BEST Explanation of Addiction I’ve Ever Heard: Dr. Gabor Maté

It's very simple. I mean, if you look at your own addictions, those of you and most of you raised your hand and when you gave it up for a while and then you relapsed, what usually happened that caused a relapse? Usually something stressful happened. So it was your way of dealing with stress. So it follows that the more you stress people, the more you entrench them in their addictions. So create a system that ostracizes and punishes and torments people and exiles them from society. You're just making sure that they're going to stay addicted, that's all. Can I make something clear right away?

Yes.

You just need to correct a couple of things. I didn't specialize in neurology and psychology and psychiatry. I wouldn't know very much if I did. I was a family physician, worked in addictions and all kinds of other fields. But that bio seems to be taken off of Wikipedia and I don't know who put it on there. But. Second thing is, I'm not doing burpees earlier.

Do some burpees.

Three months ago, I decided to do 36,500 push ups a year. That's 100 a day. And as a result, on December 4, when my speaking events are over for the year, I'll be having hernia surgery. So no burpees.

All right, awesome. Well, first off, it's great to have you here. And like I'd mentioned, you weren't in the room when I first said it, as this is the first time I've ever brought someone like you and talk about this subject at a business conference like this. And the reason I did it is because some people may not see the relevancy, but I want us to be able to describe to them what it is. And there's much that I can ask you about. I do want to.

Well, let's show them the relevancy. Okay.

What is addiction? Let's define it.

So addiction is complex, but it's manifested in any behavior. Any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and can't give up. Now, notice any behavior. I didn't say drugs. Most of the time we think about addiction, we think of substances. And that certainly is one important target of addictive behavior. But I said any behavior that could be gambling, could be sex, could be relationships, could be Internet, could be Facebook, could be shopping, as in my case, could be eating, could be work. Any behavior that gives you temporary relief pleasure, but you Suffer negative consequences. You don't get it. That's an addiction. Now let me ask you this question. According to that definition, how many people here will acknowledge that sometime or another in your lives you've had some kind of an addiction? Sometime. Okay? That's how relevant it is. Okay. And if I'm going with that stream, let me also ask you guys another question for which I'll ask some of you to just put your hand up and shout out your answers. I'm going to ask you not what you addicted to or when or for how long. I'm just going to ask you. What did you like about it? What did it do for you? What did it give you in the short term? So who would tell me? Relief from pain. Relief from pain. Thank you. Anybody else? Sorry.

Control.

Control. Relief from pain. Gave you control? What else? Love, Somebody said escape from anxiety. Thank you. What else.

Was that? Loneliness.

It dealt with loneliness. Okay, let's look at these things now. Escape from pain. Pain relief, sense of control. Relief from loneliness. What else did people say?

Anxiety.

Relief from anxiety. In other words, inner peace. So right away, when you understand that, you get that the addiction wasn't your problem. Your addiction was your attempt to solve the problem. And the real question is, how did that problem develop? How come at 7 billion human beings in the world, you felt lonely? How come you lacked a sense of agency, control, authority in your life? Why were you in so much emotional pain? And everything you said, the loneliness, the lack of power, the lack of control, the anxiety, These are forms of emotional pain. So my mantra around addiction is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And this is where we can talk more about it. But as you and I both know, the current model of addiction is either the legal one, which says it's a choice that people make and therefore we have to punish them for it, or it's a medical one, in which case it's an inherited brain disease. But it isn't either of those things. What it actually is is an attempt to solve a human life problem, that of emotional pain. Loneliness, distress, anxiety, whatever it is. And the real question then is, what happened in my life or your life, Joe, or everybody else's lives here? That we incurred pain, and then how do we deal with our pain? Because the addiction itself magnifies the pain. It multiplies, increases it exponentially. So it begins in pain. As Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, says, addictions begin in pain and they end in pain. Both my addictions, the work was very respectable. It got me nothing but Praise and income. And it created deep problems in my nuclear, my family, you know, and then my shopping addiction. Well, he's a lover of classical music. Isn't that wonderful? You know. But some of the respectable addictions, and I say this somewhat hesitatingly, but I'll say it anyway, in front of a business audience, had to do with profit and power where for some people nothing is ever enough. And it's not because they're bad people, but because they're trying to stuff a hole inside themselves. And then that can cause serious damage in the world such as we're seeing with the environment and climate change and other pollution and other issues, you know, so these or in addition to power, like I'm just reading a biography of Napoleon and Napoleon was a genius. He really. Talk about genius, Netherlands. That was a genius for you in so many ways. But he was also totally addicted to power. And even in exile he said I love power. And he called power as his mistress. Well, a lot of people died because of addiction, because of addiction to power. And yet, you know, he's a hero, he's respected. Whereas the substance addict who shoots up heroin in the back alley is ostracized and discarded from society. So yeah, there's the respectable addictions and then there is these arbitrarily chosen addicts on whom we project all our disdain and our all our self judgment. Basically the stuff we don't like about themselves, we project it onto these other people.

Well, it was on this stage last year that actually for the first time publicly told about not only my drug addiction, which I, you know, for several years ago is the first time I started talking about being a drug addict.

And what was that in your case? Cocaine? Was it?

It was cocaine, yeah. Well, I mean, heck, when I was between the ages of 16, 18, it started with I would get high every day and smoke pot, I would take pills, speed, I would snort crystal meth, I would snort cocaine. And there was one day, I remember where I. And one day I was free basing I was on lsd, I was smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, taking mushrooms and snorting crystal meth all in one day. And I mean like I was in bad shape. And you've now Gabor. When I was in Vancouver, you toured me around where you actually Vancouver's east side because you treated some of the worst addicts on Vancouver's east side for many years. And during that time, you know, I did a lot of drugs and then I got, I moved away from the environment, started exercising, ended up getting a job In a mental hospital as a mental health tech. And I would take the patients that were there for addiction to aa. I would drive them to AA meetings and NA meetings, and I would sit in on those meetings, never realizing later in life how much relevance it had. But the core addiction was sexual addiction. Because I was molested as a kid. My mother died when I was 4. I was molested as a kid. I was paid money not to say anything between the ages of 8 to 10. And it wired in my head that sex is not an intimate act of love and oneness. It's something you do. Get off.

If I may interrupt, there was something else here too. So I'll talk about myself and I'll talk about you. So one of my addictions has been to work. In fact, that's a continued challenge for me if you look at my travel schedule. So I got a certain message from the world. I was born in Budapest, Hungary, 1944. Jewish parents, two months before the Nazis occupied Hungary. So I spent the first year of my life with my mother under Nazi rule. And she was in terror the whole year, as you can imagine. Parents killed in Auschwitz and so on. My father was away in forced labor. The message I got from the world is that the world didn't want me. Not because Hitler didn't want me, because I didn't know Hitler. But my mother was unhappy. And children are narcissists in the developmental sense. They take everything personally. So when the bad things are happening, it must be about me. And if she's not happy around me, Thich Nhat Hanh, the spiritual teacher, says that the greatest gift parents can give their children is their own happiness. Because the children take that personally. It's about us. We must be great creatures. So when my mother is unhappy and depressed and in terror, I get the message the world doesn't want me. And then at one year of age, she gives me to a stranger to save my life. So I don't see her for a month. I get the message, the world doesn't want me now. Then in Canada, 30 years later, 30 odd years later, I become a physician. Well, one way to deal with not being wanted is to become a doctor. They're gonna want you all the time. They're gonna want you when they're being born, they want you when they're dying. And they're gonna want you at every moment in between. And the beeper is always going. This is before cell phones, of course. And the beeper is always going. And you're getting validation every moment. And what it is is a compensation for the sense of not being wanted that I've never dealt with. Now, in your case, you got a message as well that you're wanted through your body, you're wanted through your body, you're wanted. When you're sexually available, that's the message you get. What are you going to do? So especially if you look at men who are sex addicts and women who are sex addicts, there's no such thing as, what's the word? An infomaniac. That's just a slander. What it really is is women or sometimes men who've learned that only through their bodies and only through the sexual act are they actually wanted. Well, that's really addictive because we all need to be wanted. And that's, I think that's also what's behind it.

Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, and I lived with so much shame. Even though I started making money, I always had that deep shame and that secret life and I just struggled.

And.

The thing that became more apparent to me was I was in a. I became financially capable of joining like a high profile group. And I joined a high profile group for people that were struggling with sexual addictions. And in that room were billionaires, famous athletes, politicians, Academy Award winning actors and actresses, men and women. And I saw people that the world admired in their most broken states. And I realized, wow, that whole saying that which is most private is most public, that so many people struggle with this. And that's why I've now wanted to use the platform that I have in business to go out and try to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment. And right now the criminal justice system is treating addicts when it needs to be something else.

Well, if you look at the criminal justice system, it's really based on this idea that as I said earlier, that addiction is a choice that somebody makes. If somebody's not making a conscious choice, what are they doing punishing them? You don't punish people because they're suffering and they're trying to escape from their pain. You help them instead of making them criminals. And number one, number two, it's very arbitrary as to what we decide should be legal or illegal. Because give me a thousand heroin addicts who inject four times a day in a quantity that does not lead to an overdose, and give me a thousand people who smoke a pack a day and another thousand who drink heavily. Guess which thousand is going to be the healthiest and the longest living at the end of 30 years. By far, the heroin group. So by far, I'm talking medical facts here. So by some, I'm not saying that heroin should be legalized and sold in corner stores like cigarettes. But I am saying that the decision to criminalize it is utterly arbitrary and has nothing to do with either science or logic or humanity.

I mean, you just look at the opiate addiction. We need voices, we need people of influence that could share something that is helpful because you cannot punish pain out of people in the criminal justice system. And you said in one of your talks that if you wanted to create the perfect system that would keep people addicted, you would create the exact prison system that we have in the United States. And it's true.

It's very simple. I mean, if you look at your own addictions, those of you and most of you raised your hand and when you gave it up for a while and then you relapsed, what usually happened that caused the relapse? Usually something stressful happened. So it was your way of dealing with stress. So it follows that the more you stress people, the more you entrench them in their addictions. So create a system that ostracizes and punishes and torments people and exiles them from society. You're just making sure that they're going to stay addicted. That's all. According to the President's Commission on addiction on the opioid crisis. And by the way, even when we talk about the opioid crisis, it's a rather arbitrary determination. Not because it isn't a crisis. I mean, it is according to the President's own advisory commission, every three weeks, you have a 9, 11 happening in the United States as a result of illegal drug overdoses, let alone, we're just talking drugs.

We're not talking all the other.

We're just talking illegal drugs. I'm not even talking alcohol or cigarettes or everything else, just talking overdoses. And now it's hitting the white middle class. It's actually helping to lower the life expectancy of the white middle class male for the first time in a long time. But it's been hitting our aboriginal population for a long time. It's been happening there for decades. If you go to the native reservations in Canada or the U.S. suicides, overdoses, they've been happening in epidemic proportions for decades. We just don't think that's so important now that it's happening to us or the people that we care about. Now it's a crisis. And then if you ask the question, well, why is it that the Aboriginal population has got this tremendous rate of addiction. And again, that's a very interesting question. Because this whole idea that addiction is a genetic disease flies out the window when you look at the aboriginal experience. Because the aboriginals in North America had actually access to potentially addictive substances long before Caucasians came here. They had access to tobacco, they had access to alcohol in New Mexico, they had access to psychedelic substances like peyote. And they even knew these substances and they even used them. But how did they use them? They used them ceremonially, not to upturn and diminish their consciousness, but to raise their consciousness. They used it to connect spiritually with creation. They used it to create community and contact and culture. The addictive use is just the opposite. The other use is to escape from pain. And it's alone and it's not communal. If the problem was genetic, why weren't they addicted before? The reason they're addicted now is because the severe trauma that they've suffered over hundreds of years, they're near extermination. And I don't have to give you all the details, I'm sure you know it all. Same thing in Canada. So what I'm saying with addiction, in short, is that every case of addiction originates in trauma. And that trauma could be overt. Like in the case of the Aboriginal population, their children in Canada being taken away from them, sent to residential schools for 100 years where they were sexually abused and beaten up and their culture and their language was denied. In British Columbia in 1960, I know a woman who was four years old in 1965 in my province of British Columbia, who at four years old was taken to the residential school where she spoke her tribal language and the punishment was that they stuck a pin in her tongue for a whole hour. A four year old, and then she sits there for an hour and she can't put a tongue in her mouth because it'll cut her lips. And then sexual abuse began. So then when I look at Vancouver's downtown Eastside, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use, we have more drug addicts there in a few swell block radius than anywhere on the continent. It's a shock to people even who come from Detroit and New York to Vancouver, 30% of our clients down there are first nations are Aboriginal people. They make up 4% of the population. Why? Because of the severe trauma that they experienced. And this is the one piece, the traumaphies that you and I are so aware of. But that addiction. I was talking to a colleague of mine, Jamie where are you, Jamie? You're here somewhere in the room. She's a physician from Detroit.

Oh, Dr. Jamie, hope you in the room. Oh, she's, I think she's in the genius lounge.

Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. So she works in the emergency ward at Detroit Hospital and she graduated in 05 from medical school in Michigan. And I asked her, how many lectures on emotional trauma did you receive? Not a single one. How many lectures on how the human brain develops in interaction with the environment that you receive? Not one. Which is the same with me when I went to medical school, I don't know, 40 odd years ago. And so what I'm saying is that the medical world utterly misunderstands the problem and, and don't get any training in understanding human psychology. And the same thing is true of many of the programs where people go for addiction. So they never deal with the core issue. They only deal with the behavior of addiction. But the behavior is only a symptom.

Yeah, well, let's. I want to touch on ADD because I have been diagnosed with add. You have. How many people in the room would admit or think they have add?

Right.

And I've heard you, I mean you talk about in your book Scattered, that ADD is a response to trauma.

Yes, it is.

What does that mean?

Well, first of all, let me, let me make a point that occurred to me when you were talking about your marijuana use and your cocaine use. Those are typical self medications for ADD because the marijuana calms down the hyperactive mind. And if you get treated for add, what do they give you? They give you a stimulant which elevates dopamine levels in the brain. What do you think cocaine is? It's a stimulant. It elevates dopamine levels. So the point I'm making is that a lot of addictions are actually self medications for specific conditions, like in your case. Now ADD. Again, the medical mantra around ADD, and I was diagnosed in my 50s and two of my children were diagnosed afterwards. The medical mantra is that it's a genetic brain disease. Well, it isn't genetic and it's not a brain disease. When you look at the tuning out, the absentmindedness of add, why do we have that capacity to tune out? Do you think nature gives us that capacity? We all have that capacity to dissociate, to tune out. Why? Well, it's very simple. If I were to threaten you right now, stress you, abuse you verbally, you would the number of options available to you. One would be to get up and Leave, which is called flight. Or you could stand up and assert yourself and tell me to stop, which is called fight. And if you couldn't do either, given that. How many hundreds of people are here?

There's about 400 between both rooms.

Okay, so there's 400 people here. You could ask for help. Those would be the functional options. But what if you couldn't escape because you're too small and powerless? What if you couldn't fight back for the same reason? And what if there's nobody to ask for help? Then what would you do? Well, you wouldn't do anything. Your brain would go into an automatic dissociative mode to protect you from the distress. So what it is, it's actually. It's an adaptation to overwhelming stress. Now, if you put me back into my first year of life, and there are times in the first year of life when, in every second, like in this space of time, millions of connections are being made in the brain. What's happening in my first year of life? My mother is stressed. The day after the German army marches into Budapest, when I am two months of age, she calls the pediatrician to say, would you please come and see Gabor? Because he's crying all the time. And the pediatrician says, well, of course I'll come and see him, but I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying now. Why are Jewish babies crying? Well, not because I know anything about Hitler or genocide, but because I'm picking up on my mother's stress. There's a quote here from one of my teachers that I'd like to read to you if I can find it. And it says that the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity, and pain in the body of the mother or anyone else he's with. If the mother is suffering, the baby suffers too. The pain never gets discharged. So let's say, what do I do then? When my mother is depressed and stressed and terrorized? How do I deal with it? Can I fight back, escape and ask for help? From whom? I tune out. But then the tuning out becomes programmed into my brain. And then 55 years later or 50 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD. Odd. Now, what I'm saying is that it. And I wasn't abused, nobody abused me. I just had a depressed and fearful mother. And being a very sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more you pick up on that. So in those ADD and If you look at it's an adaptation, it begins an adaptation which later on becomes a problem. So I'm not saying it's great, I'm saying that it begins with an adaptation which then becomes a problem. That's the nature. These early adaptations, which children employ not consciously to protect themselves from stress, actually become problems later on. Now if you look at the question of why between 2002 and 2013, I'm being approximate here, the rate of ADD diagnosis in American kids has gone up threefold. What's going on? What's going on is that the parenting environment has become increasingly stressed for all kinds of reasons. And when the parenting environment is stressed, the kids are stressed. And how do they cope with it? They tune out when the brains are developing, now they're getting diagnosed and medicated and all this mental health crisis. And what we're not looking at is what is it about the environment that actually fosters or foments that that response in children. And I'm only talking about add. We could talk about anxiety because people who are addicted often self negate anxiety. They self medicate it with work, with sex, with tv, with distractions, and of course with drugs. And the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago wrote an article about the burgeoning rate of anxiety in American teenagers. And apparently a third now of teenagers and adults in the United States suffer from anxiety. And why? Well, if it was genetic, it wouldn't be increasing because genes don't change in a population over 10 years or 20 years or even 100 years. What's happening is that the conditions in which children are growing up is getting more and more stressful. And that has to do with the stress on the parents. And that also has to do, of course, with the workaholism of the parents. Like in my case, you know, the world thought I was great. I was out there delivering babies and helping the dying, palliative care and everything else in between. But what of me did my children receive? Not very much, because I was always trying to validate myself out there in the world. So then I pass on my trauma to them. But I passed it on not genetically, but through the conditions that obtained in my home. And my kids were small.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Because addicts or in active addiction, people lie, they cheat, they steal, they have symptoms that are much different than say like an actual disease, like cancer. And so they cause trouble, they cause a ruckus, they're self destructive. How does one, how do you interact with someone that's caused so much grief in your life? I mean, in my worst stages of addiction, I was a pain in the ass. And so how does one hold compassion when there's a family member, a husband, a wife, a child, friends that are just causing so much trouble? How do we take that framing? Because I'd love to have people leave here and have a whole different perspective on how to interact with addicts, how to think about it. Because through this room we can make an incredible impact in the field of helping people struggling with trauma.

Well, and just as you in my case, when I was in my addictive phase and my addiction was besides to work, it was for shopping and I shopped compulsively for classical music. And how can that be addiction? You just love music. No, I didn't. I love the music, yes, I'm passionate about it. But it's the shopping I was addicted to. I had to get more and more and more and it doesn't matter how many CDs I bought, next day I had to get a whole bunch more. And of course in the process I was spending a lot of money. And of course the one addiction justified the other because I was saying I work so hard, I deserve to give myself some pleasure. That's how clever the addicted brain is. It justifies everything. And I lied to my wife about where I was going to the store again. But it was like I was like having an affair. I lied and I cheated and so on. So what do I say to families? So there's two major things I say to families. One is you have a decision to make. There's two rational choices and one irrational one. The rational choice is number one, what you're doing causes me so much pain, so much stress, I can't be with it. I love you very much, but this is too hard on me and I'm not willing to expend my energies trying to self care for all the stress that's been caused for me by your behavior. So I can't be with you. That's a perfectly rational choice. Or you can say I love you very much and I understand that what you're doing, whatever it is, comes out of your pain. And this is the only way so far you've found to deal with your pain. So I'm not going to judge you, I'm not going to cajole you, I'm not going to try and change you. I just hope you come to your senses at some point. But I'll be with you and I'll be supporting you emotionally and so on. That's another rational choice. What is completely irrational and dysfunctional is to stay with somebody and try and change them. To cajole them, to convince them, to bribe them, to beg them, to coerce them to change. That's what's crazy making. Don't ever do that. It's one or the other. That's the first thing. The second thing is, given my understanding of addiction, that it isn't an individual brain disease, but actually is a function of a child's experience, a person's experience in a family environment, and particularly in a multi generational family environment where trauma is passed on from one generation to the next unwittingly. But it is. I did not mean to traumatize my kids, but I did, and parents do. Then we recognize that the addiction that's manifested in you didn't begin with you. It's actually an expression of multi generational family dynamics. And so what it actually is is that recognition allows for an opportunity. Now let's all heal together. So you say to the addict, thank you for being the sensitive one who's manifested for all of us what's been hidden in the family. And then we haven't known how to deal with or haven't even realized it was there. And so now it's time to heal the whole family system. And we invite you to join us if you're ready. And if you're not ready, we're still going to carry on that path of healing for the family because it's so important. But we're not going to judge you whether you join us, whether you don't. So that's what I would say to families. And you know, I should mention my book on addiction is entitled in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And there's a chapter on families in there saying just what I said here.

I wanted. I have this question that I had written that I wanted to ask you because I know at least six people, they're in this room, myself included. If someone was raped or molested as a child, as I was, how do you interact with your perpetrator if you still know them?

Well, first of all, let me say something else. People often think that the trauma was the rape it wasn't. How old were you when. I'm not saying it wasn't traumatic, but how old were you when it happened to you?

That I can Remember started around 8.

Okay, and how long did it go on for?

A couple years.

Who did you speak to about it?

No one.

That was the trauma. I mean, if you had an 8 year old child and somebody even looked at him the wrong way just once, who would you want him to talk to? If you're the father, You?

Yeah.

If your 8 year old child had such a horrific experience and he didn't talk to you, how would you explain that to yourself? I don't know. Well, you weren't available for them and they already knew that you weren't available for them. So that original trauma was the loss of the parenting contact because I have to guess that your parents were traumatized and they just weren't emotionally there for you.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you know, and so this is where you sustain the trauma. So. So the rape then comes along as a secondary trauma. The first trauma was the loss of protection and connection and safety in the world. Now in terms of how you interact with them in the present, that depends precisely on where you're at. If you haven't dealt with it yet, if you haven't healed, if you haven't recovered, if you haven't reconnected with it yourself, then whatever comes up is legitimate. If you're angry with them, if you hate them, that's legitimate. Why wouldn't you? If you don't want to see them and stay away from them, that's legitimate. And in fact, at any time, whatever you decide is legitimate. However, what you'll find is that the more you heal, the more comfortable you get with yourself. A the less of a psychological threat they become to you because you're whole and okay in yourself, they're not going to dysregulate you, they're going to make you feel bad about yourself just because they show up. And you might even, and I'm not making this, I'm not saying that you should, but you might even find yourself getting to a point of compassion for them. And I've seen that happen as well. When the recovery is so complete that the person actually have compassion because the perpetrator, I assure you, was another traumatized person.

In my case, absolutely.

Yeah.

I've worked through a lot with this individual and you know, I do have a lot of compassion because I know what happened to them. Same thing happened to them.

Right.

And it's sad in a Lot of ways I'm asking the question. I'm doing thankfully better in my life with my recovery than, than I ever have. It still is hard at times. It's still very hard. I know there's people in this room though, that are just fucking livid and just outraged.

Well, and that's perfectly legitimate, isn't it? That's the anger of the helpless child and that's the anger that they turned against themselves out of their lives. And one of the ways you do that is through the addiction, you know, so. And the depression. I mean, what is depression? If you look at this is interesting again, somebody talked about words. What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. When a kid experiences anger, but they can't express it because to express it is too dangerous, then they push it down, then they become depressed. So then anger then turns against the self. So if the anger is coming out of them, that's great, but I hope they get some help with it so they can channel it in a healthy way rather than. Because just keep exploding in rage actually puts you at risk of a heart attack and a stroke. So you might as well take that healthy anger or that rage even and find some channels for it and deal with it. But there's no reason not to be angry at the perpetrator if that's there. That's nothing more than natural.

We're so much as a society in the infancy stages of even beginning to really understand this as a whole. I mean, if you controlled everything, how would you treat this?

Well, take a very well, tragically well known case right now, Harvey Weinstein, who clearly had an addiction to sexual predation. And of course there's all kinds of justified outrage at the system that allowed him, that enabled him to carry on for so many decades. And people are angry with him, which is totally understandable. But if he came to him for treatment, I would not begin with any kind of a judgment that what you did was bad. He already knows it. I would ask him, like I asked you guys, what did it do for you? What did you get from it that was missing from your life? And what was missing from your life? How did you lose it? What happened to you? In other words, whatever else you do, first of all, you have to accept these people as they are and not judge them and understand that they were slaves to something inside them and they didn't willingly make themselves slaves, number one. Number two, something happened to create that compulsion. And that something happened. That's something that happened that created the compulsion was rooted in pain. And so, in other words, you have to treat them with compassion and you have to actually get to the core trauma rather than just dealing with the behavior and the problem. With all the many programs, Betty Ford and elsewhere, people go for all these high end, expensive treatments. Rarely do they deal with the trauma. And Even in the 12 step programs, they rarely deal with the trauma. David Smith, who's a physician in San Francisco who funded the Haight Ashbury Clinic back in the 60s, he said to me once that the medical profession is traumaphobic. So is the whole of society. We're surrounded by trauma and the manifestations of trauma which show up in the culture, from politics to every other field, and yet we don't talk about trauma.

Right, right.

So treating the trauma, dealing with the trauma. Yeah, yeah. I want to distinguish two kinds of trauma. So there's overt trauma, then there's what we call developmental trauma, and we have two very great examples of it in the United States. So what does trauma do? It separates us from ourselves. We lose ourselves. Like we said, it also gives us a very negative view of the world. So if we have a negative view of the world, then we act accordingly. We are defensive and we are grandiose and we are aggressive. So there's a man who said that the world is a horrible place. Now, I'm not commenting on anybody's politics here. I'm talking pure psychology, okay? I'm not talking about policy, foreign or domestic. I'm talking about mind states. Please understand that. So however you voted in this last election, don't take offense, please, but the man who said that the world is a horrible place is the President of the United States. That's the world he lives in. Why does he live in that world? Because he grew up in a family that taught him that his father was a domineering, rageaholic tyrant who demeaned his children. His brother drank himself to death. And this man develops all these issues like attention problems and grandiosity, and psychiatrists have diagnosed him with narcissism and all this kind of stuff, which are not false. They're the outcomes of trauma. So there's that overt trauma, and we live in such a traumatized society that these people actually rise to the top. But his opponent was even more interesting. I don't know if you saw the Democratic National Convention. And when Hillary won the nomination, there was a video narrated about her life by God himself, Morgan Freeman. Now, how many of you saw that video about her life? Now, there was something very interesting in that Video that I saw. No comments on whatsoever. This anecdote comes from Hillary and what happens is that. And it's presented as an example of wonderful character building, strength building, parenting. What happens is that the four year old Hillary runs into her home to her mother, afraid because neighborhood kids are bullying her, threatening her, and the mother says, there is no room for cards in this house. Now you get out there and you deal with it. And this is presented as this made me tough and this made me a fighter and this is character building. Now the actual message to the child is not that there's no room for cards in this house because the four year old or five year old who runs to mom is only doing what any mammal will do, any young mammal will do when they're threatened, is they'll go to their protective figures. It's not car, it is, it's just natural attachment. The message is there's no room for your vulnerability in this house. You have to be tough, you have to suck it up. Now jump 65 years ahead and the presidential campaign and there's a famous scene where Trump is looming all over, hovering all over Hillary, and she doesn't say a thing, she's just sucking it up. And then she develops pneumonia. Remember during the campaign she had pneumonia? How did the world find out that she had pneumonia? Because, because she collapsed and her security people had to pick her up, but she didn't tell anybody about it, she didn't talk about it because she learned at an early age to suck it up and she mustn't be vulnerable. So what I'm saying, and that's what's called developmental trauma, where not when something bad happens to you, but when the good things that should happen don't happen. And the good thing that didn't happen is the mother should have scooped her up and said, oh boy, you're really scared, aren't you? That's what didn't happen. And so what I'm saying is there's that overt trauma and there's lots of studies on how overt trauma, if those of you are not familiar with the adverse childhood experiences studies, the AC studies, where they looked at 17,000 Californians, most half of them university graduates, and the more adversity that was in their childhood, meaning physical, sexual or emotional abuse, death of a parent, a divorce, a parent being addicted, a parent being mentally ill, violence in the family, neglect, a parent being jailed for each of these adverse experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially. And you can download your ACE score just by going to the Internet. It'll give you a lot of insight about yourself. But there's that other kind of trauma, which is the developmental trauma, which doesn't happen because bad things happen to you, but just because you weren't held in the way you need it to be held. So that's the final thing I wanted to tell you. Okay.

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