HEAL Your TRAUMA & Finally Break Free! | Gabor Maté

The things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs. The addictions that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation.

Dr. Mate is a world renowned physician, best selling author whose work dives deep into childhood development and the impact of trauma.

Dr. Gabor Mate, you are the average neurologist with symptoms of Ms. Nobody's going to ask you about your trauma. There's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine.

How do you think in our modern society with all the medical and scientific advances, that there's so much suffering when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before?

Well.

What I read about your stuff, what I see about your content, is a lot of people are lost based on trauma and past traumas cause certain addictions or certain behaviors and routines that maybe are some healthy addictions or unhealthy addictions, but it seems to be like a lot of unhealthy addictions.

Can I interrupt right there?

Yes, please.

No such thing as a healthy addiction.

No such thing.

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

Like working out.

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

A habit, it's a healthy habit.

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

There's no healthy addiction.

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

Interesting. So addiction, what is the root of addiction?

The word?

Yeah.

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

An addictus.

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

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

Absolutely. Absolutely. You. You have no choice. You can. A slave has no choice. Wow.

And they have no free will, essentially.

Yeah. And I've had my own addictive behaviors and nothing like the patients that I worked with. But insofar as I had them, literally, even though I was a well paid, middle class, successful doctor, I was not exercising any free choice, really. Over my behaviors. No.

When did you. What was the main addiction that you were, you know, tied to? And when did you learn.

Yeah.

How to break free of that?

Well, so the. In my life, the main addictions have been to work.

To work.

Yeah.

Work hard, achieve more and more.

Patience, more and more, Success. More and more. More and more is the essence of addiction. It's always more and more. And there's a reason why I developed that addiction. And that was the hardest. That's the hardest one to give up. Then I was addicted for a long time to shopping for classical compact discs. And when I say addicted, I mean, I would spend thousands of dollars a day on CDs. Yeah.

Really?

Yeah, really. And I would lie to my wife about it, and I would neglect my patients. And as soon as I left the store, thinking, now I'm complete, my collection is full. Half an hour later, I had to run back. And as I described in my book, An Addiction in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, I once left a woman in labor, in hospital to go get a symphony. So that's an addiction, really? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like that. Now, the interesting thing about addiction is that I wasn't using substances.

You weren't smoking or drinking or things.

Like drugs, But I was looking for a chemical hit.

Dopamine.

Dopamine. Yeah. So I was in a dopamine fiend, you might say. And I get it through those particular behaviors. And so that's what my addiction was. How did I give it up? Well, it took a long time.

Really?

Yeah. A lot of struggle, a lot of, you know. And finally I just realized that the cost was greater than the. In fact, you know, in fact, if I started listening now to all the CDs that I have at home, and they did nothing but listen for the rest of my life.

You wouldn't finish.

I probably wouldn't finish. Wow.

So how long would you say. When did you realize, okay, this is an addiction. This is an unhealthy.

I realized it long before I gave it up.

Like years? 10 years? Decades.

Years. Years, yeah, years.

How long does it normally take for someone when they realize this is unhealthy, this thing I'm doing, this addiction is not good for me. And until they actually give it up. Is there any data on that?

I couldn't answer that one. I think it's a highly variable and individual issue. It has to do with what resources they have to heal. It has to do with what support they have. It has to do with what cost this habit is exacting on their lives. It has to do also with some belief that there's a part of us that's actually healthy and we can get in touch with that. You know, there has to be a co. Combination of factors. And it's very, very individual also. It also depends, of course, the degree of trauma a person suffered. And addictions are always about, like. You've heard my definition of addiction. And I'm sure if I asked you, like, if I asked for talking to a thousand people. Put your hands up. If, according to my definition, you've had an addiction, virtually everybody in the room will put their hands up. Maybe there'll be two liars who. But 998. And then I asked them not what was wrong with the addiction, but what was right about it. What did you get from it? So if I asked you that. So you've had your behaviors. If I asked you. I don't care whether it was two, but if I asked you, what did you get from it? What would it be?

You get some type of relief, you get some type of pleasure, you get some type of. Specifically, what do you get from it?

What did you get from it? What did we give you? Temporarily. Whatever it was, I don't even care what it was.

It's a. You know, you get escape.

Okay, Escape. Right. Yeah.

You're not thinking about the pain or the shame or the insecurity.

So who needs to escape? Me. No, but I mean, what kind of person needs to escape?

Oh, a scared person.

Scared person is somebody who's imprisoned, isn't it? Somebody who's not free.

Trapped.

Yeah, somebody's trapped. Exactly. And I know in your book on toxic masculinity, you talk about being trapped. Trapped is the very word you use.

Yes, I felt trapped most of my childhood.

That's the whole point. So what I'm saying is that addiction is never a choice, and it's not some kind of genetic disease, which. That is total nonsense. What it actually is is an attempt to solve a problem. In your life. In your case, you were trying to solve the problem of being trapped, which is based on your childhood trauma, which you publicly talk about. In my case, the workaholism was about trying to prove to myself that I had the right to exist. That was important.

That you're worthy of love.

That I was worthy of love. Exactly. Acceptance and all that. Now, that also came from a childhood experience. So addiction is never like either a disease as such. It can behave like a disease, but it isn't a disease as such. It's also not a choice anybody makes. It's actually an attempt to solve a deep life problem that was imposed on a person by trauma in every case. Wow.

Is it possible for someone to heal a deep wound on their own? A trauma from decades past they've had an addiction to trying to escape from. Is it possible to do it on your own, or is it really take support Someone. Someone's a team. What's your thoughts on that?

Well, I think very rarely it is possible for an individual. Maybe they have some deep spiritual experience. Maybe they're out there in nature, and all of a sudden they. They're at one with the universe.

They feel presence.

They feel connected. Yeah, exactly. So that can happen. It does happen to some people.

And they just to choose, I'm going to decide not to do this anymore.

They realize they don't need to because they're free.

They fell free.

Interesting. Yeah. Very rare. For most of us, people, beings that walk this earth. It takes a lot of self awareness. It takes a lot of support, connection, guidance. So I'd say if you're listening and you've got one of these issues where you're addicted to something in the way that Luis and I are just talking about, don't wait for that miraculous moment, get the help. Because you have a much better chance that way. Yeah.

So what would you say is the root cause of all addiction then? Is it feeling a wound? Is it feeling trapped by something that's happened in the past?

The being trapped itself is a sign of a wound. So the. In fact, the word trauma means wound. The Greek origin of the word trauma is a wound. So children who are hurt, but they're not supported, seen, accepted and helped, they get trapped in the wound. And being trapped in the wound and being trapped in the behaviors to escape from the wound. That's how the trauma shows up in our lives.

Interesting. And in our culture and our society. You know, I talk about this in my book as well, about how as a young boy growing up in the Midwest, In Ohio, I didn't see examples of older men or athletes that I aspired to be, like talking about their emotions or talking about healing or talking about, you know, I had a trauma. Talking about how to, you know, navigate the full range of emotions. It was more, you just get made fun of if you cried.

Yeah.

You get picked on and called, you know, things you don't want to be called. You're, you're kicked out of the tribe, you're not accepted in the tribe and you're, you know, boys group growing up.

Yeah.

And so I feel like culturally there's a lot of pain with men and women obviously, but that it seems to be is causing a lot of the stress in the world right now. It's just this cultural pain.

Well, if I may be self serving, my new book is called the Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. So it's just as you say, the trauma that people are experiencing massively isn't just personal to them. It's also a sign of a culture that's completely out of whack. And when I say out of whack, the things we consider the reason I call the book the Myth of Normal is what I'm saying is that the things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs. It's not healthy, it's totally unhealthy. So that the addictions and the diseases and the mental illnesses that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation. So that whatever addiction you had, or even this mask of rigid masculinity that you tried to adopt for a while until it cracked for you. Right.

Needing to win, needing to be the best.

But that was a normal response to survive. To survive, exactly. So that the abnormality wasn't in you, it was in the situation that you're in. That's what I mean by a toxic culture.

Yeah.

And I know again, in your book you, you talk about these public figures that all of a sudden you realize we're talking about their emotions. Yeah, but that's fairly new. Very.

In the last like five, ten years.

So. So these days athletes will talk about their sexual abuse.

This didn't happen until 10 years ago.

Really?

And really more three to five years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so now there's. Why do you feel like people are now starting to open up who are more public figures? Why do you think that's happening?

Well, I think what's happened that the toxicity of the culture, one of My subtitles is Toxic Culture and it's got so bad. There's a Greek playwright that I quote in my book, he's Aeschylus and he, one of his plays, he said that the way that God's created us human beings, that we have to suffer, suffer into truth. And I think that the degree of suffering now, most people I know who engage in a path of self exploration and truth, they didn't do it because all of a sudden they just made a decision. They just suffered so much. So the suffering can actually wake you up. And I think, to answer your question, this society has got to the point where the suffering is so intense and so widespread that something had to crack open. So I think that's why it's got so bad that it couldn't be hidden anymore.

Why do you think in our modern society, with all the medical and scientific advances and all the knowledge out there, that there's so much chronic pain, though, so much suffering, when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before?

Actually, we don't. We have less. What we have is a lot more physiological, physical science, which is great. You know, I mean, if I needed a heart transplant, I'd be very grateful for modern medicine or, you know, if a broken bone or anything. But we've forgotten something that human beings have always known. And for example, I write about this friend of mine. His name is Louis Mel Madrona and he's an American physician. He's Lakota background, okay. And he told me that. And he's just like me. He's full of respect for Western medicine. I was trained in it, he was trained in it. We also see what's missing. And he said that in his hij tradition, when somebody got sick, the whole community gathers and thanks the person and says, you're carrying some dysfunction in our whole culture. So your healing is our healing. Wow. So they get that the individual represents the culture and the environment and the family and the community. Now, Western medicine totally forgets that we separate the mind from the body. So often when I speak to groups, I ask people if in the last five years you've been to a neurologist or an oncologist or a cardiologist or gastroenterologist or a rheumatologist, any kind of an ologist, Put your hand up. So people put their hands up. I said, keep your hands up. If they ask you about stress in your life, trauma in your childhood, relationships. Relationships. Exactly how you feel about your work, how do you feel about yourself as a human being? Very few Hands stay up. And those questions which have to do with, number one, the unity of mind and body, which is only scientific fact, and the inseparableness of one human being from another Western medicine completely ignores, which is contrary to science. It's not only contrary to ancient wisdom, it's also contrary to modern science because we have tens of thousands of studies to show that you can't separate the mind from the body. Tens of thousands of studies showing how emotions significantly influence the onset of illness, how relationships. Do you know, there's a wonderful psychiatrist here in la. You may know of him or him, Daniel Siegel. And Dan Siegel talks about what he calls interpersonal neurobiology, which means that our brains are not separate. Something in you will sense the tension in me and we'll pick up on that. And that'll change the intuition. Yeah, that'll change your brain. And I take it a step further. I talk about interpersonal biology so that what happens to people physiologically is very effective. I'll give you two examples. Yes, but affected by their culture and their family. So we've known for decades that children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma. The parent stresses affect the physiology of the child.

The breathing.

The breathing that they narrow the air tubes, they cause inflammation. By the way, how do we treat asthma? With stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. You know, we know American black women. The more experiences of racism then you have to endure, the greater the risk for asthma. Really. We know that men who were sexually abused in childhood, the risk of heart disease triples. I could go on. Women who suffer symptoms of PTSD severely, the risk of ovarian cancer doubles. Why? Because you can't separate the emotions from the body. It's one unit, scientifically speaking. Not just from the point of view of indigenous wisdom, but on modern science. So when I talk, when you say despite all this knowledge, I'm saying what's missing from the knowledge is wisdom is the wisdom. And not just the wisdom, even the science. That's what's so ironic. So I'm a physician and as doctors we always talk about evidence based practice. And I say, my God, I only wish we had evidence based practice. Let's look at the evidence.

Right.

You know, what's the evidence for separating the mind from the body? But multiple sclerosis, this mysterious illness. The guy who first described multiple sclerosis was a French neurologist, Jean Martin charcot, in the 19th century. He said that it was a disease caused by grief and long term worry. Since then there's been Multiple studies showing the relationship of stress, trauma and multiple sclerosis. You go to the average neurologist with symptoms of ms, nobody's going to ask you about your trauma, nobody's going to ask you about your stress. And why is that significant? Because if you deal with the trauma and the stress, your multiple sclerosis can actually improve significantly. Wow. So there's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine and what we call scientific evidence based practice is miraculous. It's amazing, but it's way too narrow.

What about something like arthritis? What would you say that's connected to?

Okay, that's been studied as well. So there was a great Canadian physician who actually was one of the founding physicians at Johns Hopkins Medical School. His name is William Osler. He said in 1880 that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by long term worry and stress.

Long term worry and stress?

Yeah. Now since then, in 1890, 1880 or 90. Wow. Yeah, he said this then since then, multiple dozens of studies showing a relationship between trauma, stress and rheumatoid arthritis. Do you think the average rheumatologist knows anything about that so that people go to. I know people. In my book the Myth of Normal, I talk about people with Ms. Or arthritis who, once they start recognizing that the flare ups of the disease actually manifest stresses in their lives if they learn how to deal with those stresses. One woman told me that I have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis. She says it was my best teacher because every time it shows up, I know that I'm out of alignment with myself.

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Yeah.

And I was like, what is. Like, I've never had some type of like eczema or skin condition or something. It was like this kind of bright red flare up and I was like, do I have a disease? Like, what is this? You know, and it's fascinating because I was telling you like the moment after many, many months of therapy and, and starting to integrate the lessons of healing and really feel it internally, I started to feel this sense of peace inside of me. For the first time. I didn't feel trapped.

Right.

For the first time.

Right.

In myself.

Yeah.

In my heart and in my body. And almost overnight, like this flare up was there for months and I was like, oh, maybe I'm having, I had like allergy tests and I was like, maybe it's peanuts. I don't know. All these different, like foods that I'm eating and I was like eliminating the foods and it's still there. It was almost overnight when I felt the peace inside of me. The flare ups went away and they haven't come back. And I was like, so if you.

Had come to me that Raj, I.

Would have asked you not what are you eating?

No, I wouldn't. Well, I might have, and those are good questions, but I also would have asked you, what is your body saying no to? It's rejecting that you're not saying no to.

Oh, my gosh.

You know, now a flare up, if you take that word flare up, which is what you used.

Yeah, it's inflammation. Right. Something's inflamed.

Okay, right. But where else do you use. What else flares up? You know, what flares up is rage, anger. But you had anger that you weren't expressing.

Right.

Hence your body flares up. Yes, we know that suppressed emotions cause inflammation. So had you come to me, not had you come to me when I was out of medical school, because I wouldn't know anything about this. Nobody teaches you this stuff. But if you come to me more recently, I would have asked you, well, Louis, what is your body saying no to that you're not saying no to? And that happens in two major areas, relationships and work, you know?

Interesting.

And so the body sends us signals. We can learn from it. The problem is that you go to the average physician, they're not going to ask those things. They're just going to try and collude with you to try and get rid of the symptom, not find the root, which is. That's okay. I mean, you don't want to sit there with a rash. It's fine. But also, let's look at the source of it.

Yes.

And the source is always assumed to be something physical. Maybe they'll think of food, maybe they'll think of some toxin. They will not think of your emotions. Even though the mind and body are.

Inseparable, how much stronger do you think the emotional weight or trauma is than physical toxins, you know, in terms of affecting the body?

I can't make that assessment because I don't know what study would even compare the two side. I don't want to speak off the cuff, but what I can tell you is that the emotions are really primary in most chronic conditions. And if you deal with them now in this society where there's all these toxins in the environment and junk in the food and all, who knows? But what I know is that the emotions play a huge role and that that can have an impact on their illness. And the other thing I've. I don't know about you when you write books, but I write books as much for myself as for anybody else.

100%.

Yeah.

This show is for me.

Yeah, exactly. So I get to learn a lot when I'm writing So one of the things I learned when I was writing the Myth of Normal was even how we think about disease. Like if people say I have eczema, or I have depression, or I have rheumatoid arthritis, or I have add. Now, there's an assumption there, isn't there? The assumption is, first of all, is that there's this thing called add, there's this thing called eczema, there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis, or there's this thing called depression, then there's an I. And the I has that thing, but that thing has got its own separate, independent nature. But to say that I have this disease makes the assumption that disease got a separate life and nature of its own. It doesn't. What if we saw disease of all kinds, mental or physical or addiction, not as the things in themselves that have their own nature, but as processes that manifest our lives. And if I live my life differently, then I can have an impact on that process. So that process will change. That's exactly actually how it is. So for shorthand language, I understand it's helpful to say I have depression.

How important is the words we choose?

But if we buy into that language, we're actually missing the point because you don't have it. There's no it that's separate from you. And that means that if you change yourself. In fact, there's a. A friend of mine now, a recent friend, Dr. Jeff Rediger, who's a psychiatrist at Harvard. And last year he wrote a book called Cured the Science of Spontaneous Healing. That was the subtitle. No. He studied people who were terminally ill, documentedly. So they had no prognosis whatsoever. And then they get better.

So they were terminally ill. They were not supposed to survive.

They're not supposed to survive.

They're supposed to die in a few years or something, four months.

I've talked to such people myself, and.

They'Ve cured their disease.

There's a woman called, a psychologist called Kelly Turner who studied the same thing. She wrote a book called Radical Remission. So all three of us have looked at these people. They did it in a research kind of way. I just did it impressionistically. But I do check out the histories of people's doctors. We all know people who are supposed to have two months to live or six months to live. Either medical treatment has failed or they refuse medical treatment. Then all of a sudden, the disease goes away. I think all three of us have found that what makes the biggest difference is that the person changes their Relationship to themselves. Wow. And there's always trauma in the background. Now, Jeff and Kelly have documented people, they go on diets, they. They take supplements, they start meditating, they go into nature. They go into nature, the whole thing.

All those things are great.

Yeah. And I think the. But I think Jeff and I agree, and I think Kelly would probably agree as well, that the biggest shift is in one's relationship with oneself. In other words, the life changes, the process changes. Now, I'm not promising everybody who's listening, you can cure yourself. I mean, you know, this is not snake oil. I'm just talking about the importance of. Of recognizing the impact of emotions and one's relationship to oneself on one's physiology.

That's all I'm talking about. There's an external environment and then there's an internal environment, you know, our emotional environment that is connected to our, I'm assuming, our nervous system, our heart, our brain, the whole body and everything. And if our emotional environment is sick, then we're probably going to be physically sick as well.

Well, that's what you're. That's. That's what your story actually illustrates, isn't it? As soon as you create a. An internal environment, your physical issues abate. You know, by the way, speaking of, I just noticed I'm getting too excited here. This is, this is my passion. I mean, I. I just could go on about this forever, but I'm also noticing probably I'm getting a bit too heated here. And you're getting warm. I don't physically so much. I just noticed I need to calm down a bit. I don't want to talk too fast.

No, I like it. This is exciting for me. Well, I just feel like this is the. What you were just saying. Emotional repression is a major cause of physical illness. It may not be the only cause, there's other factors, but what we suppress usually comes to the surface in some ways. That's correct.

That's the whole point.

And most of us, I'll speak for myself, I wasn't taught, and I think most of us are not taught on how to express the emotional traumas, the emotional pains, fears, insecurities, shames, guilt, where we're not taught the skills. It's one of the reasons why I started the school of greatness, because I was like, I wish I would have learned these skills in school.

Yeah.

You know, most of most people's parents are messed up in some way or have some issues, and they aren't taught this. And so we're, you know, I grew up In a household that was very stressful and chaotic and there wasn't stability.

So did my kids, by the way. Right.

And you're like the guy.

Right, but I wasn't the guy then.

You weren't the guy then.

Yeah.

So your kids had to, had some traumas that they had to face because of you and their parents.

It's not even a matter of skills learning, it's deeper than that because you don't have to teach any one day old baby how to express their emotions, do you?

No.

If they're sad, lonely, do you hear about it? If they're hungry or uncomfortable, do you hear about it? Of course you do. There's nothing to teach. You have to allow it and you have to give space for it and you have to hear it and respond to it. The problem with most parents is not that they don't teach the kids these skills, is that how they really live their lives. Because of their own traumas and because of the stresses in this society, they actually discourage kids.

Don't cry. Stop crying.

Yeah, from what's natural.

Suck it up. Well, look, don't do this, don't do that.

Right. Well, well, you know, there's a very famous Canadian psychologist, I don't know if he's been on your program, but he, he says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal.

Interesting.

In other words, anger in a two year old is not normal and we have to socialize it out of them. Now there's nothing more natural than an angry 2 year old.

There's nothing more natural than angry 2 year old.

They get frustrated, you know, they want a cookie, they get a cookie before.

They don't get what they want.

They want a cookie. You know, they want a cookie before dinner. And if you're a good parent, you're not going to give them a cookie before dinner. Right.

So when does you teach or when does someone learn how to not express anger? Every 10 minutes though.

Well, here's the point. If that 2 year old then starts screaming or throwing a tantrum, getting angry. If you say time out and you're not going to be with them now, you're presenting the child with a tragic dilemma. I can have my authentic emotion or I can have my relationship with my parent on whom my life depends. So I can be authentic or I can be attached in relationship, but I can't have both.

Interesting. Because if I'm not authentic or if I'm authentic, then I'm going to be alone. I'm Going to be on timeout or whatever.

And to the child the timeout is.

Life threatening because you might be alone forever. Right?

Yeah. The child doesn't know that, you see, so basically you're threatening the child with depriving them of the greatest need, which is the connection with you, your love. Yeah, the love. Yeah.

No, but isn't there a point though if you're a 21 year old man now and you're, you know, screaming every 10 minutes because you don't get the cookie.

But that's not the answer. Right. The answer is answer is when they're screaming to pick them up, you're angry at daddy, aren't you? You really wish you had that cookie. Yeah. Oh, I get it. You know, and then the child relaxes and the anger moves through them. And you know what they learn that anger is just something that moves through you. You can let go of it. If you don't see the child, don't accept the child emotion. They're going to have to repress it.

They'Re going to have to stuff it.

What's another word for stuffing? It's pushing down.

Trap it.

Yeah, well, pushing down. What's another word for pushing down? Depressing. Where does depression come from? It's not this disease. Depression comes from having had to push down your emotions. Literally you had to push down your emotions. In other words, why did you have to push down your emotions to stay connected to your parents? In other words, it was a coping mechanism. And what I'm saying is that a lot of illness, whether of the mind or the body or both, comes from coping mechanisms. There are normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation. It's not normal for a child to be banished from the presence of the parent. If you look at indigenous people, they carry their kids everywhere. The kids are always with their parents. And the, the pilgrims when they arrived in North America, they're very upset with how the natives reared their children. You know why? Because the indigenous people did not hit their kids.

They didn't hit their kids.

They didn't hit their kids. And the Christians couldn't understand this.

Why they didn't, you know, beat, you know, create obedience with them.

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

So what do they do?

They nourish them. And when you nourish a child, see, see, nature has got a natural agenda is that you should grow up to be a self regulated adult in connection with yourself and with other people. That's nature's agenda. It's like nature is an agenda for an acorn to become an Oak tree. But an acorn doesn't spontaneously become an oak tree. It has to have the right conditions. So it's not a question of teaching the oak tree, the acorn to be an oak tree. Just give it the nourishment and the sunlight and the earth and irrigation that it needs its nature to become an oak tree. The nature of human beings is to become self regulated, socially responsible creatures. That's how we evolved. Given the right conditions, that will happen. So it's not a question of teaching all these things. Yeah, there's some teaching involved. Mostly it's the question of meeting children's needs, giving them the right conditions and then they will develop self regulation. They learn it because you're self legged, so they're watching you.

You're not reactive and explosive screaming, you.

Know, you realize, oh, I'm angry, okay, I'm angry. But you're not screaming at the kid, you know. So in the right environment, these traits spontaneously evolve or develop in the human being. So our society is always about how do we teach these skills and no skills. Well, teaching is important, but more important is the child's spontaneous growth given the right environment. And what I'm saying about this toxic culture, we don't give our kids the right environment.

Yeah, I mean you hear the number, the statistic that 50% of marriages turn into divorce these days. And also probably, I think when I had Esther Perel on, I was like, how many of the 50% that are married are actually happy? It's a very small percentage too.

So I've had a marriage that we've had a lot of unhappiness. We've married 53 years now.

53.

Yeah. We're very happy together now.

You are.

But we took a lot of work, a lot of commitment. But here's what I want to say. There's two ways you can tell if a marriage is unhappy. One is you can ask the parents. The other is you can measure the cortisol level of the children.

Oh, wow.

Because the parents stresses affect the physiology of the child.

Oh man, my cortisol must have been off the charts. But I was all of us children.

Yeah, it probably would have been. And so in this society, and this is not the fault of individual parents, like it begins in the uterus, actually already stresses on the pregnant woman will affect the physiology of the child. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. No, in this society, so many pregnant women are so stressed. In the States particularly, I'm talking about.

More emotional stress because there's physical stress of like the body's expanding and growing and aches and pains, but the emotional.

Stress, I mean, the emotional stress of having to the nervous system on the job or being in a difficult relationship. In one of the chapters in the book I talk about, it begins with the diary of my wife, who was writing it when she was pregnant with one of our children, about how unhappy she was. And she's talking to the infant saying, please don't take this stress personally. She wrote that, and I quoted it in the Myth of Normal. And she knew what I didn't know. And she was unhappy because of our relationship.

She was unhappy because of the relationship.

She was unhappy because of what was going on in her relationship with me. Being a workaholic doctor.

Not. Not being there, not being available emotionally or.

Exactly, exactly. And even blaming her, you know, for how I was feeling, you know, wow. So she's talking to this infant inside her. And that's how I opened one of the chapters. So already in the uterus, these stresses starts happening. A lot of evidence for that scientifically. Brain scans, blood work, all kinds of stuff. Then there's labor, which in our society is very often mechanical and emotionally very difficult. And in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. Now, that infant is meant to be with the mother for at least nine months. I would say years, but at least nine months. That infant is abandoned at two weeks. That's how they experience it.

Oh, man.

Even if they're looked after by someone, someone else but the mother, the infant needs the mother's body.

Yeah, that was. My mom was working pretty, probably pretty fast after each one of us were born, you know, had to go back to work and.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not blaming the women. Right. They have no choice. Yes, I'm saying. But this society puts those stresses on women, it then doesn't support them through the pregnancy. Then it puts a lot, and only that. We didn't grow up in individual isolated nuclear families, did we? We evolved in small band hunter gatherer groups where people supported each other, where children were with adults all day, where adults collaborated. They had to, otherwise they wouldn't survive.

Right.

So that's where our nature actually evolved. So when you get this society which tells you that people are by nature selfish and aggressive and competitive, which isolates mothers in separate homes where the community is more and more, you know, there's lots of. Lots of work done by sociologists and others in the states about how communities are breaking down. There was that book Bowling Alone, some years ago, 20 years ago now. But the breakdown of community so that people are not getting support and that means there's stress and the mothers are.

Doing it all on their own.

Exactly right.

And they're also expecting the, the husband to, you know, work and also be at home, as opposed to reaching out to peers or family or friends and.

Exactly. So it's, it's a very unnatural culture. And no wonder so many kids are getting diagnosed and with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder or depression, you know, this article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago, also in the New York Times, I think about the rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides in the U.S. it's mysterious. It's not mysterious. These kids are no longer having their developmental needs met. They feel alone and desperate and scared.

And then drug use is on the rise and addiction and.

That's right. There's nothing mysterious about it. If you look at the cultural setting, it's only mysterious if we think we're dealing with isolated mental health issues or isolated physiological issues. But when you see the connections, nothing mysterious.

So what are the main, I guess, mental health, Are they diseases or are they not considered a disease like depression, add, adhd, what are the main mental health symptoms out in the world right now, would you say?

Yeah, so depression and anxiety are fast growing and, and they're major challenges. More and more kids are being diagnosed with adhd. More and more kids are being diagnosed with something called oppositional defiant disorder, which, what is that opposition? That's when a kid is defiant and oppositional and, and goes against adult values and adult expectations. But we think there's something wrong with the kid. Instead of looking at the context of what makes the kids die, the environment. Now, are these diseases. Well, you can talk about them as diseases to some degree and certainly I've had depression and I've taken medication for it in my 40s and it really made a difference for me. You might call it a disease, but actually that's a shallow way of looking at it because actually what does it go back to? It goes back to being a one year old infant or being a three month old infant. In the book the Myth of Normal, the first chapter has a painting in it. The painting is by my wife, based on a photograph of me and my mother. This is Budapest, Hungary, 1944, and I'm three months of age and my mother in a photograph is wearing a yellow star that Jews had to wear. My father was away in forced labor and within two months her parents would be killed in Auschwitz. That was my first year of life.

Oh my gosh.

And the look on my face is full of terror. I was absorbing my mother's fear and.

My mother's anxiety because she had terror in her face. And you're mimicking and she had it in her body. You're connected to her eating ten times a day.

Exactly.

And you're feeling the stress.

Exactly.

There's probably now no calm in her.

There's no calm there. But she's already so stressed and she's just trying to make sure that we survive. She's not there to really receive my feelings. And then when I'm a year old or 11 months old, she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life because she didn't think where we were staying I would survive for a day and probably I wouldn't have. Wow. So I didn't see her for six weeks. Five or six weeks.

And you're one?

I was one then, yeah.

Oh my gosh.

And now what could I do as a one year old? I could do two things. As an infant going through all that. First of all, how do I deal with all that stress? I tune out. I tune out. I become absent minded as an adaptive.

Mechanism, a coping mechanism.

Exactly. 55 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by tuning out. Is it a disease? The heck it's a disease. It started as a coping mechanism. I'm also diagnosed with depression. Why? Because in an environment, I had to push my feelings down in order to not to burden my mother, who was.

Already burdened enough, create more peace and warmth.

So I took that on. So I pushed on my feelings. I depressed my feelings. Then I have this depression. So are they diseases? Well, you can talk about them that way. But I say they began as coping mechanisms. And I'll tell you another story. I'm 78 now. So six, seven years ago, I'm in San Francisco with a therapist and I've taken mushrooms. She works with mushrooms. And I've. I worked with psychedelics and it's one of the things I write about and that. But this time I'm the patient, I'm the client. And I'm laying there on the mat under the influence of the psilocybin. And I know exactly who I am. I'm 71 years old. I'm a medical doctor, I'm a writer, I'm a speaker. I'm married to such, you know, my wife Ray, this is a therapist. So I'm not like hallucinating I know exactly where I am, but at the same time, I'm experiencing myself as a one year old infant.

Oh, my goodness.

And this therapist to my mom is my mom. And I start crying and I say, I'm so sorry I've made your life so difficult.

Wow.

That's my one year old self all of a sudden under the influence speaking up. I took it on that early that I'm responsible now. You talked about. Oh, my gosh, in our conversation before. You told me about how you were in this relationship and you couldn't leave it even long after you realized it wasn't right for you because you took on the responsibility of how the other person would feel if you let them down. I'm telling you, that's your one year old speaking. That you took responsibility for the suffering of your parents.

Wow.

And how you mustn't let anybody down because it's your responsibility. We take this stuff on so early without words, actually. They just become ingrained. And then we live our lives out of it until something happens. As it did for you. Your body rebelled.

You have a breakdown or something happens.

Right.

And you're like, either keep breaking down or you wake you up and say, okay, why is this happening? What is. What is off? What is out of alignment? What is, you know, where am I? Out of integrity, Whatever it might be.

Exactly.

And I feel the challenge is I was like, I want to end this suffering. You know, I've repeated this pattern many times. I'm sick and tired of the suffering.

Yeah.

I'll do whatever. You know, I think when you for me, I was like, I've felt enough of this. I don't want it anymore. But it took so much courage to face these things for me. And I know other people have deeper traumas or different traumas, and it just seems so challenging.

I wouldn't go there. I would not compare your trauma to anybody else's.

Well, we all have our unique traumas.

Right.

Different experiences that we face. Why is it so challenging for people to face it and start addressing it? I was telling you, you know, I've been doing pretty intensive therapy for about a year and a half now. Every two weeks.

Yeah.

Not because I feel like something's wrong with me anymore. I'm stressed more because I want to maintain a level of peace.

Yeah.

And I want to continue to maintain peace.

Good for you.

So once I realized and started healing, I didn't say I'm good.

Yeah.

I was like, I want to go to the next level of exactly peace, love. You know, an environment of beauty inside of my emotions. But why is it so hard for so many people to face it and actually speak the shame, guilt, insecurity, you know, imperfection about them?

Well, I think in your own work you've touched upon very accurately on why it's so difficult. For one thing, if you, if you just, just the words that you just use, peace and love and connection. If you applied that to your 20 year old self, how would he have responded?

He'd been like, suck it up. Or he'd been like, what are you talking about? You're fine. Like, yeah, don't be a little wuss. Or, you know, just work harder, you know.

Yeah, but where would that have come from?

I mean, just my entire conditioning. Growing up from sports and. Yeah, you know.

Okay, so that, so there's that house, you know, so that's one of the factors, is the conditioning in this culture. Okay. I, I also say it would have come from intense fear. Oh. Because if you'd actually, it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself.

It's terrifying.

Yeah, it's terrifying. So there's intense fear. So there's the conditioning, as you say. Then there's the, the fear. It really is fear. Painful, you know. You know, nobody wants to have pain, you know, but that's called growing pains. And the third factor is we all develop this personality now. The personality, we think that's us, but it's not us. Right. The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods, along with some genuine traits. So the personality is kind of an amalgam of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities.

Yeah, some good stuff. But then that's also coping. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I used to be like, I was a fun loving guy. I was like a kind, generous. But then when there was a trigger, like I was angry and, you know, defensive and guarded and things like that.

Or you talk about the various masks, the sexual mask or the, or the material mask, the aggressive mask. You know, when I started reading a chapter on the sexual mask, you wrote about some guy whose name I forget but who's sort of the champion picking out women. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for one split second. But what's that? It's having to prove to himself that he's lovable. Where does that come from? You know, so. But we identify with it. Yes. So we think we're the personality. I'm this sexually attractive guy, or I'm this aggressive guy. I'm this material guy who's gonna make it in the world, you know, and so we think that we are a personality. So it comes from, I say, three sources. One is the conditioning. The other is the fear for the pain. And thirdly, the identification with the personality. We think that's who we are and we don't know who would be without it. All of which is all based on trauma.

Yeah, it's the identity, you know, building this identity that you know. And I talk about how the identity supported you to accomplishing certain things or protecting you from certain things by having this identity. Yeah, but it's also not serving us to hold on to that identity if we want the next level of peace and freedom.

Exactly.

So it's. But it's so hard to kill an identity. It's like you've had this thing for decades maybe, and you've got to let go of this thing.

I wouldn't even talk about killing. I mean, I. In my healing chapters of this book, I talk about, let's make friends with it. Like, for example, by the way, I have to be honest. I said that I wouldn't be in this guy's shoes for a minute. That's not true. Part of me was envying him, you know, Even here I'm 78 and married 53 years. But I read about this guy who slept with all these women. Why couldn't I be that guy? You know, I don't want to go there, and I wouldn't. I've long ago chosen not to. But there's still something that. Who doesn't want to be wanted that much, Right?

You know, something with the ego or the desire.

Yeah. Yeah. So. But if we didn't kill those parts, but made friends with them. If somebody came to me with that kind of pattern of I'm that sexual guy, but they don't want to, but they realize that it's not. They might feel high for a moment, like an idiotic world.

It's not fulfilling.

It's not fulfilling. I wouldn't say kill that part of you. I'd say let's make friends with it. Let's find out what it's really trying to do for you. What it's trying to do for you is trying to make you feel wanted, making you feel valuable, making you feel desirable, making you feel loved, temporarily making you feel powerful. What happened to you that you don't feel lovable, that you don't feel desirable, that you don't feel powerful. You know? In other words, it's not a matter of getting rid of these Parts or these aspects of ourselves. It's a question of actually getting to know them. And they all began as coping mechanisms. That man that you describe in your book, I guarantee, is a highly traumatized human being.

So when we start to ask ourselves, this question that you're asking is what happened to you? Or when, you know, when did you feel not powerful or not lovable or not wanted?

Yeah.

And let's say we're able to. Someone watching or listening is able to assess themselves and actually be present, really reflect on the painful moments of the past, which a lot of people aren't even willing to talk about it to themselves.

Right? That's right.

For 25 years, I had a memory of being sexually abused and thought about it almost every day, like for. For a moment, you know, it come, you know, at least weekly, maybe not every day. But it was like a memory. Yeah, that's there, you know, But I never told anyone for 25 years because it was so shameful and I didn't want to be, you know, made fun of or all these things. And so someone's able to self assess and say, okay, I had this pain, this trauma I felt not powerful or whatever it might be. What's the next step for them once they start to journal about it and be aware of it and they're like, I really want to heal, you know, what would be that next step in the process?

Well, I mean, it's not that I can prescribe, but sure. But it should be for everybody. And there's many different ways of working. But one of the things I would address, first of all, is the shame. Like, one of the impacts of trauma is shame because children are narcissists by nature. When I say narcissist, I don't mean in a pathological, negative sense. I mean they think it's all about them.

The world just revolves around me.

Exactly. So if bad things are happening to me, it must be. It must be a bad person. You know, number one. Number two, I didn't fight back.

I couldn't defend myself.

And so that makes me weak. And, you know, and so I'm ashamed of that now. Actually, when you look at it, the nut fighting back is nature's coping mechanism. Part of your nervous system just freezes. Because if you fought back, what would happen?

Just depends what age you are.

No, but as a young child, if.

You fight back on against the sexual abuser. Oh, right.

What would happen to you?

Who knows? I mean, it could have been even worse.

And were you in a position to run? No. No. Okay, so the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated.

It's protecting yourself.

You're protecting yourself. And the part of the nervous system that freezes you just be still and you get through this.

Wait till it passes.

Yeah. That takes over. So it's actually what you're ashamed about is actually the brilliance of your nervous system that protected you, but you're beating.

Yourself up in retrospect, saying, I, I should have ran, I should have fought back. I should have done this.

That's the first point, man. The second point is, if I can ask you, how old were you when this happened to you and how long did it go on for?

It's probably 10, 15 minutes.

Yeah. No, but it was only one time.

One time.

Okay. Who did you speak to about it?

No one.

Okay. Now, you don't have kids yet. No. But if you did have a child 5 years old and this happened to, who would you want them to speak to? Me. Yeah. Now, if you find out that this happened to your child and your child never told you, how would you explain that?

How would I explain it to.

How would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened?

I would explain it by saying, it's something I'm not doing. I'm not creating a safe environment to allow this child to speak up.

And that was your primary trauma. Yeah. So the sexual abuse is a secondary trauma. As a matter of fact, the abuser, like, you were bullied in school, you said, and the bullies can always sense the vulnerability. The bullies have, like, a weakness in you. They have a laser.

Like, because there's an insecure, weak person.

Yeah. Which, by the way, is. Speaks to their own trauma. Right. But they have a laser. Like the physicians who abuse their patients, the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers. They see a weakness, they laser like, they sense it, and that's who they pick on. And the bullies do the same thing. Now, that weakness, as we call it, comes from not having the solid support and protection and confidence and security in your family of origin. So that's the primary trauma. That's. That's what. That's the first thing that happened.

Yeah. I mean, so the case, for sure.

So to answer your question, then, if somebody comes to me with those issues now, first of all, if somebody realizes those things, I'd say, don't try and do this on your own.

It's so hard.

Talk to somebody.

It's so hard.

Yeah. Well, look, people with Addictions, at least they have the 12 step groups where they can actually talk about it. And people ideally will not judge them.

It's a safe space to.

Or you might have friends, or you might reach out to a professional, or you might have an intimate partner. That relationship is close enough where you can actually share this, but you have to bring it out of you. By the way, this just reminds me, this is one of the ancient gospels. Written around the same time as the other gospels is the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus says that what you shall bring out of you will save you and what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you. He says something like that. He was a supreme psychologist.

Wow.

And so you got to bring it out.

What you suppress becomes more depressed, right?

It's like. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's got to start with that somewhere.

You've got to bring it out. And if someone has a. What if they say, well, it wasn't that big of a deal. This thing that happened back in the day. I was a kid and it only happened a few times. Whether it's sexual abuse or okay, someone's screaming at you or you were neglected or put in the corner.

You know, I hear that all the time.

It wasn't that big of a deal.

I hear that all the time.

Yeah, okay. I shouldn't be that concerned about it. It was five, who cares? You know, it was like, okay, what do we.

Okay then that's a very simple way to answer that.

Then why are we so messed up right now?

No, no, no, no, no, not at all. If a 5 year old kid came to you and you were the uncle, Uncle Lewis, this guy did such and such to me and I'm really scared and hurt. Would you say to them, oh, no big deal, no. Think of all the other kids that worse things have happened to. Would you say that? Why wouldn't you say that?

Because I'd want to be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen and loved.

And what would be the impact if you did say that?

I feel like it'd probably affect him for a long time if that was a pattern of that was the response that he got.

But you see, that's what you're saying to yourself, right when you say that it's no big deal, you're saying to the five year old that was hurt, it doesn't matter. In other words, there's no self compassion there.

Right.

What you would never say to anybody else, you're saying to yourself, and one of the Impacts of trauma is lack of self compassion. And again, if I may mention my book, the Myth of Normal, I talk about that, about how this idea of self compassion and I see it all the time. And so when somebody says to me, no big deal, you know, I say, okay, take any other child in your position, plug them into that situation and tell them it's no big deal. And of course I wouldn't, but people.

Do, they do say these things to their kids or to their. Right. Their nephews or nieces. They're saying, like, ah, it'll be all right, you know, and I think it's because they don't have the emotional courage to, to handle the, the wide range of emotions because they probably suppress the emotions.

I mean, that's the whole point, right. Is that they're, they're not, they're not comfortable with the child's pain.

Because I'm crying, they're like, I can't handle it.

Right. They can't handle it. Yeah, yeah.

You know, my dad used to be like, stop crying. You know, just.

Yeah, stop.

You know, there was no, like, hugging and like, he had a lot of love and affection in other ways, but he couldn't handle the cross crying and the screams. Yeah. The emotions.

Well, one of the, in the book, I talk about the essential needs of children, and one of them is that they're given the freedom to feel all their emotions, particularly sadness and grief and pain, also joy and everything else. But I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this, but what do you know about your dad's childhood?

Oh, man. Yeah, it was messed up too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this goes on from generation.

Yeah, yeah. So. And I feel like a lot of people listening or watching this can relate and say, you know, I don't think anyone's like, I had the perfect parents. Right. There's some that maybe said, man, I had a great childhood and my parents did amazing. But I would say probably a majority of people had something where they didn't feel emotionally seen or accepted by their parents or some type of challenge. And they probably would all say, well, yeah, their parents, you know, had struggle from the war, from this or from the depression. And. And their parents suffered. And it was all about survival. It wasn't about thriving.

Yeah.

So how do we break, I guess, the generational trauma.

Yeah.

And not let it pass down to our children.

So not being seen is a major source of trauma.

Just not being seen in general.

Just not, not being seen for who.

You are, not being accepted for your own.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Expected to be different than who you actually are. You know, it's a major trauma for people in society and it's very common.

And how does someone who maybe is living in a stressed environment, whether it be their home or their city or their culture, political, you know, whatever it might be, they are more suppressed than others. How can they support themselves to getting out of a stressed environment so that they can be more of a baseline to have the ability to thrive and flourish emotionally?

You know something as a privileged Caucasian identified male with economic freedom. And I'm not in a position to say to somebody, these are larger political questions, these people. Society has to change and people have to work to change society. It's a question of. At some point it becomes a question of advocacy and activism and joining with others. I don't want to preach to somebody else above that. My job is to what extent is to support and help, but not to provide some kind of.

But if society, let's say society won't change for a period of time for these individuals, for certain individuals who are feeling over stress, what can they do as an individual? Whether they get support externally or not, what could they start to do? Anything else besides, I mean, we've covered a lot that they can start to do and they can get your book, that's for sure.

Well, again, you know, so I'm not sure I can fully answer that, but I can give examples. So the New Yorker a couple years ago, within the last two or three years, had an article about an American black man who was jailed for decades and kept in solitary confinement for decades.

Was this Shaka Senghor?

I don't remember the name. It could be.

I interviewed this guy who was in solitary confinement for decades, but.

Yeah, well, maybe the same man.

Yeah. Wrote a best selling book and was on Oprah and it might have been the same guy, but.

Good. All right, well, my point is that. Fair enough. My point is that it didn't. That it wasn't destroyed by it. Right.

He started to heal in the prison.

He found the inner strength somehow. So that it's not for me to tell. I don't know if I could stand it for one day, never mind for four decades or three decades.

I know that's crazy, but.

But that just shows you that the strength, the capacity to heal and to hold on to oneself and to find oneself is actually inherent in all of us.

Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

You don't make it easy on a guy, do you? I gotta challenge you It's a willingness to find your best qualities and to express them in the world. That's what I see as greatness.

Free.

Because I've forgiven myself for staying too long in relationships. Right.

Guilty of that.

Right. But. So if you choose to forgive, you.

Release what you're caring about the other person.

But it gives you an opportunity to.

Kind of release what you're caring about yourself.