hominids for millions of years there have been human species for thousands of years and our own particular species probably for about a hundred thousand years Homo sapiens which is the latest and the only current human species that's extant for all of that prehistory until about 9,000 years ago virtually all human beings lived in small hunter-gatherer bands this is a revolution this is how we became human beings so to think that not know you might like in modern society to a zoo where you take an animal from a natural habitat and you put them in a completely artificial restricted situation and you expect him to stay as normal as he was out there in the wild essentially that's what's happened to human beings in that in a very short space of time in a blink of an eye from the perspective of evolution we've been we've gone from the hunter-gatherer or small band communal attachment based group to a society which is alienated this can this connection is is is accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world urbanization it's taking people out of their villages in the big cities where they're alone here in Britain there was quite a deliberate assault on community under the Thatcher regime with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on and that trend has continued so what we're having in is societies that are less and less natural to the actual makeup of human beings from the evolutionary perspective and which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances and you know Johann Hari has written a book recently under depression called lost connections it's pointing exactly that's what happened in modern society so that these lost connections characterized the modern world and as they do you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before so we think autoimmune disease is one of these or addictions for that matter so if you look at the rate of addiction now in in countries like China and India it's going up exponentially precisely because of the and it's not a question of idealizing the old way of life we can't go back and and and of course there's all kinds of benefits to to progress and industrialization trouble is that as we progress we forget the benefits of we forget what we've lost so instead of combining progress we're trying to hold on to what was best about some of the old ways we just throw everything out and and we think we can reinvent ourselves and as we do we're making ourselves sick yeah you're right and it's a really great point to sort of bring up we're not saying we need to go back to hunter-gatherer tribes can't yeah not only should we not we can't and there are so many great benefits of the modern world and there's a industrialization I guess it's it's how do we learn from the past how do we learn from our evolutionary heritage and what can we implement from that within the constraints of the modern world that's certainly that's how I see it and mention johan horas new bookends you know I each quarter of my book on stress is about this is about relationships and our yeah a lack of connection these days you know one one-on-one level we are we've been told anyway that we're more connected than we've ever been before and certainly in a digital sense that may be the case but you know when we talk about real human meaningful connection what I see around me with the public but what I also see in my practice as a doctor is I don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely we're more wired book were less connected is if I would put it good genuine connection happens between people not between pieces of technology so as you and I are talking to each other there's a real interaction yeah when you speak I'm looking at you I'm listening to the modulation of your voice I may nod in agreement or shake my head and disagreement vice-versa but the communication is taking place so many different roles that's the connection if you never have in the same conversation online it'd be a whole different ballgame and I'd have no idea actually who I'm talking to they'll just be exchanging words so we write together but we're not actually connected we actually disconnected and it's what cause people are isolated modules sending out messages via the ethernet or the internet when it comes to addictions it's is that this connection again that leaves us so alone so we're traumatized in the first place we are then developed be them develop behaviors that soothe our pain but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people because we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and and we furtively c.carter addictive pleasures and that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation that isolation further our pain and that pain further drives our addiction so we live in a society that actually generates addiction and many of its members yeah it really does doesn't it I I did a other post on my social media channels I think just yesterday actually about friendship and I was saying that look senior friends in real life so not over the Internet in real life is a necessity for human health and not a luxury and I know myself I'm neglecting some of the friendships closest to me over the last years because I've been busy with my career and my family and so and you sort of see on social media what your friends are doing so you feel less of a need to actually see them in real life and I was really surprised with how how how much that post on social media resonated with people so many people started interacting and saying yeah you know what I've not seen my friends in months yes I've maybe had a bit of a text concept conversation with them but I'm not seeing them in real life and yeah this is me trying to sort of challenge everyone to say hey look get a date and a diary now even if it's in two months time with one of your friends email them call them Texan whatever but put a date in the diary when you're going to see your friends in real life and it's crazy isn't it that we need to say these things I mean these things have always been there in human culture yet we're now having to talk about them and remind remind us what has what has just been our norm for so many thousands millions of years and what's interesting of course is that on Facebook we use the same language as we would in real life so on Facebook people have friends but these friends that we have these are people we don't know we have nothing in common with except maybe certain cultural ideas or interests and so these friendships aren't genuinely supportive relationships they're pseudo friendships and we actually substitute the one for the other and then on Facebook people like each other but-but-but-but which are again is a substitute for genuine contact but it's not that they like each other they don't know each other you don't know somebody until you hung out with them and and so we substitute the language of friendship and we substitute the language of connection for genuine friendship and genuine connection and then we wonder why feel so lonely and why we were so dissatisfied and why we seeking pleasure or seeking to numb that discomfort with the choices we're making whether it is heroin cocaine or shopping and sugar yeah yeah because I guess you know a lot of people listen to my podcasts are trying to make lifestyle change and a lot of people inspired to do so by what they hear but some of them I know are struggling well you know I'm very interested in the language and even a phrase lifestyle change it's not lifestyle change people make its life changes people need to make yeah you can change the style but style is a rather superficial thing you know the style of clothing you know it's the life changes that people need and and and we need to be help people see the life changes that are required not the lifestyle changes they need to require is that it's the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change not not the external behaviors and lifestyle largely refers to behaviors but not necessarily a transformation within and we need to deal with addiction it's not a question of dealing with the life style it's a question of dealing with the life and it's a question of really owning the life that this is my life and I'm the one who needs to be the agent of my own life and here are the reasons why the the wound or the trauma is another word for wound actually so the wounding that I received as a child has had me behave in certain ways it's not those behaviors I need to change I need to heal that wound I need to change my life and then the the the the life behavior changes will automatically follow you really even you really got me thinking about language actually because two terms that I use very commonly in my work whether it's hypertension or lifestyle you've you've just you know in seconds we frames what those words actually mean and wonder where that comes from you know you're an immigrant to North America where has this fascination with language come from well I think it's an immigrant that you get to see the language a bit more clearly than the people who actually in it and you get to see the construction of language and by the way in my secret life I used to be an English teacher so I did that with before I went to medical school so I've always paid a lot of attention to language and language very often unconsciously expresses realities and truths that when you pay attention to it or are revealing and so words should never even the word addict the word addiction actually comes from a latin face for slavery so a slave to the pain well the original meaning was an addictive it comes from the word to a sign now in the Roman world when you couldn't pay a debt you would be assigned as a slave to somebody until you worked after death so you'll be an addictive somebody was assigned to somebody so that's the original in the world so it's OD implies slavery so we actually understand that that addict refers or originates in a word for slavery we realized that it's not a choice because who would ever choose to be a slave you know so I think language is absolutely revelatory if you understand the sources and meanings of words yeah yeah very much say okay well I want to go to something you did last night in your talk yeah you know I went out for dinner with my friends afterwards we all attended it and we were all talking about it which was he peppered throughout the evening he said I if there was anyone in here who feels they have some form of addiction yeah without childhood trauma yeah and you're happy to talk about it please raise your hand and you know at the end you you actually found someone who you know quite confidently put their hand up and was you know pretty nonchalant but they had a happy childhood and so you started inquiring into her childhoods and I remember the tone of her voice and issue was very much you said you know when you have a happy child yes happy childhood the parent said yeah parents absolutely love me you know really he's sort of very vocal about how great her childhood was and then it wasn't long before it became clear that actually she felt that her parents really loved each other and sometimes she was intruding on them that's right and I think it was really powerful for the whole audience of 300 to see how you know how we all potentially tell ourselves a certain narrative stories that we continue telling ourselves and you know she obviously maybe as a fan of your work she's come here she comes at what you speak but hunt reflected on her own experience and you know what's going on there so what's happened here is that this woman said she was happy childhood but within a couple of minutes and and you know my mentor is white not by the addition will by the pain and so that I all say that this pain underneath it and I said to the audience it never takes you more than three minutes to drill down to where the pain is you said the rest all right questions so that's what I've got to say about a minutes in yeah I thought maybe this is the first one who gave what won't get see yeah you know I actually thought because she was so confident in there and says anyway please continue well their confidence itself as a giveaway yeah because it's an assumed stance to protect herself on the pain that she doesn't want to feel or she's afraid to feel so she said well maybe I felt I was intruding on my parents and in other words really what she felt was that she wasn't accepted I love to who she was and and when she felt unhappy there's nobody further to be talked to talked to and all you have to do is ask that person if you own shell did the same thing how would you understand it and they told to get it so what's going on there she's not lying but believing that she had a happy childhood was her way of dealing with hurricane because if she dropped that idea she'd have to realize that she suffered and she actually as much as her parents did their best and loved her for not blaming the parents but she herself got the impression that she was alone and unsupported and unloved for who she was but that's very painful yeah so we defend against the pain by suppressing those emotions and develop things this ideology of the happy childhood and so that's just another form of self-defense and then given her ideology that she had a happy childhood she can't understand and what she turned to an addiction but once she gets that yeah okay that belief that I was happy denies the fact that I was feeling isolated and alone and I felt myself as an intrusion on my parents yeah no she can understand what her pain was but but not feeling that pain was how she survived her childhood because as a child how would she survive if she believed that she wasn't loved for who she was life would be intolerable for her so she has to deny and suppress that so she had an appropriate response to the signals that were given to her that's exactly what you said before and that's exactly what happened with her so that that suppression of her pain and denial of it is a completely appropriate defensive response these are not mistakes that we make these are these are essential survival adaptations the problem is then we spend the whole because we learned how to ignore our feelings as children know we learned to ignore them for the rest of our lives and that then creates problems for us so again it's that whole idea of an early adaptation essential adaptation brilliant at updation but because it's unconscious it stays with us and now it limits our lives so we've become imprisoned with our own adaptations our childhood patterns become the prison through which we live our lives so hopefully last night for her might have been a a key step potentially in her now being able to really go out and seek real healing transformative healing hopefully such would touch would but I would say that the very fact that she came to the talk and the very fact that she raised her hand she was already working at it yeah because she didn't have to raise her hand yeah so she did it meant that she already had a curiosity about it yes she'd already taken the first step yeah absolutely okay but in your in your book in the realm of hungry ghosts I think is it the second chapter where you talk about a funeral you go to you of one if you're someone you were looking after an addict 35 year old or videos yeah and I will let you tell the story about one thing it really illustrates to me is how how you know addiction is on it or not as on a spectrum of course but how powerful that addicted that addictive drive is for some people and and I just wonder if you could expand on that excite that was really really interesting so this woman's a real name was Shannon I'm a chick until now she was 35 and she was a beautiful woman as a young woman when I met her she was already fading she was in her mid 30s or early thirties when I met her she had severe opioid addiction and because she injected she had blood borne infection in her one of her knees so she had osteomyelitis joint infection or a boy infection in her knee bones she needed to be lost for life so intervenors antibiotic care but she would never be hospitalized long enough but she had to leave and use and every time she left in use she was expelled from the hospital sir Austin myelitis was never treated expelled from the hospital expelled to a hospital because she wasn't engaging in treatments while she was leaving the hospital to use right and referee wouldn't treat her so addition yes so she wouldn't today they didn't want to using your IV lines for shooting or Charlaine no since then we've developed a facility where people can have intravenous antibiotics and use if they need to but this is before the days of that particular facility yeah so out of the regular hospitals she'd be regularly kicked out before her 6 to 8 weeks of antibiotics treatment was completed so by the mid 30s and they were actually talking about amputating the knee because there's nothing more they could do and so by the mid thirties she was in a wheelchair and she would quickly real her wheelchair down the street looking for her next hit she left the Downtown Eastside for six months and she actually got clean and then she came back and within three days was there dead of an overdose because what happened of course is that she used the same amount she had left she'd used before she left the Downtown Eastside but now she was detoxed so she lost her tolerance so you would understand what I mean by that yeah so the same dose that she could tolerate prior to leaving the Downtown Eastside know that she was free of drugs that same those killed her and so she would her funeral and there's all these friends of hers each of them with their HIV or their hepatitis C or their chronic infections and they were mourning their friend I'm thinking how powerful the drive of the addiction is that this young woman would would would shed her life for the sake of that next hit and her friends who are watching her being buried and memorialized we're gonna continue using despite this dire example yeah they're gonna continue using despite seeing that that you know seeing that wasn't enough to go white we're gonna change our behavior now and which is why anybody thinks this is a choice is out of their minds nobody would choose to to to blight and endanger their lives like that and and so this is what made me thinking well what is this powerful Drive I mean it must be really deeply built in to the human brain and the human soul for people to engage in this behavior despite all this deterrence that they witness around them and so what made that event powerful for me it was the starkness of the experience of these people and the social idea that some of this is any kind of a choice yeah well I mean it's incredible to hear that's actually and certainly may and maybe maybe all the listeners on some level in their lives may know maybe not so the same degree as that but may know what that drive feels like when you when you know you shouldn't be doing something but you choose to do it nonetheless well I know that I mean I've heard that in my own life and and there's something in you that knows you shouldn't be doing it it's almost but recently I I became aware of a form of therapy called internal family systems that's what I'm doing at the moment IFS yeah it's incredible dick Schwartz and stuff yeah yeah I've had two or three sessions and it's been brilliant for me so far amazing yeah so I met the founder of it recently we've got good friends and but but I've learned to technique to some degree I'm not an official practitioner of it but I I'm quick to catch on so in internal time systems you realize this is different parts of you and these different parts perform like a squabbling family but some of them like each other sometimes don't like each other so there's a part of me that can watch the other part doing its thing knowing that he shouldn't be doing it but feels quite helpless to intervene so I watched myself like for example when I supposed to be working looking after clients but instead I watched myself bored of the story to engage in my shopping addiction I'm not unaware of what's happening there's a part of me that's watching it disapproving of it wanting me not to do it but that part is not strong enough to assert itself the part that's driving the behavior is leading is driving the boat and so it's a question of becoming friendly with all these parts finding out what is it I really want what are they after another part that's driving me to do the shopping when I should be looking after my patients yeah it's the part that really is just fretful for me desperate for me to feel good for a moment that's all I want it just wants to be happy it's not an evil part it just wants to be happy and and it's not a question of indulging it but it's a question of really getting to know it and understanding and understanding it and actually being compassionate with it and and then teaching it you know what it's okay but this guy can be happy without indulging in that behavior yeah he doesn't need to do that you may think he does but he doesn't think compassion is something that's coming up quite a lot isn't it as a society how do we deal with addiction no matter what it is instead of locking people up because we've demons have a illegal addiction yeah we should be treating them with compassion but we should also be treating ourselves with compassion I think in not beating ourselves up over the choices we make because often you know they're just a protective mechanism well so you mentioned a number of times the the question of the arbitrariness of the which drugs we choose to legalize as physicians you tell me if you disagree with me but give me a thousand people who smoke heavily every day pack a day give me another thousand to drink heavily every day give me a thousand to smoke cannabis every day and give me a thousand to shoot heroin four times a day in a dose that doesn't create an overdose at the end of thirty years in which groups are we going to see more disease and death amongst those four groups I'll probably alcohol and the smoking cigarette smoking by far by far these are formal lethal drugs than the heroin and the cannabis okay that legal yeah no there are no heroin it's true if you overdose it'll kill you but I'm talking about in doses a part of many of the overdoses happen because people are having to shoot up in back alleys with who know what impurities what if we gave them their heroin and and as they do in some clinics in the UK at least they used to in prescribed doses that keeps them from going into withdrawal but doesn't the overdose them that group will be for healthy or thirty years later so by what arbitrary standard have we decided that it's okay for two people for four people to murder themselves with cigarettes and alcohol but they can't use heroin legally what logic is behind that it has nothing to do with medicine for sure it has nothing to do with health yeah I'm not I'm not saying we should sell heroin in the streets I'm talking about the legalization and the criminalization and the authorization why is that drug addict more to be more reprehensible than the person who smokes cigarettes where do we get these ideas from it's the why not the what the you know yes and with ume we were talking about this before before we started recording but you know we're both on one level we are both just GPS with just family physicians well they were just there's another meaning what does it mean we're very just people very interested in justice but what I find really interesting and it's something I talk about quite a lot is I think we've certainly overvalued the specialists within medicine for far too long yeah and really undervalued the role of the journalist and I am very proud to be an expert generalists and one of the reasons I moved from specialism into general practice which you know was a rather unusual decision for for many and certainly and my father he was an immigrant to the UK and you know was was really shocked as to why his son would do that qualify as a specialist and then moved to general this and and it was a demotion in his rank yeah I think it was just confused yeah and I understand that you know and I think you know I think the doctors of the future their health care practitioners of the future who are going to have the best outcome with their patients are the ones who are expert generalists and can see everything and you know I know we're running short on time so I we will hopefully continue this at another time because there's so much to talk about but I do find interesting that you're one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction and you're a family practitioner and a lot of what you do with your patients you have intuitively picked up and you've also got a skill at you know I think maybe the word counseling is the wrong word you've you do a lot of emotional work with your patients yeah and I'm finding the more I understand about the human body and the more I really understand what's driving my patients behavior I'm doing a lot of emotional work with them and yes of course referring them to an appropriate practitioner where well you know where is where it's needed where someone's got that expertise but that wasn't my job I didn't train to do that but I figured out as someone who's really inquisitive as to can I get my patient better yeah I find what I have to go it's with the importance well so I think you and I are both properly and dramatically impressed by the capacities and skills of our various specialist colleagues it's amazing what they can do so this is not without this is without any sense of diminishing or devaluing their work of course but they're trained in a certain ideology which is purely budget based so they look upon the human body as a physiological entity divided into various organs and systems and that's what they deal with and what they're not taught is that human beings but the mind and the body the emotions and the physiology are inseparable scientifically inseparable and we have the science to show the unity they also not thought that human beings are social creatures so that are very physiology is shaped by our social relationships and our very brains develop in a social context so that whether we talk about neurophysiology psychology or the physiology of the body we're talking about influences that were well beyond or genetic and physical endowment they're not thought that and therefore when they see a person what they see the disease in a particular organ whereas if you are a generalist that properly trained or at least a journalist who's developed a broader view you see that human being in context you see it in relationship to their lives in relationship to their to their environment and you see that the illness whether it's addiction or depression or anxiety or for that matter rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma more anything else is a manifestation not just of a system but of an entire life and that life is lived in the context and we have to address that if we're going to deal with the illness and unfortunately both you and I have had the experience of having to come to that conclusion through our own work and through our own internal experience of dissatisfaction with our our lives are going but nobody taught this to yeah and and and and yet this is the way that the auto so the average medical student despite a lot trauma that you and I have discussed today particular in relationship to addiction and all the research showing how the addicted brain develops in response to the environment and how the addiction itself is a response to the environment the average medical student in North America and I would argue probably in Britain doesn't even hear the word trauma once in four years of medical school I mean did you hear the word trauma when you went to school I heard it so a few years ago frankly you know medical school and and and it's not sure it's not a word that they should hear it's a course they should have they should every physician should be deeply trained in trauma because everything they see virtually everything they see there's got a traumatic connection to it particularly in the mental health field but I would say in the physical health field as well they don't even hear the word so essentially when a person goes to a physician they go to somebody with very deep but very limited knowledge who does not see the whole individual who's not trained to see the whole under even the fact that we say physical health and mental health is two separate things it's almost a reflection of that in many ways that's right you know because they're not different alright with and again the herd world health is interesting because what's the origin the world health its wholeness wholeness so to talk with physical health is already a contradiction yes because you can't talk about physical all its fullness means everything yeah I love it I love it thinking about it like that well Gable for a people listening we we've gone through some quite dark stuff hopefully illuminating for people about that's actually dark and and quite demoralizing potentially for some people in terms of than thinking about their own lives potentially what they might have inadvertently passed on to their own children I know certainly the first time I saw you speak you water by these sorts think about your own ability as a father and what you could have potentially done better all the time remembering that you've done the best that you can at that time I won't if we can finish off with a few notes of positivity for people that is hope and there are things that we can do to help change this well first of all I don't see this as a gloomy discussion because I think for people to understand themselves they need to look at all aspects of their existence so to me this is illuminating and and and st. Paul says somewhere that once you shed light in the darkness the darkness itself becomes light and so that I just think we have to look at all these dark places we have to shed light into all of them so we can fully understand ourselves to me that's a positive I'm always delighted to find out something about myself that that may have maybe I haven't seen so clearly before I always find it liberating and I believe people do as well number one number two what we haven't said though and I think probably Bob probably both you and I would agree is that human beings have a tremendous healing capacity and and and one of the failures of modern medical training is that we put all the expertise and the hope for help into the hands of the physician the physician is the one who's going to deliver the cure but we don't teach people about the innate healing capacity of the human being and we don't learn how do you promote that healing capacity we may have to administer whatever treatments are appropriate and whatever genius treatments we've developed that's great but nevertheless that's person still has an innate healing capacity how do we engage it it how we evoke it how do we encourage it that's not a question that we ask ourselves and yet there's many examples of people healing or doing much better with the illnesses than medical prognosis would have told them to look at the recent case of the recent death of Stephen Hawking the physicist who I discussed in one of my works now he was given two years to live when he was 20 years old he ought lived his diagnosis by more than five decades something in him allowed him to do that something in him that the medical mind could not have fathomed at the time so there's much more to people than we realize and so we have a lot we have to have a lot more faith and I don't know curiosity what is about what is it in people that allows them to overcome the challenge of addiction what is it that helps them live much longer than he had predicted what is healing what is hope becoming a whole really all about these are the questions that medicine ought to engage with but unfortunately it does not so I think your work and in your podcast and your books if because I understand them and the same thing with me are designed to help people find within themselves that which can empower them to support their own healing and we can't say that strongly enough yeah absolutely no thanks for that cable for people who are listening who you know maybe maybe something you've said it's really deeply struck a chord with them about their own life and they want to go on that journey but don't know how have you got any words of advice as to how they can start you know even even listening to this and started to be aware of course is a very critical first step but you know where can they go next well so you and I are both authors and I would highly recommend they check out our books first because I think and in my case I hope they check out my books because there's a lot of what I know and what I've learned that I've poured into my books and a lot of people find a lot of self knowledge just by seeing the mirror that's held up and in my writings or in my multiple YouTube talks for example know where to go in their own lives I actually think that once people start asking these questions they find the answers in their own lives in other words there's an old saying that when a student is ready the teacher appears and and and I think there's many modalities of healing that are practiced here in Britain anywhere else in the world that once you start seeing the limitations without rejecting the value but seeing at the same time the limitations of mainstream medicine start looking outside it a little bit or start finding practitioners within mainstream medicine that ever broader view in other words go where the health is and don't assume that because somebody's got a degree after their name that they know everything that needs to be known in other words become you become the agent in your own healing once people take that on generally they find help I find I can't give them a specific go-to except that once you start asking the right questions the answers will start coming yeah I love the way you put that so as I always say on this podcast once a empower and inspire people so become the architects of their own health and I think that's really really important so absolutely what we said about don't just assume because someone's got a qualification or a series of letters after their name that actually they're going to be the white wants to help you yeah I mean I want to talk about but I think in the interest of time we're gonna have to stop it there today I've got to say God well I think your work is phenomenal I really genuinely do I think it's got huge potential to help it's gonna save thousands but really millions of people around the globe I think this book you know that has been released in the UK which has obviously been a huge bestseller for about what 10 years now something like that's well you said all the world effect it's been published only in North America reading some of my books like when the body says no has appeared in 25 languages but this one has been published only in North America in my home country of hunger hungry but wherever it is published it is a best-seller and I know cancer thousands of people more having been helped by them I get that feedback and even that introduction you've written for the UK Edition is you know I couldn't put it down actually and it was just amazing to where they capture the essence of it and their lives that you have changed from people who've just actually able to reflect on their own lives just from reading the book so I really would highly recommend that people buy the book and actually I think it's gonna help your own life it might even help someone close to you and gabble where can people find you apart from your books is it somewhere they can follow you online so I have a website dr. Gabor maté a where all my public speaking engagements many of my articles YouTube lectures are available chapters of my books are downloadable no cost to any of that there's no cost to anything or they can just go on YouTube put in my name and I have many dozens of lectures that people have filmed and and put on YouTube again there's no cost any of that and I speak about addiction child development and stress and health the relationship in social factors and illness so I'm very easy to find on social media I also have a Facebook wall whatever that means that people because I don't post anything but somebody those on my behalf that people can follow some easily identifiable and discoverable online and what I'll do is in the show notes page for this episode of the podcast which will be dr. chaski calm for / gabbled G R I will link to everything that GABA and I have discussed today the episode and I'll just link to your website and your various talks so to make it really easy for people to find so so let me just say Aranda and that as Umizoomi I find yourself in the beginning when your mind starts opening to new possibilities there's a bit of a lonely journey within the medical field because most people colleagues just aren't aware they're not open to what you're talking about so it's always such a delight to run across a colleague who quite at all without knowing each other we just find ourselves two in the same soil and then in mining the same veins and trying to discover the same truths which only speaks to the the nature of truths and how it just asserts itself yeah but it's always such a pleasure to meet somebody who's done some of the same work and he's looking in the same directions because both you and I you know as confident as I am in my ideas and you seem to be in yours we still need the validation yeah sure so it's off it's really wonderful to meet somebody who who who really is asking the same questions well I can't say what that means to me coming from someone like yourself it's a huge honor for me to be here today and talk to you and I look forward to the next time thank you Lokesh thank you

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 251,665

Rating: 4.887073 out of 5

Keywords: The Four Pillar Plan, Whole 30, NHS, GP, Progressive Medicine, Type 2 Diabetes, Low Carb, Four Pillar Plan, addiction, gabor mate, childhood development, stress, the stress solution, childhood trauma, Dr Chatterjee, Emotional Health, Depression, Mind-Body, Gabor, Dr Mate, Tim Ferriss Gabor Mate, rich roll, lewis howes

Id: 2oicQ2xFiIc

Length: 77min 4sec (4624 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 21 2018