Dhru Purohit Show - #243: Breaking Free of Old Habits, Addiction, and Past Traumas with Dr. Gabor Maté (Rebroadcast)

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Breaking Free of Old Habits, Addiction, and Past Traumas | This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and Vivobarefoot. Many of us carry around unrecognized guilt, different forms of addiction, and other types of destructive coping mechanisms—all of which can be traced back to traumatic childhood experiences. It’s never too late to address trauma and improve our emotional, mental, and physical health in the process. This is such a critical topic for optimal wellness and self-growth, that today we’re resharing one of our most popular episodes exploring it, with the one and only Dr. Gabor Maté Dr. Maté is a retired physician who, after 20 years of 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. Gabor is the bestselling author of four books published in twenty-five languages, and is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship between stress and illness.    In this episode, we dive into:   -The pain-body concept (4:06) -Dr. Maté’s definition of addiction (9:57) -How a painful experience or trauma is at the center of all addictions (15:03)  -Dr. Maté’s childhood trauma and how it led to his own addictive behaviors (22:01) -Understanding the difference between responsibility and blame, and why “it’s not all our parents’ fault” (30:29) -What is happening physiologically in the brains of addicted people (39:36)  -The key to healing painful experiences (46:37)  -What does it mean to recover (47:56) -How to approach the healing of behavior addictions fostered by our culture (51:11) -Dr. Maté’s non-negotiable self-care practice (1:00:03) For more on Dr. Gabor Mate you can follow him on Facebook @DrGaborMate, on Twitter @DrGaborMate, on YouTube @DrGaborMate, and through his website https://drgabormate.com/.  This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and Vivobarefoot. ButcherBox only partners with farmers and ranchers who believe in going above and beyond when it comes to caring for animals, the environment, and sustainability. For a limited time, new subscribers to ButcherBox will receive 2 lbs of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef free in every box for the life of your subscription. To get this limited-time offer go to ButcherBox.com/DHRU. Vivobarefoot footwear is designed to be wide, thin, and flexible, so you feel as close to barefoot as possible. They promote your foot's natural strength and movement and studies show that foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of months just by walking around in them. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off their first order at vivobarefoot.com/DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The addiction will soon be a compensation for something that you lost in childhood, something that you had every right to expect life to give you, something that is an essential human need, and all addictions are like that. Whether it's to gambling, sex, work, shopping, I don't care what. They always give you something that you lost. So addiction is really a compensation for something lost in childhood. Hi, everyone, Drew Prod here. Today we're talking about how to break free of old habits, addiction, and past.

traumas. We're featuring and we're rebroadcasting one of the top episodes from the year. It's with Dr. Gabor Mate. And if you've ever wondered how to let go of the past, if you've ever wondered how to stop a negative trait or habit, even if it's not a full-blown quote-unquote addiction or that you don't think of it that way, in a way, all the pain in our life is connected to some coping mechanisms, some addictions that are there. And Dr. Gabor-Monte helps us understand that when we address the pain, we actually break free from the hold of habits and addictions that don't serve us. Dr. Gabor Mante is one of the leaders in this field, and it's an honor to re-broadcast this episode with him. Our podcast community has grown so much. So chances are many of you have not heard

this episode, even though it was one of our top ones this year. I hope you enjoy. it and we'll be back soon with a whole new set of interviews on the Drew Perot podcast. Gabor, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for making time and joining us on the podcast. Thank you, Drew. Nice to be here. Before we jump into the work on addiction and your writings and teachings, which I'm sure

many of my audience is familiar with, I want to ask you actually a self-est question, which is you wrote in an article in an interview, I believe it was a Canadian newspaper that one of the books that you would have given to your younger self was A New Earth by Eckartole. Although I did add the caveat that you weren't sure if at the age of 18 or 19 or 20 that you would have actually read the book. It might have been a little bit too much at that time. I'm curious, what does that book mean to you? And why did you choose that as one of the books you'd give to you younger self? Well, a number of things.

One is that when you grow up, when you're young, you identify so much. with your ideas and your body and your own history, and you think that's all you are. But this book really takes you deeper, that there's a deeper awareness inside all of us that is more true to the essence of who we are than all the thoughts, ideas, and doings that we've been caught up in. So that's space between who we actually are internally

and the form that we've taken in the history that we've had, That's a wonderful realization. And then, of course, there's this concept of the pain body. The pain body is the accumulated hurts and grievances and emotional reactive patterns and negative beliefs that life has imposed on us because of the way life is, which is very often traumatic, and how that pain body lives within us,

almost as an independent entity. And so often it takes over our functioning. And of course, in my work as a physician, also in my own personal life, you know, my own, the measures that I've been through individually, personally, but in my work as a physician, I've seen how so often that pain body that accumulated ingrained history of pain functions to run people's lives. And so much of our lives is designed to either deny the pain or the run away from it, which is where addiction is coming. So the whole pain body concept.

And then the idea that the new earth, it's a reality that we can realize within ourselves. It's not some airy-frey concept that's out there somewhere. So, and also there's just something about that particular man, Eckhart Tolle, who, that is not just empty teachings, it's not just words. There's a sense of being that he manifests that does make a difference when you're around it, even just if you're on his words on the pages of a book, which itself is uplifting and opens you up somehow.

So it was one of the books that helped to open up my consciousness. You mentioned the term space. and the space between the life events and then the true essence of who we are. And there's a space in between which gives us, you know, as Zachartoli talks about in the book, the freedom to actually step into the present. When was the first time for you that you actually noticed that there is a space in between the life circumstances that you had gone through in your upbringing, some of your addictions that later developed that you've been very open about writing,

about and your true essence. Look, it depends on what day and in what moment of the day you catch me in. It's not like I've, it's not like I've live a life where there's, I'm always aware of this space and so on. I can get very caught up and some pretty trivial things. So I don't sit here as, I don't sit here as some example of somebody who's really realized their essence and can manifest it. Although more that I do sometimes.

So I don't think there's any particular moment. I've not had one of these... Some people I know have had these big realization moments, this direct experience of it, they just download reality or reality manifest through them. And I know I'm very close to some people who've had those experiences. I can't say I've had that experience personally.

So I can't give you a particular moment. I know whenever the glimpses of it, sometimes in real life, sometimes in work, sometimes in traditional ceremonies, sometimes psychedelic ceremonies. But I can't give you a single transformational moment that I can point to and say, here's where it happened,

and ever since then, I've got it. Because getting it for me is daily work, and it continues to be, and I expect it will continue to be. When you speak about everything, He's one of these people that went through tremendous suffering, tremendous suffering, and somehow he surrendered to it. And then he had this experience from the moment on, from that moment on, his life was never the same. Not that he had to start working, but something really opened up in a major way.

I've not had one of those dramatic experiences. And I think the beautiful thing about his message is that we don't maybe all have to have those things. We can have our own experiences that allow us to then step back into the president and recognize that we are not that thing that we identified with. I want to pivot a little bit from that, but using that as a segue into the next thing, I think for a lot of individuals, there is a quote of yours that I shared the other day on social media. And your work for a lot of individuals is the detangling of their life experiences and what they see of themselves now. And the quote that I shared, which is one of your quotes, was anything that is wrong with you, and you wrote wrong in quotation marks, began as a survival mechanism in childhood. I would love if you could expand on this quote in the context of your work.

So take anything like addiction. So addiction is a bad thing, right? And it's a sin or it's a mistake or it's a bad choice or it's a disease. It's none of that. When you ask people, when I give people my definition of addiction, which is a process that's managed. manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary relief or pleasure in and therefore craves Suffers negative consequences in the long term

But doesn't give up despite negative consequences so it's craving relief pleasure in a short term negative consequence long term Inability or refusal to give it up that's what an addiction is Drug sex gambling eating I don't care what So, Drew, I don't know how personally you wish to be here, but can I ask you, according to that definition, have you ever had an addictive pattern in your life? Absolutely. Okay, and I'm not going to ask what, and I don't care or for how long. I'm going to ask you this question. What was wrong with the addiction, but what was right about it?

What did it do for you in the short term? What did it give you that you needed or wanted at that time? And I'm happy to be open. I've never had a in what people might consider a traditional. Additional addiction, look through the Western lens of substance, but in looking it through the your lens, I absolutely have. And that was the seeking and the needing of approval of other people and the severe sort of drive to people, please people.

And to answer your question, what did I get in return? I became known as I was surrounded by individuals. I never felt alone. So you got recognition of knowledge and companionship. Is that the case? Absolutely. Absolutely. Is human contact, companionship, a good thing or a bad thing?

It's a beautiful thing. Yeah. So, in other words, the addiction wasn't your problem. Addiction was your solution to a problem. The problem was your isolation. Your sense of not having value, having to have that value of knowledge. That was your problem. And the addiction came along in a certain way to solve that problem for you.

But how did you get the sense that you weren't valuable, weren't worthy, weren't worthy of contact or isolated? That has to do with something that happened to you in childhood. In other words, the addiction was simply a compensation for something that you lost in childhood, something that you had every right to expect life to give you, something that is an essential human need, and all addictions are like that. whether it's to gambling, sex, work, shopping, I don't care what. They always give you something that you lost.

So addiction is really a compensation for something lost in childhood. As to the people pleasing, well, at a certain point, there was a time in your life when your life depended on pleasing people. Absolutely. I know it very clearly. Okay. Well, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's a compensation right now. It shouldn't have had to. You would have, ideally,

life would have given you the circumstances where you accepted and valued for exactly who you were as a young child. That's in need of ours. When we don't get that, we become people-pleasers. And let me tell you,

I've written a book called When the Body Says No, and it's all about how these chronic people-pleasers who suppress themselves to please others, that's the source of so much physical, illness because that's that that the pleasing of others and suppressing your own needs to please others actually undermines your immune system I'm talking science here so that I'm saying so many diseases or so many afflictions so many mental health conditions originate as compensations for

for what's lost in childhood take something like depression and I'm going to finish my illustrating my point with this what um what mean to depress something? Literally, physically, what does it mean? You got to push down to suppress it. Exactly, right. Any idea what people pushed on in depression? Feelings, their true essence. Right. Now, why would somebody, why would a human being pushed on their feelings? You know, I think about it to probably survive the moment, right? To avoid conflict. Avoid conflict, avoid the pain. So when a child is not allowed to have their emotions and is not held with their emotions,

or is not allowed to express anger, they learn for the sake of staying in relationship with their caregivers to push these things down. And then 30 years later, they diagnosed with this so-called illness called depression. It all began as a compensation. So I hope I've illustrated my point. Absolutely. And which brings to my next point that I wanted to bring up with that is that you always ask the question, which is it's not about the addiction, but why the pain? Not why the addiction, but why the pain? And I think that is a central question that we can, if we just look outside in this world, we can see that that question is not being asked when it comes to thinking about either traditional,

unquote addictions for those listening. I'm putting that in quotes because there's so much more of a broadband of addictions, but even all the other things that we don't see as traditional addictions that truly are. Well, exactly. And, you know, this is called the Broken Brain podcast. Well, then you get depressed because you've been pushing down your feelings. Or you compensate for your pain by getting addicted to heroin. Or you compensate for your lack of value by because or workaholic, or you compensate for your sense of not being wanted by becoming a habitual sexaholic, you know. And then they tell you, there's something wrong with your brain. There's a brain disease going on. No, these are all compensations. And yes, they affect the brain, but it's not an illness that started in the brain.

It's how your brain responded to life circumstances, to the pain of life. And the brain is actually shaped by life experience. So really, it's people's experience we have to look at, why the pain? And that's the question, not only an addiction, although it certainly applies there, but in so many human conditions. Even physical conditions. You know, we've had so many different experts in integrative and functional medicine and leading researchers in cancer.

And now the new view on cancer is that cancer is not this thing that attacks the body, but it actually is a surveillance. survival mechanism are healthy cells that are trying to survive a diseased, a dis-eased environment that they're being placed in. So really the idea that so much of we think of what is wrong with us, physical ailments, personality traits, compensations, addictions are, as you said, survival mechanisms. It's action, reaction. When we understand that, we're left with the truth of now we can actually move forward.

Well, let's see, what would I say about cancer? So lots of studies, I'm just writing new books, I've just reviewed the vast literature on this. So women who've got symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer. Children who have abused in general have a high risk of inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

And I could go on and on and on. The cancer, I wouldn't say directly, is a survival mechanism, but it's a product of the body's response to lifelong stress and trauma. And for example, we talk about people pleasing. And a lot of people who develop have got this tendency to suppress their feelings.

That suppression of feelings also suppresses the immune system. Because the immune system is not separated from your emotional system. It's all one system. So then you get cancer because your immunity has been diminished. Now, what does the cancer do? Well, the cancer just threatens your life. It really does. and physically it threatens your life.

And of course, often it takes your life, which is true. But what's also true is that for a lot of people that I've talked with, the cancer functions as a wake-up call and says, boy, you have not been paying attention, have you? You've not been paying attention to your own needs. You've not been paying attention to who you really are. So in that certain sense, I don't recommend this way of learning.

I don't recommend cancer to anybody. But once it shows up, I've known so many people to whom it's been a teaching experience. In a real sense, it was the cause of rebirth of their true selves. And this has been studied. I'm not just talking to any of fray stuff here.

This has been studied. And if you look at, there's a couple of books that could mention. In fact, you might want to have these people on your podcast. One of them is called Cure. by Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, who's a physician and psychiatrist at Harvard, and cured is his book where they looked at people with so-called spontaneous remissions, people who, despite the failure of medical treatment or despite the fact that they refuse medical treatment,

and they're supposed to die, instead their cancer goes away. And medical science doesn't study these things very much. Like, it's interesting. I talk with these people who've survived like that, And the doctors never know what they did. But what they did is in every case, transform their relationship to themselves. They became much more authentically themselves.

And that made a difference to their malignancy. Now, I'm not talking about panaceas or cure-alls. I'm just saying that when the healing happens, it has to do with a deep connection to yourself that was cut off when you were small. The cancer woke you up, and you reconnect that to yourself. And I've seen this in autoimmune disease and multiple cirrhosis,

even in ALS, which is set to be university terminal, but actually people who survived it and who have even recovered from it. And in every case, it has to do with the transformation of the relationship to themselves. And Rediger is not the only one to have studied this. Other people have as well, and I published the same kind of findings. and in my own personal research, how people, how authentically people are able to be themselves

instead of identifying with all those mechanisms that you identified in yourself, the people pleasing and all that. How they're just going to be themselves. That is a huge impact on their health and illness, again, not that I recommend it, very often comes along and says, friend wake up wake up the life you've been living is not your life for you you didn't have an

illness i don't i don't think so from the work that i've read about you but you had these addictions and this pain that was there you've been very vocal about you know shopping workaholism some challenges that were there in the relationship how your kids really felt that maybe they couldn't approach you because anger or like you know raised feelings inside what do you think at that time in your life and you feel free to give context for our listeners who don't know your story what do you think that you were suppressing that was allowing these manifestations to express themselves well so knock on wood I've not had significant physical illness so that I've had

back surgery that's that's all it's interesting but but I've not had significant illness I've had a few close calls kidney stones which had a high stress time of my life and so on but I've had significant depression and of course I've been living with ADHD and as you mentioned I've had a very addictive relationship to work and also at some point to shopping where I'd ignore work, spend thousands of dollars a day for things I didn't need. And things I didn't even enjoy. I mean, I mean, not that I didn't enjoy. And I was shopping for classical music.

I enjoy the classical music, but I didn't have time to enjoy it because I was too busy working. And too busy shopping for more music to actually sit down and appreciate what I already had. So it's pure addiction. And I lied and I cheated. and I ignored work and ignored family to pursue the addictive drive. So I've had all that. I recently read a family history written by a deceased cousin of mine. It was 11 years older than I was.

And I'm not going to go into the whole story now, but she and her family looked after me for a month when I was a year old and my mother had to give me up because she couldn't guarantee that she would live another day, let alone that I would. So she gave me to a stranger in the street and said, please take this kid one year old. This is a wartime hungry.

To these relatives who are in hiding and let them look after him. And so this cousin of mine and her family looked after me under terrible conditions. And she said, I just read this five days, ago. I had never read her. Interesting enough, I never read this before. But she said that my big black eyes, she talked with me, were filled with fear. And the only thing she could see on my face was fear.

This is the one-year-old. Not quite two years ago, I went to the Amazon jungle to take part in a ceremony with native traditional healers. And those people, they know, those people knew nothing about me. They didn't know my history of the Jewish infant under the Nazis. They knew nothing. They didn't know I've written books. They didn't know an international speaker. None of that. They just knew that I came to lead a retreat for other doctors and healers.

And they did one ceremony and they said, you can't lead anybody. You've got to heal yourself. And they said, when you were very small, you had a big scare and you still haven't got over it. Wow. No, they spoke no English. they just read me in ceremony. So I've been carrying a big scare on my life and everything else that goes on with it. I would love to ask you a question about that, which is, you know, how do you see the duality of their message, you know, them saying in the best way that it was translated to you, because you guys didn't speak, you know, the same language, you can't lead anybody.

And here you are, a wounded soul, like all. of us who is still leading as best as they can through the vulnerability. So how did you receive the duality of their message? Well, first of all, it's contextual. I just come, I just arrived in the jungle from a very fatiguing speaking trip and I'd taken on a lot of strats or a lot of other people. They saw that in me as well. They said you've been taking on the stress of a lot of other people and you haven't cleared it out of yourself. But that's the thing in the we can split our minds from our bodies in a certain sense and I can be on stage and I can be very effective and very articulate and I think very insightful and people find my work inspiring and

helpful informative but this is a healing retreat and they said for us to work with you you need to be much clearer than you are so it's not that I can't do this stuff I can do this stuff. But in that context where full healing is required and working with a sacred plant, they needed me to be really clear. And they said, you're not. So yeah. And speaking of Bertoli, by the way, he said somewhere, it might be in the new earth, but it might be in the power of noise. I forget where some people can manifest being their essence when they're working but not elsewhere, you know, so that they can be the split. Because I can channel somebody to stop when I'm on and present, but I'm not always like

that. And they found me in a moment when I wasn't like that. They found me in a moment when I was stressed and, and they quickly identified the deep sources of them. So, yeah, I can do the work. I've been able to do it. But at the same time, be confused and scared myself on deep levels. And to me, that feels like one of the most beautiful reminders for everyone because we all have our micro versions or our macro versions of that.

Everybody here listening to this podcast today is doing the best they can. You know, we still, I'm in California. I live in Los Angeles. I don't have kids, but many of my friends do. There are days where you are so loving to your kids that, you know, my friends tell me, and I can imagine I have nephews and nieces. And there's days where you've just been around your kids 24-7, they're not in schools, they're stressed, you're stressed, and you have a moment as a parent.

And that still allows an opportunity to repair. You know, everybody's working through and is doing the work. And as long as we are still living, there's still that opportunity. to continue to do the work and to step back into the present moment. Well, absolutely. And parenting, of course, is the most powerful course of teaching you'll ever get. I mean, when you're a parent, you really find out who you are and who you need to be. And you have the motivation to do the work as well. And for me, a lot of the motivation to do the self-work that I've taken on has been the difficulties of my kids whose source

originated in my own traumas that I transmitted to them. You know, when a lot of people are first introduced to your work, because so much of the connection of addiction and pain is related to early childhood experiences, those formative years where we are still developing our sense of who we are. So it's natural that we we develop it by attaching to the form of the people that are around us. So if our parents are in pain as they're in stress, as you shared with your story, your mother not even knowing if she was going to survive, having to give you to family members, and you even talking about her calling the doctor and saying, you know, my son just keeps on

crying, keeps on crying, like, we need to do something. And he's like, all my Jewish baby patients are crying. They're all crying right now. Yeah, this is right after the Nazis occupied hungry and all the Jewish babies were crying. And you can generalize this, you know, in any situation where the parents are stressed or struggling and afraid, the energy is picked up by the kids. And not only is it picked up by the kids, the kids thinks it about themselves, so somehow it's their fault. So some people grow up with the kind of guilt

that they don't even realize what the source of it is. And the sources of guilt is that they didn't make their parents happy. They couldn't have made them happy. It wasn't their job, but as children, we take this on automatically. And so that

a huge source of shame and guilt in this world, people say it's addicted, people, of course I'm ashamed. No, you were ashamed before you're addicted. one preceded the other shame preceded the addiction and by the way this is true not only for addiction but all kinds of conditions and all kinds of illnesses as I've written in my other books so that our self-concept develops in interaction with our parents and children are narcissistic And I don't mean that as a negative statement. I mean, in the genuine meaning of the word,

they think it's all about them. So Ticknad Han, the spiritual teacher, who I'm sure you know of, he said that the Buddhist teacher, he said that the biggest gift parents can give their kids is their own happiness. And the reason for that is children aren't as a statistic. If my parents are happy,

oh, I must be a great guy. I must be a good person. I must really be lovable. Hey, aren't I just wonderful? But if my parents are stressed and unhappy, guess whose fault it is? If they get divorced, guess whose fault it is? On the unconscious level, it's about me.

It's my fault. If my mother was unhappy, it was my fault. Not that it really was, but that's what the child perceives it. And so that sense of shame and failure and guilt, it precedes everything. And it's got nothing to do. with who you are and what you've done or haven't done. And I think that sometimes when people hear that,

because we all go through this, it's sort of the universal experience of humanity, and they're introduced to your work, there's almost this feeling of like, so now you're saying that everything is my parents' fault, and you have a great explanation around this that I'd love you to expand upon, because it's like these early childhood experiences impact us.

we're devoid of a feeling or or have something missing in our life, then there's adaptations that come from that that if they're not met over a period of time can turn into these versions of addictions that are there. So is it all our parents' fault? Well, I never use the word fault. It's not a concept that exists in my understanding of things because the logic thing is, well, why were my parents like that? Did my parents, Did my mother create the Second World War? Did she invite the Nazis into Budapest? If your father was an alcoholic, where did that start?

In his childhood? Okay, great, let's blame his parents. But wait a minute. Why were his parents like that? Oh, well, let's name their parents. By that logic, we end up going back blaming Adam and Eve or some poor ape ancestors sitting in a tree eating a banana, you know?

Like, in other words, there's no end to the blame game. And there's a book, a title which I like very much, is by our family assistants therapist called Mark Woolen. And the book is called It Didn't Begin with You. It didn't begin with any of us. It's not personal. And like Eckhart says, the ego is not personal. It's just what happens to people.

So no parent deliberately screws up their kids. It's not a fault. Look, when my kids are small, I would lose my temper. I was a workaholic. I was there for my patients. What a wonderful doctor who's always available. Guess where that leaves his kids? The shoemaker's son.

Shoemaker's kids with no shoes. Yeah, it was the same story. And so why was I doing that? Because as an infant, I got the sense that the world didn't want me. So if the world doesn't want me, you know what you do? You know what you do if the world doesn't want you? go to medical school. Then they're going to want you all the time.

They're going to want you when they're born, when they die, and at every moment in between, they have any problem. They're going to want you. Now you can keep proving to yourself how important you are every second. But when my kids' experience,

the father was always working, was always on a beeper, cell phone, delivering babies at night, not available on weekends. What message did they get? But they're not wanted. I'm passing on the same message. Did I do it deliberately?

Did I wake up one morning and said, I'm going to screw up my kids? Was it my fault? I didn't know myself. And as Eckhart says, without consciousness, there's no responsibility. There's no without awareness. So there's no point talking about fault.

It's a question of just being compassionate towards every generation, towards everybody. and realizing that we got caught up in these patterns, and then we pass on these patterns, not because it's our fault, but because we don't know any better. Yeah, and you have a great quote.

I'll just paraphrase it here, because you just kind of said it, but there is no responsibility without that consciousness. Without that awareness, there is no responsibility and there's a difference between responsibility and fault. Right, right. Yeah, fault is,

only comes into it if I consciously know something, I'm totally aware of it, and I quite deliberately, for selfish reasons, go against what I know to be true. That's very rare. That's actually very rare. Now, there's also a difference with me, fault, and responsibility. Yes, it's my responsibility, how I lived my life. I did it. I mean, I did it out of certain patternings. my fault, but who's going to respond to all that if I'm not me? Who's responsible if it's not me? So taking responsibility means that once I realize something, I do what I can to clean it up. That's so you take responsibility. But that's not, that's got nothing to do with fault. There's nothing to do with, not that I haven't blamed myself. Believe me, I have. I mean,

you have to really learn not to blame yourself. But, but, but it really is a lot of, you know, Responsibility and blame are two different things. And I just, for me, blame just doesn't work. In fact, you know, Hafiz, a Sufi poem poet, wrote, was it, 800 years ago now, how blame is such a sad game. It is because we're left being a victim in the truest sense of it. There's nothing we can do about the situation. Connect for me here while we still have a little bit of time.

Connect from me here what you perceive to be, you know, the experiences that you went through as a child and how that mapped out to these addictive patterns. Like what actually is taking place in the brain and in the body to create a connection between those two? Okay. So if you look at the addicted brain, the There's a number of circuits that just don't work very well. One of them is the endorphine circuitry.

Endorphins are internal opiates. We have internal opiates. We have receptors for opiates. That's why the heroin works, just because we have receptors. But why do we have receptors? Because we have our own substances internal to ourselves that look very similar to heroin.

So we have endorphine receptors. So we have an endorphine system in our brain. What do the endorphins do? They provide pain relief, physical and emotional pain relief, which is necessary for life. They give us a sense of pleasure and reward, joy, elation, and they connect us to other people. So that endorphins are one of the attachment chemicals, along with the oxytocin, that keeps us connected to people that we have to stay close to. Why? To survive.

So infants have to attach and connect with their parents. And the parents have to connect and attach to infants. Otherwise, there's no infant survival, given the helplessness of the human infant. So we have these brain chemicals that help to modulate our attachments. So we have their brain circuitry. That circuitry doesn't function well in addicted people. so heroin

boy all of a sudden they have love and connection and pain relief and pleasure which are totally normal human aspirations as a sex trade worker with HIV said to me once the first time I did heroin she said it felt like a warm soft hug so the opiates are really all about love

then there's the dopamine circuitry dopamine is our incentive motivation circuitry We have receptors for dopamine. We have brain centers and nuclei that work on dopamine. Without dopamine, we're lifeless, we're inert, we lack vigor, incentive, no motivation to do anything. Dopamine flows when you're seeking food or a sexual partner. You can see how important that is.

People who are prone to addiction, the dopamine circuits don't function very well. And that's where the addictions take root. So when you're addicted to work, it's not the work that you're addicted to. It's the dopamine that's released in your brain through that activity, that's what you're addicted to. So even a non-substance addicts are substance addicts,

except they get those substances released internally, triggered by whatever their target behavior. So the sex addict gets the dopamine from sexual seeking, the gambling, the gambler from gambling, the cocaine addict from cocaine. but they're all after the same hit of dopamine. Other circuits that don't work so well are stress regulation, circuits in the brain whose job is to calm or stress,

so our body doesn't go into overdrive. And impulse regulation so that, I may feel like doing something, but something says, no, Gabour, not a good idea, don't do it. Addicts don't have that. They keep doing what they know is bad for them. These circuits in the brain develop in childhood, in interaction with the environment. So this is what we have to get about the brain.

The brain is a dynamic social organ. It's circuitry, it's systems development, the availability of receptors for the neurochemicals like serotonin and oxytocin and vasopressin and GABA and the endorphins and dopamine. They all develop an interaction with our environment and the more stressed environment is the less these circuits develop properly and the more prone you are to be addicted later on.

So you can see, for example, even already in utero, like if you stress mothers, that will affect their children's dopamine receptors and their stress regulation. Those kids will be more prone to be addicted later on because of what happened in utero. So yes, it is about the brain, but the brain is not the primary source.

The brain itself is under the effect of life history and life experience, which also means that if we change our life experience and our relationship to ourselves, it's no easy task. We can actually change our brains. So that's the beauty of it. And the first step is awareness. would you say? But without that, there's no other steps.

So, but when you say awareness, what do you mean by that? The recognition of that space that we talked about, just at least a glimpse, not that it's going to be there with us always, but that we are not our wrong patterns. We are not our addictions. We are not these things that are, we are not our, father who is an alcoholic. We are not these things. We are not our life events. They've happened to us. I think that that's partly what I mean through awareness. Fair enough. And so even in the 12-step groups, when somebody says, my name is so-and-so,

I'm an addict, there's value in that and that the person is recognizing and owning their behavior. But at the same time, it's a double-ed sword because nobody is an addict. That's not who they are. The addiction was a pattern of behavior which came along, as we pointed out before, to suit some kind of pain. So it would be more accurate to stand up and say, hello, my name is Gabor, my name is Drew, and I've had pain in my life which I've sued through this particular behavior. But that's not who I am. That's just my behavior. That's just my coping mechanism. That'll be more accurate. Yeah, that's where awareness comes in.

So once awareness, the next component, which a big part of awareness is getting connected to there was pain first. And that pain created the void to go with lack of awareness or with unconsciousness to go find things to put into that void. So is the next component to begin to unravel the pain? Well, you know, there's no one-size-fits-all. But for me, if we don't go there, if we simply focus on the behaviors, you know, you're drinking, you want to stop drinking. Well, that's good. But very often that hasn't dealt with the fundamental addiction process in your brain.

You just stopped a certain behavior. And very often people that stop one behavior, they go into another. people who start smoking very often will put on weight. Why? Because that emptiness is still there. So for me, while it's good to work on behaviors, obviously, ultimately healing has to do with working through that pain and working through the trauma and finding your deeper, to herself underneath all that, which, by the way,

if you look at the word recovery, I mean, I say this all the time. It's almost a cliche, but recovery. What does it mean to recover something? It means to find it. You've lost contact with something. You've lost touch with it, and you've found it. So you've recovered it.

So when you say, I've recovered, what have people recovered? And if you talk to people who've been through addictions and you asked them, well, what did you recover? What did you find? Oh, I find myself. So that's what ultimately recovery is. But to do that, you have to work through the pain, for sure.

It's one of my favorite messages from Eckartoli and a New Earth is that it's in the nature of humanity and largely consciousness to have something, lose it, find it again, but find it at a deeper level with true meaning that it cannot be lost. So we have these things. We lose them. and then we step back into them, I think of that in the context of recovery. Yes.

Let me read your quote from Carl Marx, if I could. Please. And he says, the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to become conscious in order to possess it in reality. The world has been longing for something of which it only has to become conscious,

in order to really have it. In other words, it's here. You just have become conscious of it. But gaining your consciousness again. So for me, all the work that I do, whether it's on physical illness or mental illness, not there's any separation, addiction, whatever, child development, parenting,

it's all about how to be become conscious of what's already in here. But we've lost sight of it. Yes. are both on the individual level and on the society level and a good part of your work. You know, while we have a few more minutes here, I would love to talk about the society aspect of it. You've mentioned before in different interviews, like you go and speak at different medical universities and even your own medical training. You rarely ever or never heard the word

trauma, right? Like that was just not something that was being brought into the understanding. I think there's a little bit of a shift happening, especially more in the last. three, four, five years, especially your work, other people, a new generation of medical doctors who are starting to become more aware of these items. With society being in this place that it is of a version of sickness, right, it's a version of sickness that's there, what do you see zooming out as the pathways to that recovery on a societal level? Is it happening? Is it going to happen through the medical system? Is it through individual?

I would love to just get your perspective on it. Yeah. Well, I'm just writing a new book. Just rewriting it will be published in 2022. The title is The Myth of Normal, Illness and Health in an Insane Culture. Once it comes out, I'd love to come back and talk to you about it. I would love to have you on, yeah. But it's all about how illness.

in this society, physical or mental, they're not abnormalities. Their normal responses don't have normal culture. This culture is abnormal when it comes to real human needs. And it's in the nature of the system to be abnormal, because if we had a society geared to meet human needs, would we be destroying the Earth through climate change? Would we be putting extra burden

certain minority people? Would we be selling people a lot of goods that they don't need, in fact, are harmful for them? Would there be mass industries based on manufacturing, designing, and mass marketing, toxic food to people? So that we do all that for the sake of profit. That's insanity. It's not insanity from the point of view of profit, but it's insanity from the point of view of human need.

And so in so many ways this culture denies and even runs against counter to human needs. When you mention trauma, that's given how important trauma is in human life and what an impact it has, why have we ignored it for so long? Because that's denial of reality is built into this system. it keeps the system alive. It keeps, that's the whole point. So it's not a mistake. It's a design issue, almost.

Not that anybody consciously designed it, but that's just how the system survives. Now, the average medical student, to this day, I say the average, there are exceptions. And as you mentioned, thank God, there's an increasing number of exceptions. But the average medical student still doesn't get a single lecture on trauma

in four years of minutes. medical school. Now, they should have a whole course on it because I can tell you that trauma is related to addiction, all kinds of mental illnesses, and most physical health conditions as well. But they never hear, and there's a whole lot of science behind that, but they don't study that science. Now, that reflects this society's denial of trauma. The medical system simply reflects the needs of the larger society, I should say the dominant needs of this larger society. How to create change on a social level. That's a whole other discussion.

But I think whatever I can do with whatever platform that I've been able to gain for myself, whatever platform you have, whatever sphere of influence any of us have, you will be helped to create consciousness. You want people to be aware of how things are. Take something like the George Floyd murder last summer. And all of a sudden, in the wake of that murder, which became public knowledge only because there was a 17-year-old with a cell phone who videoed it. That's the only reason we know about it. But all of a sudden, people started to respect Black Lives Matter.

Well, why did it take that horror to wake us up? It's been going on for 400 years, and it's still going on. So that waking people up, waking ourselves up, consciousness. Now, for some people, that'll take the form of activism, political activity, and it has to, because it can't just happen on an individual level. But I can't sit here and prescribe people for what they should do. All I can say is, whatever degree of consciousness you have, manifested on whatever level you can through activism in your personal life through the work that you do

in your social relationships that's what we can do through all of our own individual awareness asking the universe how can i show up and contribute to this world in the best way you could be a chef at a restaurant and you're choosing to change your ingredients because you want to feed people healthier food. You could be a mother who's doing her best to instill a new values in a different pattern for a family tree that would continue on. You could host a podcast. Sorry, go ahead. I don't mean to be pessimistic. I don't need to be pessimistic. I'm really realistic. The problem is the chef is a boss. The boss wants to make a profit. Getting those healthy foods might be more expensive and against the profit motive. The mother may want to do her best, but she might be

on welfare or she might have to get a job where she commutes two hours each way and leaves your care and some poor leaves your kids in some poor daycare so the problem is i know both you and i are talking about on the individual level and we have to but i'm saying it's also systemic and at some point we have to look at these larger systemic issues and those are political and social questions absolutely which is why if you have the awareness to even recognize there's a problem and you have some of the means to be able to do it. First, starting with ourselves, just like the quote that you shared earlier,

which is the greatest gift you can give to the world, or your children is your own happiness, is very hard to help the world heal when you haven't begun your healing journey, which is a journey very much so, as we talked about earlier. And then within that, the awareness of, what way in any way that I can,

can I make a contribution? Absolutely. You may have heard this quote before. Again, it's become one of these oft-repeated mantras, but it was said by a Jewish rabbi about 100 years before Jesus. And he said, the task is not yours to finish, but neither are you free not to take part in it. And he's talking about the task of bringing light to the world. I love that quote. I've heard that. before, but it's been a long time and it's a beautiful reminder. Gabor, I want to be very mindful of your time and I want to thank you for coming on the podcast and getting a chance to talk about some things that, you know, I'm going to link to a few other episodes that are there because I feel like in some of those episodes, you very concretely

lay out the foundation of your work, but I feel like a lot of our audience is familiar with you. So I wanted to ask you some things that maybe I haven't heard it or had an opportunity to, you know, here in different interviews that we've had a chance to talk about. And I want to conclude on one more aspect, which is as a sensitive person, is it fair to say that you've identified yourself as somebody who's sensitive? I don't know if they have. I know people much more sensitive than I am. Okay, okay, got it.

Yeah. So I know there's a book that has been a big impact in your life. And it's the book by, I'm blanking on the name, I'm getting it here, Alice Miller, the drama of the gifted child. Yeah. And inside of there, she talks about the sensitive child, the gifted child, right? So really the title, the drama of the gifted child should really be translated at the drama of the sensitive child. But, and she was a Polish Jewish person who then went to Switzerland. and lived there and um cyclotherapist and the german title of the original title of the book was

prisoners of childhood it was translated into english as the drama of the gift of child we should have been the drama of the sensitive child but you know what i haven't heard the question yet so i should stop answering what's the question well we'll see if the question actually makes any sense so i will preface that before i put it out there i was connecting the component of uh in your life right now, how do you think about both what the external needs of the world are like people like me reaching out to you saying, hey, I would love to have you on my podcast or other components and bridging the gap between the addictive patterns that you've had previously where it's like the feeling of wanting to be wanted by people, but making sure, like, how do you catch yourself

on the, are there tools that you have on the path of awareness to say, okay, I'm playing back into this pattern let me pull back a little bit from the world and make sure that I'm fulfilling my own needs yeah so that's been an issue for me so number of things one is I've been married 51 years of 50 years 51 years now to a wonderful woman whose name is Ray and in the middle of a spate of workahals on my part, not that long ago. Ray said to me, listen, buddy, you've written a book

called When the Body says no? You better write one called when the wife says no. I ain't putting up with this anymore. So it's good to have relationships that speak the truth to you. Yeah. And it's good to listen when they speak to truth.

Number one. Number two, these days, I've begun by yoga practice. I do yoga. for the last month, I've been doing it 45 minutes twice a day. That's essential for me. This interview would have been very different a month ago. I don't know, it's for you and your listeners to gauge

what authenticity or energy or whatever there's there. But internally to me, I feel less driven and more at peace than when I don't do the yoga. And it's not like I've got it now, I can forget about it, no, it's ongoing practice. So even last night, like yesterday, I was busy working on my new book

and I had another interview and so on, meant for a swim. That's another thing, physical activity is very important for me. And almost every day, I bicycle, I get on my elliptical machine, I go swimming, but something. But even last night, because I didn't get to do my yoga during the day.

So last night, 10 o'clock, I did two 45-minute sessions. That's just the commitment. And I have to say I'm rather proud of myself because it's not something I would have done always. But I'm telling you, if I don't look after myself that way, if I don't, you'll find me a different person. I might have all the same ideas, but I'd have no peace around them.

So looking after my spiritual needs through yoga meditation practices, my physical needs, exercise, I eat well, I take care of my relationship. And breathe, I started doing Wim Hof's breathing technique and I begin the day with the cold shore now. Thank you, Wim. You're crazy Dutchman. All that, you know. And I have to. Because if I don't, things go to end. What a beautiful reminder to end on.

We all have to take care of ourselves. If we're meant to do the work that we're here to do on this earth, Gabor, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your wisdom with us. If the offer still stands, we'd love to have you back when your next book is out. I look forward to discussing that topic with you. Sure. I'd be so happy to do that. Thank you, dear.

Thank you so much.