How to understand & heal your trauma | Gabor Maté

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 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 it's about building connections, which is actually human nature. We're wired for connection, you see, and we're actually more wired for love than we are for selfishness if our needs are met. And so if you ask yourself this, 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 to 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.

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.

Surrounding you at this Genius Network annual event are entrepreneurs who have come from all over the world. They 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 Mate has to share with you in this discussion. Gabor is a world renowned speaker as well as a best selling author and his latest book is the Myth of 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. Thank you.

Thank you, Gabor.

Thanks very generously. Do you have a preference?

Do you have a preference?

No. That's good. All right, good.

So great to have you back.

Nice to be back.

It was 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 to a business conference. And the feedback I got was that was one of the most eye opening, valuable, insightful things that sent 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 and three different things just on YouTube has been viewed over a million times and on other forms of social media, God knows. So you're reaching a lot of people. So 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 why'd you write it?

You've written a book. Why did I write it?

Why'd you write it?

Because I wanted to get rich and famous.

Yes.

Yeah.

I knew that was your motivation.

Because the way the world is going, like, if you look at the health situation, here's the richest country in the world, the United States. And if you look at just the COVID crisis, one of the biggest risk factors for dying of COVID was being an American.

Being American.

Yeah. Per capita, a lot of people died here more than anywhere else. The number of overdoses in the United States last year exceeded 100,000, 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 is going up all the time. The number of people with autoimmune disease is going up. Women have 70 or 80% of autoimmune disease. If you're a woman of color or a minority, your risk of autoimmune 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, as you put it, that's creating all this illness, all this dysfunction. There was an article in the New York Times two months ago or so about a teenager who's on ten different psychiatric medications. Can you believe that? Ten. Excuse me. She should maybe him on one, if at all. So my argument is that if I was a laboratory scientist culturing bacteria or microorganisms in a laboratory, I'd 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, on the other 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 its 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 with. 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 also healthy and natural. No, they're not. They make us sick. And that's what I mean by the myth of normal. So I wanted to bring 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 we 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. 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 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 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. Which means that you're stuck in something that happened in the past and you can't move beyond it. So that's not. But on the one hand, on the other hand. So trauma can get a bad rap that way. On the other hand, we're not looking at trauma nearly enough. So what is trauma? This is to the point where even though there is, well, humanist scientific research does not even vaguely controversial that shows the relationship between trauma and physical and mental illness. To the point that a British psychologist, a member of the British Academy, Richard Benthall, said that the evidence, for example, linking childhood adversity trauma to adult mental health conditions is as clear as the evidence linking cigarette smoking 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 hit that you get, it's the concussion. So trauma 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. As a 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 it 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 that I'm being abandoned and rejected. So that wound can show up 70 years later when something touches it. So a trauma is a wound. It's not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you. And the characteristics 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 examine what explosive charge, what ammunition am I still carrying from childhood that has just been triggered. So trauma first of all is, you know, if you touch the wound, it's very sensitive. The other aspect of a wound is that it scars over. And scar tissue, while 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. 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 and 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. The healthy response is to fight back or to run away. But I mean, I know your experience, Joe, and could you have fought or escaped at that time? You couldn't have. So that the protective response is to disconnect from yourself. So that's trauma in a sense represents the organisms 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 trauma 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'm just going to 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 something that disconnects us from the 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. 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 my mother that I endured at age 11 months. Such as poverty or racism, such as being emotionally abused or neglected, or a parent dying, or a parent being addicted, or a parent being mentally ill, or a rancorous divorce. That a child has to live through violence in a family, a parent being mentally ill. These are the big T traumas. 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 meeting their needs. Human children have evolved with specific needs. They're not just a blank slate on 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 where the child feels 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. 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 brain 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 the parenting advice that parenting experts, so called give moms and dads in this society, is that some emotions on 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'm myself, I won't be accepted. I won't have the attachment relationship. On the other hand, to have the attachment 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 that 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 parent.

Yeah, very good. 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, I want to 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? Because there are things that happen in childhood, but then there's betrayals and things that happen in adulthood.

Well, let me tell you something. I don't quite see it that way. There is a very famous, and rightly so, child psychiatrist and neuroscientist and trauma expert called Bruce Perry, Dr. Bruce Perry, whose book with Oprah, what Happened to you? Is a recent bestseller. And Bruce points out that if you take kids and you get the first few months or years right, and all kinds of terrible things happen later, they'll be okay. But if you 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 developed PTSD in adulthood were people who were traumatized in childhood. And those adult experiences actually trigger the childhood trauma. So in a particular 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, perhaps. And 20, 30 will come out with PTSD, the others will not. It's because 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 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? 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, you were, because he wrote a book in, I think, 2009. You wrote in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

That's right.

Yeah. And he. Which is an amazing book. So if you want to, you know, go deep into on addiction, Gabor's written when the body says no Scattered. And then I think it's called Scattered Minds in Canada.

Yeah. This is my book on adhd, which is my first book after I was diagnosed with it, and it was published in Canada with the title Scattered Mines in the US with the title Scattered. I think the thought was the American publisher didn't think the US Public would understand the word minds. I don't know. I don't know what the problem was, but lo and behold, my publisher is going to bring out Scattered Mines in the US Again with the actual title Scattered Minds.

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 are a significant figure in the world. I mean, one of the most important figures. I constantly say to people that you're probably the most in tune, intelligent, articulate person describing addiction and disconnection of anyone I know. You helped Johann Hari, who has the, you know, the great line, you know, the opposite of addiction is connection. And then your. 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 book, 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 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 right before I came to this conference this morning for day two here, one of the people, one of the members in the audience said, do you know any good doctor for plantar fasciitis? I have this pain. I've not been able to get help. And one of the things I said was, I got someone I can recommend. Steve Ozanich, who wrote the Pain Deception, which I know you know, Steve, but I said, listen to my talk with Gabor, because I think there, you know, I think there might be not might be there. I know there's a link between disease and addiction because of unresolved trauma. And in your book, like chapters 27, 28 and 29, you go really deep into compassionate inquiry, which is your process. And I guarantee you, those who 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 my question is. And then I'm gonna come to add. Cause I definitely. We cannot have this interview without talking about that. Cause 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 there's a lot of people running the world right now that are creating the worst shit storms on the planet. And so I just wanted to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, so the first thing is to recognize that death is a problem. Now, 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 that I don't think is controversial. So an addiction 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 innate behavior. I didn't say drugs. It could include drugs. Of course it does. Cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol. But it could also be gambling, the Internet, pornography, sex, relationship, work. And in this culture, workaholism is rewarded like my workaholism was rewarded. Shopping, any range of human behaviors. The issue is not the activity. It's the internal relationship. Pleasure, craving, relief, harm, inability to give it up. So I'm going to ask you guys a question here. If, according to 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 raised 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 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 a good feeling. Pleasure. Yeah.

Dopamine. Hit. Of course.

Which means excitement. Yeah.

Stimulant. Escape.

Escape. Thank you. No. Escape from what? Escape from distress. Escape from emotional pain. Serenity. A sense of aliveness. Escape from pain. Are these good things or are they 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 an 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 woods 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, we. Whether we like them or not, they came along for a reason. And if we ask the question compassionately, you might do something that you're not proud of. If you ask yourself the question compassionately, 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? Or why did you do that? Do you think there's 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 teachers says, only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth. Now, if you ask somebody else, not why did you do that? But I Know you're a good person, trying to do your best. Any idea why you did that? Now, that's the question. And the same with yourself. If you put to yourself, no, why did I do this? But I wonder why I did this. That's what a compassionate inquiry is. And my belief is that the answers are within all of ourselves. They actually are. And if we are 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 the sources of that problem.

In your book, you. 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 a good portion of the book, but I listened to the entire thing on audio, 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. And Daniel, who I've met, your son reads the book.

Yeah, my son, who helped me write the book, also narrates the audio version. And it's been number two audiobook in the U.S. now it's number nine, I think, you know, on the New York Times list.

Yeah. No, and it's been like six weeks now, Right?

Six weeks in the New York Times, which is amazing.

And you actually have questions for compassion inquiry, ones that would be so beneficial to so many of the workaholics that are in this room, including myself, 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 why are you saying 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.

Yeah, thank you. And I'll tell you, I don't think I ever would have done any of this stuff had, I mean, me and Gabor in 2015, I think it was in the jun. We went and I spent a week in the jungle with you doing an ayahuasca. Three different ayahuasca journeys. And at one point you were like yelling at me. Remember that?

During the process, was I yelling at you? I'm sorry. Sort of not very compassionate. No.

But I still knew you were Coming from a really loving place. But that really was the beginning point of me starting to look at just God, the compulsivity and the. And, you know, to unravel so much of this stuff. And the other thing that helped is you helped with me and Akara Chan started 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 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. 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 expression, but it's expression gone in a wrong way. And so work, like 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 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 shit 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, compulsive work. 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 answers 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 of course, my marriage suffered. And it was hard to recognize that because the work is so rewarding and it turns you on. You get this dopamine hit from working. What was it all about? Well, when your mother gives you to a Stranger when you're 11 months old, what conclusion are you going to come to that you're not wanted? You can't come to any other conclusion. That's the wound. Not that they give 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've said many times before, you know what you do? You go to medical school now, they're going to want you all the time. When they're being born, when they're dying. And every minute in between when they're in trouble, they're going to call you. And every time they call you, it feels so great. You're so important. But it never fulfills or it never fills the inner emptiness, does it? It's a temporary hit, like with any other addiction. Because something says, whether you're aware of it or not. Would they still want me if I was giving all the time? So you have to keep proving to yourself so that hole never gets filled. You have to keep doing it. And so it's completely addictive. Now, the work that you guys do. There's probably two levels to it. If I can make a broad generalization. One is you're 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 facera to make. So when you make stuff the same as your work. When your 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 it's what turns you on. It's what allows you to express your creativity, Then that's great, and now you're no longer a workaholic. You're just 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 salve without healing some childhood trauma. That's great.

So my friend and genius network member Sam Qurachi, who did a great live. He's awesome. He actually 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, Sam and I. Yeah, he's great.

And he'll watch this.

Of course.

He's in. Where's he at right now? In Saudi Arabia. So this is the question for a speaker on stage, a leader of a team or a parent, when would vulnerability compromise credibility? I often talk about my addiction and I wonder. I talk about sex addiction.

The answer is never. Because vulnerability, again, that 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 our vulnerability. You know, hardened criminals, you know how they become hardened because they suffered so much, they tried to protect themselves from their vulnerability. If you go into the prisons and if you deal with some of the most life rich people who've done terrible things, if you get to know them, if they open up. This may sound strange to a lot of people, but they're 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 in terms of when is 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 or 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 our own struggles, something our own vulnerability, people so appreciate it because now they don't feel alone. Let me tell you guys a story and see what you think about it. I want you to imagine a four. This is a real story. A four year old girl who's being bullied by kids in a neighborhood and she runs into her family home and she runs to her mother for protection. And the mother says, there's no room for cards in this house. There's no room for cards in this house. No, you gotta deal with it. Any of your parents here are Your 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 cowards because a four year old girl 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 gorilla ignoring the distress of their 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 of our political leaders are wounded people. And the message was told as a wonderful example of, you know, toughening 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, her secret servicemen had to carry her into the van because the message she got was you gotta suck it up, you're on your own. There's no room for vulnerability here. So this is a culture that actually celebrates trauma. And millions of people watched that. There was not a single commentary in the media that was being celebrated here is the traumatization of a vulnerable 4 year old. So I'm saying on the opposite side, let's not be tough, let's be vulnerable.

Yeah, that's good. So how does ADD and ADHD develop?

So ADHD is said in medical terminology to be the most heritable mental health illness, mental disease. Well, in this book I make the point that to say that ADD is the most heritable mental condition is like saying that courts is the most chewable crystal because it's neither a disease nor is it inherited. So go back to your childhood, you 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 we have 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 so 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, let me put it that way.

You want a water?

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 what you have to understand again is that the human brain biologically develops under the impact of the environment. And as an article from the Harvard center on the Developing Child, which is the world's most prestigious child developmental organization, published in the journal Pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American pediatric academy in February 2012, pointed out, the human brain develops from in utero until adulthood. And the most important input into the physiological, healthy development of the human brain is the quality of adult child relationships. So we're relational creatures, which again is what Yuruka is all about. And our brain itself develops under the impact of our 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, it's because parents are more and more stressed in this world. They're more and more isolated and the parents are stressed and isolated. And by the way, we were never meant to be parented in nuclear families by a couple or perhaps a single parent. We evolved 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, where 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 more and more stressed, and if you look at the triggers for stress, these are the research proven triggers for 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 own fault. They're stressed, the kids are stressed. When the parents are stressed, you can measure the kids stress hormone levels, they'll be elevated. Now how do kids deal with that stress? They tune out and now they're being diagnosed with the so called disease. It does have a biological template in the brain because the biology of the brain develops in 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 the 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 what?

I hope so with your book and my book, and this may sound like I am a marketer.

Let me jump in here for a moment, if I may. In this society, 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 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 it's about building connections, which is actually human nature. We're wired for connection, you see, and we're actually more wired for love than we are for selfishness if our needs are met. And so if you ask yourself this, 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 I hope is I want to take the givers of the world to have them be better, less jaded or not jaded and better boundaried givers. Because if you are a giver, you're going to have takers. You're going to have. And I hope it can reach the takers of the world to get them to realize this is perfect. 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 as a result of that for those people. And I think your book 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, 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 if you hate yourself or if you're disconnected with yourself or you have all this pain internally and oftentimes externally. And I think both of our books do really well together. They help each other. 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 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 and my goals to take you and share it with the world as much as we can. Because it's important, it's significant. And so, like, I want to ask you this question in front of everyone just to kind of see your perspective off. I have a VR company called Genius X, and my co founders are here in the room. And Deanne Adamson, who, you know, 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 being someone in the VR world, what would happen if you change the environment? And 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 rat park studies. And one of the things that my co founders we said, I said, there's so much tech that is doing destructive things. 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 I know that sounds crazy.

Thank you, Joe. I'm really looking for more things to do in my office. I know.

Yeah, that's actually funny. You know what, Is this too narcissistic of me to have socks that say what's.

You know?

No, but. And by the way, I'm not saying you even need to be involved in it. I just like the whole. You've already created it. You've already said it. I'm just saying another way to, like, one of the ways that you. You're reaching so many people is you're out there. 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 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 wanted to just acknowledge you because it's huge.

Well, you're not easy to say no to. Let me put it that way. Yeah.

And plus, I just know that we help so many people. I mean, that was evidenced by the stuff that we've done. So the point is, there's a lot of different ways to treat trauma, to address depression, to address anxiety. And you have studied and document so many of them here, and the best people in the world that are helping others with it, you're personal friends with all of them, and I know a handful of them, too. So for things that. For everyone here that really. How many of you just totally resonate with what Gabor is saying? I mean, you can just see yourself and what he's just.

Yeah. Sir, you didn't put your hand up. What's wrong with you? I'm joking.

Well, I've been saying this as a joke, too. There's a lot of my. I said this yesterday when I was talking to my friend Marie Forleo. I was interviewing her. Is that a lot of my friends, some that I've introduced you to, that won't do the deep work or have a fear or a wall to go in and do therapy or do a journey. What they do instead is they start a podcast.

Yeah, that explains all the podcasts.

Yeah, it really does. So you talk about stuff like medicine journeys, and you talk about some that, to a lot of people, seem incredibly extreme. And I'm very careful to go tell people to go do ayahuasca or MDMA or psilocybin, because it's not the medicine itself or what some people say is a drug. It's as Timothy Leary said, I think, in the 50s, the set and setting.

Right.

And could you speak to that? Just because 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 situations.

Yeah. So 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. 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 Psychedelics Will Save the World. I don't think anything is going to save the world. 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 in our thinking and in our activity, in our 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 so much of what pushes us and drives us, 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 plaguing us have to do with childhood dynamics. So, 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 illness? Zero. That's how much evidence there is. And the fact that now I've taken antidepressants and they've helped me, but the fact that an antidepressant helped me doesn't prove, like the serotonin, which is the medication, the brain chemical that the 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 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 shyness was caused by lack of bourbon in your brain? So we make these false connections. Now, 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 push down 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 mind rejected them somehow if they experienced 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 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 as the helpless, isolated child, but as an adult with 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, 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 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 through 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 certainly have a role to play. And they've been shown to play significant potential positive roles in the treatment of ptsd. For example, various medicines can do that 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 friend, female friend, years ago with 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 in line with what you 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, and all of the things that people pursue in terms of woo. Oftentimes the woo creates a lot of ah, but there are ways to get a lot of woo in a healthy way. So what is your hope? Last question I'll have for you. What's your hope for. For. And the vision for the future 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 remembered myself, I just want people to get to know themselves and to have a sense of compassion for themselves and their world. And I want them to understand the world that has shaped us and continues to 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 too, is 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. And you are a true result leader. You have made such an impact. You live. The message of my book is what's in it for them? Because you're not doing it. I mean, you've put so much effort into helping other people, and 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, Jill.

Dr. Gabor, mate.

Thank you very much.