Why Attachment Is Everything I Dr Gabor Maté

the fundamental dynamic in human life and the most important factor in in the development and existence of human beings is attachment connection to another human being i mean the capacity to be present with and understand and see the other human being for exactly who they are and to accept them for who they are and to invite them unconditionally to be in your presence exactly the way they are that's what love actually is but what if you grew up in a home where your father your mother was a rage-a-holic and so that you're terrified of anger you can't handle it it brings up too much anxiety for you what i found out is that whether it was physical illness or addiction or mental illness of any kind or the preponderance of childhood developmental disorders that are burgeoning in north america right now with millions of children being on stimulant medications for adhd half a million kids in your country on antipsychotic medications not because they're psychotic but because we don't know when i see we i mean doctors teachers parents don't know how to regulate the child's behavior without medications and it's an experiment because we have no idea what the long-term effects of antipsychotics will be on the developing brain of the child the approach always is uh somebody gets rheumatoid arthritis but what do we do about it well we give them steroid medications or we give them immune suppressant medications because in rheumatoid arthritis the immune system attacks the body so we want to suppress the immune system so it stops attacking the body of the host with adhd what do we do about it well something going on in the brain let's change the chemistry of the brain by stimulant medications which can make a helpful difference actually but our response to any of these issues whether it's physical mental illness childhood developmental problems behavior issues is always reactive it's always reactive like we're reacting to manifestations so there was a case somewhere in the states not unusual by the way where a kid somewhere in the states eight or nine year old 10 year old is in handcuffs by the school security officer this same thing is happening up in canada we're just reacting to the behavior and with due difference to bk when he said well trauma is wrong let's talk about solutions that's not my approach at all and i'm saying for god's sakes just look at it first get present to it be aware of it see how it arises and then out of that understanding will come the solutions american psychiatrist thomas hora said when you get the what then you know the how and in north america we're very addicted to the how but not to the what we don't really understand things we don't look deeply enough we just react to symptoms behaviors manifestations that are troublesome that we don't like that are pathological and there's not a look at the source so here's what i found out that whether we're looking at mental illness depression anxiety ptsd als cancer rheumatoid arthritis behavior problems we're looking at one thing only which is the impact of early childhood stress on the individual and that stress happens in a social context and so that the ideology of western medicine which separates the mind from the body which doesn't understand that there are physical manifestations of lifelong emotional patterns and early stresses that the disease itself is an outcome of and that therefore if the individual could change their relationship to their emotions and how they function in the world and how they take on stress automatically and what kind of relationships they're in and what kind of work they're doing and how they feel about themselves that can actually significantly affect the course of the illness in a positive sense in other words if they get present to themselves but these are the things that my profession despite a whole preponderance of evidence absolutely ignores it just doesn't compute let's say you have a two-year-old and you're the parent of a two-year-old and they get angry with you incidentally if your two-year-old doesn't get angry with you you're not doing your job because she can't have that second cookie before dinner and why should she not be upset i mean i mean you want something you don't get it you get frustrated she gets frustrated so ah but what if you grew up in a home or your father your mother was a rage-a-holic and so that you're terrified of anger you can't handle it it brings up too much anxiety for you so then you give the signal overtly or covertly that good little girls don't get angry what the child gets is that little girls who get angry don't get loved so then how does she adapt she adapts by repressing her anger that's the way she maintains the relationship with you because the fundamental dynamic in human life and the most important factor in in in the development and existence of human beings is attachment connection to another human being as infants we're utterly helpless and we're more helpless than any other creature and stay that way longer than any other creature so we thought that a passionate relationship we simply don't function can't live it's actually it's life essential and throughout life of course we evolved as a species of attachment by attachment meaning it's a gravitational force that pulls two bodies together just like love is the common word for attachment connection where somebody's taking care of somebody else somebody's holding somebody else and somebody's being held now gravitation itself is an attachment force i'm talking about physical gravitation it pulls two bodies together and literally it's gravitation that makes the world go around the sun isn't it so when i say love makes the world go round it's true in the pure purest physical sense well it's also true in the psychological realm and by love here i don't mean the emotion that a parent feels towards the child because i take it for granted that all parents love their kids and even the hard as it is to fathom but even the parents who abuse their kids love their kids they just don't know how else to love them because they're acting out their own childhood programming so by love in this case i don't mean the emotion i mean the capacity to be present with and understand and see the other human being for exactly who they are and to accept them for who they are and to invite them unconditionally to be in your presence exactly the way they are that's what love actually is so i can tell you as a parent i was completely incapable of giving that to my kids because i was still dealing with my own childhood stuff as an adult when children don't receive that unconditional would call rogers called the unconditional positive regard or the unconditional invitation to be in my presence exactly the way you are then i have to adapt to that why do they have to adapt because they need the attachment relationship without which they can't survive so without attachment there's no survival therefore be adapt and if your child gets the message that she's not invited to be in your presence when she's angry then she won't be angry not that the anger won't be there but she'll repress it it's not a conscious behavior it's simply an automatic brain mechanism but when you repress the anger you know what happens in the long term you're repressing your immune system lots of studies have shown up and the immune system can then fail to function or it can actually turn against you in a form of autoimmune illness that's in a nutshell the source of a lot of physical illnesses not the only source but it's a major contributing factor that's utterly ignored in in western medicine despite reams of evidence so what i'm saying here is that when there's a loss emotionally that translates into biology so it's not that does biology here and our emotions here it's that the emotions and the biology are completely inseparable and what happens on the emotional plane inevitably will have its manifestations on a biological plane so what you lose emotionally translates into biological events in your body [Music] you

Channel: Motivation Thrive

Views: 343,200

Keywords: gabor mate parenting, attachment parenting, trauma, gabor mate trauma, gabor mate adhd, dr gabor mate addiction, gabor mate childhood trauma, hold on to your kids, dr. gabor maté, Motivation Thrive

Id: 416wwb8DvuM

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021