What No One is Telling You About Trauma and Addiction | Gabor Mate & Joe Polish

in this society that we make certain assumptions about human nature and the assumption that we make is that human nature is competitive and aggressive and selfish and aggressive don't we just make that assumption whenever it doesn't somebody does something selfish or aggressive or manipulative what do we say oh that's just human nature but when somebody does something kind or generous or giving do we say oh that's just human nature so we make certain assumptions but your work which is actually designed for the entrepreneurial world it's not about what's in it for me it's about what's in it for them and and it's about building connections which is actually human nature required for connection you see and we were actually more wired for love than we are for selfishness if I need that map and so if you ask yourself there's anybody in this room just ask yourself when do you feel more at peace inside when is your viscera your guts and your heart in your lungs more expansive and more relaxed when you've been selfish and aggressive and grasping or when you've been kind and generous and connected with people well the answer is going to be in most of our cases that it's under the second condition that should tell you what human nature is actually all about [Music] so your book here is actually an appeal to people's essential needs Tim Westbrook was the guy that I mentioned yesterday when I introduced Joe polish Tim owns Camelback recovery right here in the Phoenix area which includes a treatment facility for people that have been broken by mental health issues drug and alcohol addictions and are ready to reclaim their lives he also has a sober living home for people who have completed treatment and are on their way back to sobriety and happiness let's set up the two chairs for Joe and our special guest and as that's being done please welcome Mr Tim Westbrook [Applause] surrounding you at this genius Network annual event are entrepreneurs who have come from all over the world that are drawn by our approach to combining your business success with your personal and health success research proves however that successful entrepreneurs are often trading their health for their wealth many experience a high degree of trauma addictions and illness there is hope and there are answers and you're going to find both in what Dr Gabor Monte has to share with you in this discussion Gabor is a world-renowned speaker as well as a best-selling author his latest book is the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture please help me welcome Dr Gabor mate and your host and founder of Genius recovery and genius Network Joe polish thank you thank you thank you [Music] thank you Gabor thanks ladies and gentlemen do you have a preference do you have a preference no that's good all right good so um great to have you back nice to be Ben it was uh 2017 when I had you come to a genius Network meeting and some people at the time were thinking what the hell are you bringing this guy is going to talk about addiction and Trauma and stuff too a business conference yeah and the feedback I got was that was one of the most eye-opening valuable insightful things that sent sent to a lot of people down a path of looking at a lot of their stuff and that video that we did that I've put out in three different uh things just on YouTube has been viewed over a million times and uh on other forms of social media God knows so you're reaching a lot of people so uh your newest book The Myth and normal which we got a copy for everyone it is a big book it is powerful it's profound and uh why'd you write it you've written about how did I write it why'd you write it because I want to get rich and famous yes yeah that's I knew that was your motivation um because the way the world is going like if you look at the the health situation here's the richest country in the world the United States and if you look at just the covet the crisis one of the biggest risk factors for dying of quote was being an American being in being America yeah per capita a lot of people died here more than anywhere else um the number of overdoses in the United States last year exceeded a hundred thousand which meant that almost as many people died in one year of just opiate overdoses I'm not talking about people died of cigarettes or alcohol just drug overdoses exceeded almost the number of by doubled actually all the number of American lives lost in the Vietnam Afghan and Iraq Wars put together the number of children being diagnosed with all kinds of mental health conditions and being medicated is going up and up all the time the number of childhood suicides is rising and nobody seems to know because they're not looking in the right direction which has to do with the atmosphere that you were talking about earlier yeah uh is going up all the time the number of people with autoimmune diseases going up women have 70 or 80 percent of autoimmune disease if you're a woman of color or minority your risk of autumn disease goes up even more exponentially and so the question I was asking is either we can look upon these issues as random misfortunes dictated by genetics perhaps which is just this scientific nonsense or we need to consider that there's something in this atmosphere is as you put it that's creating all this illness all this dysfunction there was an article in New York Times two months ago or so about a teenager who's on 10 different psychiatric medications can you believe that 10. excuse me he should she should maybe him on one if at all so what my argument is that if I was a laboratory scientist culturing bacteria or microorganisms in a laboratory I put them into a brew if a lot of those organisms thrived and proliferated this would be a healthy laboratory culture that's what we call it culturing if under the hand a lot of them got sick or dysfunctional or died we would say this is a toxic culture I'm saying that this society that we're living in is a toxic culture because it for all this incredible technological and economic scientific and cultural achievements it denies essential human needs and the final comment I'll make is that in medicine when we talk about normal we're talking about the range of biological conditions within which human life can sustain itself so below or above a certain range of blood pressures you know you can't live if it's too low or too high you die or body temperature there's a normal range in which sense the normal is equated equated with healthy and natural but we make the mistake in society that we think that the conditions that we used to and therefore we think they're normal are awful health and natural healthy and natural no they're not they make us sick and that's what I mean by the myth of normal so I want to bring in all together the individual health issues onto the very cellular level with the social cultural issues including the politics including how we treat each other including how you feel about ourselves and to show the interconnection between all of these Dynamics yeah and what I hope for today is that everyone will hear something from you that they will go into they will dive deep into the book and they will learn about something that they probably may not be aware of uh we we I'm glad that all of the talk on trauma is now in the open because it hadn't been for a long time I'd like to have you first off Define trauma and then the the difference between using it as a badge or as a living in woundology which a lot of people do versus what is really trauma and addressing it and not just sweeping it under the you know under the rug sure well first of all it is possible to identify with your trauma and make that into your personality make that into your identification yeah yeah which means that you're stuck in something that happened in the past and you can't move Beyond it so this that's not but on one hand on the other hand so drama can get a bad rap that way yeah yeah on the other hand we're not looking at trauma nearly enough um so what is trauma this is to the point where even though there is volume and a scientific research does not even vague the controversial that shows the relationship between trauma and physical and mental illness to the point that uh a British psychologist a member of the British Academy Richard benthal said that the evidence for example linking childhood adversity trauma to adult mental health conditions is as clear as the evidence linking cigarettes moving to lung cancer but despite that scientific fact the average medical student never hears a single lecture on trauma which is almost unbelievable but they don't so that means they don't know what they're looking at so what is trauma so trauma literally comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding so trauma is a psychological wound trauma is not what happens to you it's what happens inside you it's not the um hit that you get it's the concussion so drama is the wound that happens inside you so trauma for example in the very first chapter of the book I talk about how when I was 11 months of age I was given to a complete stranger in the streets of Budapest by my mother and I didn't see her for six weeks the trauma is not that I was given to a stranger she did that to save my life there's a Jew Jews living under the Nazis that's the only way she could keep me alive so I didn't see her for five or six weeks the trauma is not that she gave me to a stranger and I didn't see her the trauma is the wound which is what I made the mean in myself what did I make it mean the only thing that an infant can make it mean which is that I'm not lovable and then I'm being abandoned and rejected so that wound can show up 70 years later when something touches it so a term is a wound it's not what happens to you it's what happens inside you and the characters of the wound basically are twofold one if you touch it it's very sensitive that's when you're triggered and by the way this word about being triggered I'm being triggered good thing you're being triggered because it means you get to examine yourself because the trigger is only a very small part of the mechanism for the trigger to do its work there has to be explosive material inside you every time you get triggered you get an opportunity to to examine what explosive charge what ammunition I'm still carrying from childhood that has just been triggered so trauma first of all is you know if you touch the wound that's very sensitive the other aspect of a wound is that it scars over and Scar Tissue well it's protective is not live it doesn't have growth capacity so people who are traumatized get stuck at certain levels of emotional development um Scar Tissue has no nerve endings in it so you don't feel so people who are traumatized to the extent that they're traumatized they disconnect from their bodies they disconnect from their feelings which is not a bad thing you see because if you take an extreme example a child being abused you can't run away you know the the healthy response is to fight back or to run away but I mean I know you're experienced Joe and and could you have fought or or escaped at that time you couldn't have so that the protective response is to disconnect from yourself so that's the trauma in a sense represents the organism's automatic defense mechanisms but then that disconnection from feeling it creates all kinds of problems later on in life mental and physical illness or when the pain gets too much and you can't bear it you have no way of dealing with it because you couldn't deal with it as a child and now you get into addictions to soothe the pain so drama disconnects you from yourself and that's the biggest impact of trauma which means that now you're no longer leading an authentic life and everybody in this room is committed to being authentic and isn't it just a challenge but why is it just a challenge let me ask you a question here I just ask for a show of hands how many of you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something ignoring it and then being sorry afterwards that you ignore your gut feeling just raise your hand it's always the vast majority you know what you just told me the story of your childhood because you've never met a one day old baby who's disconnected from the gut feelings so something happens that's something that disconnects us from our gut feelings is the traumatic experience now I Define or at least I describe trauma as having two major categories there's the Big T trauma excuse me this is the last gig on a seven week speaking tour now so my voice is rather challenged at the moment um but the Big T trauma is when terrible things happen to a child such as the sexual abuse that Joe endured such as the separation from a mother that I endured at age 11 months um such as poverty or racism such as being emotionally abused or neglected or apparent dying or parent being addicted or apparently mentally ill or a rancorous divorce that a child has to live through violence in the family apparently mentally ill these are the big teeth from us at least these are the Big T traumatic events but there's another way you can hurt people don't forget trauma means a wound you can wound people in two ways one is by doing bad things to them or you can wound children not by doing bad things to them but by not needing their needs human children have evolved with specific needs they're not just a blank slate or which you can write anything you want they have certain emotional needs as adults we have certain emotional needs for the healthy development of the human child certain conditions have to be met for example an attachment relationship with the parents but the child is absolutely secure absolutely safe and secure rest which means that the child shouldn't have to work to make their relationship work he she they shouldn't have to be pretty compliant smart any of that stuff they just have to exist that's the need of the child children have to be given the freedom to experience all their emotions their and our brains are wired for emotions you see our emotional brain developed long before our intellectual brain and in the individual development of the human infant the emotional brain develops before the intellectual brain the emotional pain is the scaffolding for the intellectual brain when the scaffolding is good the intellect will serve the proper purposes when that scaffolding is not good the intellect can go Rogue and be very brilliant and create a lot of evil so that one of the essential needs of children is to be able to experience all their emotions which we share with all other mammals by the way which include caring or love fear Panic grief playfulness curiosity rage anger in any parenting and this is a lot of a lot of the parenting advice that parenting experts so-called give mums and dads in this Society is that some emotions under the childhood part of the child are acceptable some are not and they have to be discouraged and even punished when you do that you're forcing the child to make a terrible decision if I myself I won't be accepted I won't have the attachment relationship on the other hand to have the attention relationship I have to suppress aspects of myself that's why you all put your hands up because at some point you learned that in your family or virgin it was safer to belong than to be yourself and then it becomes a lifelong struggle to get back to who we actually are so trauma then is this wound that you sustained either because terrible things happened I shouldn't have which happens to a lot of kids or because the good things that should have happened did not not because their parents didn't love you not because they didn't do their best but because they live in a culture that makes it so difficult to be a good band yeah very good uh so that's a good sign there at least resonating with what you're saying what is the difference between because I wrote this down and make sure I say it right what is the difference between childhood trauma and adulthood trauma would the body respond differently to each of them and would you handle them differently and if so how so I'm because there are things that happen in childhood but there's betrayals and things that happen in adulthood well let me tell you some I don't quite see it that way um there is um a very famous and rightly so child psychiatrist and neuroscientist and Trauma expert called Bruce Perry Dr Bruce Perry who who's a book with Oprah what happened to you is you know a recent bestseller and Lewis points out that if you take kids and you get the first few months or years right and you can and all kinds of terrible things happen later they'll be okay but if you could take kids and you get the first period wrong and they suffer a lot all kinds of good things can happen later and they'll still be in trouble and when you look at the studies on PTSD the people who develop pities in adulthood were people who were traumatized in childhood and those adult experiences actually trigger the childhood trauma so in a particular you know company of soldiers maybe 100 they go into battle they all experience the same killing the same cruelty the same loss of their comrades the same fear the same rage per announce and 2030 will come out with PTSD the others will not it's because of those 20 and 30 were already carrying the trauma of childhood so I'm saying that adult trauma is in virtually every case I know manifestation of unresolved childhood trauma okay well that's so uh going so Dr Don Wood you know he has the line if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life it would make sense why they do what it is that they do what have you discovered uh in because you've I mean I wish I would have found the video of me and you driving around when you were pointing out in Vancouver's yeah yeah because he wrote a book in I think 2009 he wrote in the realm of Hungry Ghost that's right yeah and he which is an amazing book so if you want to uh you know go deep into on on addiction uh gabor's written uh when the body says no um scattered and then I think it's called scattered Minds in Canada yeah this is my book on ADHD um which is my first book after I was diagnosed with it and it was published in um can I live with the title of scattered Minds in the U.S with the battle scattered I think the thought was the American publisher didn't think the U.S public would understand the word Minds I don't know I don't I don't know what the problem was but lo and behold my publisher is going to bring out scattered Minds in the U.S again with the actual title scattered lines yeah you know what I admire about you too though you have never been like a marketer like let me figure out how to build my YouTube channel and stuff and you now have millions of people that follow you because you say things that change people's lives and you help guide people and you uh you are a significant figure in the world I mean one of the most important uh figures I constantly say to people that you're probably the most uh in tune intelligent um articulate person describing addiction and disconnection of anyone I know you I know you helped Johann Hari who has the you know the great line um you know the opposite of addiction is connection and then your uh when you did your first Ted Talk you had a line where the question is not why the addiction but why the pain yeah and so you've really helped me understand that addiction is a response to pain it is a solution to pain and so even in the my my book um what's in it for them you know the first chapter is which thank you you gave me a nice endorsement for this deservedly by the way thank you thank you and I say be a pain detective because what I've realized is that pain is a great messenger and so to go back to Dr Don Wood if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life it would make sense why they they do what they do so I look through the lens of where are they suffering how can I help where am I suffering what is pain trying to tell me and and right before I came to this conference this morning for date day two here a uh one of the people and one of the members in the audience said you know do you know any good doctor for plant uh uh plantar fasciitis I have this pain and I've not been able to get help and I one of the things I said was I got someone I can recommend Steve ozannich who wrote the main deception which I know you you know you know Steve uh but I said listen to my talk with Gabor because I think they're you know I I think there might be uh not might be there I know there's a link between disease and addiction and pain because of unresolved trauma and in your book uh like chapters 27 28 and 29 you go really deep into compassionate inquiry which is your process and I guarantee you those have not read gabor's book that alone is worth this book just those three chapters of giving you a process on how to even just look at your own life and so for so my question is uh and then I'm going to come to add because I definitely we cannot have uh interview without talking about that because there's so many people here that identify with distractibility so how does one change the atmospheric conditions of their life in a positive way because we you know there's a lot of people running the world right now that are creating the worst storms on the planet and so I just wanted to get your perspective on that yeah so the first thing is to recognize that that is a problem a lot of people don't recognize it they keep trying to run away from it and one way to run away from recognizing that there's a problem is that you become addicted so for example we did this the first time you spoke but let me do it with this audience okay I'll give you a definition of addiction um that I don't think is controversial so an eviction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves but then suffers negative consequences and they have difficulty giving it up despite the harm so it's pleasure relief therefore craving short-term long-term harm inability to give up that's what addiction is I said any Behavior I didn't say drugs it could include drugs of course it does cocaine heroin custom nicotine caffeine alcohol but it could also be gambling the internet pornography sex relationship work and in this culture workaholism is rewarded like my vocalism was rewarded shopping any range of human behaviors the issue is not the activity it's the internal relationship pleasure craving relief harm inability give it up so I'm going to ask you guys a question here if I'll go into that definition you recognize that sometime or another you had some kind of an addictive pattern in your life just raise your hand okay again it's virtually everybody here now the next question I ask is not what's wrong with the addiction which we know but what's right about it what does it give you in the short term in the short term what does it give you that you like okay I wonder if a couple of people just raise their hand and then shout out their answer okay what does it give you in the short term or what did it give you I'm not I'm not going to ask you what you're addicted to or how long or when just what did you when you were in it temporarily what does it give you anybody serenity serenity okay thank you feels good feels so it's a good feeling pleasure yeah dopamine hit of course which is me which means excitement yeah stimulant Escape Escape thank you escape No Escape from what escape from distress that's came from emotional pain serenity um a sense of aliveness Escape From Pain or these good things or the bad things in themselves the good things are the things we all want they're the things we all deserve actually they're all the things we should have had as children which means that the addiction wasn't your primary problem your addiction was under them to attempt to solve the problem therefore to talk about addiction either as an inherited disease or some kind of a choice that people make and by the way there are millions of people in jail in this country because of this social belief that addiction is some kind of a choice for which people should be punished no it ain't it's an attempt to deal with life problems such as emotional pain and so if you want to understand addiction you have to look at the atmosphere again as Don Wood says that people grew up under and what they're trying to escape from so first we have to recognize that there's a problem and not run away from it secondly we have to accept compassionately all parts of ourselves all aspects of ourselves whether we like them or not because all aspects of ourselves whether we like them or not they came along for a reason and if we ask the question compassionately foreign why did I do that what need was it serving what was my organism trying to deal with you'll find the answer if you ask the question so you can ask the question two ways why did I do that why did you do that do you think this is going to be an answer no because that's not a question that's an accusation against somebody else or against the self and as one of my spiritual thesis says only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth now if you ask somebody else why did you do that but hmm I I know you're a good person trying to do your best any idea why you did that but that's the question and the same with yourself if you put to yourself no why did I do this but hmm I wonder why I did this that's what a compassionate inquiry is yeah and and my belief is is that the answers are within all of ourselves they actually are and if we're compassionate with each other which is so much of what you talk about and if we're compassionate with ourselves then the answers will emerge so that's the beginning is to recognize as a problem and to be compassionate about examining those sources of that problem yeah in in your book you uh I can't remember if I think it's chapter 28 or 29. you have a better memory for my chapters than I do that's a big book here's the thing I read I I've read a good portion of the book but I listened to the entire thing on audio Yeah I think and I listened to it at a little bit higher speed because I'm not one of these people that can do one and a half it's like 1.1 or 1.2 sped up right and Daniel who I've met your son reads the book and yeah my son uh who helped me write the book also and there it's the audio version and been number two audiobook in the US now no it's number nine I think you know and on the New York Times list yeah no the but and it's been like six weeks now right six weeks in the New York Times yeah which is amazing um and you you talk you actually have uh questions for compassion inquiry ones that would be so beneficial to so many of the Workaholics that are in this room including myself uh is where you go through the process of like what do you say yes to and you really don't want to say yes to it or what or why you say no when you really do want to say because you know part of I mean we have to talk about workaholism because I took a one-year sabbatical last year just yes I know yeah I was so proud of you you know thank you man yeah and I'll tell you I I don't think I ever would have uh done any of this stuff had uh I mean me and Gabor in 2015 I think it was in in the jungle we went and uh I spent a week in the jungle with you uh doing an Ayahuasca uh three different Ayahuasca Journeys and at one point you were like yelling at me remember that during the process not very compassionate but but I still knew you you were coming from a really loving place so yeah um but uh that really was the beginning point of me starting to look at just God the compulsivity and the and you know it's unravel so much of this stuff and the other thing that helped is you helped with me and Cara Chan started uh artists for addicts yeah and we and I was asking you about like how do we utilize artists to be the ones that carry the message to the world you know the singers and the in the actual painters and the sculptors and the writers and the people that are in the Arts because the world admires all of these people and they don't realize how many of these people that are viewed as struggle and suffer the most with these uh with with addictions and with depression and with anxiety and so all that was really helpful but it's expression I look at you know work and I look at sex addiction and gambling addiction it's it's it's expression but it's expression gone in a wrong way and so work like you you said you know there's a subtitle to a book on workaholism which is the respectable addiction so this room is filled with people that compulsively work and have ADD and I know that so much of that it's it's just it's trauma that they haven't dealt with and that's why I bring you here because I Want to Build a Better entrepreneur because if you don't have a better entrepreneur you have destructive people that do awful to make money and if you have a caring giving person these people change the world and they do amazing things so let's talk about I guess uh compulsive work sure how does one address it sure well again if you address everything from the point of view of what can it teach me and how can I be compassionate about looking at it the actions will emerge so you know like you I was a workaholic doctor now the more I was a workaholic doctor the more the world rewarded me the more money I made the more respect I had so like you say it's a respectable addiction what was the downside I was disconnected from myself I wasn't available for my children as they were growing up emotionally because the work was I was identified with the work and before my marriage suffered and it was hard to recognize that because the work is so rewarding and and it turns you on you get this dopamine headphone working what was it all about well when your mother gives you to a stranger when you're 11 months old what conclusion you're going to come to so you're not wanted you can't come to another conclusion that's the wound not that they gave me to a stranger but that I conclude that I'm not wanted now if you're not wanted if you don't think you're important just for existing as I said many times before you know what you do you go to medical school now they're gonna now they're gonna want you all the time when they're being born when they're dying and every minute in between them and they're in trouble they're gonna call you and every time they call you it feels so great you're so important but it never fulfills it or it never fills the inner emptiness does it it's a temporary hit like with any other addiction because something any says whether you're aware of it or not would they still want me if I was getting giving all the time so you have to keep proving to yourself so that whole never gets filled you have to keep doing it and so it's completely addictive no the work that you guys do there's probably two levels to it if I can make a broad generalization one is you really turned on by some project by some idea that you have that you want to realize in the world that you want to give to the world through which you want to Express some aspects of your genuine being like for medicine I really was interested in helping and healing people that's perfectly good and legitimate but then there's another Underside to it which is where I have to prove my importance I have to validate my existence I have to justify the very fact that I'm here on Earth and I have to keep proving to myself just how good I can be because I don't believe that I'm good that's the part that creates the workaholism not the first part you can do the work without identifying with it now identification means this it comes from the Latin word idem which means the same and for chair to make so when you make yourself the same as your work when you identity is bound up with your work now you're lost in your work on the other hand if you know who you are or find out who you are and then you choose to do the work because that's your calling and that's what turns you on is what allows you to express your creativity then that's great and now you'll no longer workaholic you're somebody who does great work so the distinction again is the inner relationship to it and whether or not you identify with it and if you identify with it it's always some attempt to to solve without healing some childhood trauma yeah that's great um so my my friend ingenious Network member Sam Karachi who did a great life he's he's awesome he's very he he actually I I talked with him because he's gone pretty deep into your book and I was just looking at things that would be the most valuable for this audience yeah we just did an Instagram together seminar yeah yeah he's great and he'll watch this of course he's he's in uh where's he at right now in Saudi Arabia um so this is the question for a speaker on stage a leader of a team or a parent when would vulnerability compromise credibility that was what I you know I often talk about my addiction and I wonder you know I talk about sex addiction the answer the answer is never because vulnerability again it comes from a Latin word vulnerary to wound here's the reality people as human beings we're all profoundly vulnerable from conception until death there's nothing you can do not to be vulnerable there's things you can do to protect yourself from the awareness of vulnerability and one of the impacts of trauma is we try to cover up a vulnerability you know hardened criminals you know why they become hardened because they suffered so much they try to protect themselves from their vulnerability if you're going to the prisons and if you deal with some of the most um would be lifers people have done terrible things and you get to know them if they open up this may sound strange to a lot of people but there's some of the most sweetest most sensitive people in the world they had to harden up under conditions that were intolerable when they were growing up so um in terms of when it's vulnerable vulnerability and negative no vulnerability is just owning that we're all people and that there's nothing unique about me in my woundedness so unique about you and your woundedness we all share that and I'm pretty sure you get the same response as I get whenever we share something in our own struggle or something in our own vulnerability people so appreciate it yeah because now they don't feel alone the one of the let me tell you guys a story see what you think about it I want you to imagine a for this is a real story a four-year-old girl who's being bullied by kids in the neighborhood and she wasn't to her family home and she runs to her mother for protection and the mother says there's no room for cards in his house there's no room for cards in his house no you gotta and deal with it any of your parents here are you parents some of you here how would you feel about saying that to a four-year-old girl the message is not that there's no room for coverage because a four-year-old girl is seeking protection from the mother is not a coward she's a four-year-old girl going to the natural source of support imagine a mother bear or a mother or gorilla ignoring the distress of the young one of their vulnerable young one and forcing it away from her presence now this story was told on American television at the 2016 Democratic Convention when Hillary Clinton was nominated for the presidency and this story was told as a wonderful example of resilience building parenting the message to the child wasn't and I'm not talking politics here I'm talking about how so many republican leaders are wounded people and and the message was told as a wonderful example of you know toughing up a kid 60 years later if you recall the candidate became ill with pneumonia and dehydrated do you remember what she did with it nothing she didn't tell anybody she collapsed in the street and her servicemen and their secret servicemen had to carrier into the van because the message she got was you got to suck it up you're on your own there's no room for vulnerability here so this is and this is so this is a culture that actually celebrates trauma and millions of people watched that that was not a single commentary in the media that was being celebrated here is the traumatization of a vulnerable four-year-old so I'm staying on the opposite side let's not be tough let's be vulnerable yeah yeah that's good so um how does ADD and ADHD develop yeah so um kind of ADHD um is said in a medical terminology to the most heritable mental health illness mental disease well in this book I make the point that to say that it is the most heritable mental condition is like saying that courts is the most chewable Crystal because it's neither it's neither a disease nor is it inherited so go back to your children you're being abused go back to my childhood the wartime persecution all the things as I said earlier could we have escaped no could we have changed the situation no could be a fought back no what does the Mind do when it's under too much stress one of the things it does is automatically Tunes out to the tuning out but this is when the brain is developing the human brain develops from really from In Utero to adulthood and already stresses on the mother during pregnancy can affect the brain of the child so if a mother is very stressed or depressed during pregnancy that kid is already at risk for ADHD later on it's got nothing to do with genetics or very little to do with genetics I'm putting them yeah you're underwater so thank you so the tuning out is simply one of these natural protections one of these automatic wise Dynamics on the part of your organism to protect yourself from stress that's too much now look you have to understand again is that the human brain biologically develops under the impact of the environment and as a an article from the Harvard Center and the developing child which is the world's most prestigious child developmental organization published in the Journal of Pediatrics which is the official Journal of the American Pediatric Academy in February 2012 pointed out the human brain develops from in Europe until adulthood and the most important input into the physiological healthy development of the human brain is the quality of adult child relationships so Revelation All Creatures which is again is what Europe is all about and our brain itself develops under the impact over emotional interactions with our parents now if you look at why more and more kids are being diagnosed with this condition it can't be genetics genes don't change in 10 or 20 or 15 years now that we're seeing ADHD in countries that never used to have it under the impact of corporate globalization is because parents are more and more stressed in this world they're more isolated and when kids and their parents are stressed and isolated and by the way we were never meant to be parented in nuclear families by a a couple or perhaps a single parent revolved for millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years and even in the existence of our own species we've been here for about 150 200 000 years if our species existence can be measured in one hour then until six minutes ago we lived in small band hunter-gatherer groups where parents had support from other people when the kids were with the parents the whole day where kids developed in the context of adult relationships that's our need so in this society which is a more and more stressed and if you look at the triggers for stress these are the research proven triggers flow of stress in people it's uncertainty lack of information loss of control and conflict our society could not be better designed to stress people so parents are stressed not their own fault not their unfold they're stressed the kids are stressed when the parents are stressed you can measure the kid's stress hormone levels they'll be elevated know how do kids deal with that stress they tune out another being diagnosed with the so-called disease it does have a biological template in the brain because the biology of the brain develops an interaction with the environment so sometimes medications can help but they're not the answer the answer is to change the atmosphere so kids can develop in a healthier way so they can feel safe and when that happens the brain will start developing in healthier ways so ADHD is not this disease inherited otherwise it's actually a response to stressful circumstances in this culture despite the best efforts of parents and a way to really deal with it is not to medicate these millions of kids and to try and just control their behaviors but to try to understand what's happening for them very good so foreign let me jump in here for a moment if I may in this society that we make certain assumptions about human nature and the assumption that we make is that human nature is competitive and aggressive and selfish and aggressive don't we just make that assumption whenever it doesn't somebody does something selfish or aggressive or manipulative what do we say oh that's just human nature but when somebody does something kind or generous or giving do we say oh that's just human nature so we make certain assumptions but your book which is actually designed for the entrepreneurial world it's not about what's in it for me it's about what's in it for them and and it's about building connections which is actually human nature we're wired for a connection you see and we were actually more wired for love than we are for selfishness if I need something and so if you ask yourself there's anybody in this room just ask yourself when do you feel more at peace inside when is your viscera your guts and your heart and your lungs more expansive and more relaxed when you've been selfish and aggressive and grasping or when you've been kind and generous and connected with people well the answer is going to be in most of our cases that it's under the second condition that should tell you what human nature is actually all about so your book here is actually an appeal to people's essential needs thank you yeah and see what what I hope is I want to take the givers of the world yeah to have them be better less jaded or not jaded and better boundary givers because if you are a giver you're going to have takers you're going to and I hope it can reach the takers of the world to get them to realize this is probably not the best operating system and I understand why people become takers and to a degree narcissists and sociopaths and Psychopaths and there's a lot of trauma uh as a result of that for those people and I think uh your book will is just a course in how to be a more compassionate caring connected person because what I say is you know my book is disguised as a capability book but it's really a character book yeah and if people get to develop the capabilities and they develop the compassion they are going to be more connected givers but I say if you're disconnected from yourself it's really hard to go out and connect with other people because how do you develop relationships really authentically uh if you hate yourself or if you're disconnected with yourself or you have all this pain internally and and oftentimes externally uh and and I think both of our books do really well together they help each other and and because my whole thing is I just believe we can really build a better entrepreneur and of course my goal with genius recovery is to to change the global conversation about how people View and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment and find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share it with the world so it's an educational platform and you're one of the best Educators in this particular area so it's always to my interest in my my goals to take you and share it with the world as much as we can because it's it's important it's it's significant and um so like I want to ask you this question uh in front of everyone just to kind of see your perspective off I have a a VR company called genius X and my co-founders are here in the room Indiana Adamson who you know she's we've got a course with her on addiction recovery and I want to do courses on fantasy contamination and meaning going past the fantasy where what being someone in the VR world what would happen if you change the environment where this came from is you introduced me to Dr Bruce Alexander who wrote the globalization of addiction he's the one that originally did the the rap part studies and one of the things that my co-founders we said I said there's so much Tech that is doing destructive things you know there's blood Sports there's gaming there's gambling there's distractibility and we don't want people to live in the VR world what we want is to be able to change the environment and you can do that immersively and let people experience stuff I would love to and I would pay for it with you just to develop a program with you in virtual reality because we want to do it right meaning people immersively I think we can build a compassionate inquiry process in VR where people can literally hear Gabor talking to them and and I know that sounds crazy I'm really looking for more things to do in life I know I know yeah you know that's actually funny uh you know what is this too narcissistic of me to have socks you know no but and by the way I'm not saying you even need to be involved in it I just like the the whole the whole you've already created it you've already said it I'm just saying another way to it like one of the ways that you um you're some you're reaching so many people is you're out there and and by the way most people don't know this he was at a you're at a very you're in the middle of a big conference in across the country right now and he flew in last night just to come and do the interview here and he has to fly out right after this literally just to be here so I want to just acknowledge it's it's huge and well you're not easy to say no to let me put it that way yeah and and plus I want I I I I just know that we we help so many people I mean that was evidenced by the stuff that we've done so so the point is there's a lot of different ways to uh treat trauma there's to address depression to address anxiety and you have studied and document so many of them here yeah and the best people in the world that that are helping others with it your personal friends with all of them and I know a handful of them too yeah so uh for things that uh for everyone here that really how many of you just totally resonate with his with what Gabor is saying I mean you can just see yourself in what he's just yeah sure you didn't put your hand up what's wrong with you a lot of my I said this uh yesterday when I was talking to my friend Marie forleo I was interviewing her is that a lot of my uh friends some that I've introduced you to that um won't do the the Deep work uh or or have a fear or a wall to go in and do therapy or do a journey uh what they do instead is they start they start a podcast yeah that explains all the podcasts yeah it really does but uh so you you talk about stuff like medicine Journeys and you talk about some that to to a lot of people seem incredibly extreme and and I'm a and I'm very careful to go tell people to go do Ayahuasca or MDMA or psilocybin because it's not the it's not the medicine itself or what some people say is a drug it's the it's it says Timothy Leary said I think in the 50s the set in setting right and could you speak to that just because it's it's become a trendy thing now and there's people that are doing it well and there's others that are putting people in dangerous yeah so um I do have one chapter out of 33 on psychedelics which kind of puts it into perspective like it's not the major thing of what I do and recently I refused to write a blurb for a book uh and I said even this is the best book ever written in the history of the Universe I will not blurb this book because of the title the title was oh if psychedelics will save the world I don't think anything's going to save the world no any no one particular modality is going to save the world or even the medical system I think for that we need Transformations on a much larger level thinking and you know thinking in our activity you know institutions and how we relate to each other nevertheless psychedelics can make a contribution and as you heard me speaking today and Joe and I conversing so much of what drives our behaviors our unconscious patterns that we adopted in response to traumatic events in childhood so that's so much of what pushes us and drives us it's not we're not that aware of it and so many of the mental health challenges for example or physical health challenges for that matter that are [Music] plaguing us have to do with a childhood Dynamics for example depression so depression is this inherited biological illness no it ain't you know how much evidence there is that depression is a biologically caused the illness zero that's so much evidence there is and the fact that I've taken antidepressants and they've helped me but the fact that an Ender division tells me doesn't prove like the serotonin which is the medication the the brain chemical that they um antidepressants Elevate like Prozac or Zoloft and so on okay so that made me feel better but that doesn't prove that my depression was caused by a lack of Serotonin any more than if you know you go to a party and you're um feeling very shy and you have one shot of bourbon and now you feel more sociable and you talk to people and you're more confident does that prove that your social shiners was caused by lack of bourbon in your brain you know so we make these false connections and if you look at what depression actually is what does it mean to depress something it means to push it down that's what it means and what do people pushed on when they're depressed their emotions do they feel flat now why would somebody push down their emotions because in childhood it was too dangerous for them to experience them because their moment rejected them somehow if they experience their emotions so they pushed their emotions down in order to belong and to be accepted and then 30 years later they're diagnosed with this condition called depression now you ask about psychedelics whether we're talking about depression or addiction um or the self-induced stress that drives many of the autoimmune conditions out there what the psychedelics do is they temporarily remove the membrane between the conscious and the unconscious and now you get to see all the rage and all the pain all the fear that you've been carrying inside but you get to see it in a safe environment ideally and by the way not all environments are safe and there's a lot of negative stuff that happens in the Psychedelic world we have to acknowledge that but in a safe environment with the right guidance now you get to see what's been driving you no longer is the helpless isolated child but as an adult but the capacities of an adult and you get to witness yourself guided and supported and kept safe what a powerful experience that can be and also of course under the impact of the psychedelics people can have the experience of getting to know their true selves the part that they got disconnected from a long long time ago so ideally and in a very romanticized nutshell that's what psychedelics can do it's more complex than that and it's never just here it is I know I've got it I mean believe me I've done psychedelics and I've if you don't do the integrative work if you don't they just open the door for you it's still up to you to go through that door walk to that door and walk that path in your actual life you can't rely on that psychedelic experience but a lot of people have found it transformative they've made realizations about themselves that would have taken them a long time if at all to get to through ordinary Psychotherapy so they still have a role to play and they've been shown to the significant potential positive roles in the treatment of PTSD for example various many various medicines can do that on in the right conditions people can overcome addictions people can just be closer to themselves so that's the ideal but realizable benefit of psychedelics very good very good and there's a great chapter in the myth of normal on this so thank you I helped a a friend female friend years ago with uh addiction recovery and she painted something for me that I actually have on the wall at my office that said recovery didn't open up the gates of Heaven to let me in it opened up the gates of hell to let me out and that's kind of what I think goes along with what she just said about Journeys they present to you some parts of yourself so in my book I write about what people want is more woo and less ah yeah and all of the things that people pursue in terms oftentimes the woo creates a lot of ah but there are ways to get a lot of woo in in a healthy way so what is your hope um last question I'll have for you what's your hope for uh and the vision for the future uh as a result of this book what do you hope comes out of this well the best compliment I received by somebody who's read the book was a young man who said Thank you reading the book I remember it myself I just want people to get to know themselves and and to have a sense of compassion for themselves and their world and I wanted to understand the world that has shaped us and Community shape us and I want people to understand that it doesn't have to be this way we can actually do better if we inform ourselves of the atmosphere if we get to know our traumas if we can relate compassionately to ourselves and to others that was my hope for the book you know and what I will say like I've been doing this whole little riff about which Dan Sullivan here put me on to is uh you know there's thought leaders in the world and then there's result leaders and result leaders are infinitely more valuable than just people that have thoughts uh and you are a True Result leader you have made such an impact you you you live the message of my book is what's in it for them because you're not doing it I mean you you've put so much effort into helping other people and I I greatly appreciate it I love you I love what you're doing in the world and I just thank you so much for being here thank you Dr Gabor mate thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Joe Polish

Views: 630,723

Keywords: Dr. Gabor Maté, Joe Polish, Genius Network, Genius Network Annual Event, Genius Network Podcast, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Addiction, Recovery, Genius Network Events

Id: wwjZAVrybsA

Length: 64min 9sec (3849 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022