How to HEAL Your Trauma | Gabor Maté's Powerful Insights in 24 Minutes

Gabor Mate is a world-renowned physician, author, and trauma expert whose work has transformed the way we understand addiction, stress, and childhood development. He went from growing up in war-torn Budapest and struggling with the long-lasting effects of early trauma to becoming a globally respected voice in healing, writing bestselling books, and helping millions reconnect with their inner truth and emotional well-being. Need motivation?

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If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. All right, let's kick it off with rule number 1: Be playful.

There is a book written by a palliative care nurse in Australia, and I used to work in palliative care, and it's called The Top 5 Regrets of Dying People. And she's talking to people who die before their time, you know, from cancer usually. One of the regrets is that they worked too hard, they didn't play enough. Now, playfulness is built into our brains. All mammals play. Bear cubs play, lion cubs play, puppies, kittens, they all play. We're wired for play. Why? Because play is essential for a number of things. One is essential for brain development. It's much more important for brain development than academic learning. I'm talking about scientifically, you know, brain physiologically. So play is important. Play is also important to form relationships, because in play you can kind of roughhouse a bit, but you're not actually being enemies, so you're making friends that way. So play is essential. Winnie the Pooh, which is one of my all-time favorite books—

why is it one of your all-time favorite books?

Well, well, it's so playful. And, but at the very end, and I know you're married to Chris Robbins, which is Christopher Robin, you know, I mean, anyway, there's a passage at the end of the book, Winnie the Pooh, where Christopher, the boy, by the way, him and his father had a terrible relationship, which is a whole other issue. I'm talking about the real Christopher Robin. But the fictional Christopher Robin is now growing up and he has to go to school. "Which means you won't be able to play with these animals anymore." And he's trying to explain this to these animals, including Winnie the Bear. And the book ends with the statement that I'll paraphrase where it says that they go off walking together hand in hand. And the book ends with, "But whatever they do and wherever they go in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together." And that passage as an adult would bring me to tears because as a kid, as an infant, I wasn't played with. My mother was way too terrorized and depressed to play with me. And kids peekaboo, play starts so early. It's essential for mental health. It's essential for our brain development. So these poor people who were looking back on their lives and saying, "I wish I had played more." Play is just essential. And I have to say that one of the things that has kept our marriage going 55 years now is that we play so well together. And we're just playing all the time when we're not fighting, which by the way is long gone. Not long gone, but gone. So play is just essential.

Rule number 2: Ask for help.

Have you seen this book by this British guy called Charlie McKeesey called The Boy, the Mole, the Horse, and the— The Fox? No. Okay. It's one of these children's books that are for adults, that is for adults. It's mostly illustrations. He's a wonderful illustrator. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse. It's an international bestseller, sold millions of copies. Amongst these four friends, the horse is the wisest one. And at some point, they asked the horse, what's the most courageous thing you ever said? And the horse says, "Help." Now people are ashamed of themselves, they don't even ask for help. So shame is debilitating.

Number 3, discover the root of the problem.

A lot of people are facing challenges. A lot of people are very hard on themselves. A lot of people think there's something wrong with them. My fundamental understanding and what I've learned is that underneath there's nothing wrong with anybody, that everything you're dealing with came along for a reason. They were adaptations or they were responses to difficult situations. And the more you can understand where your issues came from, and even when your negative self-view and the shame and the self-loathing and the self-criticism and the perfectionism that you experience, that they were actually responses to some kind of life experience, and that fundamentally there was and there is nothing wrong with you, and those things can be looked at and you can understand them and you can transform that and you really become yourself, who you are. That's available to you. It's available to everybody. So nobody's damaged goods.

Rule number 4: Ask why the pain.

Many people still believe in Ireland and the world that addiction is a choice. Yeah. Which is crazy. Well, what's probably the Western world's most addicted population in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. I've read about it. It's an area where we have thousands of people addicted, injecting, inhaling, ingesting all kinds of drugs and all kinds of historical reasons. There's a kind of a congregation of those people in that area of Vancouver. And I worked with them for 12 years. And I've dealt with addictions. I've yet to meet anybody who said, I woke up one morning and I said, hey, my ambition is to become an addict. It just doesn't happen. What happens is, is that people have pain they may not even realize that they have. But there's some sense of discomfort. Then they engage in a behavior, whether it's pornography, and all of a sudden they feel alive. Or they feel, or they do heroin like you did, and they feel warmth and love inside. And naturally they want more. But since my mantra is, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. Whoever chooses to be in pain, No, on a superficial level, everything is a choice. But what people don't realize is that the choices that people make on the conscious level are very often determined and moved by unconscious factors that they're not aware of. And with a conscious awareness, I mean, you wrote a book called Awareness. That was one of the other books that really was an inspiration for me. I read it every year. Yeah, I thought to look at it myself after I read your recommendation. But without awareness, there's no freedom. So you can't talk about anybody making choices.

Also, if you want to take real action out of this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Rule number 5: Resolve your trauma.

How does unresolved trauma impact the way that you deal with stress as an adult?

So, um, The body's stress regulation apparatus, which is physiological, it has to do with the connection between certain brain centers down to the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland, you might say. No child is born with stress regulation. Infants don't know how to regulate their stresses.

Well, neither do adults.

Well, as you say in your book, most adults are 8 years old, if that, but I thought that was pretty generous. It might have been 3 or 4 years old. Well, stress regulation, like other functions, has to develop so that when something stressful happens, I know how to face it without being overwhelmed. And that depends on the development of these brain circuits and receptors for brain chemicals. Now, trauma interferes with the development of the body's stress regulation apparatus. So that we become adults and we don't know how to handle stress. And then we seek escape. So one of the ways that people escape from stress is addictive behaviors. For example, so if you talk about or talk to addicts, if you look at my own addictive behaviors, even if I go quote unquote sober for a while and then I relapse, what usually happened is that I got stressed. And then I reach for that addictive outlet as a way of soothing my stress. So that's how it shows up. But physiologically, it shows up by a dysregulation of the body's stress regulation apparatus. So it's not just psychological, we're talking physiology here. And you've done these studies in laboratory animals where the way the mother handles that infant rat pup in the first few days of life will have an impact on the adult rat's capacity to handle stress. And if you take the rats, by the way, whose mothers don't handle them as well, and you put them with mothers who do, their brains develop normally. So it's not a genetic effect. It's what's called an epigenetic effect. It's the environment acting on the genes.

Which is why we come back to your original point. No human being is damaged goods. No. That the good news is that if you can recognize that your response to stress and traumatic situations and overwhelming emotional situations is something that you can identify and change, that that's what the opportunity is here in terms of being able to heal and resolve trauma.

Absolutely. And especially if you begin by recognizing that it's not your fault. There's nothing wrong with you.

Rule number 6: Understand the definition of addiction.

When I read about your stuff, what I see about your content is a lot of people are lost based on trauma, and past traumas cause certain addictions or certain behaviors.

Yeah.

And routines that maybe are some healthy addictions or unhealthy addictions, but it seems to be like a lot of unhealthy addictions.

Can I interrupt right there?

Yes, please.

No such thing as a healthy addiction.

No such thing.

If it's healthy, it's not an addiction. If it's an addiction, it's not healthy. There are passions, there are habits that are healthy, but they're not addictions.

Like working out?

Yeah, yeah, well, that can be an addiction, or it can be healthy. Like eating can be healthy, or it could be an addiction. I define addiction as any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief, and therefore craves but then suffers negative consequences and cannot give it up. So if you're suffering negative consequences, so it's craving relief, pleasure in the short term, harm in the long term, inability to give it up, that's what an addiction is. Now if you have a behavior that's ongoing but it has no negative consequences, it's not an addiction, it's a passion, it's a pleasure, it's a habit.

It's a healthy habit.

It's a healthy habit. So for me, it's not an addiction. And also, a healthy habit, a person, if it no longer works for them, they can give it up. So for me, there's no healthy addiction.

There's no healthy addiction.

Yeah, in fact, the word addiction comes from a word for slavery. So there's no healthy slavery.

Interesting. So addiction, what is the root of addiction? The word? Yeah.

So in Roman times, an addictus was somebody who's assigned to another person to serve them because they owed them money and they couldn't pay it back.

An addictus.

Yeah, addictus was like an indentured slave who had to work off the debt. So that's where the word actually comes from, is slavery, is a form of slavery.

So if you're addicted to something, you are a slave to that craving.

Absolutely, absolutely. You have no choice. You can't— a slave has no choice.

Rule number 7: Have the courage to be yourself.

If I am always being a nice guy so that you will like me, but inside I'm feeling all these emotions that I'm not sharing with you, that's pretty lonely. Even though you might like me because I'm showing you this nice side of myself. Right. That's not really me. That's not me. There was a study done in Australia, or at least I used to work in palliative care as a doctor looking after dying people. In Australia, there was a palliative care nurse who wrote a book called "The Top 5 Regrets of Dying People." These are people that were dying before their time, like I used to look after, of cancer or chronic neurological illness. You know what the top regret of dying people was? That they didn't have the courage to be themselves. And the third top regret was that they didn't have the courage to express their emotions. They pretended to be happy when they were not, and so on. So the question for, The rest of us is, do we want to wait till some terminal illness wakes us up, or should we just confront the fact that in so many ways we're afraid to be authentic because we're so afraid of being rejected? And as children, we didn't have much choice. As adults, can we develop that freedom to be ourselves?

Well, number 8, focus on the present.

I think sometimes people get so stuck in healing their past, and that becomes like the main focus of their life that they don't focus on the future at all, which is what they really need to work on to better themselves. Actually, no, it's not a question of working on the future or the past. It's working on the present. Because here's the deal. Trauma is not what happened to us. Trauma is what happened inside us as a result of what happened to us. So for reasons I explain in the book, I got the message in the first year of my life that I wasn't wanted. The trauma is not the war and the genocide amidst which I spent my first year. That wasn't the trauma. Those were the traumatic events. The trauma was the wound, which is my belief that I wasn't wanted and I'm not worthy. That's the trauma. But that's the good news. Because if the trauma was what happened to me, that was 78 years ago. It's over and done with. I can't change the past. I'll never not have been born as a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation. That'll never not have happened. Whatever happened to you, that'll never not have happened. But if the trauma is my belief that I'm not worthy, I can heal that in the present. And healing the present— so it's not a question of changing the past, it's a question of changing your relationship to the past in the present moment. So I could be embittered, and believe me, I have been, about the death of my grandparents in Auschwitz. I could be embittered about my infancy, and believe me, I have been. Or I could be damn grateful that I survived and have been able to pursue work and relationships that have been so meaningful to me. But it all depends on which angle I'm looking at it from. As long as I'm looking at it from a traumatic angle, I'm just embittered and despondent. I can't change the past, but I can change the present. Now, needless to say, I'm not giving you a formula. I'm just telling you my personal story. If I could look at it in this world, and on a bad day, by the way, I still don't, but if I can look at this world as a world in which there's a place for me, in which I can find meaning and love, my future is very different. So it's the present we need to work on. We need to work on what beliefs and body states do we hold in the present that limit us. If we deal with that present, the future will take care of itself.

Rule number 9, express anger.

The suppression, the repression of healthy anger is a major risk factor for illness. It actually suppresses the immune system for reasons I will tell you later. So there's basically, uh, 3 ways of dealing with anger. One is to repress it like this woman did. So these are the people that are always nice, you know, they're always nice. I worry about really nice people. The other way is to give into it and to act it out, to, to go into rages. That's also unhealthy. The first, the repression of anger, leads to autoimmune disease and cancer.

The—

when you're raging all the time, that increases your risk of heart disease and strokes. So in the aftermath, the studies have shown that in the aftermath of a rage episode, your risk of a heart attack doubles for the next 2 hours. Then there is the healthy expression of anger, or the healthy processing of anger, which most of us don't know how to do. We either do the one or we do the other. I'll talk to you about healthy anger later. But how do we deal with anger has a crucial effect on our health. And this guy writes, you know, she had no ego. She just blended in with the environment. In an unassuming manner. And this is supposed to be a good thing. Now, my wife's name is Ray, and she's an artist, and it's one of her paintings that provided the detail here on, on the COVID and the color scheme for the COVID for this book. And sometimes I say to Ray, you know, we've been married 42 years, I go, why can't you blend in with the environment in an unassuming manner? But Ray has done her psychological work and She's read my book and she's also seen the studies. You know, there was a study just 4 or 5 years ago presented at a major medical conference that looked at 1,700 women over a 10-year period. And over a 10-year period, out of these women, those who were unhappily married and suppressed their feelings were 4 times as likely to die as those who were also unhappily married but expressed their feelings. So the issue wasn't happy marriage or unhappy marriage. The issue was, did the woman express herself or did she not? So when I come to this point at my talk, this permits me to reassure the men in the audience that the next time you think your wife is a bitch, you should be glad about it.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is learn to say no.

Prior to your awakening and transformational journey that you undertook sometime in your 40s, how easy did you find it to say no to other people's expectations?

Oh, I couldn't.

Okay, so you couldn't say no? No. All right. So I ask people this question: Where in your life do you have difficulty saying no? It shows up in two areas: work and in personal life. Okay? So you couldn't say no. The second question I ask people then is: What was the impact on you of your difficulty saying no?

It's exhausting. I don't like my own behavior.

Yeah, so it's this shame, lack of control, lack of loss of control.

Loss of control, by the way, anger, blaming other people and making it their fault that I can't say no.

That's right. And loss of control is one of the most significant triggers for stress, by the way, according to the stress literature.

Well, that makes sense because we have a biological hardwired need for safety.

Exactly.

Which we try to achieve by controlling everything and everyone around us.

Only because we learned in childhood that if we didn't, there'd be no safety. If we had learned that there was safety, we would trust the world a lot more and we wouldn't have to control. So nobody's a control freak. Nobody's born a control freak. It's an adaptive trait is what that is.

Let me tell you about a friend of mine who lives in Calgary. Her name is Shannon Doug. Shannon is 48 years old now, and when she was 37, she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Stage 4 meant that the cancer was already in her bones by the time it was diagnosed. At that time, she had 2 young children, aged 1 and 3, and married to a well-to-do businessman. She herself was a very high-functioning executive for Microsoft in Calgary. And then she's diagnosed. She had the perfect life, perfect marriage, perfect home, of course. And then she's diagnosed. And healthy, physically, you know, fit, always ate well. And then she's diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. And she has a transformation. Now, she gets the best medical advice she can get anywhere in North America, and she traveled to New York and elsewhere. She got the best medical treatment, and with that, she was given 1 year to live, because that's the prognosis. Stage 4, despite the medical treatment, chances are you'll be dead in 1 year. Now, a year ago in February, just a year ago now, Shannon traveled to the Napa Valley of California. California with some of her friends, and they celebrated her 10th year survival and her 47th birthday. And the transformation that she experienced was that when she was diagnosed and started paying attention, she realized that her life had not been her life, because she was sexually abused as a child. And her response to the abuse was, of course, as many children will experience, It can't be about the adults, it's about me. So if this terrible thing happened to me, I must be a very bad person. So I have to be very good to compensate. So the good daughter who doesn't talk about it, doesn't disturb the waters. The good employee, the good student, the good wife who doesn't talk about the husband's addiction issues because that would again disturb the waters. And when she's diagnosed and she decides she wants to live, she says, "The hell with all this perfection and goodness." and she confronts her family of origin about the abuse that she had endured, and she confronts her husband, and she starts living an authentic— and she leaves the job, by the way, which wasn't her, wasn't really expressing who she was. Now, 11 years later, the cancer is still in her bones, but it's completely inactive. But she knows that if she wants to stay alive, she needs to stay authentic. So that— I believe that many of these issues are reversible. I'm not promising a cure here to anybody, but Shannon really underwent a major self-journey, and she continues every day to work at it. And she practices her spiritual ways, which she ignored all those years, and she pays attention to herself, and she keeps clearing the stuff out. And she is the picture of health. Her and I give workshops together sometimes. So that there's ways to get there, but it's a commitment. And of course, it might threaten the attachment relationships. So that's always your call.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. For 10 more amazing rules from Andrew Huberman, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Double inhales followed by an extended exhale are the fastest way that I'm aware of to bring the mind and the body into a more relaxed state. 2 inhales through the nose and then exhale slow through the mouth. 1 to 3 of those repeated