How to understand & heal your trauma: Gabor Maté, M.D. | mbg Podcast

that was a study in the states not that long ago that looked at two thousand women over 10 years those women that were unhappily married and didn't talk about it were four times as likely to die as those women were unhappily married and did Express their emotions so the issue wasn't happiness to unhappiness the issue was did they express it because the immune system is connected to the emotions when you're repressing your emotions you're also repressing your immune system in certain ways [Music] Gabor welcome nice to be with you thank you it's so great to have you uh as I mentioned before we hit record such an honor and privilege to have you on the show you are a living legend and you know as I was mentioning my old friend Lisa Rankin we've had on the show multiple times speaks so highly of you so it's just so great to have you thank you you know many of our listeners are likely familiar with you but for those who are not would you mind just talking a little bit about your background and journey which led you to writing your latest Incredible Book the myth of normal do you want me to begin with my Beginnings or my professional work where do you want me to go take I I didn't just tell people a little bit about your your beginnings and your professional work as succinctly as possible I know you you have such a great breath of work that's going to be difficult to do but I'll say in five in five minutes tell us what you can well I'll tell you what personally is that I was born in Budapest 1944 January the Jewish parents two months before the Nazis occupied Hungary you can imagine what my first year of life was like and it left me with significant traumas I then um integrated with my family to Canada After the Revolution against the stalinous dictatorship in Hungary that occurred in October 1956 a lot of hungarians left the country then refugees and we ended up in Vancouver Canada where I've lived ever since where I entered medical school after three years as a high school teacher I became a physician and in my medical work both in my personal life having to deal with that dichotomy would be my success as a physician my popularity is a as a doctor and you know successes in other areas of endeavor there was my own unhappiness the difficulties of my marriage and the challenges of my children and in my mid-40s I had to begin to asking myself about what's going on here and not surprisingly that took me back to looking at the traumas that I had endured very early in life at the same time as a family physician and a palliative care doctor I also began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental that people's emotional traumas in childhood had a significant resonance in their adult illnesses whether of Mind as in mental illnesses so-called or an illnesses of the body so whether we're talking about ADHD with which I was diagnosed at age 54 and that became my first book or whether we're talking about chronic fatigue or other autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis multiple sclerosis or malignancy or depression or anxiety or psychosis I began to notice that stuff had happened to these people and those illnesses were not um random Strokes of bad luck but there were outcomes of a process that had begun with childhood adversity and this was reinforced even more when I worked for 12 years in Vancouver's downtown his side which is North America was in fact the Western world's most Consolidated area of drug use if anybody visits here they're shocked at what they see in the streets thousands of people injecting and using drugs of all kinds I worked there for 12 years again the connection between trauma and addiction became inescapable in my experience and observation and what was astonishing is when I turned to the medical literature the scientific literature connecting physiological illness of the body mental health conditions addictions there was a vast body of scientific literature connecting childhood trauma and his adult outcomes and none of this is taught in the medical schools nobody had taught me about it despite the fact that the scientific evidence appears in the major medical journals medicine separates the Mind from the body and the individual from the environment so I wasn't adequately trained to understand what I was dealing with but once I my eyes began to open because of my own stuff that I had to deal with and what I saw my clients live with and die with the link between childhood experience and adult outcomes became inextricably clear and that has been proven by a hundred years of scientific research one more time published in major scientific and medical journals and yet it flies under the medical practice radar that's a summary well done there's a lot to um back there and so with regards to Childhood trauma you know there's a spectrum of trauma big teen little T as you talk about the book can you can you walk us through Big T specifically what you experience as as a child and then also talk about Little T as well what that looks like so first we have to understand the word trauma itself and Trauma doesn't just mean bad things happening to you it's actually not what happens to you or what happens inside you the word trauma comes from a weak word for wound or wounding so trauma is a wound it's a psychological wound that you sustain or that persists and leaves an imprint in your mind and in your body and on your functioning so trauma is a wound now the Big T traumas are the ones that people usually identify as traumatic such as a war a tsunami um the death of a parent physical sexual emotional abuse uh append dying a parent being mentally ill apparent being addicted violence in the family apparent being jailed any major separation from a parent um a ranker's divorce neglect these are would have been called the Big T traumas and they certainly wound kids and and kids sustain wounds psychological wounds as a result those wounds then show up in their functioning and in their health later on in life but that's not the only way you can wound kids you can also wound kids in ways that are very common and normal in this society and that's part of the reason for my title of the book The Myth of normal because it is normal for example in this culture to tell parents not to pick up a crying child well we're not talking about abuse we're not talking about lack of love we're talking about a child's needs being ignored the child the infant has a need to be held you tell a mother gorilla not to pick up their distressed infant you tell a mother dog or bear to ignore the distress of the infant but with telling parents to let their kids cry out and go back to sleep on their own we've been telling this for 100 years the child doesn't need to be picked up because the child doesn't need to be held that's a that's an emotional physiological need of the child when you're not doing that you're wounding them you don't mean to but you are so the small teeth farmers are not the big things that happen that shouldn't have but the small things that should have happened but didn't so human children are born with certain inalienable needs when I say inaliable inalienable needs I mean needs that Evolution programmed into us as creatures every creature have you been plant or animal entered this world with certain needs if those needs are met development will be healthy if they're not it won't be if a plant that doesn't get enough water it will not be healthy if it doesn't get enough sunlight it won't be healthy children are also born with certain needs dictated by Evolution and these are for unconditional attachment connection being held received accepted by the parents they even need not to have to work to make their relationship work so there's nothing a child should have to do they don't have to be pretty compliant smart good successful to make the relationship with the parent work there's nothing they should have to do to make the relationship work and nothing they should be able to do to break their relationship that's the second essential need of healthy human development the third essential human need of children or in need of human children is the capacity to experience all their emotions all their emotions now the our brains are wired scientifically neuroscientifically studied for certain emotional experiences love anger curiosity lust fear grief these are all essential emotions that human brains are wired for for healthy development the child needs to be able to experience all of them and have that received by the parents in our society a lot of parents get the advice don't allow your kid to be angry or when kids when a kid is grieving something just tell them to get over it this happens all the time when we do that we're denying the essential need of the child our children fourthly also have a need for free spontaneous play so when we give one-year-old kids this thing we've just destroyed their capacity to play spontaneously creatively and intuitively those are four essential needs a lot of children are wounded and in society not because the parents hurt them by doing bad things although that happens too but by not meeting their needs so that's those that's the Big T trauma and this is the most small T and the implications are heavy in both kinds of teas and can you talk about your personal experience growing up in well so my experience was that I was two months of age when the Nazis occupied hungry when I was five months of age my grandparents were transported and murdered in Auschwitz and um my mother and I came near to suffering the same Faith so you can imagine her Terror and her grief and the stress she was under my father was away in forced labor she didn't know if he was that or alive this is my first year and uh when I was 11 months old to save my life she handed me to a complete stranger in the street to Budapest and asked her to take me to a place of relative Refuge because I would not have survived under the conditions that she had to live under so I had this major trauma on of Abandonment of course she wasn't abandoning me she was saving my life but the infant can only experience it as abandonment and that sense of Abandonment then who gets abandoned somebody who's not worth it someone who's not good enough summer is not important so my wound is not that my mother gave me to The Stranger my wound is what I made of it but what happened inside is the belief that was being abandoned and that I wasn't worthy I wasn't lovable I carried that into my adult life into my medical career into my marriage so that's what happened to me you don't need such dramatic circumstances to make people feel that I have to earn the right to exist in my case it led to all kinds of conflicts in my marriage the slightest slight I would um interpret as an abandonment or rejection which would make me very upset in my marriage so a lot of conflict and it made me into a workout like Doctor Who had to justify his existence by being always available for everybody but his own family so that my workaholism which came out of my need to prove the value of my existence which came out of my one-year-old experience made me very successful in this world very high respected and well paid and it made me ignore my own children because of course when the Beeper went I was out of the house so this is how trauma is passed on from one generation to the next not intentionally by the most loving parents because we can't help it until we deal with it ourselves okay you mentioned trauma passed on from one generation to the next when one experiences trauma like you've identified being abandoned as a child uh I think that's easier to I to identify whereas generational trauma if there's trauma passed down from my grandfather who passed away before I was born a little more difficult to identify how does one go about that process and identifying the generational trauma that's been passed down let me just say that 95 of Toronto is multi-generational that's just how it works we unwittingly pass it on now I would you know it's certainly true that from the biological point of view um when grandparents are traumatized some of that is passed on into the genetic functioning of even their grandchildren not their genes as such but how those genes are triggered or not triggered how they come activate it and how they don't so that's called epigenetics but you know that's just an emerging field they were only beginning to understand it now but I would say that any trauma that was passed on to you from your grandfather wasn't then skip a generation it was passed on to you was this a maternal or a paternal grandfather both of me specifically both my grandfathers died before I was born and I just think it's an example A lot of people have grandparents have never met I would say that whatever was passed on to you happened through your parents and through your parents experience in life which they hadn't quite resolved by the time they had you that's so I would say that the modulation was passed on and a lot of you know sometimes in case some people tell me I had a perfectly happy childhood you know and uh that usually takes me about three minutes to sort that one out so well it does bring the point I think if one does the work they can identify the trauma in their own life but I think it becomes a lot more difficult when you're trying to identify the potential trauma in a parent for a grandparent who maybe is not open to doing the work or hasn't shared the trauma and if you're saying 95 trauma is passed down I'm just trying to give people an idea of what they can do to understand that to do the necessary work well so I think the only people understand their own traumas the more seed with Clear Eyes the traumas of others so here's the point about trauma I recall what I said trauma is not what happened to you it's what happened inside you so Thomas the wound Thomas not the event it's the wound that you're carrying that means you're carrying into the present it's an unhealed wound is what it is and so that trauma doesn't have to be recalled as such always because it's always remembered so there's a difference between recall and remembering recall is conscious I can recall what I had for breakfast I think I can recall our conversation so far I can recall what somebody said to me when I was five years old that's calling it back that's your conscious vehicle but the body has a memory in it the nervous system is a memory that is not necessarily conscious but the wound will still show up in a present moment so you tell me the last time you're upset with somebody and I can tell you exactly your childhood trauma because uh 95 95 of upsets like in it says in the course of Miracles we're never we're never upset about what we're upset about so most of the time people are upset it's about something else and so in the first chapter of this book I talk about how my wife is not there to pick me up at the airport on my return from a speaking trip I go into this rage and this withdrawal what was that about it's not about me being 70 years old and my wife the artist forgot that she had a husband when she was in the middle of a painting that's only been going on for the last 50 years for about six it's it's about the fact that the memory the that I don't recall but the emotional memory of Abandonment is triggered in my brain and so it's very easy for me to tell about somebody's childhood trauma just if they tell me the last time they were really upset with somebody in their lives usually it's about old stuff what role does perspective play here you know let's say two two people experience a similar traumatic event say a car accident for example same injury same Experience One walks away feeling blessed that they didn't have more serious injuries the other you know walks away feeling unlucky and victim and it defines them yeah so um uncanny that you would say that because I often talk about that very example for my own family practice of people being say rear ended with about the same Force among them develops severe back pain and and uh depression and you know and the other no big deal and and the insurance companies say well how can you this is not possible because there was the same impact as the other person and you're not they're not suffering why are you here's the deal traumas again not what happens to you it's what happens inside you as a result so when you said the same traumatic event happens to both of them no it didn't they both had a car accident one was traumatized the other wasn't now what's the difference here's what I found in Family Practice and as a fine practitioner I did have an advantage over my specialist colleagues in that I knew my patients I knew their family histories I knew their backgrounds I knew them as individuals two people get rearended with the same Force okay one of them had childhood trauma let's say they were abused okay yeah they didn't the car accident and the abuse have something in common the child did nothing to bring it on they couldn't have foreseen it and they couldn't have protected themselves against it that's the same it took her accident do you see the similarity number one number two the person was traumatized tends to carry themselves more stiffly than a motivated defensive mode people automatized the nervous system tend to be more in a defensive mode when your nervous system is in defensive mode you tend to be more rigid now take a lead take a a little grass or take a a piece of straw and bend them what happens to the grass when you bend it it rebounds what happens to the straw when you bend it with the same force it breaks so you have two different mentalities and you have two different physiologies undergoing the same impact you got that so far the third point is the person who complains of severe pain tends not to be believed nobody listens to them you're making it up you're just trying to you're just trying to get a big payout you're trying to get off work you know that reinforces their childhood experience of nobody being there for them and people not even believing them now no wonder that second person is more traumatized than the first so the point is perception as you put it has everything to do with it it's it's who's it happening to and what is the view of themselves and of the world the person who perceives the world already is dangerous and unpredictable um they're going to be hurt the other person no they just walk away so that's the difference let's segue to illness and this was an example of an injury and earlier on you said that in your experience much illness you've seen is related to trauma can you talk about that let's first of all go to the scientific side of it I'll mention three conditions um all of them um more common amongst women by the way so first of all multiple sclerosis which medical knowledge in its limitation sees this sort of a unexplainable neurological disorder image the immune system attacks the nervous system so it's an autoimmune condition inflammation of the nervous system then rheumatoid arthritis which again happens much more to women about 80 percent of autoimmune disease happens to women inflammation of the joints and the connective tissues that's rheumatoid arthritis then breast cancer okay in 1870 the first person to describe multiple sclerosis genre a French neurologist said that this is a stress caused condition in 1890 the Great Canadian physician and one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore William Osler survey Mosler said that rheumatoid arthritis was a nervous system condition caused by worrying stress in 1870 now in in six months ago in the New York Times there was an article by Jane Brody about some new research that shows that women with breast cancer if they're depressed the chance of their prognosis is much worse because based on their emotions in 1870 this is big news but wasn't big news at all it's just that medical science or medical practice ignores all the evidence in 1870 a British surgeon James Paget said the same thing the connection between emotions and particularly hopelessness and depression and breast cancer and now since these medical giants made those observations for which they had no scientific evidence at all because they didn't understand they just had their intuition there's been research on breast cancer on multiple sclerosis on rheumatoid arthritis repeated research that shows the relationship between emotions difficult emotions repressed emotions and the onset of disease and stress and the onset of these diseases and I quote some of that research in the myth of normal and I wrote about it previously in a book of mine called when the body says no the research is not even controversial most Physicians don't hear about it now what is the connection the connection is very simple very scientific very basic not taught in the medical schools which is almost astonishing that mind and body can't be separated so my emotional states have an impact on my physiology why because of the emotional centers in my brain my nervous system my immune system and my hormonal apparatus are not separate systems it's one super system they're not connected it's more than that they're one so whenever press anger I'm actually affecting my immune system now people who get chronically ill I notice certain characteristics um in family practice and this has been researched by others as well so I'm not making this up I when I saw it I I had no basis for it because nobody told me this but then I realized found out there was a lot of research as well people who are tend to be compulsively looking after the emotional needs of others and ignoring their own people who are identified with the duty and role in responsibility rather than also the needs of the self people who repress their healthy anger that was the study in the states not that long ago that looked at 2 000 women over 10 years those women that were unhappily married and didn't talk about it were four times as likely to die as those women who unhappily married and did Express their emotions so the issue wasn't happiness to unhappiness the issue was did they express it because because the immune system is connected to the emotions when you're repressing your emotions you're also repressing your immune system in certain ways now the final characteristic is people who believe that a they're responsible for other people feel and be they must never disappoint anybody now if you look at this culture between the two major genders which is the one that's programmed by this particular culture to take care of others emotionally while ignoring their own needs including their spouses which which is the ones who are told to identify with their duties rather than the needs of the self which is the one that is taught not to be angry they must repress their anger and which is the one that's made to feel responsible for other people feel it's not exclusive to women but by and large it is women and so that's why there's more ottoman disease amongst women and the more stress and the more um social oppression uh people experience the greatest risk for all these conditions so women of color are even more likely to have autoimmune disease than Caucasian women and in Canada where I live indigenous women have six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than that of somebody else six times this is in a population that never used to have autoimmune disease at all so what we're talking about is that emotions can't be separated from your physiology you cannot be separated from your environment and that means when you have an illness that's not just a manifestation of pathology in a particular organ in an isolated body but it's a manifestation of a lifelong process of a life that grew up in a certain environment in a certain culture in certain relationships so to understand the source of disease you have to look Way Beyond the individual organ individual body and look at their social situation and their emotional Dynamics that's the message in a nutshell and so if trauma is similar to stress in that we all have varying degrees of it whether it's Big T or Little T and like stress you can't eliminate it but you can you can manage it how do we all become better at managing our trauma what does that look like in our day-to-day well Jason I wouldn't use the word manage okay um because um I'm talking about resolving it you know so that it doesn't affect you the same way um so there you know it's useful to learn stress management techniques and there's a whole bunch of them out there including mindfulness and so on but I'm I'm interested in something deeper than that which is healing the trauma and and resolving that now for example to go back to my disease prone personality those four traits that I outlined it's a big word missing for you know from all those you know what the big word is no people have trouble saying no so in this book now why do they have trouble saying no really interesting question because you've got children you told me before we began the recording uh how old are they now uh we have two girls almost six and three and a half excellent um what's the word they started using at age one and a half oh of course there was no exactly now why does nature do that why didn't nature say this is this is natural this is automatic this is universal this we're programmed for it now why because um wouldn't be much more pleasant if nature told the kid to say yes instead hey time to put your shoes on yes you know time for supper yes you know no it's no why is that it's because Nature's agenda is that we should all develop into independent human beings with their own sense of what we want and what we don't want our own sense of values our own sets of of of perspective on the world our own desires and in other words nature wants to set a boundary between ourselves and other people's will otherwise we never become independent so Nature's agenda is Independence actually and if we don't know how to say no our yeses don't mean anything at all you live in Miami you told me if I come to Miami I invite you to for coffee and you don't know how to say no you're going to say yes automatically the uses doesn't mean a thing it doesn't mean you really want to be with me you might not even like me but you don't know how to say no you come to Miami invite me for coffee I'm definitely I got that one man but your yes is only meaningful if you know if you know you know you get that of course yes of course so what's the impact on you if you don't want to come to have coffee with me because you're tired or really busy or stressed about something and if I invite you to a coffee and you don't say no what's the impact on you afterwards sure you get upset you you go into that meeting you know you're a little bit uh upset you're upset with yourself that you said yes and then you're you're not fully present and maybe you're short maybe you're angry on the drive over here yeah all that has physiological impacts on your body these aren't just thoughts in that body the experiences and furthermore you'll be tired afterwards because you're already tired to start with and now you make yourself more tired so not saying no has the impacts on you so why do people have trouble saying no here's the big question because they began Life by saying no so what happened what happened was is they got their message early in childhood that in order to be acceptable to their parents they have to be compliant they have to suppress their own will their own needs their own perspective and they have to just serve others that's a very simplification of what I call the pension between attachment or need to connect and authenticity or need to be ourselves so that's what happens to a lot of people so people that don't know how to say no and they tend to be not exclusively but largely women in the society in order to they learned in childhood that they mustn't be their authentic selves in order to be acceptable and all their lives now they have trouble saying no if I have trouble saying no that's going to be very stressful for them so my intention is not just to manage the stress that prevent it by teaching people to say no for example I have the I say no all the time so maybe I've got another issue there yeah well well there is two kinds of no there's the authentic um responsive note that says no I'm considered this and this is not me I don't want to do it then it's the automatic no which is just a exaggeration of that one and a half year olds automatic resistant you you you tell me which one you've got maybe you've got I've got the authentic one uh it's taken it's taken work I I've had the other I've had the other one quite a bit in my life so if I it's take it's taken work it's been a process I am a working I have a work in progress that's what we all are we're all on a journey so you're never done and so you know we started talking about parenting and kids and something else you've talked about in previous work the influence of peer groups and this idea of holding your children close can you talk a bit about that the subtitle of this book is um the mythology is trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture and when I talk about the influence of peers on children I'm talking about the toxicities of our culture so how we evolved as creatures as human beings was in Small band hunter-gatherer groups so for hundreds of thousands of years before we became Homo Sapien and even after we became home soapy and about 150 200 000 years about 200 000 years ago we lived in small Bounty hunter-gatherer groups which meant that kids grew up around adults all the time everybody went everybody to get everywhere together children had multiple parenting figures in their lives I mean the the biological parents would be the primary ones but there'd be Aunts Uncles grandparents you know friends and children were held in this very securely held securely maintained environment of a network of caregiving adults that's so evolved that's our nature nature never intended us to live in nuclear family isolated Bungalows where single father a single mother or a single couple away from extended family is raising kids so we're living in a very unnatural situation now now what's the consequence children even need to attach now the need to attach is wired into our brain attachment means to be close to somebody for the purpose of taking care of them or to be taken care of by them so children of this attachment need they can't live without it even Birds can't live without the attachment Drive of the infant to connect to the parent and of the parent to connect to the infant so we have this circuit in our brain for attachment we can't live without it but nature doesn't tell us who we should attach to this is a good reason for it see if nature told your children to attach only to you and your spouse what's the danger there I think that I don't know if they'd have any friends or be able to attach to a partner later on in life and also you might die even now you might you know and that would leave them totally helpless so we have the circuit to attach without any information as to who to attach to it's the job of a community of the culture to make sure that children's attachments happen the way they're meant to happen so when the duckling hatches from the egg what do they they see the mother duck you know what that process is called it's called imprinting imprinting means the duckling essentially says to themselves this is the creature whom I'm relying for support nurturing guidance protection and help until I become an adult that's imprinting as an attachment process now as we know if the duckling hatches with the mother duck absent the duckling was still attached because their brains have to attach but who will they attach to ball attached to anybody who's around could be a dog a horse or a mechanical toy none of which are designed by nature to bring that duckling up to adulthood the human brain is the same the child's brain can't handle what is called an attachment void an absence of attachment nature nature assumes that the culture will take care of that attachment that's how we evolved in these small Ventura groups but in our society 25 percent of American women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth that's a major abandonment trauma for the child and a lot of parents just because they have to work you know and also because women very rightly want to feel that they can make a contribution to society they can express themselves professionally or through a career or through working um just as much as men can so a lot of children spend most of their time from very early age on no longer with the nurturing adults but where in daycares kindergarten schools preschools where most of their contact is with who with other children now their brains can't handle the attachment void now they have to feel the attachment void just like the duckling with whoever's around who's around are other kids and our kids become attached to other kids and the problem is that the brain can't handle competing primary attachments so it's very difficult for any human being to be genuinely and equally in love with two people at the same time usually the one one is chosen the other one is rejected when children become pure attached they start resisting their parents when they start resisting their parents the Parents try to become authoritarian about controlling their behavior and as they do they create more resistance it's not the fault of the parents it's the fault of a culture that doesn't honor attachments so is the message for Parents try to be is present as as you can and you're children's lives yeah the message for parents is no matter how you live your life you need to stay as the primary attachment for your children don't invite play dates until you're very sure of your child's attachment to you you know um if you can if your kids have to go to daycare there's this idea that we have to socialize kids no we don't socialization is an automatic natural process it happens to people who are well attached feel good about themselves and well individuated now they can attack now they can socialize in a very free and spontaneous fashion and so not that I'm telling people that they should homeschool their kids I couldn't have homeschooled my kids but homeschool kids interestingly enough make better friends later on and stronger friendships because they feel better about themselves for the most part not always but for the most part now it means that if your kids have to go to daycare or if they go to school and they spend most of the day away from you don't assume when they come back that they still belong to you you have to as my friend core writer this is a book that I wrote called hold on to your kids where all this is laid put in yes fantastic fantastic book Thank you And the main author of that is Gordon youfeld a psychologist and Gordon says collect them before you direct them so that when you see them at night it's not about homeschool and you know what's your homework it's about hello let's sit down together and hang on together gather them in again make sure they belong to you before you start directing them so in other words this culture is nuts in a way that it has broken apart healthy adult child relationships destroyed communities um severed um extended family contacts destroy neighborhoods we have to compensate for the failures of the culture by making sure that our kids stay attached to us and there's ways to do that but we have to be aware of the problem and not assume that our kid and for God's sakes keep this away from young kids you're pointing you're pointing to the iPhone of course keep it away from them because this iPhone and the computer technology connects kids to each other even men and not with each other long before they're ready to handle it so when are they ready to handle it is there a specific age look it's there's no specific age so much is this I mean we'll talk about this and hold on to your kids and we added towards the chapters just to deal with this but it's like when are you going to offer a kid a glass of wine it's when they can handle it you know so that may not be tied to a specific age it's tied to their maturation so when you have a good relationship with your child to the point where the child respects you and follows your guidance now you're safe to expose them to the technology because you can regulate it but if your child is not well connected to you if your child is more connected to the peer group and you give them a computer all they're going to do is deepen their relationship with the peer group and you come into the room they're gonna hate you and and you try and peel them off the computer it's like trying to get look I used to work with drug addicts and I used to have my own addictive behaviors trying to separate a kid from the computer once they become addicted it's like separating an analytics from their drug so you mentioned multi-gender generational living the power of real connection uh what we've done to communities it reminds me of one of my favorite studies the Rosetto study so the Rosetto study I heard the name yeah Alyssa talked about it Mind Over medicine so it was a small close-knit Italian Community in the 1950s Rosetto Pennsylvania oh yeah multi multi-generational people lived longer it was Paramount yes and so they they were very close-knit they were you know doing all the things we you know we know what we shouldn't do they were drinking wine they were smoking they were eating meatballs they were doing this every night but they were doing it together and this is when heart disease started to explode America Rosetto was way under the national average I think it was that complete absence of heart disease to some degree and no one could explain it and then in the 1960s the community started to break up people moved away ties became weaker heart disease arrived in Rosetto and to me it speaks to everything you're talking about in terms of multi-generational living connection and where we sit today is I think about the the culture we're living in and the trauma and the illness and all the things you talk about I think about Rosetta but that's what I call it a toxic culture you see um because it actually makes people sick and um if you look at the number of kids being diagnosed with all manner of so-called mental health conditions ADHD so-called oppositional defend disorder um anxiety depression the number of kids killing themselves suicidal suiciding is going up in in the United States the number of overdoses in the U.S last year exceeded a hundred thousand people the U.S lost more people almost as many people to overdoses in one year as they had lost in all the Iraq Afghan and Vietnam Wars put together women's ratio of multiple sclerosis when in the 1930s it used to be about one man for every woman almost now it's three and a half women to every man uh the rates of our the rates of autoimmune diseases are going up so here's this is it's something like um 70 of American adults are at least on one medication 50 40 percent are on two medications we're talking about a toxic culture unless we think that these are all individual and genetically determined misfortunes or random misfortunes we have to look at the conditions that is driving all this pathology and I'm telling how we're living the lives that we're living by the way parents are taught to raise their kids the way kids are schooled look um there was a last week two weeks ago Elon Musk acquired Twitter first thing you did was hire it fires 7 500 people just like that there was a report in the British Guardian a few days ago some in the United States some furniture and building Factory fired 2500 people while they were sleeping they sent them texts just before Thanksgiving they send them a text saying you're fired don't even come into work until we make sure that security is okay now when you look at what stresses people scientifically what creates physiological stress for people or insecurity lack of information uncertainty conflict and lack of control and in society those are rampant unemployment and the loss of a job isn't just an economic hardship it's also a blow to your physiology and we know that people are chronically unemployed have more heart disease for example so uh we can't separate the Mind from the body the individual from the environment where what has been called bio psychosocial creatures which means that arbiology is dependent on our psychological States and that depends on our social relationship with others that's just a scientific fact about human beings is there something is they they hear you talk I think about other points in history growing up in World War II uncertainty War conflict Lots going on is there something that's unique to the time we live in today to make it so much worse what what is it this connection isolation people being on their own one of the things that um if you look at multiple sclerosis for example stress triggers the flare-ups but social connection mitigates and diminishes the the risk of flare-ups so I so human beings are social creatures so loneliness for example extreme loneliness is a risk factor for illness when you're lonely you're likely to get sicker faster and to die quicker of your disease now is an epidemic of loneliness the number of Americans who say they're lonely has gone up exponentially in the last several decades in Britain they've had to establish a minister for loneliness for God's sakes but it's the conditions of Modern Life and modern uh globalized culture that promotes the loneliness so that its isolation it's loss of community it's loss of connection in the 1930s the Depression was very hard on a lot of people economically very stressful but if you read the literature of the time there was a much more sense of social connection people were poured together people struggled together and uh that is missing for us so it's the disconnection so if disconnection is driving this how do we write this ship yeah uh well I think there are two big issues here and I the reason I side and I'm gonna shook my head here if you're hearing this you can't see that but it's because that's a very big question to which I don't pretend to have a satisfactory answer but here here's some Beginnings step towards an answer for one thing we have to recognize the nature of the culture that we're living in and recognize that we think what we think is normal is neither healthy or natural and communally we have to start thinking about different solutions of how to live our lives and how to run our communities we have to use the technologies that we have to connect with each other in modern communication technology has all kinds of terrible consequences but it is certainly made possible communication amongst mature adults people need to bring virtual at least build virtual communities where they can share ideas and share their miseries and share their Joys and talk about their values and so on so we need to see connection on a local level on the internet level if possible um we have to actually bring trauma awareness I makes very simple suggestions in the last chapter of the book what if we actually introduced to the stuff I talked about today which is more than amply scientifically demonstrated is completely ignored by medical education which is astonishing but the average medical student doesn't hear a word about trauma except in a specific case of post-traumatic stress disorder but the relationship between trauma stress and multiple sclerosis for example or rheumatoid arthritis or breast cancer well documented in literature is not mentioned in medical schools they don't even need to hear about it so let's introduce trauma and stress education in the medical schools into our schools so when teachers see kids with all these troubled behaviors they don't focus on the behavior they understand the emotional dynamics of the child and they can read to the child as a human being not just as a problem with a problem behavior that would change the experience of a lot of kids in school especially kids who come from difficult backgrounds um what if we introduce strong education into the legal system so that the judge and the lawyer and the prosecutor were looking at these criminals understood what the source was not to validate or to support or to accept harmful Behavior but also have rehabilitate people afterwards rather than just punishing them that would change so many things you know on the individual level we need to look at what was our childhood programming to what extent am I living a life that expresses who I am where I'm free to say what I think and what I feel and to what extent do I suppress myself to say she or to propitiate others to to make them accept me to be nice to what extent do I suppress myself so that loves you accept me these are all the questions that we have to ask ourselves I think it's doable and in closing on a personal level what has made the greatest impact in your personal life in terms of all the things you talk about and and working on trauma working through it becoming more self-aware I think two things um when it's personal the other is relational the personal one if I've I always wanted to know why like as soon as I realized what happened in the genocide in Eastern Europe that really swept away so much of my own family I wanted to know why is it that people suffer and why is it that they make each other suffer so that question has driven me since I was a teenager and you learn a lot about that through medical practice so just a willingness to keep asking questions and that willingness is with me up till now and I hope it'll stay with me for the rest of my days on the personal level yes I've done emotional healing work I've also taught it to others and guided others many others but but made the most personal difference to me was my marriage relationship where because what happens in a marriage folks I hate to tell you we always find somebody to partner with that is exactly at the same level of traumatization that we are even if it looks different my wife didn't grow up in Eastern Europe with midst of a war genocide she grew up in sunny or off and rainy but very peaceful Vancouver British Columbia but the level of trauma although the externals look quite different was it the same degree as mine we always find somebody at the same level of traumatization which means that in a good relationship people can grow up together and most of my growing up has been and continues to be in my marriage because as I say in the first chapter is that my Misfortune is that I married somebody who understands me you know she doesn't she doesn't let me get away with being the poor traumatized child in the body of an adult she would she demands that her needs to be met that wasn't always the case by the way there was a period in my life where my wife really suppressed herself she suffered and then she learned nah not anymore now I had to either keep up with her or say goodbye I'd rather preferred to keep up with her and so the marriage relationship I think is a wonderful opportunity if both are willing to heal trauma and to grow up together well said Gabor thank you so much my pleasure thank you

Channel: the mindbodygreen podcast

Views: 651,687

Keywords: childhood trauma, dr gabor mate, dr. gabor maté, gabor mate, healing from trauma, health podcasts, mental health, self development, self help, self improvement

Id: C-1Ukfaf7co

Length: 53min 6sec (3186 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022