Dhru Purohit Show - Big Idea: How We Can Start to Heal From Traumatic Childhood Experiences that Shape Our Health with Dr. Gabor Mate

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Pique Life and Aqua Tru. If you’ve ever gone to your doctor for pain or discomfort, did they ask you about the pain or trauma you’ve experienced in your life? Western medicine often separates the mind from the body, but in reality, the two are deeply connected. From a young age, many of us face hardships we don’t fully recognize, shaping the lens through which we see the world. Adversity is a part of the collective human experience, but when left unresolved, it can lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices that directly impact our physical well-being. Today, on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re revisiting one of our most talked-about moments with  Dr. Gabor Maté about the link between trauma, addiction, and chronic illness. They also discuss how profit-driven culture targets our insecurities and the crisis of separation, disconnection, and loneliness we currently face as a society. Most importantly, they discuss the first steps we can take toward health and healing. Dr. Gabor Maté is a renowned speaker and bestselling author known for his work on addiction, trauma, stress, and childhood development. He’s the author of several acclaimed books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, and The Myth of Normal. For his groundbreaking contributions, he’s received the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor. He also co-developed Compassionate Inquiry, a therapeutic approach now used by professionals worldwide. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Maté dive into: The role of genes in human health and behavior (1:34) Gabor’s childhood trauma and its lasting impact (6:10) Understanding trauma and how it shapes the way we live, love, and interpret the world (12:45) What society gains and loses from living in a toxic culture (23:35) Final thoughts (30:25) Also mentioned: Full episode with Dr. Gabor Maté This episode is brought to you by Pique Life and Aqua Tru. Right now, Pique Life is offering 20% off the Pu’er fermented black and green teas. Plus, you’ll get a free beaker and frother when you go to piquelife.com/dhru. AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prote here. For decades, we've been told that our genes are our destiny, that if chronic disease runs in your family, whether it's heart disease, depression, cancer, obesity, that it's only a matter of time before it will affect you too. But we know that's only part of the story. There are about 20,000 genes that make up the human genome. Every cell, protein, and molecule that makes us, us, is coded in the DNA we inherent from our parents, and those genes never change. But here's what's critical. How those genes, genes are expressed can change. And through the field of epigenetics, science is now showing us that our internal and external environments and experiences can literally switch those genes on or off.

So while we often focus on things like what we eat and how we move, we're also learning more and more about how our early childhood experiences impact our health later on in life. So in today's episode, I'm sharing a highly impactful moment from my conversation with Dr. Gabor Mante. Dr. Mante is a renowned speaker and bestselling author who's a highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. In this moment that we're going to play for you, we explore how childhood experiences shape the way our brains and bodies function and how we can apply this information to not only our individual health, but our societal health as well. Let's dive into this conversation

and this special moment that we're presenting on our podcast with Dr. Gabor Mata. Tell us how we know that genetics are not the full picture when it comes to this idea of what's creating disease today. I'm going to be more radical than that. Not only of the not the full picture, they're not even half the picture. So there are very few diseases. There are some that are purely genetically driven. One of them is runs in my family.

muscular dystrophy. If you have the gene, you're going to have the disease. And it's in my family. My mother had it. My aunt had it. But those diseases are very rare. Now most diseases have very little genetic component. This is contrary to everything you read. I'm just talking about what the research shows. So they something like breast cancer. Yeah, there are breast cancer genes. There are such genes. but out of 100 women with breast cancer, only 7 have the gene. 93 don't. And of 100 women with the gene, not all of them, the risk is increased for sure.

But not all of them will have the disease either. For the reason that genes are turned on and off by the environment. And there's a whole new science of epigenetics that studies our genes are turned on and off by the environment. And so that even if there's a genetic predisposition, which in most cases there's nothing or very little of, it still depends on the environment to turn those genes on or off. So genes explain very little about diseases. For the most, but diseases represent a person's life,

not a person's genetic background. A genes can in some cases increase the risk for some conditions, but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination. You can have two people with exactly the same genes, put them in, or two animals, put them in different environments, they'll have very different outcomes, because the genes are turned on and off by the environment, by multiple mechanisms. So for the most part, the idea that mental health conditions or physical health conditions are generally determined is completely false. There might in some cases to be, to some degree, be genetically influenced.

But that doesn't. cover even half the picture in most cases. So I'm saying, besides, here's the thing, Drew, like even if a disease was 20% genetically determined, which most disease is not even close to that much, but let's say 20% was and 80% wasn't. There's nothing I can do about that 20%. It's there. But that 80%, the environmental stuff, that I can work with, I can give children a better environment. that supports healthy growth. We can provide adults with healthy environments that support healthy physiology,

regardless of their genes. But what I'm saying is, so even if it was as high as 20%, you know what? I would say even if it was 99% genetic and 1% environmental. I don't know what that 1% was and how to work with it.

But in most cases, it's nothing like that even, not even close. So what I'm saying is that the most important determinant of people's health is actually the lives that they lived. And you mentioned the Buddha. Yes, the Buddha says that with our minds we create the world, that how we see the world, how we see ourselves, determines how we will behave and treat ourselves and other people.

But it took modern psychology to point out that before with our minds we create the world, the world creates our minds. So when my mom, when I was two weeks of age, writes in her diary, I was two weeks of age and she writes in her diary, my poor little gabour, my heart is breaking for you because you've been crying to be fed

for the last hour and a half. By the promise to the doctor, I would only feed you on schedule. What message am I getting? Your message you're getting is that, you know, you're on your own. I'm on my own. My needs don't matter.

Four years later, five years later, I have a severe earache. It's four in the morning and I have a really bad air infection. I'm not crying. I'm whimpering to myself. I'm not calling my parents. That's unnatural. The natural thing is for me to scream with my earache to get help. That self-suppression happens to so many people in this society.

so that if my needs are ignored, then the world I'm living in is a world in which I must fight or either ignore my needs or fight for them like crazy. Well, that's a worldview that was shaped by my early experience. And my poor mom, her heart was breaking, but she had to suppress her own parenting instincts

to comply with the doctor's advice. And then I get the message, okay, you're on your own. And that has affected my whole life, by the way. It has affected my marriage relationship and how I relate to my work. And I have had to do a lot of healing to overcome that early messaging. And just to add to that, you know, we talked about this a little bit in depth when you were on the podcast last time. But there's multiple journal entries that you share so beautifully of your mom inside of the book.

And one of the journal entries, your mom is writing, now began the most dreadful five or six weeks of my life when I couldn't see you. So just to add that to, it wasn't, you know, just that you weren't in that moment not being breastfed. There was a very sort of crazy circumstances. If you could just chat about those for a moment here, for those that are not familiar. So there's a chapter in this book on psychedelic healing. And I went to the Amazon jungle to work with some shamans. I'm not going to tell you the whole story here. It's in the book. But These shaman said to me that when you were very, they didn't know anything about me, by the way, or my personal history or who I was. They just, I was this guy from the north, you know.

They said to me after one ceremony, you had a big scare when you were very small and you haven't got over it yet. Now, when I was a year old, as you mentioned, being a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in Budapest, Hungary, Second World War, my mother was living under circumstances where she couldn't ensure my survival. So she gave me to a strange Christian woman in the street and said, please take this baby to this address while they'll look after him because I can't feed him. I can't assure that he'll live another day. So I didn't see my mom for five or six weeks. A pediatrician came to see me during that time of separation.

and a pediatrician said that she's never seen touch terror in the eyes of a human being if she saw in my eyes as a one-year-old. These shamans, 76 years later, picked up on that fear. That's how deep it went. And that, of course, again, has affected how I've been in work and my relationship

and how I parented my children and my mental health, of course. So these early experiences do shape how we see the world, but we're not conscious of them. Then we live out of these early experiences, and by doing so, we create more stress for ourselves. And that stress then acts on our physiology. And then we go to a doctor with an illness. They'll deal with the physical aspects of it, but then that deal with the historical and human aspects of it. No doctor has ever asked me about what was my infancy like.

And maybe you wouldn't even known. And actually, you found out much later on because you stumbled upon a book at your parents and library are on their desk. And that's when you started asking questions about what was my childhood like. And I think for a lot of people, they weren't even taught to even think about what was my life like growing up? And what are the foundational experiences that have shaped me into who I am today, which, by way, it's not just, you know, addictive behaviors, which we went into detail on our last podcast,

but it's also some of the beautiful things that we are today, too. Yeah. Is that an accurate statement? So I recently sat down with one of the biggest experts in the food is medicine space, and he shared some pretty fascinating information about the power of tea. Yes, that's right. Tea. Now, I grew up in a tea drinking household, to say the least, but I didn't realize how beneficial

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They contain al-theonine, which also helps me stay focused even on my busiest days. I really do think that it's important to be super careful about where we source our coffee and teas, and that's one of the reasons that I love peak because they've always upheld a standard that makes me feel confident in their product. Because I'm obsessive about quality, I love that these teas are triple toxin screen for pesticides, heavy metals, and even things like mold. You know, for limited time, if you're interested in getting the longevity and gut benefits of peak teas, they're offering my community 20% off a free starter kit of these amazing teas plus a frother and beaker.

I'm a huge fan of the beaker, by the way. Don't miss out on this incredible deal with my exclusive link. And that link is peaklife.com slash drew. That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E dot com slash D-H-R-U, Drew. That's me to get 20% off plus your free. starter kit, cheers to making 2025 the healthiest and most vibrant year yet with high-quality teas from peak tea. Well, for most people, childhood is a mixed thing, you know, there's the mixture of the loving

and the neglectful, a mixture of the accepting and they're rejecting, and everything has an impact. People are also born with certain qualities like joy and curiosity and engagement. And if we're lucky enough, those are not totally driven out of us. In fact, they never are totally driven out of us, although we may lose contact with them as a result of what happens in childhood. But certainly, we're not just talking about addictions here. What I'm saying is that these days, if I talk to anybody with any chronic health condition, whether it's depression or anxiety or ADHD or ADHD or addictions or rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis or malignancy or any other conditions I mentioned, I will talk to them about their lives.

And what's interesting is, just as you say, people only have the one childhood to recall. They don't recall. Some people believe in past lives, my mind doesn't go there. But even people that believe in past lives, they're not recall. What was it like to be a child in some other life? If there was another life, they only know this childhood. And so to them that seems to perfectly normal. And I've talked to so many people who tell me, I had a perfectly happy childhood.

And I talk about this in the book. After three minutes, it turns out that what they thought was a happy childhood had a lot of pain in it, that it suppressed or not recalled. They pushed it below the surface. So in every case of chronic illness, virtually every case of chronic illness or chronic mental health conditions, there's always a history. And that history always includes significant emotional losses in childhood. whether that person is aware of it or not. And it's not that difficult to excavate, by the way, once you ask the right questions.

Part of the messaging of this book is that this idea that there are the traumatized, which is usually our version of like the other, right? So there's a group of people that have been traumatized. There's different versions of trauma, the Big T and, you know, the little T trauma. But when we think of that there's other people that have gone through trauma and that we are, quote, unquote, normal, we're missing the understanding that everyone has experienced some degree of this, and that can often lead to these behaviors in our life

that are either filled with addiction, fear, obsessions over things. So it's when we understand that, that because we don't live in a trauma-conscious society, we don't see where our own trauma could have lived out. We missed the boat on really understanding who we truly are. And not to figure out who is to blame, as we've talked about before, but to actually get a better sense of letting go what's not useful

so that we can move forward and focus on all the things that we were brought on Earth to be able to do. Yes, so it's a question of how we understand trauma. And most people naturally, when they think of trauma, they think of catastrophic events like a war. No question that children in Ukraine right now are being traumatized. No question that children in Gaza are traumatized whenever they get bombed by the Israeli Air Force.

No question that children living in poverty under condition of racism are being traumatized on a regular basis. But to think of trauma only as catastrophe is, well, it's understandable, it's inaccurate. So the word trauma itself comes from a Greek word for wound. So trauma is a wound. And people can be wounded in many, many ways and to different degrees. But the point is that the degree to which we wounded, those wounds are going to be affecting how we live, how we think, how we handle ourselves, how we relate to others, how we relate to the world.

So these childhood traumas, and in our society they're very common. Now, there's the catastrophic kind, like physical or sexual or emotional abuse or severe neglect, the death of a parent, violence in a family. Those are significantly traumatic events. But you can also hurt kids, wound kids, just by not meeting their needs for being held, for being seen, for being understood, for being accepted. for being celebrated for who they are. These are needs of the child. We can hurt children by forbidding their expression of emotion. A lot of parents are told, if your kid is angry, give them a time out.

Which means anger is not, if you're angry, you're not acceptable to me. Now you're forcing the child to make a decision. Do I stay a relationship with my parent or do I express what I feel? Because if I express what I feel, I'm going to be banished. Well, guess what this is. most kids will make, not that it's a conscious decision. But what I'm saying is that we can traumatize or hurt or wound children in many, many, many, many ways. I've already talked about some of the ways that we hurt children in our society. And those traumas will show up later on in life.

And we'll say, well, I was never traumatized because I was never beaten or sexually abused. Thank God you weren't. But that doesn't mean you weren't wounded. And it doesn't mean that your wounds aren't showing up. And it doesn't mean that if you understood those wounds and you dealt with them and you healed them, you couldn't have a more satisfying and meaningful and more connected life. And just to be clear, every parent will wound their child and every child that grows up to be a parent one day, if that's part of their path, will wound their own children. So part of this is that there is a degree of just the human experience that wounds will. It's not just a human experience, and it's a human experience in certain conditions.

Because, again, we were not meant to be parented in isolated nuclear families with stressed parents who are absent most of the day and who are having to worry about making a living and whose relations may be in shambles. That's not how we evolved. How we evolved for millions of years was in small communities with the nurturing environment holding each child. That's how we evolved.

So it's not necessarily part of the human condition to be traumatized. It's been part of the human condition for many, many thousands of years. That's true. And this society didn't invent trauma. But then no society has known as much disconnection as the society knows. So in some ways, we've sophisticated or traumatization of children. But you're right. In this society, there are very few children who don't get wounded.

And you're also right. It's not a question of blaming parents. Parents do their best. They love their kids. I love my kids. Did I pass my trauma onto them? Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote this book with one of my sons.

And thank God, because I would not have been able to do this one on my own. And even writing the book, we had to work through our stuff. You know? So we had a much better relationship by the end of the book than we did it at the beginning. So yeah, we pass on our traumas unwittingly without meaning to do so, sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in major ways. And the thing is to understand that, not to blame ourselves and not to blame others either, but, okay, now that we get it, what do we do about it? It's not a question of feeling sorry for ourselves or making ourselves victims. Let's just say that in this society, at least, this is the human condition.

and how do we address it? Now, it would help tremendously if the institutions in this society, such as the educational system, such as the daycare system, such as the medical system, such as the legal system, understood these traumatic imprints,

but they don't. Average teacher, doctor, lawyer, daycare worker, never gets a single bit of introduction into understanding children's wounding. And so many of the practices that are followed in daycares, that are followed in schools, not to mention the legal system, might as well be designed to traumatize kids or adults because they do.

You know, off that topic, you know, the idea inside of the book is like, as the individual goes, as society goes, so goes the individual. And one of the things that you have talked about, in the past is that you say, ask not what is wrong with an addiction, but what is right about it? What benefit is the person deriving from their habit? What does it do for them? What are they getting that they otherwise can't access? So if we apply that thinking and those questions to our culture, what is our culture getting

from continuing to play out these addictive behaviors that keep the cycle of trauma life. This episode is brought to you by Aquatru, my favorite at-home water filter. All right, here's a question for you. If you wouldn't eat plastic and all sorts of crazy chemicals, the question I have for you is why are you drinking them? You know, the water you drink is just as important as the food you eat. You may have heard about the headlines featuring all the latest studies about the alarming levels of nanoplastics in bottled water and tap water isn't any better. It often contains prescription drug residue and toxic chemicals like forever chemicals, PFAs, and these microplastics that everybody's talking about. But the question that everybody asks is

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Because clean water shouldn't be a luxury. It should be your everyday. Well, whole industries are based on manufacturing and conveying goods that don't do anybody good, but they make for good profits. So, for example, junk food. Now, in this case, the vast majority of obesity is rising around the world. The food, the food, sugar, and pop drinks industry. know full well. They conspire, actually. This is not conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy

reality that's been documented. How do we get the right combination of sugar, salt, and fat that will make people most addictive? Now, junk foods are very addictive because they actually suit stress in the short term. They're like, you know, eating junk food is like getting a hit of opium as far as their brain circuitry is concerned. But they have scientists for figuring out how to maximize the addictive hit of junk foods. This has been documented and published in papers and books and so on. Well, in this case, it's a very simple reason why they do it. It's profit. Or take another example, specifically addictive, you know, the opiate. So, you know, the whole scandal about the Sackler family and, is it Pfizer, you know, pharmaceuticals who

manufactured oxycontin and they sold it to doctors as non-addictive opiates when they knew better. And we have had tens and hundreds of thousands of people dying of overdoses and big court cases and all this. Did they care? No, it's profit. When companies deliberately hire phony scientists to write articles about the non-examines, of climate change, as they did for decades. And they lobby politicians, even now, to inhibit forestall climate protective legislation. They do that in full knowledge of the science.

So that's why I have a chapter in a book called sociopathy, a strategy. What do you call entities that are willing to see millions of people die. And millions of people are dying because of drugs, because of obesity, because of junk foods, because of climate change. Well, because of cigarettes. Why would people do that? It's because profit is more important. So the system works beautifully. Like on one hand, the way of this culture goes, it stresses people to the max. People are just very, very stressed. This is recognized by everybody. The more stressed people are, the more they want soothing. So they want soothing with, you know, by diverting their attention to sports. The average person can tell you a lot more about

the quarterbacking strategy of the New England Patriots. Then they could tell you about the war in Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of people died, including. thousands of Americans. So there's all this culture to divert us from paying attention to what's important. There's all these products that prey on our stressed lives to give us temporary stress relief. So consumer goods and foods, entertainment becomes addictive because precisely they're diverting us from our stress. So the system works with elegance. Number one, to create the stresses and then to profit off those stresses that the system creates. Now, there are some conspiracy involved, as I've mentioned, you know, like on climate change.

Yeah, they conspired. Cigarette companies, they conspired. That's not controversial. I'm just stating a fact. Junk food companies, they conspired. Pharmaceutical companies? Yeah, they conspired. But it's not the conspiracy that runs the world.

The conspiracies simply take advantage of the word, the way this culture works. So there's a beautiful elegance to it, as I said. On the one hand, we live in a society that by its very nature stresses people from in-eural onwards, and then creates industries that are based on trying to take advantage of those stresses. So it's a self-generating system, is what I'm saying.

And then, of course, these same companies will hire politicians that will enact policies that will protect their interests. Now, that's not disputable. It's just demonstrated fact. So the system works on every level to maintain itself, like any system does. So we're not looking for villains here, not that there aren't any, but we're not looking for them. What we're looking to understand is the nature of the system itself. And I think it's so good to talk about the nature of that system because As goes, society, also there's those parallels that happen in the individual as well. And when we find and we see a system that's out of whack, it's easy to see the dysfunction

in that. It's harder for individuals to see the dysfunction themselves, but both are super key, right? Both are super key because they're both part of the solution. I'm often confronted by the question. How in a culture so obsessed with wellness are we dealing with more chronic disease, autoimmunity, mental illness and addiction than ever before. I hope that this moment from my conversation with Dr. Gabor Matae has begun to shed some light on the answers to this question and offer an introduction to the initial steps that we can take towards health and healing. If you've enjoyed this conversation

on the super complicated subject that we try to break down for you today, you can listen to more of it by checking out the full-length interview with Dr. Mate. You can find the link in the conversation in the episode show notes. In that conversation, we dive first. into the crisis of separation, disconnection, and loneliness. And Dr. Monta provides tips and guidance on moving out of our conditioned trauma responses to rewire our stress circuits and restore health. And if there's someone in your life, as always, who'd think would benefit from this conversation and the information we shared in it, please do me a favor. Consider sharing this episode with them. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.