Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #37 How Our Childhood Shapes Every Aspect of Our Health with Dr. Gabor Maté

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

“We live in a society that generates addiction in most of its members.”   This week, I talk to renowned addiction expert, physician and best-selling author, Dr. Gabor Maté. He calls for a compassionate approach toward addiction, whether in ourselves or in others. Dr Maté believes addiction is not a choice, neither is it all about drugs and illicit substances. Instead, he believes that addiction affects most of us – whether it be to alcohol, nicotine, sugar, work or exercise…the list is endless. According to Dr Maté, the source of addiction is not to be found in our genes but in our early childhood.   We also talk about how our emotional stress translates into physical chronic illnesses and how we now live in a culture that doesn’t meet our human needs. Indeed, the conditions necessary for healthy child development are increasingly under threat in today’s society. Loneliness and lack of meaningful connection are on the rise, as are the rates of autoimmune disease and addiction. We discuss how the way we live our modern lives is impacting us more than we realise.   It was a real honour to sit down and talk eye-to-eye with Gabor about his truly revolutionary work. This was a deep and powerful conversation and I hope it helps you in your lives. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/gabor Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, when I speak to a room of people and I ask them how many are addicted, most people will only think of drugs, so some people put their hand up. Then I give them my broader definition of addiction and everybody puts their hand up. Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and television presenter. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower

you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier, because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome to another episode of my Feel Better, Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chastji and I am your host. Today's conversation is quite possibly one of the most important conversations I have ever had on my podcast. It's a little bit longer than my usual conversations and I thought long and hard about splitting it into two shorter episodes but after a lot of consideration, I decided against it. This is a

deep conversation that I believe needs to be put out as one complete entity from start to finish. My guest today is Dr. Gabor Mate, one of the world's most revered thinkers on the psychology of addiction. His radical findings based on decades of work with patients challenged by catastrophic drug addiction and mental illness are reframing how we view all human development. I think the concepts we explore are relevant to each and every single one of us. We explore human connection, friendship, loneliness and of course take a deep dive into addiction. Dr. Mate explains how addiction is not a choice, that it is actually about the emotional pain behind the behavior, and how there is actually only one universal addictive process.

The conclusion is that there may not be quite as many differences between addictions like heroin, cocaine and gambling when compared to addictions such as sex, shopping and even sugar. This conversation will likely cause you to rethink a few assumptions that are made in society and perhaps help you understand your own behaviours and tendencies a little bit better. and perhaps help you understand your own behaviours and tendencies a little bit better. We discuss why, for almost all of us, our childhood conditioning and adaptive behaviours dictate the choices we make and the behaviours we engage in for the rest of our lives. I think Gabor Mate is one of the most important and compassionate voices in the world right now, and it was a real honor for me to sit down face to face, eye to eye with this phenomenal man. Before we get started, I need to give a quick shout out to our sponsors. I'm delighted that Athletic Greens continue to support this podcast.

As you know, I believe that the right nutrition is an essential ingredient to having a healthy and happy life. And whilst I prefer people to get their nutrition from eating foods, I recognize that sometimes in today's busy, stressful world, that can be a little bit challenging. If you want to take a super tasty greens powder each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend Athletic Greens. It is unquestionably one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I have come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. minerals prebiotics digestive enzymes and adaptogens for listeners of this podcast if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more you will be able to access a special offer

where you get a free travel pack box with your first order which contains 20 servings of athletic greens which is worth around 70 pounds so do go and check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. So Dr. Mate, it's a huge pleasure for me to be talking to you today. I've been following your work for a good period of time now, and it's had a huge impact on the way that I look after my patients. But if I'm honest, it's also had a huge impact on the way I look after myself. And I want to thank you for that. There's so many things that we could start talking about. But I think the place I'd like to start is something I heard you say once, which is

addiction is not a choice. Yeah. I think most of society probably thinks that it is a choice. And so I wonder if you could clarify that. The whole legal system is based on the assumption that people are making the choice to indulge in addictions and therefore the decisions they make that flow from that are conscious and deliberate. And therefore, of course, what they need to do is to be punished for making such a choice. It's basically the same attitude that a lot of people take towards child-rearing.

When a child does something we don't like, we punish them. This is our idea of child rearing. Well, with adults, the punishment is called jail or legal sanctions. The assumption is totally false. There's no scientific basis to it. And having worked with addicts, really seriously caught people who've been entrapped in the cycle and shoals of addiction with all the consequences like HIV, homelessness, loss of health, wealth, teeth, beauty, personal relationships. I never saw any instance of anybody having chosen to become that way. And having had my own addictive behaviors, I can also tell you I never chose, I never woke up one morning and said,

my ambition is to become an addict. So it's an entirely shallow behaviorist view of human beings. And what we need to do is to look at the deeper reasons. If something appears to be a choice, it's an unconscious one. And we still have to look at what is it that would drive a person in that direction. Conscious choice has nothing to do with it, which means to say that the legal system has no logical basis to stand on.

Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing how we have decided as a society that some addictions are criminal, but some are okay. And I've heard you talk about that many times in the past. I think that makes me think of a line in your new book. Well, I say new, it's been out for over 10 years, I think. It's been a bestseller all over the world, but we've got it now in the UK in the realm of Hungry Ghosts. And in the introduction, you say, all drugs and all behaviours of addiction,

substance dependent or not, whether gambling, sex, the Internet or cocaine, all of them either soothe pain directly or distract from it. Hence your mantra. The first question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And I think that beautifully sums it up. And I think that beautifully sums it up. In that, you're likening addiction to drugs, potentially to sex, gambling, alcohol, maybe shopping. So I've had my own shopping addiction. And I can tell you that what happens in my brain when I'm indulged in my shopping addiction is exactly the same that happens in the brain of the cocaine addict. In other words, there's an excitation of the reward, incentive, and motivation circuitry. And what the addict is

after is that temporary change in brain status. Really what it is, all addictions are an attempt to regulate an unbearable emotional state internally. But you're trying to regulate your internal state through external means. And that's what an addiction is. So temporarily you get a change in the state of your brain, in the change of your physiology. You can do that through drugs. You can also do it through gambling or internet or sex or shopping. But essentially after that same revitalization of your incentive and motivation

circuitry of your brain. And so from my perspective, there's only one universal addiction process that dominates all addicted people. The targets of addiction may be different. The internal effects are much the same. Yeah. internal effects are much the same. Yeah.

And I'm sorry, I should add, when you look at the sources of it, the states that people are trying to escape are states of emotional distress, states of emotional pain, and hence, why the addiction? Not why the addiction, but why the pain? So some people who are listening to this or watching this right now might be thinking,

yeah, I get that, that all sounds fine. For those people who are listening to this or watching this right now might be thinking, yeah, I get that. That all sounds fine for those people who are addicted. But I, of course, am not addicted to anything. So you've got a rather beautiful definition, I think, of addiction, which I think will be really helpful to sort of go through at the start here so that people listening can actually figure out if it does relate to them or not. figure out if it does relate to them or not? Well, when I speak to a room of people and I ask them how many are addicted, most people will only think of drugs, so some people put their hand up. Then I give them my broader definition of addiction, and not everybody puts their hand up.

And that definition is that an addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and is going to be able to give it up. So any behavior, not just drugs. The key hallmarks are craving, pleasure, relief in the short term, negative outcomes in the long term, inability to give it up. That's what an addiction is. And that could be to drugs, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, the lethal and legal substances, or it could be to heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, fentanyl, cannabis, any number of other substances.

But it could also be to sex, to gambling, to shopping, to eating, to work, to exercise, to the internet, to gaming, to pornography, to political power, to the acquisition of wealth, to the hoarding of objects, anything. And when you give that definition and you ask people how many here would acknowledge some addiction in their life, sometimes the vast majority of people would put their hands up, which means to say that addictions are on a continuum, it's on a spectrum, and they're distributed, dispersed throughout all of our society. And so that the identified drug addicts make up only a small, narrow segment of our addicted population. So really the whole way we think about addiction, the way we criminalize various forms of addiction

really needs to change to a much more compassionate way of dealing with it, but also really trying to understand what's the root cause. Because I totally subscribe to your theories and I think that ultimately, if the root cause of all addiction or all addictive behavior is the same, how do we tackle that? And where does that come from? What is that root cause? So once you're asking not why the addiction but why the pain, now you have to forget that it's a choice because nobody chooses to be in pain. And you also have to forget the medical idea that it's an inherited brain disease. You actually have to look at people's lives. Now, in Vancouver's downtown Eastside in Canada, where I worked for 12 years with

a highly addicted population, these people had multiple addictions, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis, opiates of all kinds, cigarettes in every case. They suffered with HIV, with hepatitis C. They would die of overdoses, suicide, infections of all kinds. And these people, every single one of them, had been heavily traumatized in childhood. All the women I worked with over 12 years had been sexually abused. All the men had been neglected or beaten or emotionally abused. I'm talking about not a severely addicted population,

which is also what the large-scale study shows, that the greater the childhood adversity, the greater the risk for addiction in adulthood. Now, the more severe the childhood adversity, the greater the risk of substance addiction and injection use. However, if you look at my own case, I wasn't beaten, I wasn't abused in my family of origin, I wasn't neglected. But I was a Jewish infant born during the war in Hungary and spent my first year under the Nazi regime, you can imagine under what circumstances. So I had a very unhappy, stressed, terrorized mother. And children can be hurt in two ways. Children can be hurt when bad things happen to them that shouldn't happen. That's the

abuse, that's the violence in the family, that's the parental addiction. But children can also be hurt when their needs are not met. Now, I had this need for an attuned, empathetic, emotionally responsive mother. She couldn't be that. Not because she didn't love me, not because she didn't do her best, but simply she was too terrorized, she was too depressed. The lack of that joyful, attuned, loving mother who, I shouldn't say loving because she loved me tremendously, but her love couldn't be translated into responsive behavior. That alone was enough to hurt me. So in other words, the source of addiction is always some kind of a childhood hurt, either because bad things happen that shouldn't have, or because the good things that should have happened

couldn't happen because of the parent's emotional states. Both of these are enough to hurt the child in a way to driving them to self-soothe through addictions. through addictions so so do you think your own experience of trauma really as a as a young baby not even a child as a young baby yeah has impacted your own health your own behaviors and therefore ultimately where you are today which is one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction do you think that has been instrumental in you getting to where you are today? Having to deal with the impacts of that has been instrumental. I mean, I really, as an adult, I was a successful physician, you know, I was much in demand, a family practitioner, I was head of a palliative care department at a major hospital. I was a national medical columnist for a Canadian newspaper in my 50s. And internally, I was driven, workaholic, depressed, affected by ADHD, anxious, and

unfulfilled and unsatisfied. And it's when looking at those dynamics and wondering, well, what the heck has happened to me here? And what is the gap between my external persona and my internal experience of myself? That's when I began to deal with trauma. Not to mention, as a family physician, and you and I were talking about this before, we get to see patients before they get sick. The specialists only see them after the illness has been diagnosed. I get to see people before they get ill. I get to see people in their context of their multi-generational family background. So we have a much broader view of who gets sick and why.

And so both through my medical work and having to deal with my own stuff, I began to realize the central role of trauma in shaping people's health or illness. Since I've been studying trauma myself both with the work that you do but just other things that i'm reading around it it really helps me understand my patients and their behavior is much better i really start to you can start to tap in now as to what they're coming in with more you think oh that's what's going on behind that not the symptom they're describing but but why are they making those choices? And something you may not know, Gabe, a few years ago, I did a series of documentaries on BBC One called Doctor in the House. And what I would do on that is I went to live alongside

families who had health problems. They were already under GPs, they were already under specialists, they were all taking medication pretty much already. And they still weren't getting better. And they were still struggling. So I went in to, sometimes I'd stay the night in their houses. I'd live alongside them, really get to understand, you know, what choices they were making with their lifestyle. Sure. But also I'd get to see, you know, various dynamics in the family, the sort of thing that would never come up in the consultation room.

Even if you ask that question, they would never even think to bring those things up. But you would just start to spot things and little dynamics. And I found that with every single family pretty much now, if I reflect back on all those families I stayed alongside, I was very fortunate to get really good health outcomes with them all after about six weeks. But there was a huge emotional component behind a lot of the illness. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that it was in their head at all. They had proper physical symptoms that they were struggling with. And obviously that in some ways can make people feel down a little bit about themselves because they're not feeling so good. But I really got this strong sense that when you start to look at their lives and their upbringing and how they saw themselves,

it was uncanny how many times their emotional health was absolutely tied into their physical health. Well, so one of the books I've written, which will be published and written in a few months, is entitled When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress. And I'm making the case precisely as I heard you articulate just now, is that when it comes to chronic illness, and whether it's colitis or Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS or motor neuron disease in England, malignancy, chronic psoriasis, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome. The physiological symptoms, which are not in people's heads in the sense that they're imagining them, but it very much originates in people's heads in that it has a lot to

do with certain relational and emotional patterns that they adopted in childhood. In other words, what I'm saying is that because of childhood programming, people impose certain unconscious stresses on themselves, and those stresses, because of the unity of mind and body, which unfortunately is not taught or recognized in the medical schools, but which scientifically is not even vaguely controversial, because the immune system and the emotional apparatus and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are part and parcel of the same system.

So when something occurs emotionally, which it does on a chronic basis, that has an impact of undermining people's physiology, turning their immune system against themselves or suppressing the immune system. So I absolutely agree that people's emotional patterns, which reflect not individual choices or mistakes, but multi-generational patterns in the family, those emotional patterns

translate into physical illness. And if we can address those emotional dynamics, we can actually have an impact on the physiological course of their illness, which is again, not something that anybody in medical school will ever tell you because there's this unfortunate separation of mind and body that you and I are trained in. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the key things there for me was that you're not putting blame on people. There's no blame. Yeah.

And I think that's really, really a key point that maybe we can discuss now because a lot of people may be hearing that feeling, you know, maybe I've done this to myself or my mother did this to me, for example. And that's not what you're saying at all, is it? Well, this is an interesting conversation. I make the distinction between blame and responsibility. Blame says that you did something that you could have done otherwise, and so therefore you're at fault. That's what blame says. Responsibility says, yes, you did this to yourself, but not consciously or deliberately. You did it because you're

programmed to do it by your own childhood experience, which in turn was programmed by your parents' childhood experience. So there's nobody at fault. Everybody does their best. What we do pass these unconscious patterns on. And you don't blame people for having unconscious patterns. You try to make them conscious of it so they can take responsibility for it. So there's no responsibility without consciousness.

And there's no blame. So I don't blame anybody for their illness. I don't blame their parents either. But I do say these unconscious patterns have been passed on and these unconscious emotional dynamics have an impact on your physiology. That's all. And if you want to have an impact on your physiology, you've got to get conscious. You have to realize what have you been doing unconsciously

so you can stop doing it or do it differently. So it's a matter of liberating people from these ingrained patterns for which they're not to be blamed. So in my world, there's no room for blame whatsoever. But there is room for helping people to become responsible, for helping people being response-able, being able to respond to their circumstances. And without awareness, none of us are responsible yeah i think if i think to my own life and my own health journey

over the last few years and i guess what's really changed for me over the last few years you know i've done a lot with my lifestyle i've done a lot with my nutrition my sleep and those things have been great and they've really helped me but over the last years i've really been focused on my emotional health you know i i see a therapist pretty regularly um and i can always feel when i've got something new some some deeper layer that's starting to come out you know i have i have a session or i go through some sort of therapy and i i feel good i feel oh yeah you know i've got it now i get it i get it why I do this. And it changes your behavior, certainly. But it's almost as if as you do that, there's multiple layers. It's like peeling back a layer of the, you know, it's peeling back layers of the onion and newer things keep coming out, which has been really rewarding for me because, you know, you talk about addiction and I think

back to my own life and various things that I've done at certain points. You know, I don't think anyone who knows me well, maybe my close friends, but most people probably wouldn't think that I've ever had an addiction because we have all these connotations about addiction. You know, it's like being on a street corner or being a drug addict or something. But everyone around me would know that I've got an addictive personality. And I used to think that that was my personality. That's the way I was born. What's weird that as I start to process my own emotional baggage and I start to clear it, I'm no longer as an addictive person as I used to be. And that's why I really, I kind of feel, I feel so strongly about the work that you're doing because I kind of feel that that wasn't my personality. That was

the behavior I had chosen to soothe something that I was missing. Well, so how would I would put it? I mean, I agree with your concept. I would use a different language around it. That was your personality, but it wasn't your person. It wasn't who you were. The personality itself is a defensive structure that we develop as a way of dealing with our pain. So much of what we consider to be our personality is actually an overlay upon our true selves. And so these weren't choices in childhood. For example, with my ADD, the tuning out, I never chose to tune out. But when I was an infant under the conditions that I've described of being a Jewish infant under the Nazis, I had plenty of stress on me. And how does an infant deal with stress that they can't change? They tune out. And then the tuning out becomes

programmed into my brain. And then so many years later, I'm diagnosed with ADD. It wasn't a choice that I made. It was an adaptation. So what I would say about the personality, including what you described as your addictive personality, it wasn't you. It was an adaptation that you took on as a way of surviving your childhood, as a way of surviving your childhood as a way of soothing your pain it's when we get older that we realize that there's something more to us than a personality that the personality is actually a defensive cover for who we truly are and as we start like as you describe your own process you go through therapy and you go through layers and then you realize oh that's not actually me yeah and and i'm freer layers and then you realize oh that's not actually

me yeah and and i'm freer without it then you realize that what we thought was the personality was actually just a defensive cover and and once we strip that defense off and we find it no longer necessary we become much more true ourselves more much more true to ourselves so become much more true to ourselves so we become much more balanced and happier in our lives so yes it was a personality but you are not your personality that's how I would formulate it I love the way you put that actually it really helps me think about it in a slightly different way

I think something came into my mind there which is and we were chatting a little bit about this before we got on air, about medicine and how reductionist it has become, the practice of medicine. And I think something like high blood pressure, for example, I think of as an appropriate response from the body to the signals that it's been given. Absolutely. And I think there's an analogy there with what you're saying, which is if you're surrounded by stress as a young baby, whatever that stress is, your brain is going to adapt to that. It's an appropriate response to the signals that your brain is getting. Is that fair to say?

That's right. that your brain is getting. Is that fair to say? That's right. So my next book is going to be entitled The Myth of Normal, Illness and Health in an Insane Culture. And when I say in culture, insane culture, I mean a culture that doesn't meet human needs. So if you take a condition like high blood pressure,

for which, what's the medical term for high blood pressure? Hypertension. Hypertension. All right. And doctors and and doctors of course say our colleagues say well there's a few types of hypertension forces a cause like kidney disease or some kind of hormonal disorder but for most part we don't know what causes high blood pressure essential hypertension essential because essentially we don't know what the heck we're talking about that's what that means. Just take the word hypertension and slow it down a bit.

Hypertension. Hypertension. Hypertension. Maybe there's too much tension in people's lives. And if you actually look at the rising rates of hypertension, it's got to do with social pressure and social stresses. And I know that usually when I take care of myself myself i have the blood pressure of a young person but there's been times in my lives when i've been driven by stress and i've had the blood pressure ranges in the in the risky end of the scale so so for me when my blood pressure goes up it's a real warning buddy you've got too

much tension in your lives you better do something about it all we do in medicine is we hand out pills or we tell people to lose weight but we never address the sources of real tension in their lives and i'd say that most hypertension and so for example if you look at a black black american males they have much higher risk of hypertension than, say, white American males. What we say is genetic. No, it isn't. Their biological relatives in Africa do not have high blood pressure. So it's an artifact of being a black male in essentially a racist society.

And James Baldwin, the American writer, once said that being a black American male is to live in a condition of suppressed rage all the time yeah well that suppressed rage will drive your blood pressure so hypertension other ill health yeah yeah so so high blood pressure is a great example of a socially induced physiological condition which is mediated through our emotions and the impact of our emotions on our autonomic nervous system and our hormones. Yeah. I mean, I've never really thought about the term hypertension like that before, hypertension. And it makes such sense when we think about it like that. You mentioned this new book you're writing, talking about how we've got, I think, is it an insane society around

us? And I think of stress, as I've mentioned to you, I've, is it an insane society around us? Yeah. And I think of stress. As I mentioned to you, I've just spent a few months locked away writing a new book on stress called The Stress Solution. And I feel strongly that when we talk about making changes, so a lot of people, when they try and improve their health, they try and improve their lifestyle, which is a pretty reasonable start. But many people, I find find can't do that. Well, they do it temporarily for a few weeks, a few days, a few months maybe, but then they revert back. And as a doctor, I've always been intrigued as to why do some patients keep coming back? And why do some patients with the same so-called problem get better with the same course of treatment? And I always think, well, if they keep coming back, I'm clearly not getting to the root cause of the problem.

And the more I think about your work, although people talk about you in the realm of addiction and trauma, I think your work doesn't only explain addiction and trauma, it explains all human behavior. And that has profound implications, not only for trauma, not only for pain, not only for addiction, but actually the whole of the health landscape. Well, thank you. And again, in my various books I've written about that, it just so happens that it's my addiction book that's being published right now, first in England. When you get down to it, it's very simple. Either you raise human beings whose needs are met, or you raise human beings in a way that

you don't meet their needs. When you don't meet people's needs, they have to adapt in artificial ways. Those adaptations become the source of illness later on. There was a very interesting article in the Journal of Pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, published in January 2012. There was an article on childhood development generated by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. So as prestigious as you get. And in the abstract, they say that human environments, that because of scarcity or stress, trouble young children, cause these children to make adaptations, which are psychological and physiological

adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a long-term cost to health, behavior, and longevity. In other words, the way that young children adapt to stress early on helps them survive that early stress, but in the long term, those same adaptations become sources of pathology. So if you look at my own tuning out, so the tuning out that I did as an infant under conditions of severe psychological strain is an adaptation. It helped me as an infant survive a year where the situation was utterly impossible. But that same tuning out gets programmed into my brain, and now I'm diagnosed with a medical condition, ADHD, decades later.

So what was adaptive in my circumstance becomes maladaptive later on. I'm suggesting that much of illness begins with that, that these are necessary personally adaptations, however, which then stress us later on. And so that is a real, so what's common to my work is that I look at the sources of adult function or dysfunction in our formative experiences. And, you know, that's not controversial if you look at a gardener. I mean, if a gardener looks at their plants, they know that how they treat that young plant will have a huge impact on the adult plant. Anybody who is in animal husbandry will realize that how you treat the young, whether it's a dog or a horse,

will have a huge impact on the personality and behavior of that animal later on. Why don't we get the same thing in human beings? It's the same principle. So it's essentially very simple. Yeah, it really is, isn't it? When you break it down like that, it's super simple. We need a society that really supports children and babies and mothers and parents at a young age. Absolutely. And then I guess what comes to my mind is, and you may know the stats on this, I don't, but we here in the UK, we always are talking about Scandinavia.

And we talk about how they are really prioritizing those early years. You know, they give a lot of maternity leave, a lot of paternity leave. You know, yes, they may have high taxes, but it seems to me that their society there has prioritized family and bringing up children. Whereas I don't think we're quite as good here, but I don't think we're as bad as the US. A really good friend of mine,

he married an American girl and she, I can't remember, but maybe after she gave birth to her first child, she might have been back at work. It might have been something like four weeks or something. Yeah. Something obscene, like to me, or it sounds obscene to me. Absolutely. And the child's in daycare. Yeah.

And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, how society is set up now and then what that is doing. Because you mentioned your mum's clearly, that's a huge trauma. I mean, that's hopefully the sort of trauma that most of us aren't experiencing. But are there similarities in terms of what that's doing to the child? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So the United States, which to hear their politicians is the best and most glorious country in the world, which itself, by the way, is interesting. Like if you met a person, if your neighbor was always telling you how great he was and how he's the best and everybody wants to be like him, what would you think of him? Yeah. You think he's got a grandiose personality disorder

and he's compensating for his real sense of deficiency well that's the united states and they have a lot to compensate for and what you say about child care is absolutely true is that they have a barbaric child care system a barbaric maternity leave system where women and often poor women on welfare have to go back to work after a few weeks of giving birth. Now, if you look at human evolution, or look at an ape culture, the ape mothers hold their babies for months. There's no separation.

The child actually develops by being held by the mother. And human societies, until very recently, were organized around children being around the parents, really all their lives, certainly through childhood and adolescence. There was just no separation. What we do in our culture, more in the States than elsewhere, but increasingly elsewhere as well, we separate children from their parents. In other words, we're depriving them

from the natural conditions for healthy development. There was a study last year or two years ago comparing the crying of British, German, Canadian, and Danish children. Lo and behold, Danish kids cried much less than these others. What was the difference? The parents were around much more. And the parents were much more likely to pick up the kids

when they were crying. That's what made the difference. Now, that crying child is an anxious child. When the child is crying, it's not just a benign thing. The child is crying because they're stressed. When they're stressed, their brains are suffused by stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline and cortisol interfere with your physiology, interfere with healthy brain development. So just the fact of holding

a child, which was historically and prehistorically the standard standard is an essential aspect of child rearing, which modern societies have denied. And as a matter of fact, I don't know what it's like in England, but in North America, we actually advise parents not to pick up their kids. When they're crying at night, we tell them not to pick them up. We sleep train the kid by not picking them up. In other words, we're denying the child's needs for connection. And what's that doing to the child, do you think? Well, it does a number of things. One is to give the child the message that his emotions don't matter.

And children take everything personally. It's not true that babies don't have emotions. And it's not true that babies are tabula rasa, where you can write anything you want. Babies have certain defined emotional needs. And when they get the message that they're not important, that's the message they're going to imbibe unconsciously, non-verbally. And you can see that behavior in the adults.

You know, the person who comes into your office and says, Doc, I'm sorry to bother you. I'm sure you have many people much more important than me, but I have this little problem. You know what kind of a child to the head. Yeah. Number one. So it gives them.

That would be me going into the doctor. Okay. Or in, in just various assets of my life. And you know, the people pleaser. Yeah. Always doing,

you know, always. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. You know, the amount of times I think just on a social thing, you'd be like, Oh,

where'd you want to go guys? Yeah. No worries. Wherever, wherever you end up somewhere, you just don't want to be in. You're in a restaurant. You you'd be like, oh, where do you want to go, guys? Yeah, no worries, wherever, wherever. You end up somewhere you just don't want to be in. You're in a restaurant you hate the food in. But hey, yeah, it's cool, guys.

No problem. And it's, sorry, I don't mean to trivialize what you're saying. You're not trivializing it. What you're actually illustrating, you're telling me exactly what kind of infancy you had. Yeah. And physiologically, what does it do? The baby's crying. And again, these stress hormones. Now, one of the things that Aboriginal peoples don't do is let their babies cry.

When I say it's not that they forbid them to cry, they pick them up. They don't even put them down, to tell you the truth. But should they cry, they pick them up immediately. We, in our society, we actually advise people to let their babies the baby's crying it's because they're stressed when they're stressed again their brains are suffused by stress hormones that interferes with healthy brain development i mean what about this whole idea that um you know we're quite isolated now you know many of us have moved away from where we grew up we don't have friends we don't have a family network around us so and often two parents are working yeah so you've got this really stressful situation where everyone's trying to do that the best that they can

they're trying to you know make enough money to feed themselves to house themselves they're also trying to spend enough time with their children yet they have have no support. So there's a huge amount of pressure then that goes on to the kids, but also on the parents. And I think I saw you talk last night at the Tabernacle in London. It was an amazing talk. And you mentioned a little bit about hunter-gatherer societies and how for the bulk of human evolution, we have lived and raised our children a certain way. I wonder

if you could expand on that. Well, again, human beings, some version of human beings have been on the earth for millions of years. They've been hominids for millions of years. They've been human species for hundreds of thousands of years, and our own particular species, probably for about 100,000 years. thousands of years, and our own particular species, probably for about 100,000 years, Homo sapiens, which is the latest and the only current human species that's extant. For all of that prehistory, until about 9,000 years ago, virtually all human beings lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. This is a revolution. This is how we became human beings so to think that no no you might liken modern society to a zoo where you take an animal from a natural habitat and you put them

in a completely artificial restricted situation and you expect him to stay as normal as he was out there in the wild essentially that's what's happened to human beings in that in a very short space of time, in the blink of an eye from the perspective of evolution, we've gone from the hunter-gatherer, small band, communal attachment-based group to a society which is alienated, disconnected, and that disconnection is accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world.

Urbanization, it's taking people out of their villages and into the big cities where they're alone. Here in Britain, there was quite a deliberate assault on community under the Thatcher regime with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on. And that trend has continued. So what we're having in is societies that are less and less natural to the actual makeup of human beings from the evolutionary perspective. And which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances. And, you know, Johan Hari, who's written a book recently on depression called Lost Connections, is pointing exactly at what's happening in modern society, so that these lost connections characterize the modern world. And as they do, you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before.

So we think autoimmune disease is one of these, or addictions for that matter. So if you look at the rate of addiction now in countries like China and India, it's going up exponentially precisely because of the... And it's not a question of idealizing the old way of life. No. We can't go back. And of course, there it's not a question of idealizing the old way of life. No.

I mean, we can't go back. And of course, there's all kinds of benefits to progress and industrialization. Trouble is that as we progress, we forget the benefits of, we forget what we've lost. So instead of combining progress, we're trying to hold on to what was best about some of the old ways. We just throw everything out and we think we can reinvent ourselves. And as we do, we're making ourselves sick. Yeah, you're right. And I think it's a really great point to sort of bring up.

We're not saying we need to go back to hunter-gatherer tribes. We can't. Yeah, not only should we not, we can't. And there are so many great benefits of the modern world and as you say industrialization i guess it's it's how do we learn from the past how do we learn from our evolutionary heritage and what can we implement from that within the constraints of the modern world that certainly that's how i see it and you mentioned uh johan harry's new book and you know i i write a huge quarter of my book on stress is about this um it's about relationships and our yeah our lack

of connection these days you know one on one level we are we've been told anyway that we're more connected than we've ever been before and certainly in a digital sense that may be the case but you know when we talk about real human meaningful connection what i see around me with the public but what i also see in my practice as a doctor is i don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely and we're more wired but we're less connected is how i would put it because genuine connection happens between people not between pieces of technology so as you and i are talking to each other, there's a real interaction.

When you speak, I'm looking at you, I'm listening to the modulation of your voice. I may not in agreement or shake my head in disagreement, vice versa, but the communication is taking place on many different levels. That's a connection. If you're never having the same conversation online, it'd be all different different um ball game and

i'd have no idea actually who i'm talking to they'll just be exchanging words so we're wired together but we're not actually connected we're actually disconnected in this world because people are isolated modules sending out messages via the ethernet or the internet um when it comes to addictions it's it's it's that disconnection again um that that leaves us so alone so we're traumatized in the first place we are then um develop we then develop behaviors that soothe our pain but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people because we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and and we furtively seek out our addictive pleasures and that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation that isolation further our pain and that pain further drives our addiction so we live in a society that actually generates addiction in

many of its members. Yeah. It really does, doesn't it? I did a post on my social media channels, I think just yesterday, actually, about friendship. And I was saying that, look, seeing your friends in real life, so not over the internet. In real life is a necessity for human health, not a luxury. And I know myself, I've neglected some of the friendships closest to me over the last few years because I've been busy with my career and my family.

And so, you know, and you sort of see on social media what your friends are doing. So you feel less of a need to actually see them in real life. And I was really surprised with how much that post on social media resonated with people. So many people started interacting and saying, yeah, you know what? I've not seen my friends in months.

Yes, I've maybe had a bit of a text conversation with them, but I'm not seeing them in real life. And this was me trying to sort of challenge everyone to say, hey, look, get a date in the diary now, even if it's in two months time with one of your friends, email them, call them, text them, whatever, but put a date in the diary where you're going to see your friends in real life. And it's crazy, isn't it? That we need to say these things. I mean, these things have always been there in human culture, yet we're now having to talk about them and remind us what has just been our norm for so many thousands, millions of years. And what's interesting, of course, is that on Facebook, we use the same language as we

would in real life. So on Facebook, people have friends. But these friends that we have, these are people we don't know. We have nothing necessarily in common with except maybe certain cultural ideas or interests. And so these friendships aren't genuinely supportive relationships. They're pseudo friendships. And we actually substitute the one for the other. And then on Facebook, people like each other, which again is a substitute for genuine contact. But it's not that they like each other. They don't even know each other. You don't know somebody until you hung out with them. And so we substitute the language of friendship and we substitute the language of connection

for genuine friendship and genuine connection. And then we wonder why we feel so lonely and why we feel so dissatisfied. And why we are seeking pleasure or seeking to numb that discomfort with the choices we're making whether it is heroin cocaine or shopping and sugar yeah yeah because i guess you know a lot of people listen to my podcast are trying to make lifestyle change and a lot of them feel inspired to do so by what they hear but some of them

um i know are struggling well you know i'm very interested in language and even the phrase lifestyle change it's not lifestyle changes people make it's life changes people need to make yeah you can change the style but style is a rather superficial thing you know the style of clothing you know. It's the life changes that people need. And we need to help people see the life changes that are required, not the lifestyle changes they need to require. It's the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change,

not the external behaviors. And lifestyle largely refers to behaviors, but not necessarily a transformation within. And really to deal with addiction, it's not a question of dealing with the lifestyle, it's a question of dealing with the life. And it's a question of really owning the life, that this is my life, and I'm the one who needs to be the agent of my own life. And here are the reasons why the wound, or trauma is another word for wound, actually. So the wounding that I received as a child has had me behave in certain ways.

It's not those behaviors I need to change. I need to heal that wound. I need to change my life. And then the life behavior changes will automatically follow. You really got me thinking about language, actually, the life behavior changes will automatically follow. You really got me thinking about language, actually, because two terms that I use very commonly in my work, whether it's hypertension or lifestyle,

you've just, you know, in seconds, reframed what those words actually mean. And I wonder where that comes from. You know, you're an immigrant to North America. Where has this fascination with language come from? Well, I think as an immigrant, you get to see the language a bit more clearly than the people who are actually in it. And you get to see the construction of language. And by the way, in my secret life, I used to be an English teacher. So I did that before I went to medical school. So I've always paid a lot of attention to language. And language very often unconsciously expresses realities and truths

that when you pay attention to it are revealing. And so words should never, even the word addict, the word addiction actually comes from a Latin phrase for slavery. So... A slave to the pain. Well, the original meaning was an addictus, it comes from the word to assign.

Now, in the Roman world, when you couldn't pay a debt, you would be assigned as a slave to somebody until you worked off the debt. So you'd be an addictus. Somebody was assigned to somebody. So that's the origin of the world so it implies slavery so we actually understand that that addict refers or originates

in the word for slavery we realize that it's not a choice because who would who would ever choose to be a slave you know so i think language is absolutely revelatory if you understand the sources and meanings of words. Yeah. Yeah, very much so. Gerard, I want to go to something you did last night in your talk, which, you know, I went out for dinner with my friends afterwards. We all attended it and we were all talking about it, which was you peppered throughout the evening. You said, if there is anyone in here who feels they have some form of addiction without childhood trauma and you're happy to talk about it, please raise your hand.

And at the end, you actually found someone who quite confidently put their hand up and was pretty nonchalant that they had a happy childhood. And so you started inquiring into her childhood. And I remember the tone of her voice initially was very much, you said, you know, you have a happy childhood. Yes, happy childhood. Parents said, yeah, parents absolutely love me. You know, really sort of very vocal about how great her childhood was. And then it wasn't long before it became clear that actually she felt that her parents really loved each other and sometimes she was intruding on them that's right and i think it was really powerful for the whole audience of 300 to see how you know

how we all potentially tell ourselves a certain narrative stories that we continue telling ourselves and you know she obviously maybe is a fan of your work she's come here she's come to watch you speak but hadn't reflected on her own experience and i wonder you know what's going on there so what's happened here is that this woman said she had this happy childhood but within a couple of minutes and, you know, my mantra is

not by the addiction but by the pain and so I always say that there's pain underneath it and I said to the audience it never takes more than three minutes to drill down

to where the pain is. You just have to ask the right questions. And I've got to say about a minute in, I thought maybe this is the first one who Gabriel won't get to.

You know, I actually thought because she was so confident in her answers. Anyway, please continue. Well, that confidence itself is a giveaway. Yeah. Because it's an assumed stance to protect herself from the pain that she doesn't want to feel or she's afraid to feel. So she said, well, maybe I felt I was intruding on my parents. And in other words, really what she felt was that she wasn't accepted and loved for who she was. And when she felt unhappy, there was nobody for her to talk to.

And all you have to do is ask that person, if your own child did the same thing, how would you understand it? And they totally get it. So what's going on there? She's not lying. But believing that she had a happy childhood was her way of dealing with her pain. Because if she dropped that idea, she'd have to realize that she suffered. And she actually, as much as her parents did their best and loved her, we're not blaming the parents. But she herself got the impression that she was alone and unsupported and unloved for who she was.

But that's very painful. So we defend against the pain by suppressing those emotions and developing this ideology of the happy childhood. And so that's just another form of self-defense. And then, given her ideology that she had a happy childhood, she can't understand why she turned to an addiction. but once she gets that yeah okay that belief that i was happy denies the fact that i was feeling isolated and alone and i felt myself as an as an intrusion on my parents yeah now she can understand what her pain was but but not feeling that pain was how she survived her childhood because as a child how would she survive if she believed that she was in love for who she was life would be intolerable for her so she has to deny and

suppress that so she had an appropriate response to the signals that were given to her that's exactly what you said before and that's exactly what happened with her so that that suppression of her pain and denial of it is a completely appropriate defensive response. These are not mistakes that we make. These are essential survival adaptations. The problem is then we spend a whole, because we learned how to ignore our feelings as children, now we learn to ignore them for the rest of our lives. And that then creates problems for us. So again, it's that whole idea of an early adaptation,

essential adaptation, brilliant adaptation, but because it's unconscious, it stays with us, and now it limits our lives. So we become imprisoned with our own adaptations. Our childhood patterns become the prison through which we live our lives. So hopefully last night for her might have been a key step potentially in her now being able to really go out and seek real healing, transformative healing.

Hopefully, touch wood. Touch wood. But I would say that the very fact that she came to the talk and the very fact that she raised her hand, she was already working at it. Yeah. Because she didn't have she raised her hand she was already working at it yeah because she didn't have to raise her hand yeah so if she did it meant that she already had a curiosity about it yeah so she'd already taken the first step yeah absolutely okay well in your in your book uh in the realm of hungry ghosts i think is it the second chapter where you talk about um a funeral

you go to of one of your uh someone you were looking after an addict a 35 year old or overdosed yeah and i will let you tell the story but um one thing it really illustrates to me is how how you know addiction is on a on a spectrum of course but how powerful that addictive that that addictive drive is for some people and i just wonder if you could expand on that because that was really really interesting so this woman's real name was shannon which i can tell now she was 35 and she was a beautiful woman as a young woman when i met her she was already fading She was in her mid-30s or early 30s when I met her. She had severe opiate addiction. And because she injected,

she had blood-borne infection in one of her knees. So she had osteomyelitis, a joint infection or a bone infection in her knee bones. She needed to be hospitalized for intravenous antibiotic care, but she could never be hospitalized long enough. She had to leave and use, and every time she left and used, she was expelled from the hospital. So her osteomyelitis was never treated. Expelled from the hospital? Expelled from the hospital because she...

She wasn't engaging in treatment? Well, she was leaving the hospital to use. Right. So therefore they wouldn't treat her? So, yeah, so she wouldn't… they didn't want her using her IV lines for shooting. No. Since then, we've developed a facility where people can have intravenous antibiotics and use if they need to. But this is before the days of that particular facility. So out of the regular hospitals, she'd be regularly kicked out

before her six or eight weeks of antibiotics treatment was completed. So by the mid thirties, and they were actually talking about amputating the knee because there's nothing more they could do. And so by the mid thirties, she was in a wheelchair and she would quickly wheel her wheelchair down the street looking for her next hit. She left the Downtown Eastside for six months,

and she actually got clean. And then she came back, and within three days was dead of an overdose. Because what happened, of course, is that she used the same amount she had used before she left the Downtown Eastside, but now she was detoxed. So she'd lost her tolerance. So you would understand what I mean by that. So the same dose that she could tolerate prior to leaving the Downtown Eastside, now that she was free of drugs, that same dose killed her. And so we wrote her a funeral and there's all these friends of hers, each of them with their HIV or their hepatitis C or their chronic infections. And they're mourning their friend. And I'm thinking how powerful the drive of the addiction is that this young woman would shed her life for the sake of that next hit. And her friends who are watching her being buried and memorialized

are going to continue using despite this dire example. Yeah, they're going to continue using despite seeing that. Just seeing that wasn't enough to go, right, we're going to change our behavior now. And which is why anybody who thinks this is a choice is out of their minds. Anybody who thinks this is a choice is out of their minds. Nobody would choose to blight and endanger their lives like that. And so this is what made me thinking, well, what is this powerful drive? I mean, it must be really deeply built in to the human brain and the human soul for people to engage in this behavior, despite all this deterrence that they witness around them.

And so what made that event powerful for me was the starkness of the experience of these people and the social idea that somehow this is any kind of a choice. Wow. I mean, it's incredible to hear that actually. And certainly me and maybe all the listeners on some level in their lives may know, maybe not to the same degree as that, but may know what that drive feels like when you know you shouldn't be doing something, but you choose to do it nonetheless. Well, I know that.

I mean, i've had that in my own life and and there's something in you that knows you shouldn't be doing it it's almost recently i i i became aware of a form of therapy called internal family systems oh my god that's what i'm doing at the moment ifs yeah it's incredible dick schwartz's stuff yeah yeah i've had two or three sessions and it's been brilliant for me so far. Amazing. Yeah. So I met the founder of it recently.

We've become good friends. But I've learned the technique to some degree. I'm not an official practitioner of it, but I'm quick to catch on. So in internal time systems, you realize there's these different parts of you. And these different parts form like a squabbling family. Some of them like each other, some of them don't like each other. So there's a part of me that can watch the other part doing its thing, knowing that he shouldn't be doing it, but feels quite helpless to intervene. So I watch myself, like for example, when I am supposed to be working, looking after

clients, but instead I watch myself go to the store to engage in my shopping addiction. I'm not unaware of what's happening. There's a part of me that's watching it, disapproving of it, wanting me not to do it, but that part is not strong enough to assert itself. The part that's driving the behavior is leading, is driving the boat. And so it's a question of becoming friendly with all these parts, finding out what is it they really want, what are they after, and the part that's driving me to do the shopping when I should be looking after my patients

is a part that really is desperate for me to feel the shopping when I should be looking after my patients is a part that really is desperate for me to feel good for a moment. That's all I want. It just wants to be happy. It's not an evil part. It just wants to be happy. And it's not a question of indulging it, but it's a question of really getting to know it.

And understanding it. Understanding it and actually being compassionate with it. And then teaching it, you know what, it's okay, but this guy can be happy without indulging in that behavior. He doesn't need to do that. You may think he does, but he doesn't. I think compassion is something that's coming up quite a lot, isn't it? As a society, how do we deal with addiction no matter what it is instead of locking people up because we've deemed them to have a

illegal addiction yeah we should be treating them with compassion but we should also be treating ourselves with compassion i think and not beating ourselves up over the choices we make because often you know they're just a protective mechanism Well, so you mentioned a number of times the question of the arbitrariness of which drugs we choose to illegalize. As physicians, tell me if you disagree with me, but give me a thousand people who smoke heavily every

day, pack a day. Give me another thousand who drink heavily every day. Give me a thousand who smoke cannabis every day and give me a thousand who shoot heroin four times a day in a dose that doesn't create an overdose. At the end of 30 years, in which groups are we going to see more disease and death amongst those four groups alcohol probably alcohol and the smoking, the cigarette smoking by far

these are far more lethal drugs than the heroin and the cannabis but they're okay aren't they, they're legal yeah, now heroin it's true if you overdose it'll kill you but I'm talking about in doses many of the overdoses happen because people are having to shoot up in back alleys with who know what impurities. What if we gave them their heroin, as they do in some clinics in the UK, at least they used to, and prescribed doses that keeps them from going into withdrawal, but doesn't overdose them? that group will be far healthier 30 years later. So by what arbitrary standard have we decided

that it's okay for people to murder themselves with cigarettes and alcohol, but they can't use heroin legally? What logic is behind that? It has nothing to do with medicine, for sure. It has nothing to do with health. And I'm not saying we should sell heroin in the streets. I'm talking about the legalization and the criminalization and the ostracization. Why is that drug addict more to be more reprehensible than the person who smokes cigarettes? Where do we get these

ideas from? It's the why, not the what. That's right you know it's and really i mean we were talking about this before before we started recording but you know we're both um on one level we are both just gps we're just family physicians um well the word just has another meaning of what does it mean? We're very just people. We're interested in justice. Yeah, I like it.

I like it. But what I find really interesting, and it's something I talk about quite a lot, is I think we've certainly overvalued the specialists within medicine for far too long and really undervalued the role of the generalists.

And I am very proud to be an expert generalist. And one of the reasons I moved from specialism into general practice, which was a rather unusual decision for many, and certainly my father, who was an immigrant to the UK, and was really shocked as to why his son would do that, qualify as a specialist and then move to generalism. And it was a demotion in his mind a specialist, and then move to generalism. And it was a demotion in his mind.

Yeah, I think he was just confused. And I understand that. And I think the doctors of the future, the healthcare practitioners of the future who are going to have the best outcome with their patients are the ones who are expert generalists and can see everything. And I know we're running short on time, so we will hopefully continue this at another time because there's so much to talk about. But I do find interesting that you're one of the world's leading voices

on trauma and addiction, and you're a family practitioner. And a lot of what you do with your patients, you have intuitively picked up and you've also got a skill at you know i think maybe the word counseling is the wrong word you've um you do a lot of emotional work with your patients and i'm finding the more i understand about the human body and the more i really understand what's driving my patient's behavior i'm doing a lot of emotional work with them and yes of course referring them to an appropriate practitioner where where you know where it's where it's needed where someone's got that expertise but that wasn't my job i didn't

train to do that but i figured out as someone who's really inquisitive as to how can i get my patient better i find well i have to go there because if it's with the importance well so i think you and i are both properly and dramatically impressed by the capacities and skills of our very specialist colleagues absolutely it's amazing what they can do so this is not without this is without any sense of diminishing or devaluing their work. Of course. But they're trained in a certain ideology, which is purely biological based. So they look upon the human body as a physiological entity divided into various organs and systems.

And that's what they deal with. And what they're not taught is that human beings, the mind and the body, the emotions and the physiology are inseparable, scientifically inseparable. And we have the science to show the unity. They're also not taught that human beings are social creatures so that our very physiology is shaped by our social relationships. and our very brains develop in a social context so that whether we talk about neurophysiology, psychology, or the physiology of the body, we're talking about influences that go well beyond our genetic and physiological endowment. They're not taught that, and therefore when they see a person, what they see is a disease in a particular organ. Whereas if you're a generalist, a properly trained or at least a generalist who's developed a broader view, you see that human being in context, you see it

in relationship to their lives, in relationship to their environment. And you see that the illness, whether it's addiction or depression or anxiety, or for that matter, rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma or anything else, is a manifestation not just of a system but of an entire life. And that life is lived in a context. And we have to address that if we're going to deal with the illness. And unfortunately, both you and I have had the experience of having to come to that conclusion through our own work and through our own internal experience of this satisfaction with our lives we're going, but nobody taught

this to us. And yet this is the way that the... So the average medical student, despite all the trauma that you and I have discussed today, particularly in relationship to addiction and all the research showing how the addicted brain develops in response to the environment and how the addiction itself is a response to the environment. The average medical student in North America, and I would argue probably in Britain, doesn't even hear the word trauma once in four years of medical school. I mean, did you hear the word trauma when you went to school? I don't think I heard it until a few years ago, frankly.

You know, let's learn at medical school. And it's not a word that they should hear. It's a course they should have. Every physician should be deeply trained in trauma because everything they see, virtually everything they see, has got a traumatic connection to it, particularly in the mental health field. But I would say in the physical health field as well,

they don't even hear the word. So essentially, when a person goes to a physician they go to somebody with very deep but very limited knowledge who does not see the whole individual who's not trained to see the whole individual even even the fact that we say physical health and mental health as two separate things is almost a reflection of that in many ways that's right you know because they're not different are they and again i heard world health is interesting because what's the origin of world health? It's wholeness.

Wholeness. So to talk about physical health is already a contradiction because you can't talk about physical wholeness. Wholeness means everything. Yeah. Oh, I love it. I love it thinking about it like that.

Look, Gabriel, for many people listening, we've gone through some quite dark stuff, hopefully illuminating for people, but potentially dark and quite demoralizing, potentially for some people in terms of them thinking about their own lives, potentially what they might have inadvertently passed on to their own children. I know certainly the first time I saw you speak, you automatically start to think about your own ability as a father and what you could have potentially done better all the time, remembering that you've done the best that you can at that time. I wonder if we can finish off with a few notes of positivity for people that there is hope and there are things that we can do

to help change this. Well, first of all, I don't see this as a gloomy discussion because I think for people to understand themselves, they need to look at all aspects of their existence. So to me, this is illuminating. And St. Paul says somewhere that once you shed light into darkness, the darkness itself becomes light. And so I just think we have to look at all these dark places. We have to shed light into all of them

so we can fully understand ourselves. To me, that's a positive. I'm always delighted to find out something about myself that maybe I haven't seen so clearly before. I always find it liberating, and I believe people do as well. Number one, number two, what we haven't said, though,

and I think probably both you and I would agree, is that the human beings have a tremendous healing capacity. Yeah. And one of the failures of modern medical training is that we put all the expertise and the hope for help into the hands of the physician. The physician is the one who's going to deliver the cure. But we don't teach people about the innate healing capacity of the human being. And we don't learn how do you promote that healing capacity. We may have to administer whatever treatments are appropriate and whatever genius treatments we have developed. That's great.

But nevertheless, that person still has an innate healing capacity. How do we engage in it? How do we evoke it? How do we encourage it? That's not a question that we ask ourselves. And yet there's many examples of people healing or doing much better with illnesses than medical prognosis would have told them. Now look at the recent case of the recent death of Stephen Hawking, the physicist who I discuss in one of my books. Now he was given two years to live when he was 20 years old.

He outlived his diagnosis by more than five decades. Something in him allowed him to do that. Something in him that the medical mind could not have fathomed at the time. So there's much more to people than we realize. And so we have to have a lot more faith and a lot more curiosity. What is it in people that allows them to overcome the challenge of addiction? What is it that helps them live much longer than we had predicted? What is healing? What is becoming whole really all about? These are the questions that medicine ought to engage with, but unfortunately it does not. So I think your work and your podcast and your books,

as I understand them, and the same thing with me, are designed to help people find within themselves that which can empower them to support their own healing. And we can't say that strongly enough. Yeah, absolutely. Now, thanks for that, Cable. For people who are listening, maybe something you've said has really deeply struck a chord with them about their own life. And they want to go on that journey, but don't know how. Have you got any words of advice as to how they can start, even listening to this and starting to be aware, of course, is a very critical first step.

But where can they go next? Well, so you and I are both authors, and I would highly recommend they check out our books first. Because I think, and in my case, I hope they check out my books. Because there's a lot of what I know and what I've learned that I've poured into my books. And a lot of people find a lot of self-knowledge just by seeing the mirror that's held up in my writings or in my multiple YouTube talks, for example. Now, where do they go in their own lives? I actually think that once people start asking these questions, they find the answers in their own lives. In other words, there's an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

And I think there's many modalities of healing that are practiced here in Britain or anywhere else in the world that once you start seeing the limitations without rejecting the value, but seeing at the same time the limitations of mainstream medicine, start looking outside it a little bit or start finding practitioners within mainstream medicine that have a broader view. In other words, go where the help is and don't assume that because somebody's got a degree after their name that they know everything that needs to be known. In other words, become the agent in your own healing. Once people take that on, generally they find help. I can't give them a specific go- to accept that once you start asking the right

questions the answers will start coming yeah i love the way you put that and as i always say on this podcast i i want to empower and inspire people to become the architects of their own health exactly um and i think that's really really important particularly what you said about don't just assume because someone's got a qualification or a series of letters after their name that actually they're going to be the right ones to help you um yeah i mean so much more i want to talk about but i think um in the interest of time we're gonna have to stop it there today um i've got to say gabriel i think your work is phenomenal i really genuinely do i think it's got huge potential to help uh i'm to say thousands, but really millions of people around the globe.

I think this book that has been released in the UK, which has obviously been a huge bestseller for about, what, 10 years now, something like that? Well, you said all over the world. In fact, it's been published only in North America. Really? Some of my books, like When the Body Says No, has appeared in 25 languages.

But this one has been published only in North America and my home country of Hungary. But wherever it is published, it is a bestseller. And I know tens of thousands of people, more have been helped by them. I get that feedback. Even that introduction you've written for the UK edition, I couldn't put it down, actually. And it was just amazing to really capture the essence of it and the lives that you have changed from people who have just actually able to reflect on their own lives

just from reading the book. So I really would highly recommend that people buy the book and actually I think it's going to help your own life. It might even help someone close to you. Gabor, where can people find you apart from your books? Is there somewhere they can follow you online? So I have a website, Dr. Gabor Mate, where all my public speaking engagements, many of my articles, YouTube lectures are available. Chapters of my books are downloadable. No cost to any of that. There's no cost to anything. Or they can just go on YouTube, put in my name,

and I have many dozens of lectures that people have filmed and put on YouTube. Again, there's no cost to any of that. And I speak about addiction, child development, stress and health, the relationship between social factors and illness. So I'm very easy to find on social media. I also have a facebook wall whatever that means that people people i because i don't post anything but somebody does on my behalf that people can follow so i'm easily identifiable and and discoverable online and

what i'll do is in the show notes page for this episode of the podcast which will be drchastity.com forward slash gabor g-a-b-o-r i will link to everything that um gabor and i have discussed today on the episode and i'll just i'll link to your website and your various talks so to make it really easy for people to find so so let me just say around that um as you as you may have found yourself in the beginning when your mind starts opening to new possibilities, it's a bit of a lonely journey within the medical field. Because most of your colleagues just aren't aware, they're not open to what you're talking about. run across a colleague who quite at all without knowing each other we just find ourselves tilling the same soil and and and and mining the same veins and trying to discover the same truths which only speaks to the the nature of truth and how it just asserts itself yeah but it's always such a pleasure to meet somebody who's done some of the same work and is looking in the same directions because both you and I, as confident as I am in my ideas and you seem to be in yours, we still need validation.

So it's really wonderful to meet somebody who really is asking the same questions. I can't say what that means to me, coming from someone like yourself. It's a huge honour for me to be here today and talk to you. And I look forward to the next time. Thank you. Likewise. Thank you. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. A key message to remember from today is that this is not about blame. Everyone is doing the best that they can. This is about compassion and understanding. I really hope you connected with the conversation and that perhaps it has helped you understand

some of your own behaviours a little bit better. I know it has done for me. I think that this is a conversation that many of you will want to revisit again. I genuinely believe that the content in today's episode is relevant for pretty much all of us and that it will almost certainly change the lives of people close to you. Please do consider sharing this episode with someone who you feel may benefit. It may be a parent, a work colleague, a sibling, a partner, or a friend.

An easy way to do this is to take a screenshot right now and share on your social media channels or simply text the link to this episode to your network. For those of you who like watching videos, I managed to video the entire conversation today and you can watch it all on my YouTube channel at drchastjee.com forward slash YouTube. There is also a link to the video interview on the show notes page, which for today's episode is drchastjee.com forward slash Gabor. That's G-A-B-O-R. My team and I really do spend a lot of time putting these show notes pages together based on your feedback. If you have never checked them out before, please do take a look. It is a resource that we create for you to continue your learning experience once the podcast is over.

Everything Dr. Matej and I talked about will be there, including links to all of his books, many of his articles and YouTube videos. So please do check it out at drchastity.com forward slash Gabor. If you have been feeling tired and struggling with energy recently, I have created a free six-part video series to help you. You can access all of the videos at drchastity.com forward slash energy. Stress came up a lot in today's conversation. We also spoke about a lack of human connection in the modern world and how this impacts our relationships and our health. I cover these topics in great detail in my book, The Stress Solution,

which will help you identify where stress is present in your life. And most importantly, I give you plenty of take-home strategies to help lower your stress levels so that you can live a happier and calmer life. The Stress Solution is available to order now in paperback as well as audiobook, which I am narrating. For those of you new to the podcast, my first book, The Four Pillar Plan, is all about helping people

to make simple and accessible lifestyle change. It has literally inspired thousands of people to make lifestyle change that many had previously thought unachievable. If you don't have a copy yet, please do consider picking one up. For those of you listening in the US and Canada, it has been released over there with a different title, How to Make Disease Disappear. That's it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I will be back next week with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel

better, you live more. I'll see you next time.