Trauma, illness and healing in a 'Toxic Culture' | Dr Gabor Maté

In the course of those decades, I've learned so much about the world, about the oneness of the individual human body and the entire universe. I've also had to do my own work because I've come through quite a bit of trauma as a child and that showed up in my life in serious ways. And what I've come to recognize is that common to all illness, whether of mind or body, in fact, you can't even separate the two, are the traumas imposed by life in the modern world.

Welcome back folks, to the Mindvalley Podcast. I'm so excited about our guest today, Dr. Gabor Mate. I first heard about Gabor through a friend who was going through an insanely bad time with addiction. This man had gone through a lot of trauma and as a result of that, had ruined his life with addiction. And he said that the inspiration for him to get back on his feet to reclaim his life, to later go on and build a business with close to 30 million in revenue, was the wisdom and the advice from this renowned author, Dr. Gabor Mate. Dr. Gabor's bestselling books have been published in over 30 languages and he's a highly sought after international expert for his expertise on addiction, trauma, but also childhood development and the relationship of stress and illness. He's written multiple books. The one I'm reading right now is called when the Body says no. And it is fascinating. It's all about how insanely problematic stress is in our modern lives. But today we're going to be discussing ideas from Gabor's new book, the Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And this book is so important for the world right now. It's so important for the world right now because in the Myth of Normal you start to understand that the benchmark by which we are measuring human health is actually hopelessly skewed. We are measuring against a much lower bar because over the last couple of generations we have actually gotten our health so bad and it's happened incrementally that we haven't noticed. Gabor is going to go more into this now. He's also the co developer of a therapeutic approach, compassionate inquiry, now studied by therapists, physicians, counselors globally. And I'm excited today to be speaking to Gabor Mate, the legendary Gabor Mate, about the myth of normal and toxic culture. Gabo, welcome to the mindvalley podcast.

Well, thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here.

So firstly, you've written so many books. What was the spark that made you write the Myth of Normal with your son Daniel.

So I'm 78 years old now. And 11 years ago I retired from medical work after over three decades being a physician. In the course of those decades, I've learned so much about the world, about the oneness of the individual human body and the entire universe. I've also had to do my own work because I've come through quite a bit of trauma as a child. And that showed up in my life in serious ways. What I've come to recognize is that common to all illness, whether of mind or body, in fact you can't even separate the two, are the traumas imposed by life in the modern world. And so that I wanted to bring a perspective to my readers of how you cannot separate the mind from the body. You cannot separate the individual from the multi generational family history. You cannot separate the family from the culture and the world that we live in. In other words, when somebody gets sick, it manifests the entire world in our one body. And if I can give you a beautiful story, a friend of mine is an American part Native psychiatrist and physician. His name is Louis Mel Madrona from the Lakota tradition. And he told me that in his Lakota heritage, when somebody gets sick, the community gathers and says thank you. Your illness is manifesting the dysfunction and problems of our whole community. So your healing is our healing. And I want to show how that is true for the whole society that we live in.

That's, that's so beautiful. Your healing is healing. So your work covers a really broad spectrum. Right there is you write about childhood development and how it's for parents to play an even more active role in their kids development. You write about stress and the negative impact of stress. This new book, the Myth of Normal, what if you have to talk about how this is different from your prior work? What are you focused on here?

Well, first of all, my most recent book was the one on addiction and that was published 13 years ago now. And I've learned a lot in those 13 years. My other books were published 20 years ago. The one you're reading was published about 20 years ago. And so I've learned a lot since then as well. So first of all, it brings in what I've learned since and what the science since has also demonstrated. But I say what sets this book apart is I look at the whole picture here. I look at how we, what we consider to be normal and what we think is normal is actually completely unhealthy and unnatural. I look at what trauma is. I look at what happens to Children in the womb according because of the stresses in society on women. I look at how we bring children to the world. Childbirthing is completely unnatural and interferes with human development. I talk about how we raise children in a culture that's designed not to support their needs, but to make them fit into a culture of consumerism and self suppression. I talk about how mental illnesses and physical illnesses are not abnormalities. They're normal responses to an abnormal situation. So what is abnormal is the culture that generates. Let me give you an example. For example, the more episodes of racism a black American woman experiences, the greater her risk for asthma. So what does that say about the inflammation of our lungs? Is that an individual pathological manifestation or does it represent the malaise of a whole culture? I talk about how trauma shows up in politics and people like Donald Trump and people like Hillary Clinton and how their trauma affects us. I talk about how the decisions in the society are made by people who don't care about people's needs or people's lives. They care about profit and so that human life and human health becomes like a sunk cost in the race for profits. I talk about how women in this society carry a heavy, heavy burden, and that's why of stress and that's why 80% of autoimmune disease happens to women. I talk about the impact of racism and poverty and inequality on people's physiology. Then I lay out an eight chapter vision of healing individually and socially. So it's, it's not a small book and it wasn't easy to write.

And it's coming out September 14th, I believe.

13Th.

September 13th. Okay, that's fantastic. That's. That's about six weeks away from the time we're recording this. So one of the things you mentioned in the book is this concept called the myth of normal. Okay. You say that. That what we consider normal actually isn't. Let's go deeper in that topic.

Yes. So we can consider normal two ways. One is this is a statistical norm. So if everybody's doing something, then that's the norm. So take. Let me give you a shocking and fanciful example. If everybody in the Vancouver area where I live tortured their cats, then torturing cats would be normal statistically. But would it be healthy or natural? So that what I'm saying is that what is statistically normal in our society, the way that people behave and the way we're taught and raised, that seems to be the norm. But from the point of view of human needs and human health and human development, it's completely abnormal. And when you look at human beings and human evolution, most of it took place in nature in small band hunter gatherer groups where people lived in community, supporting each other, and children were raised in the context of a multi generational nexus of support and adult presence. That was the norm, evolutionary speaking, for millions of years. That's how our ancestors developed. For most of the time that our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, have been on the earth 150, 200,000 years. That's how we lived. What we call civilization is if human existence is one hour long, then civilization is about six minutes. And so what I'm saying is that what was normal in terms of human needs and human evolution is no longer available to us. And the way we're living right now is completely abnormal when it comes to compare in comparison to what human needs actually are.

But why is it then, why is it then that if you look at lifespans, lifespans are getting longer and longer. What does that mean?

Well, first of all, that's somewhat questionable as to how our lifespans compare with ancient indigenous peoples, number one. Number two, what is true is that in terms of the last few hundred years, lifespans have increased terrifically. That's because we have better sanitation, more people have access to food. It's mostly these social factors. Not to mention there's been wonderful advances in Western medicine as well. But consider the fact that in the United States, 70% of adults are taking at least one medication for a health condition, and about 40% are taking two. So our lifestyles may be longer, but they're not healthy at all. And we have the rising incidence of autoimmune disease, of childhood suicide or childhood mental health conditions, of depression and anxiety. When we get the rising incidence of overdoses from drugs, last little while has been a really. As a matter of fact, even the lifespan of white American males has gone down in the last few years. So that, yes, historically we've made progress, but that progress has come at a heavy price.

Right, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. I have a grandmother who is in her mid-90s, right? She's alive, she's a vegetable, she, she can't communicate, she can't talk, she can't move. And we may be living longer, but we are living so much sicker. So what, what is this concept? You used the word toxic culture or culture that has become toxic in your book. What, what is that and what is causing that?

Okay, so if the analogy I give is that if you're a laboratory scientist and you're growing organisms, microorganisms in a petri dish. So you prepare a certain broth that is designed to support their thriving and their health. We call that a laboratory culture. We culture things in a laboratory. Now, if those organisms thrive and multiply, it's a healthy culture, it's a nourishing culture. But if the organisms are falling sick at high rates, you'd have to call that sick culture. I'm saying that human culture is the same. Human culture is where we're incubated and where we grow. If a lot of people are falling sick, are stressed, anxious children, all those things I mentioned before, then you have to say, what's wrong with this culture? I'm saying it's a toxic culture because it doesn't support human needs. It not only doesn't support them, it actually suppresses them.

So this, this is really interesting. I'm curious to know what, what you think of this. I. I was reading this interesting article that said that it was talking about males in Denmark, right. And how close to 50% of males in Denmark are now infertile. Yet again, if you read about Denmark, it's one of the happiest countries in the world, one of the best standards of living in the world. It is one of the best. If you define it by modern human culture, it is one of the happiest, greatest places to live. Yet there's this weird phenomenon where 50% of Danish men are infertile. What do you think could be going on there?

Well, another statistic from Denmark, the incidence of multiple sclerosis in the last 25 years amongst women in Denmark has doubled. Multiple sclerosis. Given that these things are not genetic, we have to look at the environment. What's the environment doing to people? To say that Denmark is a happy place as compared to a lot of other places only tells you how miserable other places are. It doesn't necessarily. It's a comparative measure. It doesn't mean that people are happy. It just means that according to certain arbitrary measures, the Danes rate pretty well. It doesn't really tell you the internal quality of their lives. Now, in terms of the spermcon going down in the Western world, not just in Denmark, but in general, there's been a lot of speculation about that. There's so many toxins in the environment, physical toxins that we ingest through our food or through the air. I mean, everybody knows that. I think also a lot of it has to do with stress and the stress of modern life.

I see. Now you say so, so you make A delineation between disease and the, the cause of disease. And you say disease can be a teacher. What do you mean by this?

Yes. So I've talked to so many, so many people. Well, you know, how many of a crisis in your life, whether it's a loss of a job, like I was fired once from a job and it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it made me examine what is it that I had done that contributed to that situation where it becomes so envenomed that I ended up being fired. It was a great, it was one of the best things that happened to me. A personal crisis like a divorce can be seen as a tragedy and a misery, but can also be an impetus for self examination. When I was found myself very depressed in my 40s, I had to start looking. What do I have to learn here? Like what, what's going on here? So that in the same sense a health crisis like an illness for a lot of people can function like a wake up call. Because if we don't see disease as some isolated biological entity, but we see it as a process that manifests something about that person's lives, when that person examines their lives, they can learn a lot about why they got sick. And so that I, you know, I used to work in palliative care and looking at this is terminal people. And I don't recommend this and it may sound surprising, but even people who are dying sometimes tell me doc, this cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me because it made me, it made me wake up to what's valuable and what's not valuable in life. It made me wake up to who I was and who I'm not. And so again, I'm not recommending it. But disease can be a wake up call and a impetus for self examination that a lot of people end up being grateful for.

It reminds me of that, that book. There was a book recently that was written by a nurse and it was the five greatest regrets of people who were dying. And that book was, was just an incredible bestseller. And so I see what you mean. Disease can be a teacher. So one of the things you talk about a lot is parenting. You wrote a book called hold on to your kids why Parents need to matter More. Tell us about what's going on right now in terms of this normal myth and what we need to understand in relation to our children.

Well, I've just been reading about the birth of sperm whales and the birth of elephants is incredible. When a baby elephant is born, as the mother goes into labor, all the other mother elephants stand around in a circle. And when the little elephant plops them to the ground, all the other mothers stroke her with their trunks so that this baby is welcomed by a whole community. Same with whales. That's how it used to be with human beings. Used to parenting community. If you look at the children are born with certain needs. Those needs include unconditional, loving acceptance. Not because you're pretty or smart or cute or compliant or nice, but because you are. Children of the need not have to work to make that relationship with the parents work. So it's not. They should be accepted 100%. And they shouldn't have to make the parents feel better or make peace in the family or earn a parent's regard. Children need to be able to experience all their emotions, whether it's anger, sorrow, grief, joy, pain, whatever it is, and have those emotions validated by the parents. These are some of the irreducible, irrevocable needs of children. Now, parenting used to be in the hunter gatherer thrives. Wherever we evolved, that's what parenting was. Kids were breastfed for three and a half, four years. Kids were always with adults. They didn't sleep in separate cubicles when they, when they said they were fed right away. Nobody said, you're going to be fed on schedule. When they needed to cry to be picked up at night, nobody said you should sleep it out and you should cry it out and I'll see you in the morning. Now, in modern world, parents have become disconnected from their feelings. They no longer have the communal support. Mothers and fathers are isolated and stressed. When a parent is stressed, you know, you can tell when a marriage is in difficulty. You can do two things. You can ask the parents or you could measure the stress trauma levels of the child so that in a stressed world, isolated world where community is lost for a lot of people, parents no longer have the instinct to support their children's needs. Parents are programmed to raise their kids according to the expectations of society, not according to the needs of the child. So what I'm suggesting is we have to go back to asking ourselves not what we expect this child to be in a social setting, but what are the needs of the child. If we meet the needs of the child, that child will be, well, socialized automatically. But we do it backwards. We try and focus on the behavior of the child rather than the needs of the child.

We focus on the behavior of the child rather than the needs of the child. That is a really, really important lesson. So let's go back to the. The myth of normal. So you suggest in the book solutions for some of the. The. The fundamental things that we get wrong about the world right now. Let's. Let's talk about one of these solutions. Let's talk about, for example, parenting. What do you suggest? How do you suggest we wake up?

Well, if I have a friend, he's a children's singer, quite well known. His name is Raffi, and, you know, he sang at the Bill Clinton White House, and he's sold millions of records around the world. He's a beloved children's troubadour. And Raffi woke up one night and he had this vision of child honoring a child honoring society. So what if we had a society that didn't put profit or convenience ahead of the child's needs? What if we had a society that actually was oriented around what the child needs? Well, first of all, we would support pregnant women not to be stressed because already stresses on the mother during pregnancy translate into brain problems in the child later on in life. So we would make sure that pregnant women are really well held communally and are secure. We would stop the mechanization of labor and birth. We would interfere, not interfere, but intervene when we needed to save a life or health. And that's some of the miracles of modern medicine. But you know what? The caesarean section right now is in a lot of countries, and here in British Columbia, it's close to 40%, which means that people no longer deliver naturally. You know what? In Turkey, it's over 50%. It's shocking. In a lot of the European countries, it's around 40%. It should be around 10 or 15%. So now that labor itself is a process that isn't just a matter of getting the baby out of the womb. It's actually a process of preparing the mother and child biochemically for bonding. When we interfere with it, we're interfering with the brain physiology of both mother and child problems for later on. So I've just talked about gestation and birth. And then there is what I said about the irreducible needs of children. They're not met. In the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth.

That is insane.

That means that 25% of babies are being abandoned because the infant experiences that as an abandonment. Can't help but experience it that way. That's a trauma. So right off the bat, we're traumatizing 25% of children being born even without having done anything else to them.

That is One of the most insane things about American culture. I live in Europe, in Estonia. When my son was born here, his mother was given 18 months maternity leave. So that truly focus on raising the kid. And, and that's what my, my employees, that's what my staff here gets. And it's so wonderful. I cannot understand how America can be so dysfunctional when it comes to maternal and, and paternal leave.

Well, you know, but it's not dysfunctional. It's functioning all too well. Because the intention is, if the intention is conscious or unconscious, is to bring children into the world who are alienated from themselves and then have fill that hole inside themselves that was left by the mother's absence by buying, by buying products and putting up with all kinds of unacceptable conditions, then it's a beautiful system.

It functions. Yeah, even, even the idea of, of cesarean section versus vaginal birth, I think there were studies that showed that a child who is, goes through a C section has a 30% reduction in their immunity because they don't pick up the necessary bacteria that comes from vaginal birth.

The microbiome is different.

You have sicker adults who are better clients for big pharma.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Now it's true, sometimes C sections are absolutely life saving. But not at the rate.

Right, not at the rate. So this is fascinating. Now, now what about the role of. One of the things you talk about is trauma in politics. How does trauma show up in politics in pop culture? Because these are two things that, that are so prevalent in America.

Okay, well, let's take a couple of salient examples. One is if I said to you that the world is a horrible place and everybody's against you and even your friends want your house and they want your wife and they want your wealth, and this is your friends. It's a dog eat dog world. What would you imagine about the conditions that shaped my worldview? What would you imagine about them?

That you are a horribly deprived, broken individual.

We're talking about the former President of the United States because he said this. So Donald Trump was a highly traumatized person. You can tell that by looking at him. His need to be grandiose and control women and his inability to accept reality. These are all markers of trauma. Now, we know this very. You could, you could tell it by looking at him. But you also know this because of the revelations of his niece, Mary Trump, who wrote, who wrote a book. You know. Now Trump's father was a. Mary calls him a sociopath. And her own father, her own father, Tom's brother, drank himself to death, you know, so this is a very traumatized person. But let's take his opponent. So what if I told you about a four year old girl who's bullied by neighborhood kids? Let's say your child. Okay. How old is your child?

My child, my little girl is eight.

Okay, well, let's take her at age four and she's bullied by neighborhood kids and she runs into the house to you or to your spouse for protection and she's told there's no room for cards in this house. Now you get out there and deal with those kids. How would you see that? How would you say that?

That's cruel. It's absolutely cruel on a child.

That's Hillary Clinton's story. That story was told at the Democratic convention where she was nominated. And this was presented as a wonderful example of, of resilience building. In other words, the whole culture was celebrating the public traumatization of one of his leaders and didn't even see it. Nobody even commented on it.

Right.

And we know that her father beat the heck out of her, you know, and, and she just called him a stern tax master. So now these traumatized people then go into politics. What kind of policies that they're going to enact? You're right, the ones that further traumatize people because that's what they think is normal. Or let's take a cultural figure. Let's take any one of the great artists, Aretha Franklin, she sings this song called Respct, which is kind of an anthemic celebration of women's right to be respected. She was an abused child and she was abused as an adult throughout her life. So that, so that there was a real gap between the public Persona. And you know what, if you're sensitive enough, you can pick it up in her. You can see it in her face. She was a great, great, great artist. But there was a real split between the public Persona. Same with the Presley, same with the Marilyn Monroe, same with the Kurt Cobain, same with Amy Winehouse. Same with any number of these artists. We sort of lap up their talent and their charisma and we don't see the pain and the trauma behind it. So a lot of popular culture, great. You know, the other day I had the great pleasure Alanis Morissette was in town and she invited me to attend her concert as a guest. Now she's somebody who's dealt with her trauma publicly. She's talked about it and she's healing and she's healed. That's what needs to happen. But so Often the pop culture just hides the, hides the trauma and covers.

It up or normalizes it as you talk about in your book.

Yeah, that's right.

So what then is healing? How do you heal trauma? And what is the role of spirituality, of psychedelics in healing trauma?

Okay, so healing comes from the, an old Anglo Saxon, Anglo Saxon word for whole. So healing means becoming a whole. Now what does that mean? As children, when we're not accepted for who we are, where our emotions are not accepted, where if I'm angry, I'm made to sit by myself and I group, which is what a lot of psychologists advise, then what I learned to do is to split up from the part of myself that is angry. So I suppress my anger, but that means my boundaries are no longer clear because healthy anger is a boundary protection. And people that repress their anger, they're much more prone for cancer and autoimmune disease, for example. So healing then doesn't just mean getting the disease cured, but of reuniting all the parts of ourselves that we've suppressed. So healing means wholeness. So the path of healing is a path of reclaiming our authentic selves, our whole selves. That's what healing actually means. And spirituality. Again, if you look at Indigenous traditions, Indigenous people never saw themselves in separation from nature, never saw themselves in separation from all of the universe. They just. I've worked with them. And in Canada, the native people have been horribly traumatized, horribly traumatized for hundreds of years by colonization, by colonialism, by the suppression of their spiritual ways, by the robbery of their lands, by sheer genocide, by the physical, sexual, emotional abuse of their children in church run residential schools. I mean it's. In fact, the Pope has been in Canada just recently apologizing for some of that. But they've never lost the sense that there's something greater. There's something beyond the individual human organism and human little ego that we all belong to. And that's, to me, that's what spirituality means, is that sense of connection, that sense of no, I'm not just an isolated little self. I'm not just a competitive, aggressive, selfish little being out there to get everybody else so I can gain more. There's more to me than that, much more. So that's the spiritual part. And people, when they heal from addictions or illnesses or just when they deal with their issues, sooner or later, many of them are guided to take on some kind of a spiritual path, some sense of that connection. Psychedelics, which I worked with, which is a one chapter in my book, which I'VE worked with for well over a decade now as both a healer, but also as a beneficiary. They can be powerful supports because they can really show you two things. They can show you all the pain that you carry inside that you've been running away from, that underlies your physical illness, that underlies your depression, that underlies your, your addiction. But they can also show you that wholeness, that connection, that perfection, that goodness, that love that really is inside all of us. So they can reveal both the bad, the ugly and the good. And once you see the good, you see that nothing was bad in the first place. We just lost connection. So I'm not a psychedelic evangelist, but they can be powerfully helpful in that healing process. And I've witnessed that and I've guided people through that and I've benefited from it myself.

I see, I see. And what about spirituality? Have you come across modalities, practices that you think are worth looking at deeper for healing trauma?

Yes, I've seen that. I've seen that yoga can help people, meditation can help people. We've seen studies on mindfulness meditation where you actually see effects on brain physiology, beneficial effects. We can see, measure, physically measure the stress reduction effects of mindfulness practices. I'm a very undisciplined spiritual practitioner. I have to tell you, I'm the world's worst meditator. But I think about it every day. And I said that in one of my books. I have a profound relationship with meditation. I think about it daily, you know, and a bit of a yoga practice, it has to be combined with the emotional work. Sometimes people do the spiritual work and they do physical work like exercise. But if they don't do the emotional work, a big piece is still missing. So what I'm brought back to is the idea of the medicine wheel of the North American indigenous peoples, which has to do with the mind, the emotions, the spirituality and the social connections. Those all make up the four quadrants of the medicine wheel. And I think if we miss any of them, we're lacking something and we're falling short of health.

One of the things that you help pioneer is compassionate inquiry. Tell us about that. What is this concept?

So in family practice, once I realized that somebody would say rheumatoid arthritis. Well, let me just say a little bit about this. In 1880, 1890, there's a great Canadian physician who also worked at Johns Hopkins and also at Oxford, Sir William Mosler. And he said that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by long term worry and stress. And he's just very intuitive. He's considered one of the great teachers in medical history. Since then, there's been dozens of studies showing the relationship of stress, trauma and rheumatoid arthritis. Dozens of studies. Yet when you go to the average rheumatologist, nobody will ask you about stresses, traumas, or anything like that. They just give you physical medications, but nobody's going to look for the deeper causes. Now, when I began to saw these connections in family practice, I realized that it wasn't enough for me just to give people anti inflammatories or steroids. I ought to ask about their lives. So I actually began this at the end of the day. I would say, well, come in at the end of the day so we'll have some time, and let's just. Let me just ask you about your life. And so in that process, I began to learn how to ask questions about people's lives. And what I found is that the answers are always inside everybody given the right questions. And so that little practice that I was impelled upon in family practice then became what has become known as compassion inquiry, which is now a therapeutic method, been studied by close to three dozen people in over 80 countries. And we offer that online for health professionals and psychologists and counselors. And it really has to do with being compassionate. In other words, you're not judging anybody. And not only are you compassionate, you are noticing when somebody is not compassionate towards themselves because people tend to lack compassion for themselves. That's one of the impacts of trauma, is you lose compassion for yourselves. Now, if I said to you, for example, why did you do this? Right. Oh, that land for you. Would that land like a question you wanted to answer?

I mean, I. I don't have anyone speaking to me like that, but I can imagine that I've seen people speak to children like that.

Yeah. No, so that's. That's not a question, that's an accusation, right?

It is, yeah.

It's now, no. What a funny. Then I said to you, I wonder why you did that.

Yeah, huge difference. Right?

So. So the, the words are almost the same, but the intention and the tone. One is judgmental and harsh, the other is compassion. So there's a spiritual teacher called Age Almas, who I revere, and he said that only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth. So the whole idea of compassion inquiry is to help people question themselves or respond to questions in a setting of compassion when they feel supported and safe, so they can actually look at the truth. Because the truth is always liberating once we get to know it. And so that if somebody realizes, oh, all my life I've been one of these self repressing, self suppressing, really nice, compliant, hyper responsible individuals. And I've contributed to my rheumatoid arthritis or to my eczema or to my asthma. But if I ask the right questions, well, why am I behaving that way? Oh, I was programmed to be that, to fit in with my family of origin. But you know what? I'm no longer a little child. I don't have to behave like that anymore. I can now be myself. I can say no when I feel that I can set a boundary. You know, I don't have to stress myself. I don't have to take on the burdens of other people in order to be accepted by them. Well, that can make a huge difference to the disease. And so but to get there is a process of what we've called compassionate inquiry.

Amazing. I love what you're doing for the world, Gabor, mate, I love your book. The new book is called the Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And definitely buy this book. I'm so excited about getting this book. Here's what a couple of reviewers have said. This riveting and beautifully written tale has profound implications for all of our lives, including the practice of medicine and mental health. Another reviewer said, this is from Esther Perel, whom you've seen on mindvalley before. Gabo and Daniel have delivered a book in which readers can seek refuge and solace during moments of profound personal and social crisis. The Myth of Normal is an essential compass during disorienting times. So read this book because it is up to all of us to help make the world better. It's up to all of us to help bring some of these visions to reality. And you're going to get so many ideas from this book on how to shift the way we function as, as individuals as well as, as a species, as a society to create a much more compassionate, healing world for the generations to come. So you can find it on Amazon, of course, but earlier Gabor said please ask people to buy it from local bookstores because many local bookstore owners are hurting right now as Amazon is a giant, you know, takes business away from them. And so if you can get it from a local bookstore, definitely buy it from a local bookstore. I try to buy all my books from the local bookstores here in Europe and not from am. Nothing wrong with Amazon, but let's support local industry okay. So, Gabor, thank you for being a guest today. I'm so honored to have you on, and someday I hope to see you in a bigger way on mindvalley.

Vishen, thank you so much for your interest and for this interview. Thank you.

Thank you. For those of you who enjoyed this podcast, consider going deeper into mindvalley membership to study many of the topics that we discuss today. On parenting, look into conscious parenting with Shafali Sabari. On healing trauma, look into programs by Marissa Peer. So if you are not yet a MindValley member, you can learn more@mindvalley.com Membership is probably in, well, in the opinion of many of our members, one of the best investments you can make on any product in the world today because it gives you back to yourself. And don't forget to check out Gabor Mate's book, the Myth of Normal, preferably in your local bookstore. Thank you.