In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: A Candid Conversation About Addiction with Gabor Maté and Joe Polish - Genius Network #66

Is addiction the biggest crisis we've ever faced? Can we do anything about it? In a candid conversation about addiction, Gabor Mate and Joe Polish define what addiction is and why it's actually a solution to pain. Gabor Mate is a Hungarian born Canadian physician with a background in family practice and a special interest in child development and trauma and their potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health and including adhd, addictions, and a wide range of other conditions. Recorded live at the 2017 Genius Network annual event. If you would like access to the full video presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 66 that's geniusnetwork.com 66.

Let me read some stats to you. There will be 47 new addicts in this room out of the 331 that are here now. That statistic comes from a 2017 U.S. surgeon General's report that one out of seven Americans now face substance addiction. That's not counting the ones who are already an addict like myself. The financial cost is also astounding. It costs our economy over 740 billion a year. How many of you know someone who has an addiction? Raise your hand. Okay, look around the room. Keep your hands up.

That's.

That's a lot. I mean, more than half the room, at least. Now, I'm not going to ask you how many of you have an addiction, although many people come up to me and say, I'm in recovery. So this is why I want you to meet and hear what Dr. Gabor Mate has to say. And we're going to do. I'm going to ask him a few questions. Then I'm going to open it up for some of you to ask questions to Gabor. Dr. Mate was born in Hungary and survived the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. He and his family then immigrated to Canada in 1956, where he has specialized in neurology, psychiatry and psychology, as well as the study and treatment of addictions. Add many different diseases and illnesses. Gabor's books and articles are considered some of the best ever written in the area of addiction. And you got to read everything that you'll see. Just when you hear me talk to him, you'll see how bright he is. Even if you have no personal connection to addiction, you certainly have a financial connection. And based on the statistic that I gave you, there's a very good chance, one in seven that someone in your immediate family will struggle with addiction in the near future. So you need to know the best sources and how to think about this, to make good decisions. Now, this is something I'm reading here just to give some context. However, I think addiction is one of the most misunderstood, mislabeled we currently penalize. And you can't punish the pain out of people. And there's many people in the room here that have behavioral addictions, which this doesn't even address. And so I'm going to ask Gabor about this and several other subjects. And so please welcome my good friend, Dr. Gabor Mate. Thank you, sir.

Okay. Can I make something clear right away?

Yes.

I 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 Wikipedia, and I don't know who put it on there. But second thing is, I'm not doing burpees earlier.

Let's do some burpees.

Three months ago, I decided to do 36,500 pushups 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. 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 cover.

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 worked. Any behavior that gives you temporary relief pleasure, but you suffer negative consequences, you don't get that 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're 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 relief from pain. Thank you. Anybody else? Sorry.

Control.

Control. Gave you 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 a problem. And the real question is, how did that problem develop? How come it's 7 billion humans 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, lack of control, the anxiety, these are forms of emotional pain. So my mantra on 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.

Yeah, 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?

Or 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. Were 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, I did a lot of drugs. And then 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. 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 a 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. And 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. Not they're going to want you all the time. They're going to want you when they're being born, they want you when they're dying. And they're going to 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, 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. Right. Instead of making them criminals. And number one, number two, it's very arbitrary as to what we decide is 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 to 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.

Right? I mean, you know, you cannot punish pain out of people. And I mean, I have some stats here that I've heard you say that, you know, every month 911 happens actually.

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 911 happening in the United States as a result of illegal drug overdoses, let alone.

And 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. We're 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. Not 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. 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 uptand 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, their 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 a whole hour and she can't put a tongue in her mouth because it'll cut her lips. And then the sexual abuse began. So then when I look at Vancouver's downtown east side, 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 or Aboriginal people. They make up 4% of the population. Why? Because of the severe trauma that they've experienced. And this is the one piece, the trauma piece 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 help 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 did 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 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 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 addiction 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 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. And 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 as 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 response in children? And I'm only talking about add. We could talk about anxiety because people who are addicted often self medicate 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 read 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, 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 pass it on. Not genetically, but, but through the conditions that obtained in my home. And my kids were small. Wow. Wow.

We'll take a few questions in a moment. 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 with 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 worked 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 being 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.

Yeah. And Gabor's books are amazing. I'll ask you at the end to get out websites and stuff. Eben Pagan, since you're up at the mic, if you could please. Yeah, Joe, thanks for being vulnerable. You know, you said when you were kind of under the influence of the addiction, you were a pain in the ass. But it wasn't about the addiction. Thank you. It's trying to be funny right now. One observation is this word addiction and the term addict. It feels like there could be a word. I'm very interested in words and symbols and what we call things that could make it easier to relate to.

Well, look, the problem with words is that they become used originally they're quite accurate, but then they become pejoratives. So in psychological terms, say the word like neurotic, just refer to a certain state of mind, but then it becomes the pejorative. Don't be so neurotic. No. Addict actually originates from a perfectly good Latin word, an addictus. And an addictus was a person who was assigned to somebody else as a slave because they were in debt and they couldn't pay the debt back. So the origin of the word addiction itself originates in slavery. It's a really good word because the addict is a slave to the habit. And in itself there's nothing wrong with it except that it becomes a pejorative and a stigma and there's so little understanding of it. So I quite agree with you. I've said this before, that if I could pass a law, I would. That every time a politician or anybody, physician, anybody talks about an addict, they would have to say not the word addict, but they'd have to say a human being who suffered so much pain that didn't know how else to escape from it, but through this particular behavior. Outlaw the word addict. And every time you want to say addict, you have to say what I just said. That would change the conversation. It would also be very accurate.

Yeah, it feels like what's coming to me is maybe like compulsive soother or compulsive self soother or something.

Yeah, that's okay. Again, you know, the problem is that it's not in the words that we use, but in how we view people. Because pretty soon, unless the view of the addict changes, then any phrase I come up with, you come up with, would also become pejoratives. So it's the fundamental attitude that needs to shift. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks. How do you treat it, Gabor? What's the best? I mean, we're currently, I think 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 me 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 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 founded 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 is how you.

Would dealing with the trauma. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gabor, you were referring to trauma that's passed from generation to generation.

Yeah.

And if I inferred correctly from your saying, it was based on the behavior. So the behavior, the trauma gets passed through by the behavior of the parents to the children, then that results in addiction. But I keep reading about this field of epigenetics, where there may be an actual biological change. So how sure are you that there's not a biological mechanism?

Well, there's no contradiction. So you're quite right. So epigenetics, for those of you that may not know, the word EPI means on top of. So genetics. On top of genetics. So it turns out that genes are turned on and off by the environment, and that happens early in life. So that even two people with the same genes, if they have different experiences, they'll have different outcomes, because in one case the gene was turned off, the other one was turned on. So the trauma is passed on both behaviorally and in the pain that it induces in the child. That's clear, because I can tell you that what I haven't said much about, I Referred to it was that if I look at the circuits in the brain that are affected by anxiety or ADHD or addiction or any other mental health problem, these circuits develop an interaction with the environment. You see, the human brain is the least mature of any mammal. The horse can run on the first day of life. We can't do that for a year and a half. And that's because we're born with large heads, comparatively speaking. Already at birth, the head is the largest part of the body. And the female, a human female, has a relatively narrow pelvis compared to a horse because we have to walk on two legs. So narrow pelvis, large head, we have to get out there prematurely. And that means that most of our brain development, 80 to 90% of it, occurs after birth and not before. Very much affected by the emotional environment. So that these are not just behavioral problems. They become physiological problems in the brain based on what happens in the environment. And on top of that, then what you say is also true, that our gene functioning is also affected by trauma multi generationally, and so that you traumatize grandparents and that still affect the genetic functioning of their grandchildren. So that's true as well. So it's all these things coming together. Having said that, though, the brain can develop new circuits even later on in life. And that's called neuroplasticity, for which I always say, thank God for neuroplasticity, because I'm 73 now and I would not wish to be as stupid as I was when I was 71, you know, so thank God that the brain can change. And that's why the word recovery is so interesting, because when we talk about recovery, what does it mean to recover something? What do you do when you recover something? You find you get it back. And when you ask people when you recovered, what did you get back? I got back myself. So in trauma, there's a loss of self, and in recovery, there's a reconnection with the self.

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 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 were 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.

This is where you sustain the trauma. 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 that 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 I do have a lot of compassion because I know what happened to them. Same thing happened to them. 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 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, 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, 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 itself. 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 could 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. Got you.

Let me also mention. So we got Dr. Jamie Hope. Who Gabor. I met her a few months ago. Verne Harnish, who I believe is in the room, was doing a scale up summit and it was a business conference and me and Dean Graziosi spoke for about an hour and 15 minutes or so, I think it was. And there's a thousand people in the room. The average business owner was I think worth like 20, had $20 million business. And Vern's like an amazing guy. And we spent most of the time talking about business. I think I spent two minutes talking about addiction. And it was early in the two day session, John was there and, and over the next two days after I, I just mentioned for a couple minutes about addiction, nine out of 10 people that came up and talked to me, their questions were not about business, they were about addiction. And I was like, wow, it really dawned on me just how prevalent this subject matter is. And that's what really kind of put me on this, like, you know, bringing you here today.

And by the way, if I haven't said it yet, I'm just so grateful that you did. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. And I met Jamie and she told me she works in the ninth busiest hospital in the U.S. emergency in Detroit. And she has this incredible compassion for addicts. And we totally hit it off and have become dear friends since. And so this is Dr. Jamie Hope so.

The first thing I actually wanted to say was thank you for doing this. You wouldn't necessarily expect this at a business conference, but to see successful, influential, strong people talking about truth, talking about what it's like to be human because we're all human in this room, and bringing it out in a way that is socially acceptable, that is such a huge thing. There are probably people in this room who have suffered trauma and haven't really faced it or spoken about it. So the first thing I wanted to do was thank you guys. What you do matters. This is so huge.

Thank you.

And then Gabor, after lunch, when you were doing your interview with Akira, we had talked about respectable addictions versus drugs in which we stigmatize. And you had some really interesting insights and I think a lot of people in the room could relate to that. When you were talking about that.

Yeah, so. Well, again I mentioned that so that 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, 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 an addiction to power, like I'm just reading a biography of Napoleon and Napoleon was a genius. He really. When you talk about Genius Network, 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 his mistress. Well, a lot of people died 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 all our self judgment. Basically, the stuff they don't like about themselves, we project it onto these other people.

When I started talking about addiction in the Genius Network meetings, some people loved it. Other people like what the Hell is all this? I didn't come join Genius Network so I could hear you talk about addictions. And this one guy literally dropped out of the group because he didn't like me talking about addiction. And then he came, he contacted me a few months later, and he's like, I'm going to be in Phoenix. Can we have lunch? And we get together for lunch. And then he's like, I am so sorry. My daughter is a heroin addict. I'm a workaholic. It just was too close to home. And he's like, I gave him some suggestions, and it got her into treatment, and now she's doing much better. But I just want to plant a seed today. That's why I brought Gab Bohr here. I want to plant a seed. Some of you totally are in this conversation. Others are like, it's getting worse. The world is. 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. And it's true.

It's very simple. I mean, if you. 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.

So what didn't I ask you that I should have, if anything, Because I could go on for a long time, but we're on the clock. But there's so many different areas.

Well, I don't know that there's much that you didn't ask me that you should have. What I was really hoping to do here in conversation with you is just to get across just how human this phenomenon of addiction is. And if we approach it with understanding and curiosity about the person who's experiencing it, or in our own case, real compassionate curiosity for ourselves, then we can actually deal with the problem. One thing I'll mention is, oh, yeah, I'll say one thing. 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 is 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 a 4 year old or 5 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 cowardice, 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 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, 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, 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 needed to be held. So that's the final thing I wanted to tell you. Great.

Thank you. And for people to read your books, watch your videos. I mean, I'm going to put a lot of Gabor's work on Genius Recovery.com, which is the educational platform we're creating. And we'll have him featured in a documentary, the stuff we're doing with Artists for Addicts. Your books. When the Body says no in the Realm of Hungry Goes Scattered. I know you have a new book.

Coming out in my head.

Yes, in your head. Hey, it's all in our head, right?

It's all in my head.

So how do people find more about you?

Well, my website is www.gabormati.com. Dr. Dr. Yeah, Dr. Gabor. It's also. You can just Google me on YouTube. A lot of my lectures are on there. They're free. So both my website and on YouTube. Great.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks.

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