Change Your Brain Every Day - Dr. Gabor Maté: This Is What a Doctor Wants You To Know About Past Emotional Trauma

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

Is what we call “normal” actually healthy—or just common? In this powerful episode, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen sit down with world-renowned physician and bestselling author Dr. Gabor Maté to explore how trauma, stress, and childhood experiences shape our health, addictions, and even our immune system. Dr. Maté explains why depression and anxiety aren’t simply “diseases,” how suppressed emotions harm the body, and why addictions are not about the drug or behavior—but about unhealed pain. You’ll hear deep insights on boundaries, the hidden costs of saying “yes,” why so many of us struggle in silence, and how true healing begins with connection. This conversation will challenge everything you think you know about mental health—and give you hope for change.   Dr. Maté's new book, The Myth of Normal: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Normal-Illness-Healing-Culture/dp/0593083881    

You had trouble saying no to other people's expectations. Absolutely. You tended to take responsibility for everybody else. You had trouble expressing healthy anger. Oof. Yeah. You probably had this belief that you're responsible other people's emotions, and you must never disappoint anybody.

This is all the result of child of trauma. And these four traits that I just listed are characteristic of people with malignancy and autoimmune disease. Wow. And I'd both. Go over those four again. Okay. So, um...

Dr. Gabor Matte is a world-renowned physician and best-selling author. author. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma. He has written five books exploring topics including ADHD, stress, developmental psychology, and addiction. The role of the know is to protect your boundaries. If I invade your space, you better get angry. The role of emotions basically is to allow in what is healthy and nurturing and to keep

out what is not. And what's the role of the immune system? The same thing. Right. That's so interesting. Keep out the bad, allowing the healthy. When we suppress our emotions that way, we're also messing with our immune system. Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn

how you can change your brain for the better every day. Are you a doctor or mental health professional who's tired of one-size-fits-all care? Are you passionate about helping people heal? the root causes of their issues, but frustrated by the limitations of standard care. What if you didn't have to guess what's going on with your patients? Because you could see it. At Amen Clinics, we do psychiatry differently. We use brain imaging to improve diagnoses and guide personalized treatment because mental health is really brain health.

If you're ready to be a leader in the future of mental health care, We're looking for you. When you join Amen Clinics, you don't just make a difference. You own it. With our employee stock option plan, you become an owner in the mission, a stake in every life we change. This is your invitation to be a healer, a brain health warrior, a pioneer. Join us. Let's end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health together.

We are so excited about our guest today. Dr. Gabor Matte is a retired physician who, after 20 years in family practice and palliative care experience, worked for over a decade in Vancouver's downtown Eastside with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The best-selling author of five books published in 43 languages, including the award-winning in the realm of hungry ghosts. Close encounters with addiction. Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker. highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. And for his groundbreaking medical work and writing, he's been awarded the Order of Canada, his country's highest civilian distinction, so awesome, and the Civic Merit Award for his hometown Vancouver. His most recent book, The Myth of Normal,

trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture is a New York Times and international bestseller. Welcome, Dr. Gabor Mote, to the Change Your Brain Everyday Podcasts. We're so excited to have you. Thanks for having me. So why this book? And I love the title. Because I often say when I lecture that normal is a meth.

That normal is the setting on a dryer or a city in Illinois. I actually got to lecture once in Normal, Illinois. And I met Normal Women. I was interviewed on the Normal Radio Station. and they were just like everybody else. And whenever I would think someone is normal, within three weeks they'd be in my office, telling me about the addiction, the affair, the suicide attempt. So by method normal, I mean two things.

One is as physicians, you and I are trained to recognize that life is possible and thrives within a certain range of parameters, like within a certain range of temperature. You live too high, too low, you're in trouble. And there's a normal range of blood pressure within which we do okay. If it's too low, too high, you're at risk. So in that sense, normal is associated with healthy and natural. But then we make a mistake in society that we think that whatever we used to, we use the word normal.

Like if everybody in Los Angeles beat their dogs, then beating your dogs would be normal in that social sense. But it would be nothing healthy or natural about it. So we confuse this, what we're accustomed to, with healthy and natural. And many of the things that are normal in this society are actually totally unhealthy for people, as you know. So that's what I mean by the myth of normal. The other myth is that, just as you suggested, there's this whole idea that there's the normal people, then there's the troubled diseased people. But you and I both know that everybody's on some kind of a spectrum.

And there's no such thing as normal as such. It's just a question of certain stresses, certain experiences, will make some people more troubled or challenged at certain times. But they're not different from anybody else. And the third meaning is this, is that let's say we say somebody with ADHD is not normal or somebody with PTSD is not normal. But what if their ADHD or their PTSD, or their autoimmune disease is actually a normal response

to completely abnormal circumstances. Then who has the abnormality, the individual or the social circumstances and that induced those conditions? So that's what I mean by the myth of normal. So if someone is suffering with sadness or with anxiety or with panic or disorganization, and distractibility how do you approach them how do you help them it's interesting i was just

reading this morning about the um history of depression and you know in ancient times it's called they call it melancholia and melan means black and colia is bile they thought it was due to black bile in the in the but and then become more sophisticated since then but we still call these things medical diseases. But what if they're not? What if somebody's low mood and social isolation and poor sleep is a reflection of their lives of what happened to them? And Bruce Perry and Oprah wrote a book called What Happened to You? Which is to say what occurred to you in childhood that might have created certain responses to the environment. So when I talk to somebody with anxiety or depression or disorganization. The first thing I want to know about them is not to

convey to them that you've got this disease that I have to treat, but what's going on in your life and what has been? So the first thing I do is I listen to them. Rather than it's not question of so much I tell them. It's how do I listen to them and how do I help them make sense of their experience? And as you well know, certain patterns, certain patterns, patterns then get ingrained in the brain. And then it's a question of these patterns that were ingrained in your brain long time ago before you had any choice no matter. How can you develop new ways of coping and responding so that you no longer the effect

of these old experiences? So, but it begins by listening of, tell me about your life. And if it begins by listening, what it means is it begins by connecting. Absolutely, yeah. Right. Remember Jerome Frank, who is a psychiatrist at Harvard, he said, what works in psychotherapy is that the doctor has a method. The doctor believes in the method, and the patient believes in the doctor.

So it's that bond when we have 60 psychiatrists that work with us here at Eamon Clinics. And whenever I think of hiring someone, it's like, will they bond? right i mean i can teach them our method but that's harder to teach that are they someone that someone will trust that's not a technique that's a way of being and uh unfortunately so much of medical training as i think you might agree undermines i mean i think that there was a study i saw once that the highest degree of empathy of medical people was just before they started their training Well, and just to get into medical school, I mean, probably the same in Canada. Yeah.

But here, it's so competitive. Yeah. And our niece, who we adopted, is a pre-med student at UCLA. Yeah. And it's chronically stressful to always feel like you have to be at the top of your class. You know what telomeres are, telomeres. So they've done a study. telomeres for the listener who might not know these are DNA structures at the end of our

chromosomes that were born with a certain length of them and as we age or get stressed they shorten and they keep the chromosomes together like like the aglet on a shoelace keeps the shoelace from fraying the more they lose the telomeres the more we fray now so it's a marker of it's of biological aging, actually. And you can let people have the same biological age, the same chronological age, but have totally different biological age. Like the telomere length, the biological age of black women

is seven years shorter in this country, then Caucasian women. And it's got nothing to do with genetics. It's got to do with stress, the stress of racism specifically. Now, medical students, they've looked at their telomeres and they compare them to the fraying over a year of telomeres of people their age, they aged faster. That makes sense. Because of the stress they were under.

It's chronic stress. Yeah. I mean, I remember when I was a pre-med and I want to go to medical school, you need these grades, you need the MCAT score, and it's just chronic. And then when you get to medical school, it doesn't get better. Have you ever heard? how do you create a cult? Okay, you isolate people from their families.

Oh, no. You sleep deprive them. You give them a special jargon that only they can understand. Oh, no. You stress them and you put them under authority on leaders. No. In other words, you send them to medical school. Yes, that's so good.

That's so good. That just reminds me of all the residents they used to work with in the hospital. Yeah. And then these stressed people, and nothing in medical school ever teaches you to take care of yourself. In fact, if you try and take care yourself, you're considered a weak thing. You're considered weak. Well, mine was different, thank God.

I went to Oro Roberts University, which was a Christian medical school. And when you walk on the campus, there's this big sign and body, mind, spirit, body, mind, spirit. We were required to exercise. and they served healthy food and they really thought about the whole person which so for my training what I always think of my patients always in four big circles what's the biology their brain and we look at what's their psychology how do they think their development what's the social circle their support and what's the spiritual circle which is why the heck do you care. Isn't that interesting? Do you know about the indigenous northern magneticist medicine wheel?

So the medicine wheel has got four quadrants when it comes to health. There's the mental, which is your thoughts and your emotions. There's the physical. There's the social and there's a spiritual. I love that. And health rests in all those four quadrants. Interesting. And in Western medicine, we ignore almost everything except the biological. Yeah. No, we're in big trouble. We're in big trouble. I have a question. So you talked about the telomere spraying and how stress in these environments, just one year of medical school can make a big difference. What happens if that happens when you're a child and you're still developing? You're still developing brain,

still developing body. Well, so tell them about when we met. Which part? You thought I was so fascinating, just the whole thing. I'm still fascinated. I'm a psychiatrist, like, dream, I suppose. No, our first lunch, she told me when she was four years old, she had upper and lower GIs. Yeah. Up and lower, sorry?

Upper and lower G.I. studies. Gastrointestinal procedures, right? They called her a frequent flyer in the hospital. And I'm like, so what happened when you were four years old? And I'm like, don't shrink me. I was like, don't shrink me. It had nothing to do with that. It had nothing to do with my childhood.

And he's like, okay. well, what was going on in your life? And so I was like, I don't know, my, like, it was a weird year. My uncle was murdered and a drug deal gone wrong. My one uncle was a heroin addict, and then my other uncle was murdered in a drug deal. And I still remember the chaos and the screaming and the police and the whole thing. And he's like, so how long after that did you start having these tests? And I'm like, it was a couple weeks, I think.

And he was like, and you don't think there's anything to do with, like, they're not connected. Well, you know what? So when I was in family practice, I'd have these kids. with unexplained abdominal pains or symptoms. And all these specialists will do all these tests, and then there's nothing wrong. You know, what they never asked is what's going on in the family. Yeah.

And what actually happened in every case, these guys were like the canary in the mind as you were. So it probably means that genetically you were probably hypersensitive. Very. You know, and so that things affect you more. So when there's stress in the environment, you're the one who manifests it through your body. And then particularly through the GI.

track because of the vagus nerve and you know the dysfunction they can cut and so but this is what they never look at they just look at the body and if they can't find anything they think there's nothing wrong here right and then there's but actually your head had a perfectly normal response right to highly have a normal circumstance well and i had cancer when i was 23 and i was like how is this possible i'm like a healthy person yeah you know i was 23 and i was fit and i was working out all the time and it never made sense to me until I learned about adverse childhood experiences. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I would also venture to describe your personality at age 23, and maybe I'm wrong this time, but can I try? Sure. You had trouble saying no to other people's expectations. And you tended to take responsibility for everybody else. Responsibility is still my favorite word. Yeah, okay. And you had trouble expressing healthy anger.

Oof, yeah. Yeah. And you're probably a disbelief that other people's, you're responsible, other people's emotions, and you must never disappoint anybody. No, that's the person. I think you've lost that. I've lost it. I did a lot of work.

Thank God. Yeah. It took years of work. But this is all the result of child trauma. And these four traits that I just listed are characteristic of people with malignancy and autoimmune disease. Wow. And I'd both. Go over those four again.

For the listener. So a kind of a compulsive tendency to take care of other people's emotional needs while ignoring your own. A rigid and compulsive identification with duties, role and responsibility rather than the self. Repression of healthy anger, which is essential for bond. defense, repression of healthy anger, and the beliefs that you're responsible of other people feel, and you must never disappoint anybody. Now, here's the point. Nobody's born with those traits.

The average infant does not take responsibility for the mother's feelings, not at day one. So when that develops, this is how you survive your environment. So these traits that I just described are not your fault, they're at a patience. to your early environment where you learn, for example, that if I express my healthy anger, I'm not going to be late. Therefore, in order to be accepted,

I have to suppress myself. But given the unity of mind and body, that self-suppression then also has all kinds of immunological, physiological, epigenetic, inflammatory stress-producing impacts, which then makes it more likely

that disease, appear. And as a matter of fact, in one of my books, it's called When the Body Says No, and I make to some point in the myth of normal, when people don't know how to say no, the body will say it for them. I have my patients practice in the mirror. Yeah. I have to think about it. When someone asks them to do something, it's like, I have to think about it so that they

get rid of that automatic yes response. That's a great one. Which gets them into so much trouble. I literally started practicing saying, no, boundaries are my friend now. Yeah. But it took years to be able to do that. And now I love the word no.

Yeah. It's like one of my favorite ways. So think about it this way now. The role of the know is to protect your boundaries. Mm-hmm. The role of healthy anger is to protect you boundaries. Right. If I invade your space, you better get angry.

If other measures don't. Don't get me out of there. No, stay out. It's a healthy response. I don't know if you know the work with Dr. Yak Panksep. He was neuroaffective. He studied effective psychology, like the psychology and physiology of emotions. Neuroscientist.

He died a bit too early. And he points out that were wired by evolution for a number of basic emotions, including caring, without which human beings don't survive, or mammals don't survive, including grief, which come to terms of loss, it's essential, including fear without which we don't survive, also including anger without which we don't survive. So the role of emotions basically is to allow in what is healthy and nurturing and to keep out what is not. That's basically what emotions do, like the membrane. So keep out the bad, letting the good. That's the role of emotion. Now, what's the role of the immune system?

It's the same thing. Right. That's so interesting. Keep out the bad, the toxic, allowing they're healthy. Given the mind-body unity that the science of saccharine immunology has demonstrated now for 100 years, that there's no separation between mind and body, when we suppress our emotions that way, we're also messing with our immune system. Makes sense. You know? And there's been lots of studies on that. Over 50 million Americans live with chronic pain.

And too many are told there's no hope beyond pills or surgery. My new book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, Gives You Proven Practical Steps from the latest neuroscience to calm your brain, heal your mind, and finally feel better physically and emotionally. Pre-order now to receive bonus gifts at change your brain, change your pain, book.com. You know, one of the things that I still believe to this day helped me so much. I mean, yes, I did a lot of therapy. I did a lot of work. I was a seeker always trying to figure.

it out. But I started practicing martial arts. And it was so, no, it's so empowering. I said there was, I told, I came home, I told my husband, I said, because I was attacked when I was 15 walking to high school. It was a very bizarre thing. It was drugged down an alley. And I was one of the lucky ones who got away. Wow. But I always wanted my daughter to feel empowered. And so I started practicing martial arts and like learning how to, you know, really protect myself. But they're very big on the word no and they're very big on you know yelling and and keeping your boundaries and teaching you those things and I came home I told Daniel I'm like there is no better therapy than beating the hell out of some big padded guy like there's just and just screaming on him like there was no

better therapy like for teaching me to like just get that out you know yeah it was amazing well so yeah and it makes sense why it would yeah I think women like it's just such an empowering thing absolutely tell us what you've learned on your work with addiction. Okay, so thanks for asking. So I worked for 12 years in what is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. It's in Vancouver, British Columbia.

It's called the downtown east side. And within a few square block radius, we have more people shooting and inhaling and ingesting drugs of all kinds than anywhere in North America. So it's sort of like our Skid Row? it's sort of like it but it's beyond it you know like it's just more concentrated and uh so i worked there for 12 years and uh of course the medical matter and addiction is that it's a genetic disease no it isn't nobody's ever found any genes that determine that you'll be addictive addicted there's some genes that make it more likely that you will be but that's but a predisposition is not the same i've been so

disappointed in psychiatric genetics. Well, because they're a master of hila beans. That's right. It's a master of hila beans. Yeah. There's been no genetic. I could talk a whole hour about the genetics of psychiatry, but the point is there's no genes that determine.

And as leading geneticist, Levantin pointed out, that genetics set the sensitivity, but the rest is up to the environment. So then if you look at the addicted brain, which circuits are involved, what is the opiate circuitry? And then you might ask, why does a plant that comes from Afghanistan opium work on a human brain? Because as you will know, we have receptors for opiates. Now why do we have receptors for a plant from Afghanistan? We don't. We are receptors for our own internal opiates.

So if you want to know what heroin addiction is all about, look at the role of the internal. opiates. And what is the role of the internal opiates in nature, in animals and especially human beings? Number one, pain relief. They're the most powerful pain relievers that we have. Not just physical pain relief, but emotional pain relief as all. Number two, they make possible experiences of reward and pleasure and elation. So when people go bungee jumping and you measure the level of endorphins, the higher the endorphins, the happier there. Now, Try and imagine life without pain relief or elation. And then the third role that they have is actually the most important one.

They help facilitate the infant-parent relationship. So when there's that attuned, warm, parental, maternal, usually, but parental child interaction, they both have endorphins happening in their brain. Now, for those circuits to develop properly, the endorphine circuits, you need their right environment. You need loving, attuned, non-stressed, calm parenting environment. When that's missing, those circuits don't develop. And then when somebody does heroin for the first time, it's like they feel, ah, this is what I've been looking for all my life.

But why? Because their brains didn't develop the right way in the first place. If you look at the dopamine circuitry that I know, Daniel, you work with a lot, especially in ADHD work, but in other work as well. The dopamine is essential for motivation, for feeling alive, for activation, for sense of purpose. Dopamine flows when we're seeking food, exploring a novel environment. It's the curiosity molecule, and it's the motivation molecule. But my mothers are stressed. Their infants don't develop the same number of dopamine receptors.

And if you put human beings in isolation, the number of dopamine receptors will go down. What I'm saying is that these circuits develop an interaction with the environment. If you look at the histories of my downtown Eastside clients, every one of them has severe adversity in childhood. I didn't have a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child. Not one in 12 years. The men had been abused or neglected in terrific ways.

And they're the ones who end up at the extremes of addiction. that's the first thing I learned. Then I looked, you know, so when I looked at their lives and then the brain science, you know, it made sense. Number one, number two, I've had my own addictive behaviors. I've never been addicted to substances, but I behaved addictively, compulsively. I had to keep repeating the behavior. In my case, it was shopping. I'd spend thousands of dollars a day. And then I would justify it by saying, I'm working so hard as a doctor. I, you know, in other words, one addiction. My work-holism was just a by justified my...

Your other addiction. My other addiction, yeah. The addicted brain is fantastic in coming up with excuses, you know. And I neglected my family or sometimes my work even, you know. And I realized there was nothing different about me and my patients except they had a had a tougher time and I've had more advantage. That's all. So, and let me give you a definition of addiction.

I hope I'm not talking too much. No, I'm just fascinated. Okay, thanks. An addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but then they suffer negative consequences and they don't give it up despite the negative consequences. So pleasure, craving, relief, harm, inability to give it up. I said any behavior.

It could be cocaine. So eating disorders. Bulimia, pornography, gambling, internet gaming, the same. cell phone, work, shopping, compulsive sexual acting of extreme sports can be that way for some people. So when I talk to a thousand people and I say, I give them my definition of addiction, said, how many of you meet that criteria? Out of 1,999, who put their hands up and there'll be one liar who won't basically. So most people, so why are we ostracizing these drug addicts?

You know, that's the first point. Second point is when you ask people, so let me ask you, if I can ask it. Yeah. According to that definition, I'm not going to ask you what, but have you ever had- I wrote a book about it, so. Yeah, okay. Have you ever had an addictive pattern in your life? Oh, yes.

So because of the environment I grew up in with all the actual addicts, I was horrified and disgusted. Yeah. You know, my uncle was murdered. The other one was a heroin addict. So that was not going to ever be me. Like, I love you guys, never going to be like you, wanted to be different. So I just hid my addiction because I was a good girl.

And so I was, I had an eating disorder. Okay, so don't, I'm not going to ask you, okay, you had the eating disorder. Let me have, don't tell me what's wrong about it, because we all know what's wrong with it. What was right about it? What did it give you in the short term? The anxiety relief. It was clearly, it was like a pressure building and then there was like a valve. Exactly.

In other words, the addiction wasn't your problem. Your addiction was an attempt to solve a problem. It was the anxiety. Of anxiety, which is a question of emotional pain. So my mantra around addiction is, to some of this little sermon is, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. Yeah. And when I learned how to draw boundaries, when I learned how to say no, when I learned how to, like, really defend myself, protect myself. Exactly.

It went away. Of course it would. Which is to say, you didn't have a genetic problem. Right. You had a normal response to an abnormal. Right. So even though you could see it through generations in our family, you could also say, well, that was modeled behavior.

Modeling is one thing, but the other thing, it's even deeper than modeling. Let's say your father's an alcoholic. So he's modeling it. And in some cultures, it's kind of alcohol is even romanticized. In my own country, Hungary, out of a population of 9 million, they're set to be a million. alcoholics. So that culture kind of embraces it. So there's the modeling for sure. But there's something else. What's it like to go up with a father that was alcoholic? It's terrible. It's painful. So then you want to kill the pain yourself. So it's not just the modeling. It's also the

response to trauma. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I became a psychiatrist because my first wife tried to kill herself and I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist. And that's when I learned. learned her dad was an alcoholic. And so I started studying children and grandchildren of alcoholics. And they don't talk. They don't trust. And they don't feel because all of those things are dangerous for them. And so I was really curious what would that trauma do for my own children.

And it impacts them, which is why we had Mark Walen on. And you said you mentioned him in your book. block it doesn't start with you so trauma can go generationally yeah and there's this great study out of emery where they took mice made them afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms yeah and then their babies were afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms and then their grandbabies even though they had no negative association and then brand new study on aspartame of all things the sweetener in Diet Coke, give it to rats, makes them very anxious. They give them Valium and it calms them down.

It's like, okay, but their babies were anxious and their grandbabies of the Aspartame fed rats. So what is going on in our society where we see autism, spiking, ADHD, spiking? Right. Yes, emotional trauma, but we also might be traumatized by some of the artificial toxins. Or messing up our gut. Yeah, I think there's so many different factors and it's impossible to isolate anyone

and you want to say this. Biological, psychological, social. But it's all one, right? My own interest has been, I know when I listen to you talk, you often mention the brain and which substances affect the brain and which supplements would support healthy brain and so I started taking shoganda after I heard you talk about it. But I pay attention. My own particular interest is the stress and trauma part.

And you have to start with the fact that human beings are not blank slates. We're born with certain needs. I mean, evolution dictated certain needs and tools. and apart from the physical needs for shelter and food, but we also have other needs. And if those needs are not met, we don't develop properly. And so those needs are for emotional security and safety and belonging in a non-stressed supportive environment.

It means the child doesn't have to work to make the relationship with the parent work because it's just there. But how many normal mothers are there? Right. I mean, we're talking about the myth of. normal yeah and so it's like i'm one of seven my a score is one okay so i i had his mother's amazing a normal childhood but i was completely lost that my mom had four children in four years and i'm third which meant sort of irrelevant and she's but look so we're not just talking about

okay well that's because i'm wondering because i had a good mother But overwhelmed, and am I getting what you're describing? And I'm like, no, I like got kicked off the breast really like four months. Well, I'll tell you, Daniel, when you were talking about, trying to find it ever since. When you were talking with your first wife and how she was a traumatized, I didn't say, but now you've just given open the door for me to say something, which is that you were no less traumatized than she was.

Otherwise, you wouldn't have been with her in the first place. We always marry somebody exactly at the same level of trauma resolution. Now, I can hear you that you had an A-Scove-1, I believe you. But there's two ways you can hurt kids. One is by doing bad things to them, which is the A-st stuff, the physical, sexual, emotional abuse, you know, the neglect, the parent dying, a parent being jailed, a rancor's divorce, you know, a parent being mental. ill brand being addicted, violence in a family. But there's another way you can hurt kids, which is where I think you would come into it, which is not by doing bad things to them that you shouldn't, but by not giving them what they need. The lack of nurturing. And if you're one

a seven and you're the third, how much attention did you get that you needed? Nothing. Well, that hurt you. And that's why you were lost. In other words, you were hurt not because somebody did bad things to you, but because somebody didn't do the good things that was necessary. Now, when you ask, how many... But at that time, in the 1950s and a Catholic family, it's the norm, right? To have lots of kids. But normal is a minute. That's the middle of normal.

Okay, number one, number two. Yeah, no, I feel it when you say that. Okay. Because my dad was working all the time and his favorite words were bullshit and no. He wasn't warm. But there's one more thing here. which is, we have to take the stress off mothers and blaming mothers because they're not a fault here. But how did human beings evolve?

So they've been humanoid creatures on the earth for millions of years. And there's been our own species, homo sapiens, has been here for, what, 150,000,000 years until 12,000 years ago, which is like, if you can put human existence on a clock, then until five months. minutes ago, how did we live? We lived in small band of hunter-gatherer groups. Yeah. In communal groups where people had each other to support each other all the time. And that was a blink of an eye ago. Yep. So the modern situation, from the point of view of human evolution, is completely abnormal, where there's isolated nuclear families, where there is social stress on people all the time. When people don't have that extended family, the communal support. So the saying it takes a village? It's absolutely.

takes a village and so that in that sense it's not that mothers are abnormal is that mothers no longer have the support that there's not all the ants and yeah all the ants and right yeah yeah so that's so i heard something and i actually think i heard you say something similar yeah um but i heard something about these villages in bg that still don't put babies down for the first six weeks or their of their lives or maybe it's first six months they don't set them down they've passed them around not six weeks i had a kree woman tell me one in Canada, that in our culture, babies don't even touch the ground for two years. Oh, well, that's a long time.

And, which is a bit of an overstatement, but babies were carried everywhere, the papoose. Right. You know, and this idea of separate bedroom for the baby, and furthermore, the whole idea of sleep training babies, where you ignore that they're crying for help. So you don't believe in that? Oh, my God. What message do you get? But what message do you get as a six-month-old?

Why are you crying? You're not crying out of capris or jollies. You're crying because you need something. You might need food. But here's the thing about infants. Like we mentioned connection. Now, connection can exist on all kinds of different levels. You guys can connect with each other even if you don't see each other for a year.

even if you don't speak on Zoom just because you love each other because you can carry somebody in your heart. An infant can't do that. The infant can only connect by physically. So when a infant is crying, it's because they need to be picked up. And if you read it, there's a wonderful book

called Continuum Concept by Gene Lidloff, who studied this tribe in Venezuela in the jungle back in the 90s or 80s. Those babies are never put down. Yeah, so now I just feel so much less guilty because I was criticized because I slept with my daughter when she was little. I tried the whole putting her in her room thing. And I'm like, I don't want her in her room. Like, I was very bonded to her. And so I slept with her and I'm like, everyone thought it was crazy. But

well, you know what I always tell people? Don't worry about it. By the time they're 18, they won't be sleeping in your bed. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Although my husband would say we're enmeshed. I don't think we're enmeshed. But my husband thinks we're enmeshed. No, and he was describing the endorphin rush. I'm like, you totally got that with Chloe. I totally. Because she was a sales rep for metaphysics. Medtronics. And she's like, I'm going to have the baby. I was not the mom who was ever going to stay home.

And as soon as she saw the baby, she was addicted. I took one look at my baby. I'm like, I cannot have someone else raised my child. And I didn't expect that. Well, you actually get in a good sense. And this crazy mama bear thing came over me and was wild. Well, then your child is very lucky. Yeah, it was fun.

And what actually happens is, So many of the birth practice, the birthing practices and the parenting advice that parents get these age undermine that bonding. And they undermine the physiological development of those bonding circuitry. You know, and then we wonder. See, in our book, Raising Mentally Strong Kids, we talk about bonding first. Yeah. Listening, special time. Yeah.

It's, and I give the example, if you're bonded with your children, they're likely to pick your values. That's the whole point. If you're not bonded to your children, they're likely to pick the opposite ones just to piss you off. So that book, as I was telling you before, is always in competition with one of my books. And it's either the second or the third one, either yours is or mine is on medical child psychology on Amazon. And we make the same point that when children are bonded to you, they will follow your values, your guidance. And they'll ask you for your help.

They ask you advice that when you know, and what happening in this culture is, is that because parents, look, in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. I know. That's barbaric. I know. I literally said I will sell my house. It was the weirdest reaction, but. It was barbaric.

And so the kids are deprived. with their parents, they connect instead to the other kids. Now they take their advice and guidance from other kids. And you can see what a disaster that is. Or TikTok. The other thing that you point that you make is people think we're telling coddle kids and hover over them. No, you make it very clear that you let kids do things for themselves when they're able to do it. They have to develop that resilience.

They have to develop that self trust. But you don't do it by denying them. I'm bonding, you do it by encouraging the bonding. You become a really good coach. What I learned is you're there with them. You're always encouraging them and they come to you. And then they talk to you about it. And then when they give you a problem, you're like, oh, that's really hard.

What are you going to do? What do you think you're going to do? Exactly. But you're talking them through it. Right. And then when they ask you, I don't know, what do you think I should do? It's like, oh, you want my opinion. Yeah.

And then we. Exactly. But don't give them your opinion too soon. Right. What are you working on now? What at this point in your, Your career is the most exciting, most interesting. Well, I'll tell you, the most exciting thing is I'm 81 years old now.

And in three weeks, I'll be a grandfather for the first time. Oh, how fun. Congratulations. It's like falling in love. We have five grandchildren. It's like falling in love all over again. You have five kids as well, don't you? Between us, we have sex.

We adopted our two nieces because their parents were not behaving properly. good for them so that's and as a matter of fact what i've had to do i had this big european speaking trip lined up for this month and i had to say sorry good for you this baby comes first good for you but you know what it was remarkably difficult for me to do it what about the organizers who went to all this trouble and all the people who bought tickets and on but you know at the end oh my god was i going to miss the birth of my grandchild so that's the big thing coming up in terms of my work My eldest son and I, Daniel, who helped me write The Myth of Normal, we were working on a book called Hello Again,

A Fresh Start for Parents and Adult Children. Aw. A fresh start for parents and adult children. Because we've been through our share of grief in our relationship, and so we've learned a lot, and we've given a workshop about it. Now we're writing a book about those that want to engage with that relationship, how to set it right. Oh, interesting.

You like that. I would. I don't know, but I don't know if it has anything to do with the emptiness is wicked. It's a wicked thing. It's awful. It's cruel. And the fact that it comes right at the same time as menopause, what was God thinking? I'm just like.

But God wasn't thinking because there wasn't an emptiness. That's true. Oh, my goodness. You just made such a good point. From the evolutionary point of view, the family stayed together. My jaw just hit the floor. That is so, you know, so don't blame God on it. Yeah, that's.

Yeah. Not for this one anyway. So smart. That's so true. And the empty nest was only in your head. It's awful. It's like losing a part of your body. It's like.

Well, I think, you know, I love this conversation so much. You guys still just said. No, he's actually kind of happy because he feels like he's number one again. Right. So for the little boy that was third, that was ignored, that was beaten up by his older brother, every day and you don't think you were traumatized huh well no that's where the one comes from that's no i think it prepared me in the sense oh come on oh no because when i started looking at the brain

in 1991 yeah i got no end of grief from my colleagues that charlatan a snake oil salesman right I'm a psychiatrist, right? I belong to the only medical specialty that virtually never looks at the organ it treats. So when I started going, you should look, if you don't look, you don't know, stop lying about this. So they started looking at the brain.

I started getting so much grief, but because I got beaten up, I could stand up for myself. Because ultimately, my brother, older brother, became my best friend. And I figured if I can deal with him, I can deal with these crazy. Yeah, but so, look, so it's certainly true that adversity can give us skills and adaptations that help us later on. But you could have also learned to stand up for yourself through another means.

And so let me ask you, when your brother beat you up, how did you feel? Angry. Who would you speak to? Nobody. Okay. Because years later, they're home videos of this. Yeah. And when I was 50, my dad gave us the videos.

Yeah. And I'm like, why didn't you stop him? Yeah. And he said, somebody had to take the videos. And I'm like. Good God. So I want to hear what you had this to say. So what I'm saying is had there been somebody to talk to, so there wasn't just a trauma of being beaten.

You know, there was also a trauma of being alone with it. Yeah. And had somebody, hey, you could be able to go to your parents and say, this is happening. And they said, oh, yeah, that's really upset you, doesn't it? You must be really angry. Yeah. Yeah, no, there was none of that. Yeah.

So then you would have learned how to stand up for yourself just by having your anger validated. You know, so. Interesting. And, you know, and you got lucky because a lot of people, the same thing happens to, they just totally suppress themselves. and they try to make them some small in order to survive because if they stand up with themselves it might

that's what our nieces did and invite further further adversity yeah so yeah when I was an I was an anxious kid if I look back on it I sort of didn't come into my own

until I went in the army when I was 18 and became an infantry medic and that helped me so much to just sort of grow up And a lot of people, you know, speak negatively about their military experience. I thought the Army was the ultimate good mother. Clear rules, reward you when you do good, and discipline you when you don't.

And you know what to expect. Yeah, you know what to expect. It's absolutely predictable. Yeah. And that's when I learned I was smarter than I thought I was. Oh, yeah. Okay. Anyways.

We've enjoyed this. So much. I won't do it again. I feel like there's so many things we could be talking about. Well, it's a pleasure to speak with you both. Thank you. Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Lehman. I've experienced firsthand the powerful impact that proper supplementation can have on your brain, your body, and your mind. That's why I founded Brain MD. Our formulas are scientifically created from decades of clinical research designed to help. help you think clear, feel better, and improve every aspect of your health. Whether it's brain and body power max, the same formula I used in the world's largest study

of NFL players to optimize brain performance to happy saffron to boost mood and memory and pro-brain-biotics max to improve the gut-brain-connection. Brain MD delivers the highest-quality science-backed solutions to help you think and feel better. Tana and I take many of our products every day. And as a special offer, just for our listeners, you can save 20% on your next order. Visit brainmd.com and use the code podcast 20. With a better brain always comes a better life. So you've been listening to change your brain every day with

Gabor Mante and his internationally best-selling book, the myth of normal, so worth getting, reading it, sharing it with people that you care about. We would love for you to leave us a comment, question, review, subscribe. We're going to be here for you. And if you get a chance, listen to some of Dr. Mante's work on what stress during pregnancy does. Because, yeah, you don't really want to feel guilty, but you do want to be informed because it's very important. I thought that was fascinating. And my daughter told me not to say a word to her about anything to do with that. It's so important that. I'll be the grandfather, not the doctor. Well, thank you both very much. Thank you. Thank you.