Gabor Mate's Warning About Codependency Will Shock You!

If you don't know how to say no, your body will do it for you and it'll do it in the form of chronic illness. This comes straight from the mouth of Dr. Gabor Mate, who's one of the most well respected physicians and researchers in the realm of addiction, trauma and even adhd. Now, I've followed his work for a very long time now. I've read his books, I've watched tons of his videos. I even attended a conference where he was speaking. But recently I was watching one of his videos and he said something that just struck me. Completely different. Now, to be honest, it's not that much different than the things he normally talks about. But you know how sometimes just a light bulb goes off or you hear something differently? That's what happened to me in this case. And maybe it was because the topic was framed differently from what Dr. Gabor Mate normally talks about. He normally talks about the person with trauma, addiction and adhd. But in this circumstance he was actually talking about what happens to people who care for other people. Now, he wasn't talking specifically about what happens to people who care for people with addictions. He was talking about it in a more general way, like taking care of a family member who's got an illness, like working in the medical profession like, or even just being a parent. But as he's talking about this, I start really connecting the dots to what's happening to the loved ones of people struggling with an addiction. Now listening to all this actually started making me feel really, really guilty. I think it just struck a nerve with something that I sort of internally struggle with pretty commonly, but it just sort of hit the button on this particular day. I kind of always have this sort of constant ongoing back and forth dilemma and dynamic inside of me about the advice I give on these videos because I feel like I'm constantly telling you as a family member how to help your addicted loved one. And a lot of that adv involves suppressing your feelings, suppressing your urges, and dealing with a very, very stressful situation in a different way. Now, I absolutely stand by the things that I teach you as far as what is going to help your addicted loved one. But I also have this other naggy part of me inside that feels super mixed up because I'm aware of the toll it takes on you as a person. And so when I was listening to this particular talk of Dr. Gabor mate, it that home even further in this talk, he was given a lot of examples, but he was also citing some research and these numbers just really kind of freaked me out. For example, one of the studies he cited was talking about women who were going in for, like, a mammogram and who had recently had, like, a lump, and they were going to biopsy or figure out whether it was cancer or benign or whatever. And so as they're going through this process, they have them go through these psychological evaluations. And the results were pretty interesting. The results said that if the women had a significant stressful event happen just before the lump showed up, it didn't necessarily change the statistical outcome of whether or not it was cancer. Now, another thing that it showed was if women identified as feeling very lonely and isolated, that also didn't have a big statistical difference on whether or not their lump was cancerous. But if the woman had a significant stressful event and they were isolated, their chances of having breast cancer was nine times more than the average. That is huge. Nine times more. So, of course, that brings up the question, what is the connection between the two? You've got the stressful event, which is changing your psychology, changing all your body physiology, your immune system, your hormones, all that stuff. But if you have a close support system that's there for you and cares about you, it kind of offsets some of that physiological and psychological trauma. If you do not have a support system in place, all of that biological and psychological trauma stays stuck inside your body, which, according to Gabor Mate, ultimately will manifest into some kind of chronic illness. Now, another very surprising statistic that he gave, he talked about how kids with really stressed parents are five times more likely to have asthma. Now, of course, you might be thinking, well, what's the connection there? Well, kids, not really just kids, but all people. We feel the stress of the people around us.

Several studies have shown that. So in polluted areas where there is more asthma, it's the kids of parents who are stressed who are most likely to have the asthma.

And so if the parent or parents are very stressed, the kid takes on that stress, sometimes even subconsciously, not really even aware of it. And because they're taking all that stress on, it kind of messes with their stress response system. The connection he made there was he talked about the medicines that you give people with asthma are all medicines that simulate activating the stress response system. And so what he's saying here with, with these kids, with the stressed parents is their stress systems are so chronically fatigued that they're having to have medicines to induce the stress response that they need for their body to function properly.

Shouldn't we be Asking ourselves that if we're treating people with stress hormones, whether or not there might be connection between stress and their disease.

Now, just those two statistics alone were pretty shocking to me, but this last one literally blew my mind. He was talking about ALS in the United States. It's oftentimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. And this is a severe, debilitating illness which usually ends up in death within a few years of being diagnosed. So we're talking about serious, serious illness here. What he was saying about it is that 100% of people who end up with this illness have this particular personality type and characteristics about them. He was talking about how they're all sort of perfectionistic, they're all uber, uber responsible, and they almost completely refuse to ask for help. And he gave some different case studies to support that. But he even talked about Lou Gehrig, the baseball player who this illness is named after. He talked about Lou Gehrig has these records, and one of those records, like baseball records, which stood for like 60 and 80 years, and one of those records was never having missed a baseball game. Now, one of the things he said about this was that Lou Gehrig actually had some X rays of his hands and body part as he was going through this illness. And it showed that his. He had had 17 different fractures in his hands and arms over the years, but kept playing anyway. He never missed a game. He just suppressed and suppressed and suppressed, and ultimately it manifest itself in this terminal illness.

He was known as the Iron Horse because he never missed a game. And he didn't never miss a game because he was never sick. He was a human being. He had flus and colds like everybody else. Furthermore, being an athlete, he was injured at one point. His hands were X rayed, and it turned out that his fingers had been fractured 17 separate times. And each time he would play through the injury and his teammates would describe him as grimacing like a maddened monkey in agony as he fielded the ball, but he never missed the game.

Now, if that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what will. There is absolutely 100% connection between our mind and our body, but not just between our mind and our body, but between our mind, our body and our environment. It's all a feedback loop. We one thing pings off of the other, which pings off of the other. Now, a lot of that is why my advice to you works to help your addicted loved one. Because if you change you, you change them. You can't help but respond to your environment, it happens automatically. But I feel like I really need to stress this to you. There is a price to pay for this. Now I have another video where I talk about the psychological trauma of caring about someone with an addiction. But today in this video I'm talking about the biological, the physical trauma of taking care of someone who has an addiction. It's massive. And for that reason, I really want to encourage you on a few things. Number one, do not allow yourself to be abused. Now I have several videos where I talk about this. Yes, all these methods I'm teaching you, I stand by them and they work. But I don't want you to continue to try to use my methods at the detriment of your own physical and psychological health. If you are being abused, that's one of those boundaries that you absolutely need to keep. Now I hear this all the time in comments on my videos. I hear people saying, well, when my loved one gets messed up, they do this and this and this like terrible, terrorizing, mean, abusive thing. And in those circumstances, you need to back up and do something different. This whole thing about helping an addicted loved one, it's this constant ebb and flow or balancing act between taking care of yourself and doing what's right for them. And none of us, including me, do it perfectly. Sometimes it's really hard to figure out where that line is. But if you're being abused, that line is clear. Do not tolerate that. And another thing I really want to strongly encourage you on is get some support for yourself. Let's refer back to the statistic about breast cancer. People who had the major stressor but had support that was almost like a mitigating factor for developing cancer. So please, please, please get some support.

Those women that had been stressed but were emotionally alone, the stress hormone acted on their system for months. That's why they were more likely to get cancer.

And lastly, this is something that I don't talk about much in my videos, but I would tell you I would not stay in this caretaking role of trying to get them to change forever. I really just wouldn't. Now, I do think you have to give it a sufficient amount of time. I'm always telling you guys how this thing doesn't change overnight and there's a lot of back and forth and you're going to have to give it some time if you want your addicted loved one to change. But that doesn't mean subject yourself to this forever. Now I don't know the actual like research proven numbers on this, but in my experience, if you're practicing the techniques that I'm telling you and you're doing a pretty good job at it. Doesn't have to be perfect, but you're doing pretty decent at it. And your loved one hasn't made a change in a year, it might be time to back up. Because if it's not positively affecting them and it's not positively affecting you, then maybe it's time to do something different. Now, most of the time when you're practicing the methods that I teach, you're going to start to see little changes, actually fairly quickly. But those changes in your loved one, it's not like the problem goes away immediately. When I say a year, I'm talking about giving time for the trial and error and the bargaining and the trying it their way and agreeing to get help and all those phases that come in the process. You do have to give it time, but you don't have to give it forever. Now, having said all that, I feel like I need to give you some resources here. I'm definitely going to link to the video I was talking about in the description. So if you want to watch Gabor Mate talk about it and he does a lot better job than I do, you can click that link in the description and watch that video. I also want to tell you about our free Facebook group for family members. It doesn't cost anything and that group is pretty active. You're going to get a lot of support and advice, and not only that, but you're going to be getting support and advice from people who are kind of coming from the same philosophy and mindset, which I think is super helpful. And if you really want to focus on your skills and taking care of yourself, you can take a look at our membership program, which is exactly for how to take care of yourself, practice good, healthy skills, and kind of get yourself back on track. Now up Next, more from Dr. Gabor Mate right here. You just have to click on it.