Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Dr Gabor Maté on Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture #294

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Today I’m excited to welcome Dr Gabor Maté back to the podcast for a third time. Gabor is a fellow physician, author, speaker and friend who brings warmth and wisdom to every conversation we have. He’s a renowned expert on addiction, trauma, stress and childhood development – and someone with a unique understanding of how our spiritual, emotional and physical lives are connected.   Gabor’s latest book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture is quite simply a masterpiece, which has the potential to help people the world over. It connects two of the most important factors in modern health – individual trauma and the pressures of modern-day living.   During this conversation, we discuss the prevalence and nature of addiction. We ask what ‘normal’ means these days when it comes to health. And why it is that success rarely equates with contentment.   Gabor defines childhood trauma and we discuss how parents can be aware of what causes it – but, importantly, why they shouldn’t look back and feel shame or blame. He shares some very personal insights that demonstrate that he’s as human as the rest of us, and how he’s found peace today.   We talk about self-awareness as a key factor in being a good doctor; why ‘psychosomatic’ should be a diagnosis not a dismissal, and how stress burdens the body, undermines immunity and causes emotional distress. Gabor shares some fascinating new research on the different personality traits that link to chronic disease. And he gives his view on why 80% of all autoimmune disease is seen in women.   This was a very special conversation, one which I hope you will find comforting, motivating and full of hope. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/294 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Addiction is the most human thing there is. And my contention is that all addictions, they're not primary problems, they're not inherited diseases, they're not aberrations, they're not moral failures. They're attempts to gain pain relief, emotional pain relief for something or another. And so the first question in addiction for me is not why the addiction, but why the pain? Hello, how's it going? I hope you are having a good week so far.

My name, of course, is Rangan, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Now, today's conversation is with someone who I met in person for the first time back in 2018, and he's someone who I now have the great privilege of calling a friend, Dr. Gabor Mate. Gabor is a fellow physician and author. He's a renowned expert on addiction, trauma stress and childhood development and he's someone with a quite unique understanding of how our spiritual,

emotional and physical lives are connected. Now if you you're a long-time listener, you'll know that Dr. Gabor Mate has been on this podcast two times in the past. Two of the most downloaded episodes in this podcast's history, which really is unsurprising as the topics that Gabor speaks to are things that affect every single one of us. The occasion for this third conversation on my show is the release of his brand new book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, co-written with his son Daniel, which is quite simply a masterpiece. During our conversation, we discuss the prevalence and nature of addiction, why it is that success rarely equates with true contentment. We talk about childhood trauma. Gabble shares his definition and we discuss what parents need

to know about it and also why it's crucial that parents don't look back and feel shame or blame. Gabble also opens up and shares some very personal insights that demonstrate he's as human as the rest of us and how he's found peace today. We cover so many different fascinating topics in our conversation, including the impact of stress on our bodies and our immune systems, how our personality traits are often not fixed, and why 80% of all autoimmune disease is seen in women. This really was a special conversation, one that I hope you'll find comforting, motivating, and full of hope. I hope you enjoyed listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Gabor Mate. You're known around the world for many things.

You're certainly known as an expert in addiction. As we have this conversation now in 2022, given how many countries you've spoken in, given to the thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people you've gone around the world and communicated with, would you go as far as to say that pretty much all of us in Western society are addicted to something?

Well, your words about what it means to be a human being really speak to me because addiction is the most human thing there is. And you understand it when you don't understand it looks like an aberration and abnormality and some kind of a moral deviation but when you understand it it's a very human thing so let's just define addiction as manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves and continues with it despite negative consequences. So the definition then involves pleasure, relief, craving in the short term, harm in the long term, inability to give it up despite the harm.

Now, by that definition, of course, we're not just talking about drugs, we're talking about all manner of behaviors from sex to pornography to gambling to eating to shopping to the internet to gaming to self-cutting to work as probably as a physician, you know, and to any number of other activities. and my contention is that all addictions they're not primary problems they're not inherited diseases they're not aberrations they're not more failures they're attempts to gain pain relief emotional pain relief for something or another and so the first question in addiction for me is not why the addiction but why the pain and so we have to look at why the pain,

you have to look at people's lives, their life experience, their traumas, their adversity, their suffering. And so that's why I say that. Now, when you talk to other people, what did you get from your addiction? They'll say peace of mind. They'll say connection with other people. They say sense of control. They say stress relief.

They say sense of control they say stress relief they say sense of purpose those are all supreme human qualities in fact their qualities that we all want in fact have every right to expect so that's why i said there's nothing more human than addiction now problem of course, is it creates more pain. But the impulse is simply, the addict just wants to feel like a normal human being. That's all. Yeah. It's such a profoundly different way of looking at addiction compared to, I think, the norm in society. Certainly, the way many people view addicts.

There's a certain view, isn't there? The addict is on the street corner, it's homeless, it's destitute. Yet we often don't want to put that mirror up and look at our own lives and go, oh, wow, by your definition, by that definition, there's probably very few of us who can honestly hold our hands

up and say at some point in our life we weren't addicted to something i think in this society hardly anybody hence in part hence the title of my book the myth of normal like we think that so many things are normal then there's the abnormal people who are different from us i'm saying that that's a myth that that from the from the most abject and most dependent and most ill drug addicted people that i worked with in vancouver canada to the most elevated segments of society addictions are just rife and and we're completely are blind when we choose one segment of the population to ostracize and to punish and to feel superior to and what we're really doing is denying our own humanity when we do that there's all manner of different things that people can be addicted to yeah i want to talk about one which i don't think is spoken about enough, and that's

online pornography. It is something that I think is, it's just seeping there underneath. People aren't talking about it. I remember one of my patients, not that long ago, this young man, he couldn't look at me, Gabor. He couldn't look him in the eye. So ashamed. young man he couldn't look at me gabble he couldn't look him in the eye so ashamed so ashamed and he was just sharing me how he was addicted to online pornography yeah and um when i asked him has he opened up with anyone is he shared with anyone no hasn't told a single person i was the first person he told and what was really interesting as I got to know him and I built up trust with him and rapport when he knew that he could open up with me and I wasn't going to judge him or invalidate him or

look down on him. Actually for this particular chap in his life, he was very isolated. He didn't have a tribe. He didn't have a community. There was no part of his life where he felt like he belonged. And for him, the ultimate solution was actually joining a boxing club. It wasn't just the physical activity. It was the tribe he got. I remember he said to me, Gabbo, he says, you know, before I joined the boxing club, if someone said to me, do 10 press-ups, I wouldn't do a single one. But in a boxing gym, 10 means 10.

And my conclusion with him was simply that he was missing a tribe. He was missing community. So in the hole that left inside him, he decided to fill that hole with online pornography. It was a symptom of the problem, which really speaks to what you just said. Well, a number of things come up as I listen to this anecdote. One is the compassion that's required for people to open up and to actually heal.

And so one of my teachers says, only when compassion is present will people love themselves to see the truth. And so I know that one of your three core values that you often talk about is compassion. And that's what this man needed to be able to open up and share and to look at himself honestly. That's the first thing. The second thing is when you study people addicted to pornography,

they're not actually after the pornography. It's not about sex. It's about a temporary spike of dopamine in their brain. Dopamine being the brain chemical that makes us feel alive and vital and present and excited and curious now so the end of it something happened to this man to shut down that mechanism so he needed the extreme stimulation and titillation of pornography

to get that dopamine spike so he can feel really alive he just wanted to feel alive that's all he wanted then he connects with the boxing community and he gets himself going physically and him in spikes so he can feel really alive. He just wanted to feel alive. That's all he wanted. Then he connects with the boxing community and he gets himself going physically and he gets his engagement with the group. All of a sudden he gets his needs met in a much healthier way. So again to

criticize him and ostracize him and to shame him as he shamed himself. He just wanted to feel like a normal human being. That's all he wanted. And that's the thing with addictions. There's a certain hierarchical kind of preference we give to them. Certain things are acceptable addictions.

Certain things are not. Pornography is not an acceptable addiction. Heroin is not an acceptable addiction. But it's okay to be addicted to Instagram. It's okay to be addicted to consumption and shopping. Or power. Or power. Yeah. One of the big messages I feel the new book really makes a strong case for is that we're living in a society that has as its core some values that are not conducive to good physical mental and

emotional health right and it takes a lot of pressure off the individual it doesn't mean that the individual can do nothing about it but i think it helps people realize why they're struggling so much well i know that a real core value for you is authenticity, and being oneself, being truly oneself. And I know that you've been through some struggle in your own life to become yourself or to realize who you were and to let go what wasn't. Certainly that's been my pattern and struggle and commitment as well. This is a society that fundamentally demands of people that they be other than who they are.

This is a society that fundamentally demands of people that they be other than who they are. Because the demand, the expectations that we fit in into structures and workplaces and educational institutions and families and social settings, where if we ourselves, we risk being rejected. So that there's almost a universal demand for self-suppression, which is we both, you and I know, creates both mental and physical health problems.

So that the core values of the society, which are fundamentally materialistic, individualistic, aggressive and competitive, they go against what it really means to be a human being. And when you look at how we evolved as human beings, like if you want to study a zebra, where would you study him? If you want to understand his true nature, would you study him in the London Zoo? Or would you study him out in the savannah where wherever he or she lives? Well, you'd have to study him in the natural environment.

In our natural environment, I'm talking about eons and millions and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and even about 90% of our own existence as a species. We lived out in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups. Connected, engaged, belonging, connected to nature,

connected to our gut feelings. We had to be otherwise we wouldn't survive. That's what it means to be a human being. Now, we can adapt to other environments, but that doesn't mean that we can thrive in them as well. And so that, in a sense, what I'm saying about our species, we're like zoo creatures right now.

We're living in an unnatural environment. I'm not suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers, but I am suggesting we realize what we've lost and how the particular social system in which we live right now demands that we stay lost. That's my whole point. Once our eyes get open to this, because as you mentioned, for much of my life, I've been blind to this. I felt that success was important being competitive was important being a winner was important and as i've shared a lot of these behavioral adaptations to my own childhoods i find an innocence of peace and contentment and calm that i never had before yeah and actually what's really interesting is as you do that,

a lot of the addictive tendencies I had, they fall away. Not because you're trying to. You're not trying to stop the addiction. This is kind of what I feel a lot of the time with, let's say something like alcohol. And as medical doctors, we say, you know, this is the limit. You should drink under 14 units of alcohol a week or whatever it is,

which frankly, I find a lot of public health guidance quite unhelpful. I understand the need for it. But A, it's dry. B, there's no understanding within that of what role does the alcohol play in that person's life. And I feel the classic case of something like alcohol is New Year. People decide on January the 1st that this year is gonna be different. I'm not gonna fall into the trap I fell in before, I'm gonna cut down my intake. And they do for the first week and the second week,

and they're not drinking at all. But by the third week, when the stress of work is still there, when the toxic relationship that they're in is still there, when the toxic relationship that they're in is still there, when the boss that doesn't value them is still there, it starts to creep in because the alcohol is playing a role, right? Serving a need. And coming back to this cultural point, you mentioned where would you study a zebra, right? I think there's a key point here. Who are we as humans? Many of us feel that we are competitive right

and conversation is something i think a lot about yeah right as someone who used to be competitive who is no longer competitive really i can put my hand on my heart and say yeah i'm not competitive anymore that was a that was a trait i developed that's right but some people say competition is natural and i i guess my view is that it comes down to the relationship you have with that competition so can you speak a little bit to competition well yeah well first of all i know something about your personal history which is that you know being immigrants from the subcontinent here to to the uk and your parents with all their goodwill, they put this pressure on you to excel.

I think I heard you say once that if you only got 99% of the test, your mother would say, what's wrong? How come you can get 100? You have to be the best. You have to be the best. Yeah. Now, they did that out of their anxiety that you just con see in this world in which you came with some disadvantage being immigrants and maybe

people of color as well. But as a result, you become competitive. That's not your nature, that's just your second nature. But even in the phrase second nature, there's an implication that there's a first nature. And

the first nature is you just are a human being, you want to belong, no competition. It depends what the intention is. If it's a competition, in the sense that you want to manifest your best, and in a sense you're competing with yourself, not to be better than anybody else, not to beat or to dominate or to subjugate

or exclude somebody else, but just because you just want to be your best. Well, that's great. The idea that we're individually competitive creatures really comes along with the rise of capitalism, which is a system based on competition where it is dog-eat-dog and where the bigger fish do swallow the smaller ones.

And as we can see this happening right now with the tremendous rise of inequality in the last decades, eight people in the world now control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of humanity. Now, the interesting thing about human nature is that when people do something selfish or aggressive or competitive, what do we say? Well, that's just human nature. But when people do something selfless and generous and kind, nobody says, oh that's just human nature. So

there's an assumption in this culture and what we do is we take the core values of a particular materialistic culture and we project them onto human beings as if that was our true nature. It isn't. And to the extent that we try to conform to it, we create suffering for ourselves and for others. you know now competition as between Liverpool and Manchester City in this capitalist world even that gets pretty vicious not in the sense of the players being vicious but in a sense of how can we get the best players in the world and who can pay the most money for the best striker and where will Haagland go will

go to Manchester City or Arsenal even on on that level, what is meant to be play, we talk about playing football, but it's no longer play. It becomes a business of dominating others. So whereas it could be just play, which is, and in play there's no consequences to humans and who doesn't. It's just for the process, it's just for the enjoyment, it's just for the process it's just for the enjoyment it's just for the sheer pleasure of the activity the human beings are meant to play there's a circuit in our brain that's designated to play play is essential for human development

for human child development for the brain development but even the play we've made into a competitive cutthroat endeavor. That's how far the nature we've become. I don't know if you are familiar with Johnny Wilkinson, probably one of the world's, certainly one of England's most famous rugby players ever. When Johnny was a little boy, he wrote down his dreams on a piece of paper. He said, I want to play for England, I want to win the World Cup. Now, the problem for Johnny

is that by the age of 24, he'd achieved his dreams, right? So yes, he plays for England. And then he helps England win the World Cup in the most fairytale situation. He kicks the winning goal in the final minute of the World Cup final. The sort of thing that kids all over the world now would dream about doing. He did it, maybe at age of 24. The problem is, is that he said, as the ball left his boot, even before it had gone through the goals,

he starts to go down. I get it. In his mind. The following morning, this is after they won the World Cup, first time in years, national hero, he can't get out of bed.

Lonely, depressed. I find his story incredibly fascinating because he ticked the boxes of what society says you need to do to be happy and successful. Yet it left him with this inner turmoil. And he said something to me, Gabbo, he said many things,

but one thing in particular I remember is he said, I used to play rugby for the joy of the game is to play at some point it changed from being joyful and playful to being something that said something about who i was yeah and he thought winning would say something about him and his relationship to rugby changed yeah it's an incredibly powerful story and it illustrates a point that i've often made is that about him and his relationships of rugby changed. Yeah. It's a very incredibly powerful story. And it illustrates a point that I've often made is that there's two common ways to wake up.

One of them is to fail, but an even more dramatic ways to succeed because then you realize that you've got what you wanted and it's empty. Yeah. Cause it's all been external. And so in a certain sense, people who are succeeding, they're fortunate. Because as long as you're failing, you might keep thinking, if only I succeeded, I'd be happy.

But the people who succeed, then they realize, they have a much more rapid opportunity to wake up. Because now I've got what I wanted and it's nothing. That's still the whole science. Yeah, you and I both know this. We both have been successful physicians as a child or as if your parent could have pictured your future, my future, famous and physician and successful and all this

kind of stuff. But we both know who MT is in itself. No, it doesn't need to be. If it's fulfilling, if it expresses who we are, if it's aligned, as you say, if we're in alignment, then it's great. But it's precisely when we succeed that we find out, was this an alignment or was it not? And often it isn't.

I guess there's that wider point there, which is success. What is that definition of success? Because if we talk about the toxic culture in which we live, many of us around the world live, If we talk about the toxic culture in which we live, many of us around the world live.

Actually, by its metrics of success, society is successful. Making a load of money, people consuming lots of different things, new fashion every three months, people buying clothes they don't need, endlessly consuming things that they don't want. I was thinking the other day about sustainability and the environment and even the word sustainable

and then sustainable products. I was like, yeah, the elephant in the room here is that sure, there's a value to sustainable products, but if we're still over-consuming sustainable products, it's not that sustainable. And what it ignores is that if everybody in what we call the third world, or what we euphemistically call the developing world, consumed at the same level as we do in this world, it would take several Earths to support the population. So even the so-called sustainability is only sustainability so far as it's restricted to a fairly small proportion of

the earth's population and so that in a global sense there's nothing sustainable about it whatsoever people often hear this gaba they hear you speaking or me speaking or whoever saying you know these things don't make us happy yeah jim car, I think, was once quoted as saying, I wish everyone would become rich and famous so they could realize it doesn't make you happy. But the common view from people is, yes, it's okay for you, Jim, to say that. You've had all that success.

Gabor, it's okay for you. You've got all these successful books, millions of people around the world watch your talks. It's okay for you. Or the same thing to me, right's okay for you. Or the same thing to me, right? So I guess the question is, how do we help people see this without having to go to that extreme first? Is it possible? Well, you know, and those people who point that out to us, they're making a valid statement, you know? I agree. It is easy for you and I do this at this

point. All I can say to people is you have to find out for yourself you know when do you feel good about yourself when you're straining for something external or when you're aligned with yourself when you've have got other people's approval even on a limited basis i mean, not everybody's going to be famous, not everybody's going to be in the public eye, but everybody has a certain circle of belonging, a certain circle of engagement. When in that world you get approbation from others,

but you're denying yourself, how do you feel? When you are being yourself, even if others don't approve, how do you feel? When you are being yourself, even if others don't approve, how do you feel? When I say how do you feel, what's happening in your body? And most people, most of the time, if they paid close attention,

they'd realize that when they're being authentic is when they feel really good about themselves. Even if it means, and let's face it, but to be fair to you and I, we didn't exactly make it because we tried to fit in. We made it because we at some point decided that we're just going to speak our truth. And especially as physicians,

you don't immediately get a lot of brownie points for pointing out the shallowness and just limited world view and and actually harmful binary division of mind and body you don't get a lot of accolades within the profession for pointing these things out so it's not like i didn't set out for success, honest to God, I didn't. I wanted it. I'm not denying it. And I had a lot of ego investment in whatever I did.

I did. But fundamentally, that wasn't what was driving me or calling me. What was calling me is I just, once you start seeing certain things, you just want to speak them. And it was that desire to speak my truth

that led to whatever success I've had. And I would guess that something similar is true for you as well. Yeah, 100%. And I think what's so powerful about that is that these things can coexist, right? You can be speaking your truth. You can feel compelled to write a book that the world needs, but you need to write.

That's right. And also like the success that comes with it. It's not either or. It's not either. It's completely selfless. You know, maybe there is a selfish component to these things as well, at least at the start.

At the start, yes. At least at the start. That's certainly been my experience. You know, I felt compelled to speak the truth as I saw it, the frustrations I had within medicine that for so many patients, I think we're underserving them

with our reductionist, simplistic biomedical model without taking into consideration all the other aspects that drive health. But yes, it was my son nearly dying when he was six months old that really drove me to completely change my worldview on what is important. I had to speak up. I thought I had no choice but to speak up. And yes, over the last years,

I've had a high degree of success, whether it's with this podcast or my books, for sure. But over the last two or three years, I've really gone deep, Gabbo. Your words helped me hugely with that, for sure. But also the work of Dick Schwartz and IFS. Yeah, I know. Internal Family Systems has been transformative for me in terms of making peace with various parts of myself. And now, honestly, I sit here before you like a different person to when I first met you three or four years ago.

Like I feel when I met you last time face to face, I feel I had multiple holes in my soul. And we had a great conversation that people enjoyed for sure. But I feel I sit alongside you today, complete and whole. And I've never felt this deep sense of contentment and happiness. I'm so happy for you. When you talk about wholes, there's a teacher of mine that I quote often, A.H. Almas, and he says that we're born with these innate essential qualities. As the world doesn't recognize them or discourages them,

we shut them off and we develop holes instead. Then we spend all our lives trying to fill these holes until we realize that as soon as self-love or self-acceptance or clarity or courage or love for others or sense of belonging or a sense of unity. These get shut down, develop these holes instead. Then this whole society is so expert at selling us stuff to fill those holes temporarily, but only temporarily.

So you have to get getting more and more and more. And the whole society lives on trying to fill people's holes that can never be filled from the outside. This is the whole ethic of this culture in terms of writing the book i was sharing with you before and then writing this one um it it it really wasn't okay i'm gonna write this book and become even more famous uh honest to god because uh i suffered writing this book i mean i I'm not saying this self-pityingly. I'm just telling you what happened. Ten years, I collected 25,000 articles of newspaper reports,

scientific papers, medical journals, and so on. A couple hundred books, 300 interviews. And then three years of writing, like every day. And at times, I sat there, I had nothing to say. I didn't know, there's nothing was coming out of, flowing from the tips of my fingers. And I thought, I can't do this. I talked to Russell Brand once, and Russell said,

remember something, you're not doing this for yourself, you're doing this for the world. And that really helped. Get over your own ego. Just do what you need to do. And at some point I actually weekly talked to a therapist for a couple of months I was so despondent about this feeling that I had I'm gonna do so much I want to say and

then what I want to say is at least I think is so important and I'm not finding the way to to get it out of me so that wasn't done for my pleasure, believe me. That was really done because there's something in me that just wanted to be said. You know, that's so powerful, Gabor, because I think for people to hear that, that you, this esteemed, globally respected physician, when writing this latest book,

and you've written many fantastic books already, right? That you are getting consumed with self-doubt and insecurity about, you know, have I got anything? My blood pressure, which is usually that of a baby's, was going up. I was getting concerned.

Do I have to go on blood pressure? No, of course, I didn't have to go on medication. But it was just the... Finally, somebody said to me, a very wise therapist, she said, your problem is not the book. Your problem is your relationship to the book. And just that rugby player that you mentioned,

I'd allow myself to be totally identified with the book. So my success or my validation of human being depended on how well this book was doing. Well, actually, what's the reality? Let's say if I'd written a lousy book and nobody wanted it. It's not the end of the world. It doesn't change who I am.

It just means that for once I didn't succeed. But it's the identification that had me so anxious. As we have this conversation, you are maybe two months out from publication. Three. It's okay, three months. But this is going to come out when the book's out. Yeah.

A lot of us, we know the right things to say. We've studied this. We know what we should value. Yet we still can't help falling into traps. These traps I think society lays out for us. At this stage in your life, you've heard me say that I think your new book is a masterpiece. And I genuinely mean it from the bottom of my heart. Let's say the book comes out and it's not as successful as I think it's going to be, as maybe you think it's going to be, or maybe your publishers think it's going to be.

Or as I think it should be. Well, yeah, right? As honestly as you can, what would you say is your relationship with that now? If this book tanks when it comes out, what does that say about you? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc which helps support a healthy immune system,

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After all that struggle and all that, this book, it's a long book, but it was double as long when I first finished writing it, my son and I who helped me write it. And we had to cut it and trim it and rewrite it and rewrite, rewrite it. But now, you know what? This is the book I had envisioned 10 years ago when it first occurred to me. So you know what? Now it's out in the world.

Not up to me anymore. But I'm satisfied that I said what I needed to say now. Talk to me four months from now. If the book tanks, how will I be feeling? Probably pretty lousy in some ways. But it's not going to fundamentally affect who I am. And it's not going to really affect my core happiness, my core sense of what my life is about,

my sense of myself. It is not going to affect that. It's going to be okay regardless. I believe you. I honestly believe you. I happen to think it will be a big international bestseller. Yeah. Fear your mouth to God's ears, as they say.

I think it's a must-read book for everyone. But if I may, I'm going to share my own experience with that, which, again, you know, the the wrong, even five years ago, would have felt too shy and insecure about sharing, right? You've touched on some of my childhood story. I know you've read my latest book. You've heard a lot about how I saw myself when I grew up, which was very much, I felt loved and validated when I had high levels of success. It's nobody's fault. My parents did the best that they could. They wanted the best for me. But Little Rongan took on this very, very toxic idea that has led to a very lonely place inside me for much of my life.

Now, like you, I'm someone who has ticked the door to the societal box of success. This is a... Millions listen to this podcast each week. A lot of people buy my books. They've all been Sunday Times bestsellers, right? Yeah. And what was interesting is my latest book, Happy Mind, Happy Life came out, I don't know, two months ago,

two and a half months ago in the UK. Yeah. And you can't write a book like this without doing a lot of self-reflection on yourself. And I remember the week or two before it came out, I was just chatting with people close to me. I was thinking about it. And I genuinely thought, like you've said, Gabbo, this book is the best that I can do at this moment in time. It's exactly what I want it to be. I've really tried to distill a lot of complex ideas

down, make it really simple, very readable, very practical, which is my goal when writing it. How this book does in the world is no reflection of who I am as a human being. If nobody buys this book, it is still a great book. I'm still incredibly proud of it. And it says nothing about who I am. Now, I was pretty convinced that I honestly believe that. But as you've hinted to, we're pretty good as humans at kidding ourselves as well. Yeah, yeah. Now here's the reality.

The book comes out. It's a success. It's the most successful of any book I've ever published. And about a week after it came out, like I got a text from my senior editor saying, hey, Rung, can you give me a call, please? I thought, this is weird. I never get texts like this. So I said, sure. So I called her and she goes, hey, Rung, can you give me a call, please? I thought, this is weird. I never

get texts like this. So I said, sure. So I called her and she goes, hey, Rung, we just found out this Sunday, you're going to be the number one Sunday Times paperback bestseller in the country. Congratulations. Now, the point of me sharing this, and this is where my insecurities come, for sharing something like this, will people think I'm being arrogant? Will they think I'm boasting? I promise from all my heart and soul, this is not the purpose of sharing this. The purpose of sharing this is, in that moment, Gabble,

I didn't feel this artificial ego elevation. I really didn't. I was just quietly content. I could hear her excitement and the team's excitement in the background. I didn't feel it. I know for a fact that five years ago, I would have been jumping through the ceiling.

I would have phoned all my friends. But honestly, I thought, okay, this is awesome. My message is going to get out there to more people. Fantastic. But my wife said, I still need to wash my daughter's sports clothing before school tomorrow. I still need to cook the kids dinner.

And for me, it was a real life test where I thought you're saying the right things. You think this is happening. Now in the actual reality, now look, what would have happened had the book tanked? I don't know because that didn't happen. But for me, that was a really powerful real life scenario where I thought, hey, buddy,

maybe you have actually healed these holes inside yourself because actually you didn't feel it. You didn't feel it like you used to. Well, it's wonderful. You mentioned your wife when you were talking. It made me think of my wife because she has never wanted my success. She wanted me, my success she wanted me the real person and so she as much as she appreciates the success and celebrates it if I get too caught up in it if I start identifying myself with it I have somebody to come home to who knocked me off my pedestal pretty quickly you know know, which is great, you know, you know, and you know, my relationship with Ray is woven throughout the book because it shows up in so many areas of parenting and male-female relationships and why women get chronic illnesses

more than men do and so that we've sort of lived the whole thing. And I have to say, left on my own, my head would be a whole lot bigger than it is. But thanks to... No, of course, I give myself credit. I chose that relationship. And I chose to stay in it. I'd rather have the truth than whatever simulacrum of truth

I could sort of project and blow a balloon like out there in the world. But it's essential because... And I came to success rather late in life. I mean, you're a young whippersnapper compared to me. But here I'm 78 success rather late in life. I mean, you're a young whippersnapper compared to me, you know. But here I'm 78 and I can handle it now. Honest to God, 10 years ago

it would have blown me away. Yeah, it's interesting because I think all these things are relative, right? Because you're saying 10 years ago you would have struggled. But 10 years ago you were still pretty experienced in life, right? I was. And I say, because where I think these things all become relative

is my first appearance on the public stage was in 2015, where I got my own primetime BBC One series called Doctrine in the House, where I go and live alongside families who are struggling with their health for four to six weeks. They've all been under GPs and specialists before. They're all struggling. And without fail, every single family, after six weeks, either their conditions were fully reversed, or they were significantly better, whether it's, you know, type 2 diabetes has been put into remission, fibromyalgia pain's gone in six weeks,

panic attacks down by, all through helping them understand the various drivers in their life that were influencing their health. What does that say about the actual practice of medicine? Because you take something like fibromyalgia, which most physicians,

if they know anything about it at all, they just throw up their hands in frustration. Yeah. Whereas, what I imagine what happened was that the presence of a compassionate witness and physician and guide changed those people's relationship to themselves. And it's that whatever lifestyle choices they may have made that have made them healthier, fundamentally what happened is the transformation of the relationship to themselves. And that's the key to healing, not just in Frabemajor,

but in a whole lot of other conditions as well. And that's something I explore quite a bit. But that's the part that Western medicine doesn't get. And so these so-called miracles turn out not to be miracles at all. They're only what you'd expect if you understand the mind-body unity and its scientifically demonstrated physiological, psychophysiological unity. You'd expect somebody to get better once they get into a healthy relationship with themselves, for which they need somebody with compassion and some insight to guide them and to reflect their process.

You must be frustrated as I am sometimes. And I know some colleagues of ours are as well. Just how much more we could achieve as physicians if we just understood these basic principles. I've gone through various emotions over my career. I'm pretty much 21 years in my practice as we speak. I used to get frustrated and I guess I went through a phase of anger. But I'm a lot more at peace with things now. It doesn't really rile me up in the way that it used to. I feel a lot calmer about it. I want to talk about some of the problems with Western medicine. I think,

you know, we're both physicians, we both practiced for many years within that system. So I think we have a perspective that's useful for people, I'm sure. I think there's a whole multitude of problems. I'd love your view on that. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about recently is, in fact, I was on the tube last night. I normally only record podcasts down in my studio, but I knew you were in London. I had to speak to you as I came down to London. I got the tube to my hotel,

and a chap stopped me on the tube to talk to me, which is very rare in London. He'd heard me on a podcast. He's a psychologist. He loved the sort of content he was hearing. And he said something to me, which is, it's interesting that you guys as doctors, you seem to know a lot about psychology and yourself. But actually, most doctors he meets and works with, he says, he doesn't have that perception of them. And he said, to be a clinical psychologist, you have to demonstrate that you have done a lot

of self-reflection. I found this fascinating. I thought, wow. And I said, what's the average age when someone becomes a clinical psychologist? And I think what he said to me was around 27. And I thought, it's really interesting. In the UK, you can go to medical school when you're 17, straight out of high school. Really? Really. You can, depending on where your birthday is in the year, 17 or you've just, I mean, I had literally just turned 18 when I went to medical school. So I was actually... So you didn't have to do four years of pre-med?

No, no, you go straight into medical school, which means you could potentially be a practicing doctor at 22 or 23. Frightening. It is frightening because what, you know, of course everyone's different, but what life experience do you have? But I find that really interesting how many doctors have never been

through a period of self-reflection and therefore potentially can't help their patients with that. It's even worse than that. I don't know what the quality of medical, the experience of medical school here is in Britain, but when you talk to fellow physicians, when I talk to fellow physicians in writing this book and reflecting on my own experience, there's a lot of pressure, stress, and even trauma in medical training. And there's one

particular study that's rather alarming. You know what telomeres are? Telomeres being these chromosomal structures or DNA structures at the end of our chromosomes that are meant to keep our chromosomes healthy. Let me just put it in shorthand like that. The length of our telomeres are some markers of biological aging and stress. So that the more stress, the more age we get, the shorter our telomeres are some markers of biological aging and stress. So that the more stress, the more aged we get, the shorter our telomeres get. The telomeres of medical residents, medical students,

fray more rapidly than those of other people their age. In other words, the stress between us is, so not only are we callow and unexperienced and without a broader vision when we enter medical school, the pressure that we're under further traumatizes us and makes us even more tight and less open. So that when they've done studies on compassion in medical students, some of the studies show that the highest level of compassion is as they begin their studies.

And after that, it diminishes. And not because they mean ill or anything like that, but because of the stress and pressure of the training itself and because of the narrowness of the education. So then we get out there and we deal with people with complex life problems and all these chronic conditions that have huge emotional,

scientifically demonstrated and demonstrable pathways where their emotions and their relationships and their social standing and their context has everything to do with their physical conditions. We're in no way prepared to recognize that. So we concentrate, as you said earlier in this conversation, on pretty shallow symptom control at the very best. Now, you and I both know the miracles that Western medicine has also achieved.

This is not in any way to dismiss the findings and brilliant achievements of our profession and the science that we follow. It's only if we could apply that science in a much more broader and humanly framed perspective, we could achieve so much more and the population could be so much more healthy. Yeah.

There's a couple of things there for me. I just want to echo what you said, so much more healthy. Yeah. There's a couple of things there for me. I just want to echo what you said that modern medicine has, you know, had so many phenomenal achievements and so many life-saving treatments and all kinds of things that it does. But I do certainly feel for much of chronic disease, I would say much of modern medicine is broken, I think.

I really do. Well, certainly parts of it. I guess if we take Dick's IFS model and different parts within ourselves, I guess we could apply that same thing to modern medicine and chronic disease management, that there are certain parts within it that have been exiled. Well, let me give you a really salient example. Take something like multiple sclerosis,

which is an autoimmune condition that affects the nervous system, results in weakness, paralysis, sometimes blindness, you know, balance issues. It can be very debilitating. Now, multiple sclerosis was first described by a French physician called Jean-Marie Charcot in the 1800s, sometimes the mid-19th century, I forget exactly when. He said that this disease is caused by long-term vexation and grief.

Now, since then, there have been dozens of studies showing a relationship between childhood trauma, multiple sclerosis, stress, and multiple sclerosis. Overwhelming evidence. And also, that if we deal with these stresses, or we have social support, the disease abates. So what I'm saying is, this is not fanciful. We also know the pathways, because we know how stress can cause inflammation in the nervous system.

And despite this scientifically demonstrated relationship between stress and multiple sclerosis, the average neurologist will never ask their client about their childhood trauma or about what stresses are in their lives or about even helping them understand that the flare-up of the disease could be a teaching moment and where the patient could investigate, well, how did I stress myself or what stress I was under before this flare-up?

In other words, the disease is assumed to have a life of its own. But it doesn't. The disease is a process that reflects a life experience. And if we can affect that life experience, we can affect that process. Now, I'm talking pure science here. But it's science that completely eludes

most people in our profession. You've detailed, yes, in this book, but also in your previous books as well, the detailed science behind this. And then when we talk about evidence-based medicine, you just think, well, really, are we practicing evidence-based medicine or are we practicing selective evidence-based medicine? Well, you know what? Myopic evidence-based medicine.

Well, if there's one phrase I could delete from the medical dictionary, it would be evidence-based.. Well, you know what? Myopic evidence-based medicine. If there's one phrase I could delete from the medical dictionary, it would be evidence-based. Yeah, me too. Because I only wish, you know, it's not evidence-based practice,

it's practice-based evidence. And like we keep doing the same thing over and over again and then we gather the evidence from what we do. Yeah. It's also, you know,

this whole thing, you know, what is that, you know, holistic definition of evidence-based medicine? It's three things, isn't it. It's also, you know, this whole thing, you know, what is that, you know, holistic definition of evidence-based medicine? It's three things, isn't it? It's research, evidence, it's clinical experience and expertise and patient preference. Whereas in this modern world now, it's just become one of those things. What does the research show? As if our clinical expertise, as if seeing people, reading them, what a patient might want for their condition is like irrelevant. And so I have a real problem with that term as well. I do think all doctors at their core

want to help. Of course. I don't think the system is that helpful. Certainly 10-minute consultations, 15-minute consultations really are completely inadequate now to actually look at the various things that are influencing disease. And to actually look at the various things that are influencing disease. And I guess one of the great things for Doctor in the House for me was that I would see things, even if I had an hour with a patient in a consultation room, they would never come up. I would see relationship dynamics. How would one party talk? How would a husband talk to his wife? What was going on before bedtime? I was thinking, oh, this is interesting.

I wonder if that's why she's sick at the moment. You know, all these things started to go in my mind. I thought this is almost like, I feel so fortunate to have had that experience. Well, you know, and this is where I think that family physicians, should they choose to use the opportunity or an advantageous position,

because there's a family doc. I knew a lot more than my specialist colleagues did. 100%. Not about their particular field, about which they knew infinitely more than I did. But I knew the person before they got sick. I knew the family background. I knew the multigenerational family background. And so that, to me, the person wasn't just a disease. It was somebody manifesting a life.

Not that I knew that right away. It took me some time to realize what was I looking at. But you knew intuitively. Intuitively I knew. And so there's another phase that might drive you as bad as it drives me. There's evidence-based practice. Then there's anecdotal. That's anecdotal.

Like if you tell a story about a patient, that's anecdotal. For God's sakes. practice then there's anecdotal that's anecdotal like if you tell a story about a patient i know that's anecdotal for god's sakes yes it's anecdotal and i pay attention to anecdotes people's life experience matters to me yeah and and and how they how they view their life experience matters to me it's part of the evidence yeah one of the other things you mentioned before when talking about the medical school, students fraying their telomeres and shortening them. It just made me think, like an idea that I spend a lot of time sitting with these days is that our experience of the world is dependent on the state of our nervous system. Yes.

So if we have a nice, calm, relaxed nervous system yeah we can see things our vision is peripheral we're open it's outward we can hear whereas when we have this stress the tuning of your nervous system then is slightly higher maybe significantly higher and what happens when we're feeling stressed our vision becomes narrow and focused, right? So if we think about the profession as a whole, if there's a chronic state of stress and you've only got 10 or 15-minute consultations and you have patients coming in with chronic complex issues,

your focus being narrow is a problem. It's fundamentally built into the system. And do you know what I mean? It makes me think... Totally, and patients feel it. Pat know, it's fundamentally built into the system. And do you know what I mean? It makes me think... Oh, totally. And patients feel it. Patients feel it. Because they come out of there thinking, I wasn't heard, I wasn't seen, you know. And it's certainly true that the state of our nervous system determines the state of the world as we perceive it. And going back to a point you made earlier, what if an essential aspect of medical training

was actually self-awareness? And not just only self-awareness of the broad sense of who we are and all that, but just what am I experiencing at the moment? Because the energy that I'm experiencing at the moment is going to be felt by the patient. Now, I'm in a position of authority as a physician. If I'm tense, there's no way that's not going to affect the emotional and physiological state of the patient.

Now, in the more mechanical aspects of our profession, like an orthopedic surgeon, when the patient is asleep on the table, you know, I just want that guy to have good hands. Yeah, I get it. Or that woman to have good hands and to be able to perform the technical aspect of the operation. So in that acute sense, it's not as important. Not that it isn't, but it's not nearly as important. I'd rather have a technically skilled orthopedic surgeon who is an emotional idiot than somebody who's emotionally really sensitive and lousy hands, you know,

if they're going to operate on my femur, you know. But that's a rare example. When we talk about the chronic conditions of the mind, as in psychiatry, or in chronic conditions of the body, as in autoimmune disease and malignancy and you know, chronic inflammations and so on. This lack of awareness of self and of the client is a huge handicap that burdens our profession and limits our capacity to deliver good care. And nothing in our training prepares us for it. A couple of times in this conversation, you mentioned stress. Yeah.

And I'd like to talk a little bit about stress because I think it's a term that is thrown around a lot these days. And often when doctors talk about stress and put patient symptoms down to stress, patients can often feel unheard and say that they feel... And I think often that comes to the way we communicate these things. And if we become skilled communicators, I think we can very clearly explain what we mean by that.

But I think stress often gets misinterpreted. You mentioned when you were writing your latest book that the emotional stress that you created in your mind would raise your blood pressure. Yeah. Right? So you were making yourself,

you know, sick. Absolutely I was. Through no physical threat, through just your relationship with this book and what you thought it should be or could be. Yeah.

So stress is endemic these days. The World Health Organization still calls stress the health epidemic of the 21st century, right? So how do you see stress and how do you see its relationship to disease? Well, it's one of those, as you imply, it's one of those words with double meaning and it all depends how we use it a related word is psychosomatic like you and i both know in the best possible sense of the word that a lot of illnesses are genuinely psychosomatic because psyche means their emotional apparatus and soul if you will and and soma is the body. And because of the mind-body unity and the unshakable unity of our emotional system and the brain's emotional circuits

with the nervous system, the immune system, and the hormonal apparatus, it's a unit. It's a psychosomatic unit. That's a really great word. But when most people hear psychosomatic, they think we're just telling them they're imagining their diseases, which is very often if doctors have used it. And it's the same with stress. Now, stress is a genuine psychophysiological

event. Stress isn't some fancied, imagined fantasy on the part of the patient. Stress is actually what happens when the organism faces pressures that are beyond its capacity to deal with chronically. And that results in the release of stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, amongst other things. Stress also affects the immune system. Stress affects the gut. Stress affects the brain.

It affects the heart. We mentioned high blood pressure. What's the medical term for high blood pressure? Hypertension. As physicians, we're trained that 5% of hypertension is explainable due to kidney disease or some hormonal abnormality, but 95% is what we call essential hypertension, which means we haven't got a clue what's causing it.

Come on, people. Read the word. Hypertension. Hypertension. Too much tension. That's what causes hypertension. And we know this from all kinds of studies. In other words, it's the impact of stress and high levels of adrenaline on the cardiovascular

system. Now, when your doctor uses the word stress and the patient thinks that I'm being dismissed, they often are being dismissed. Because the physician himself or herself or themselves don't recognize the unity of mind and body.

So, when the word leaves their lips, they do mean a kind of dismissive, I can't find anything physically wrong with you, therefore it's just stress. Well, that's not how it works. In the genuine sense of the word, as we know from millions of studies,

stress has huge impacts, and they have impacts even sometimes when we can't measure them, when we don't have the clinical tools to measure something. You mentioned fibromyalgia earlier. Well, there's no clinical test that will diagnose or rule out fibromyalgia, but it's clearly a stress-related condition. And when you study people's lives with fibromyalgia,

salient amongst the findings is significant degrees of childhood trauma and childhood adversity and their impacts on the body. Yeah. Can we at that point, Gamma, just explain what exactly do you mean when you say childhood trauma?

Well, geez, I'm so glad to be able to talk about that because that's another word that's on the one hand not appreciated understood even recognized by much of medical practice on the one hand another hand is used too loosely sometimes so people say i went to a movie last night and it was i was really uh traumatized no you't. You just were upset. You were sad. You were angry. But that doesn't mean you were traumatized. So what does trauma mean?

Well, again, if you look at the word origins, the origin of the word trauma is a Greek phrase for wounding or a wound. So trauma is a wound that you sustained. Now, when people think of the word trauma, they often believe it has to do with what we call the big T events, the big trauma events, such as sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, apparent dying, violence in the family, parental addiction, maybe a rancorous divorce. These are traumatic,

but trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you. So trauma is the psychic wound that you sustained. That's the first point. The second point is if we understand the nature of a wound, really there's two ways to look at a wound. If it stays open, it's very sore, you touch it. If I pat myself on the shoulder right now, I feel no pain.

But if there was a wound there and my shoulder was bare and my nerve endings were close to the surface, in other words, if I was thin-skinned, and if I tap myself with the same force, there'd be severe pain. So one aspect of trauma is like an open sword that if you touch it, you just react, like you just wounded all over again. That's one aspect of a wound. The other way to look at a wound is that it forms a scar. A scar tissue protects the wound, but at the same time,'s thick it's inflexible it's hard it's

not capable of growth and it lacks nerve endings so you don't feel so trauma both sensitizes us to certain stimuli and the other hand numbs us their own feelings and and and and and separates it from our bodies because it's too painful to be in our bodies. Now, to traumatize people, you can do bad things to them, as I mentioned earlier. But you can also wound people, particularly sensitive kids, but all kids, but especially highly sensitive children, not just by doing bad things to them, but by not giving them the good things that they need.

So it's not just what shouldn't have happened what did but what should have happened what didn't so for this we have to understand children's basic needs children have certain developmental needs for healthy emotional and brain development one of them is to be seen and heard and to be accepted for exactly who they are without any condition yeah now lots of people tell me they had happy childhoods nothing traumatic but when I delve into them there is there's even a little bit that lack of unconditional acceptance and understanding and being seen is salient you can hurt people that way. That can wound people.

And so these traumas then show up in all kinds of coping mechanisms and adaptations. Many of them, we call them mental illnesses. Like, take something like depression. Again, look at a word origin. What does it mean to depress something? You push something down. Now, what gets pushed down in depression, and I've been diagnosed with that, what gets pushed on in depression is your emotions.

But why would you push down on your emotions? You push down on your emotions when to feel them puts you at odds with your environment. So that if your parents can't handle your verve and your enthusiasm, or your sadness, or your grief, or your anger, then in order to fit in with the family environment, you will push down those feelings, not consciously, but simply as a matter of automatic adaptation. 30 years later, you're diagnosed with this disease called depression. But it was a response to a childhood wounding, the wounding of not being seen and accepted with all your emotions,

which is another essential need of the child. The child should be able to experience all their emotions, no matter what they are. So that's a very simple example of childhood wounding trauma, which then shows up in the form of adult distress. And I can show similar patterns for all manner of chronic illness, that there was childhood wounding either because of things happening that shouldn't have, or what I call the small T trauma of things not happening that should have,

that then leads to adaptations, which adaptations in the long term promote illness. Yeah. There's a couple of things there, right? So childhood trauma then shows up later in a whole variety of different behaviors, a whole variety of different diseases. Yeah. Right.

So there's the question there is then as an adult how can we start addressing this but there's also another piece which is many people listening or watching our parents themselves yeah and they may recognize certain things and certain behaviors they've had in their own life as i as i certainly have done but there's also well how do we not traumatize or shall i say minimize the trauma that we put onto our kids you know what are those if we if we maybe start there yeah because we we are living in a society where it's very hard to be parents parent. It's very hard to be a mother. It's very hard. You know, really hard. And actually, through no fault of parents,

they're struggling to be present and have time and patience with their children. I know in the book you write that being understood as a child is as much of a need as food and shelter, which I found really profound. Yeah. Being understood, being seen, being heard. Yeah. Right. So, what can parents think about when trying to bring up their kids? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can

break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now,

journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every

evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app.

So first of all, it's very important to avoid any hint of parent blaming. Yeah. As you say. And so it's not a matter of individual failure. It's really the question of a society that doesn't put children's needs in the forefront at all. And so let's take a really simple example. Now, in the book I talk about my personal history which is you know a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in Hungary very dramatic be a terrible time in history for beer to be a an infant yeah and then my mother and I live under

really deplorable conditions under threat of death and at one point she gives me up to a total stranger in the street by the way i was just in budapest my home city uh two weeks ago and i swam every morning at a sports club it was right across the house from where they gave me to a stranger 76 years ago 77 years ago to save my life. So that's very dramatic. But forget the Nazis, forget genocide, forget the war. When my mother and I are still in the hospital, maternity hospital, and I'm two weeks old, she writes in her diary, my poor little Gabor, my heart is breaking for you because you've been crying for the last hour and a half, wanting to be

fed. But I promised the doctor I'd only feed you every four hours. So it's not time yet. You're going to have to learn that nighttime is for sleeping, not for eating. Her heart was breaking. She was completely suppressing her parental instinct to please the doctor. So forget the war. Forget the genocide. Forget all the drama. Just a mom, a 24-year-old genocide, forget all the drama.

Just a mom, a 24-year-old mom, following doctor's orders. Now, in this society, parents are often advised to ignore their kids' needs, just like that. For example, you have this thing called sleep training, where parents are told, don't pick up the crying child. Now, you tell a mother orangutan not to pick up their crying child. You tell a mother cat to ignore the cries and distress of their infant. But we tell human beings this every day. And we call this sleep training. You know, and what we're doing is giving the child the message,

no, you know it works. You ignore a child's cries for four nights, they're going to sleep through the night. You know why? Because they give up. And they can't stand it. They put themselves to sleep just to get away from the distress of it. And their brain is flooded with cortisol, which interferes with healthy brain development.

And the message they get is that their feelings don't matter, that they're on their own, they're all alone. Now, this is done by loving parents under the advice of well-meaning professionals. And we call this parenting advice. Or another simple little device that parents are often told to do, time out. Now there's a very famous Canadian psychologist, who I don't need to name, but in his mega-selling book, he advises parents

that an angry little child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. It's not normal for a two-year-old to be angry. And that child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal it's not normal for a two-year-old to be angry and that child should be excluded the message the child should get is you're not acceptable to us when you have that emotion a lot of parents there's best-selling books on this technique of time out which basically means separating the child from yourself until they start behaving in ways that you can approve of. In other words, the message to the child is, your acceptance is purely conditional on your pleasing me.

Now, we're not talking about parents that are beating their kids. We're not talking about parents who don't love their kids. We're not talking about parents who are trying to hurt their kids. We're just talking about parents who are complying with social norms and social values. Then there's the factor of stress that you mentioned, how stressful it is to be parenting. Again, we're not meant to parent in isolated homes, in one person or two person, two parent families. We're meant to parent in groups, in community. This is how we evolved as a species. We know already, and I spend chapters on this, a chapter on prenatal life,

that stress on the pregnant woman. You know, I mentioned telomeres earlier. Yeah. The telomeres of infants born to highly stressed mothers are shorter already at birth. This is a new study that just came out since I wrote the book. So stress on pregnant women. Now how, just exactly how are we taking care of pregnant women in our society? Are we honoring their needs? Are we making provisions for them on the job

or even to give them prenatal leave to take care of themselves or tell me are we telling husbands to really look after their wife's emotional needs i mean i talk about in the book about just what an unsupportive husband i was when i was you know when we're expecting our children that has an impact on the developing child already in the womb. Not because the mother doesn't love the child, but because when she's stressed, that stress translates into physiological impacts on the child. Now, there are times in the first year of life

when every second, millions of circuits, millions of connections are being made in the brain. The mother's emotional states directly affect the brain development of the child. We know this from scientific studies. How are we taking care of new mothers in this society? What support are we giving them? How do we ensure that they have the best possible environment to raise that child? And so what I'm saying is that this society is so stressful.

And look, I'm in Britain right now. I read the newspaper. 10% inflation rate while the economy is shrinking. How does that affect? One of the triggers for stress is uncertainty. Yeah. So this is a society, this rich society, that massively stresses its population. And those stressed parents then

are supposed to raise healthy children? Yeah. You know, with lousy advice from experts to ignore the child's needs? I'm not even talking about trauma in a big sense. Yeah. You've been very open in the book about things that maybe you could have done better,

whether it's… To say the least. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's interesting. It's very insightful to read that from you. And I guess as you talk about your children there and how you maybe didn't give your wife as much support as you as you could have done it was worse than that i stressed her yeah i added to her stress so you added to her stress i had an impact on your children yeah you're writing about more and more the research on the long-term implications of that

you're writing about more and more of the research on the long-term implications of that. How do you feel about that now? Have you made peace with it? Or do you beat yourself up? Well, so this book that we're discussing was written with the help, with the brilliant help of my eldest son, who's a lyricist and a musical theater writer, but he's just a wonderful writer. And I couldn't have done it without him.

And he's now, as the book comes out, he'll be 47 years old. This is the kid that when he was three years old, I slapped across the face because he wouldn't think happy birthday to me. Now, the story is worth telling. It was my birthday party and we had gathered at my parents' place. My mother made me a traditional Hungarian meal for my birthday and my brothers were there with their wives, their families, my parents, my wife and I and our eldest son, three years old.

And Daniel, my co-writer on this book, to be, announces, I'm not singing Happy Birthday. And I said, if you're not singing, you're not getting cake. Well, I'm not singing anyway. I get more and more angry. Everybody's begging me to desist. Everybody's begging me to lay off. The more they ask me to do that, the more angry I get.

They ended up hitting him. What was that all about? He was just being a three-year-old. He says, I'm going to exert my own personality. I'm not going to go along with the crowd. You know? I might have said, hey, Daniel, sweetheart, don't sing. Just have the cake and enjoy it. What was being triggered in me is the sense I developed as a young child

that I wasn't loved and lovable. So I needed this three-year-old to prove to me that I was lovable. When he didn't, I got enraged. I'm not either criticizing myself or defending myself. I'm just saying, this is what happened. This is how we passed on our trauma unwittingly. So one of the pieces of advice I give to parents is, deal with your trauma as much as you can,

as you have children and before you have children and as you're raising them. Now, in terms of my own trajectory with my kids, we've done a lot of repair, a lot of healing. And even writing this book together has been a tremendously healing process. I mean, we've had our moments, believe me, when we're each other's throats. In fact, we have another book contract.

The next book we're writing together is going to be called Hello Again, A Fresh Start for Adult Children and Their Parents. Oh, love it. Yeah, so as soon as the hoopla on this book settles down, which I hope won't for a long time, but as soon as it does, we're going to start writing that book together. So yeah, we've made the repair. And that repair is possible. But to young parents, I would say,

don't make the repair necessary. You know, work on your own stuff. You learned something very important about yourself as you're six months old, got ill. And I've heard you say that the greatest value to you is not your success as a physician or anything else, but the healthy raising of your children. Now, if you'd asked me that when my kids were small, I would have said, yeah, my highest value is the happiness of my own

children. If you'd asked me that, but if you looked at my life that's not what you would have seen you would have seen somebody consumed with success consuming the professional security consuming the egoic concerns so what i would say to parents is really do a valuation of what's important to you and to use your phrase look at how your value your life is aligned with what your best intentions are when it comes to parenting it's not a question of not making mistakes of course you will but if you actually live a life that even in this stressful society with all the pressures on you has its core value the genuine needs and well-being of your children you're going to do okay yeah some parents are likely to have heard what you said about sleep training yeah and i imagine

they will have gone through their head and go oh no i i did that with my baby i did that with my child yeah i didn't know any better i was reading the latest parenting book and I thought I was doing the right thing. But now I hear you, Gabor, explain it. It totally makes sense why that possibly wasn't the most helpful thing to do. A lot of people then take that next step and go into guilt and shame. They feel bad about themselves. They start to berate themselves. It feeds an existing pattern of negative self-talk within them. Yeah. For someone who's doing that right now as they're listening, what would you say to them? Well, first of all, I would just say,

I totally understand why you wanted to sleep train your child, because you might have to go to work in the morning. Yeah. It's not like we're hunter-gatherers carrying our babies everywhere we go, you know? Yeah. We live in this harried world where there's demands on us. And a child who doesn't sleep at night really makes it difficult for us to live our lives. So I totally get it.

So you should not blame yourself for that. Secondly, you should not blame yourself for accepting advice from people that you thought were experts. But thirdly, I would ask you, what did it feel like to you? And if you ask most people, most parents would say, it broke my heart. And so I would say to them, henceforth, listen to yourself. Because we all have these parenting instincts. But the instincts have to be evoked by the environment. And we live in an artificial environment that not only does not evoke,

but in fact suppresses our innate instincts. And so as much as possible, don't listen to the experts. Listen to your heart and deal with your stuff. And as far as guilt, look, I'm telling you, I'm 78. I just told you the story of hitting my three-year-old, who's now 47, and helped me write the book of my life. It doesn't matter what else I might write from now on. This is going to be the book that expresses the essence of what I've learned,

at least so far. It's all repairable, but just wake up. As soon as possible, wake up. Forget the guilt. You did your best. I'm not defending myself. My reaction to my child that night, that was my best at the time.

Not proud of it, but neither am I. No, did I feel guilt? Shame? Oh, yeah. I've had a lot that to deal with, but I've learned better.

Yeah. So that, just accept yourself that you are a human being who had certain traumas, certain stresses, certain wrong information. You know,

there was a famous pediatrician, Benjamin Spock. I don't know if his name was well-known in Britain, but for decades he was like the arbiter of hard-to-raise children in North America. Millions of books sold. In many ways, a good man.

But he talked about the tyranny of the infant who wanted to be picked up at night. Can you imagine the tyranny of the infant who wanted to be picked up at night can you imagine the tyranny of the infant who just wants to be held by his parents her parents which is the natural desire of any mammalian infant yeah so don't blame yourself yeah blame blame guilt doesn't help anything, does it? It keeps you locked. Absolutely. You know, and I remember you may not remember this. So in fact, you won't remember this

because this is before I knew you. I was in LA at a conference and I went to see you speak. And I was, when you took Q&A at the end, I actually asked you a question. Really? Yeah, yeah. This is, you know, years before I actually spoke to you on the podcast or I even had a podcast or I was just drawn to your work. And, um, you know, I was

probably, I'm going to guess it was two or three years after, you know, my son was sick. Hmm. And I can't remember now exactly what I asked you, but you gave a pretty hard-hitting, uncompromising, I guess an uncomfortable truth, which I really value. You weren't shying away from it. You were just kind of saying, get over yourself in as compassionate a way as you could, but a very direct way,

which I really needed because, you know, when my son was six months, he had a hypocalcemic convulsion. So very low levels of calcium in his blood, secondary to non-existent levels of vitamin D in his body. And as somebody who used to be, I shall say now, as someone who used to be a perfectionist, I felt I'd let my son down. I felt that I had been a substandard parent and, you know, modern medicine saved his life, but it did nothing to help me understand what might have

the consequences of being low in vitamin D for six months for the development of his immune system and all the other functions that this vitamin, or I should say hormone, does in the body. This is where when we make things too binary, it gets really confusing and it keeps us locked. So we left the hospital after five days with them saying, yeah, he's fine now, he can go. And I was thinking, well, what about everything else? Is this it? I made myself a vow as we were walking out of the hospital. I made myself a vow, I'm going to get my son back to full health as if this had never happened. And I became obsessed. I would read, I would study nutrition, the gut microbiome, the immune system four or five hours a day, obsessed with one goal, to get him back to full

health. And he is, as of last week, he's 12. He's a thriving, happy, healthy 12-year-old boy. But I realized for the first, I don't know, five, six years of me being a father, I was consumed by guilt. I thought I'd let him down and that would drive everything I really would encourage him to do and I realized after a while he doesn't need your guilt he just wants a present dad nobody else, my wife didn't think I was to blame the medical profession didn't think I was to blame

it's a self-created story in my head oh yeah, well I still resonate with that but first of all let me just say something you say you felt you let him down you felt you didn't help him those aren't feelings those are beliefs

you believe them now if you like the feeling it's probably shame and guilt and then if I asked you shame and guilt is that the first time you felt them? You would say, no, they probably go back a long, long way.

In other words, your son had nothing to do with it. And my kids have given me that message so much. Leave off with your guilt already. Leave off with your mea culpa already. They say, we don't want to be seen as your mistakes. We don't want to be seen as your failure. We're people. That's a great point.

seen as your mistakes. We don't be seen as your failure. We're people. That's a great point. You know, and so that you're doing nobody any favors when you look at your children through the eyes of your own guilt, which has nothing to do with them anyway. Yeah, completely. And I've noticed as I've done the work through IFS, through all kinds of different modalities, as I've let go of that, and I think I mostly have, I'm sure it comes up now and again at certain times and then it's another self-awareness piece of, oh, I thought I was over that.

That's coming up again. What is that part trying to say? Well, it's interesting because I know that amongst your core values, I think you used to talk about integrity, compassion and curiosity. So I teach a course called Compassionate Inquiry.

In fact, Dick Schwartz and I did a program together recently where we talked about the differences and similarities between his approach and mine. And there's a lot of overlap. And so if you took the same dynamic of you and your son and your guilt, if you applied some compassionate inquiry to it, what would you find out?

You would find out that you did nothing wrong you'd find out that the guilt and the shame that you're experiencing had nothing to do with your son they predated his they predated his birth by a couple of decades at least yeah you know and that you do yourself and him no favor by projecting it onto him so again when it comes back to the parents it's so important that you be compassionate to yourselves and if you make mistakes rather than making stuff wrong for it inquire well why did i do that if you want to use ifs model what part of me did that what part of me hit my kid you know uh so angry or if you want to use compassion inquiry you know what need of mine was not being met there yeah that

that led to that outrage on my part you know again this is not to take anybody off the hook or to excuse any kind of behavior but if we want to grow we have to understand and if we don't take a stance of compassionate clear curiosity towards ourselves if we like if I say that like if you said to yourself why did I do this that's not a question that's a statement full of judgment. But if you said to yourself, hmm, I wonder why I did that. That that's the question. Yeah.

Having let go of that guilt or much of it, or certainly I hope most of it, that's a more authentic interaction between us now yeah um you understand me yeah my son and i of course and it's it's really beautiful and i think for me this speaks to the incredible power in your work through all your work but speaking about this latest book, I think one of the most powerful things that gives people is awareness.

Because everyone wants to jump from awareness to what do I do now? And I think we underestimate just how powerful that first step is. Just to be, oh, that's why I behave like that. Oh, I had no idea. You know, I guess we're blind until we're not. We're unaware until we're not.

And then we can't unsee what we see. Exactly. And I really feel your work beautifully helps people see patterns in their life that they weren't previously aware of. And there are multiple ways that they can then go and move forward through that. But I think that's very, very powerful. life that they weren't previously aware of. And there are multiple ways that they can then go and move forward through that. But I think that's very, very powerful. In terms of patterns,

you write in this book about personality. Yeah. And there's a very powerful section where you talk about the association between certain personality types and disease. And in particular, I like that section where you mentioned William Osler, and he was talking about the type of people who he observed getting angina. And you contrasted that with this kind of type C personality, which is associated with all kinds of other chronic conditions. I wonder if you could speak to those things a little bit. Sure.

So, again, these are the things that nobody teaches you in medical school. But as I advanced in my experience in family practice and also did seven years of palliative care work, I began to notice that who developed chronic illness and who didn't wasn't accidental. That the people that developed chronic illness, by that I mean autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis multiple sclerosis scleroderma lupus chronic fatigue fibromyalgia inflammatory bowel disease chronic asthma etc etc these people have certain personality patterns

that i kept noticing over and over and. And especially in palliative care, when people are dying of chronic illness, often malignancy, I would see these patterns. And what were they? So there were automatic concern for the emotional needs of others while suppressing your own. emotional needs of others by suppressing your own. Exemplified by a woman who,

this is a true story, she's diagnosed with breast cancer. Her husband's first wife died of breast cancer. Another doctor tells her she's got it. And her first response is, but I'm worried about my husband, how will I support him?, she's the one that's going to have to go through chemotherapy, radiation, and possibly surgery or whatever. How will I support my husband? So this automatic concern for the emotional needs of others while ignoring your own, that's a salient characteristic of people who have chronic illness.

Secondly, a rigid identification with duty, role, and responsibility. It's in the case of when I was writing the book and I was rigidly identified with the book and my blood pressure was going up. Because I wasn't thinking of myself. Number three, repression of healthy anger. That's a major one. Healthy anger is one of my healing principles and it's essential.

Healthy anger is simply a boundary defense that says, no, you're in my space, get out. That's what healthy anger is. It does its job, it's gone. But without that boundary defense, you get trampled on all the time. And these really so-called really nice people who never get angry, they're the ones who develop malignancy and autoimmune disease. And the fourth characteristic is two fatal beliefs.

I say fatal beliefs, potentially fatal. One is that you're responsible for what other people feel, and the other is that you must never disappoint anybody. Now how these traits predispose, I don't say they cause the disease. I don't deal in causes. It's simplistic to talk about single causes. But they contribute to the onset significantly. And people with chronic illness invariably have them.

I never find otherwise. These are not, nobody's born with these traits. I mean, have you ever met a one-day day old baby that doesn't know what to say no try and feed them something they don't want to eat you know these are personally traits that we develop to fit in with our environment yeah and if their environment is if your parents are alcoholics you're to end up as a caretaker. As a four or five-year-old, you're going to be an emotional caretaker by suppressing your own needs. Now, that's going to show up in illness

of mind or body later on in life. And for all kinds of physiological reasons, mostly because it invites all kinds of stress. You're creating all kinds of stress for yourself, which then has all kinds of physiological impacts. So these character traits are in contrast with the... But they're not who the person really is. It's who they became.

It's who they became as an adaptation to their environment. Then the body says no. The body rebels and says, no no this is not good for you but the question is are people gonna learn from their disease or not and a lot of people whether through help or whether through some intuition or some grace if they learn to look at their diseases not just just as something to get rid of, but also as a teacher of why in my life was I not being myself. Now, I don't recommend disease as a way of learning,

and I'm not saying people shouldn't do whatever they can to get treatment and to heal in other ways, but at the same time, if they open that inquiry of what is the disease here to teach me about me, they're going to find that these patterns are present and they don't need to be because they're no longer the children

that are constrained to be that way it's not either or it's not either it's emotional or it's physical these things are complex and you know disease as a teacher, wow.

I mean, I completely agree with you. That is something that many people may find triggering. The medical profession, certainly, in my experience of it, the Western medical profession, doesn't really acknowledge that side of things. Disease is that discrete entity. Now you have it, we've got the the proof now we need to treat it yeah without an understanding you know it's it's the biomedical model not the bio psycho social model right spiritual spiritual yeah i mean what what

role does spirituality play in modern medicine at the moment yeah very little for me. And I think it's very important. You know, you explained that there with compassion. It is such a tricky area I found to communicate with people because a lot of people who are that way inclined feel this as blame. You know, I've made myself get sick. What are you saying, Dr. Mati? Are you saying that my personality has caused my illness? And let's just sort of expand on that a little bit

in case anyone is thinking like that. Well, it's a really essential question. I would say yes, aspects of your personality contributed to the onset of your illness. Again, I don't use cause because there's so many different aspects to causation. But yes, aspects of it. But the reason it's important to pay attention to that is because if I could tell you that aspects of your personality, ways of being contributed to illness, I'm also telling you that if you were to transform those, you could actually affect your illness in a very positive way. That's the first thing. The second thing is, I would say, is it's not your fault. You didn't choose to suppress yourself.

Those were adaptations to your environment. You didn't choose to put other people's needs ahead of your own, chronically and pathologically. That was your response to the environment. Why would I blame you for an unconscious adaptation that you developed when you were two years old and could and didn't know any better so there's absolutely no blame in this perspective whatsoever absolutely none and it's inappropriate to even think of blame but um do

people perceive it that way yeah they can but i won't i would say to them look what would you rather have what would you rather be told that you're simply a physical object in the hands of your physicians with no agency whatsoever. I mean, when you talk about your principles of healing in your book, control is one of them. I hadn't read your book when I wrote mine, and you hadn't read mine when you wrote yours. But I talk about the same dynamic.

I call it agency. You call it control. But it's the same thing. Would you rather be an object in the hands of your physicians? Would you have some agency? Would you rather be actually involved and to learn how aspects of your life that you developed as a helpless young child

are no longer serving you? And if you alter them. Now, in that chapter called Diseases Teacher, I quote two American researchers, absolutely credentialed. One of them is a physician at Harvard, Dr. Jeff Rediger. Yeah, great book. Have you had Jeff? No, I want to. We went to schedule it then. He couldn't travel and I just haven't got around to

it, but I really want to. Maybe this will be a nice emphasis when we see a reconsultant. So Jeff wrote a book called Cured, about what they call spontaneous healing. These are people that are given terminal diagnosis. By the way, here in Britain, there's a wonderful example of it. Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with ALS at age 20. He was given two years to live. And he became one of the world's great physicians

and writers and lived well deep into his 70s maybe we don't know everything as physicians is that possible that we don't? but in any case Jeff Rediger he's a director of a hospital unit at Harvard at McLean's Hospital in Massachusetts

he's also a doctor of divinity and a psychiatrist and a physician. And in this book, he researched people with so-called spontaneous healing. These are people that have been written off by the medical profession as terminally ill, death sentences, either because medical treatment had failed or because they had refused them. And they got better anyway and lived decades longer. And so Jeff says, well, what happened here?

Another American researcher, oncological psychologist, Kelly Turner, wrote a book called Radical Remission. Same thing. I've done the same kind of research myself. What all three of us have found is that whatever else people did this these uh healings were not spontaneous didn't just happen no these people have changed their lives they took supplements they um did yoga they meditated they went into

nature they got counseling whatever they did but the biggest change was in their relationship to themselves. You know, and now I'm not saying we have a cure-all for everybody, but I'm saying that if these dramatic examples exist, what if we applied that all across the whole range of medicine? What if everybody with chronic illness this question was raised well what is your relationship to yourself and what extent are you being authentic and you know what this may sound surprising and i don't recommend it but even when i was working

in palliative care i had the occasional patient say to me, Doc, this cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. They're saying it's a week or two before they died. Why? Because I learned so much about myself that otherwise I never would have found out. It's made my whole life worthwhile. Again, people, I'm not recommending cancer

as a way of waking up. All I'm saying is even that experience, we can use it to learn something about ourselves. I mean, that chapter is so powerful. I know a friend of a friend who's no longer with us. He at a young age was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And before that, he was super active, captain of a sports team, super active.

I was in a wheelchair for many years. And I got to know him only for about three years or so. And I remember the last time I spoke to him, well, I say I spoke to him, we'd communicate on WhatsApp. It was really funny because he would really enjoy listening to the podcast and he'd send me messages on what he'd learned or what he was saying and he said once um i've never felt this happy and content and you know at that time he couldn't communicate with his voice it could only be via words he was all his needs were taken care of by a you know by a carer he was in a wheelchair to move around, previously very sporty, very active. And I thought,

wow, never felt this happy and content. And again, you speak to what Jeff was saying, what you write about this in that chapter, you know, yes, one of my core values is curiosity. I think every physician should have that as one of their core values, because what do we often do in medicine with these healings or these things we can't explain? We kind of pretend they're not happening. We can't explain them in our reductionist model. So they're not real. I don't know, maybe the patient's lying is often what people think, which is ridiculous. It's like, well, isn't that interesting that we don't know? I love learning things that I don't know. I go, wow, what is going on there? Yeah, but to interrupt for a moment, for curiosity, you have to let go of something.

Ego. You have to let go of the ego that I know. Yeah. And unfortunately, physicians, it's not that they think they know everything, but they think that what they don't know is not worth knowing. Exactly, exactly. And also it goes into how we even, you talk about culture, right?

Unfortunately, a lot of people who end up in medicine simply went into medicine because they were good at school, academic subjects. That is so, so common. They often weren't drawn to healing. It was just like, oh, I'm good at school. I want to do a good job that pays decent money and gives me security.

And I understand why people make those decisions. I really do. But the truth is, is that at some point in your career, if you didn't go in for the right reasons, you don't actually figure some of that stuff out. You're going to be having quite an unhappy, discontented life, which is going to impact the way that you look after your patients. But this kind of emotional stress within our minds, the way we view ourselves,

it is always, in my experience, a missing piece. And unless we look at, we have a limit on our recovery. There's a patient I wrote about in Happy Mind, Happy Life, who this 48-year-old lady, There's a patient I wrote about in Happy Mind, Happy Life who this 48-year-old lady who she had upper abdominal pain, she had bloating, she had bilateral upper arm pains and she'd been to see a variety of physicians. She wasn't getting much better. The medications weren't helping. She then was reading things online.

She was empowering herself. She made changes to her lifestyle. She changed her diets. She would move more regularly. She would prioritize her sleep and stress reduction. And there was some improvement, but there was still a ceiling. There was still these symptoms afflicting everywhere.

And when she came to me, I remember thinking, what are we missing here? What are we missing? Her life, a lot of these choices now in her life look pretty great. What's going on here? And as I inquired, as I compassionately inquired,

it became very clear. She said something. This is when I knew, oh, here we go. She said, Doc, I always end up in relationships with older men. They're usually married.

And they always treat me really badly. That's right. And as we sort of together inquired, obviously all roots went back to her childhood, and she perceived as a child that her older sister got more attention than her from her parents. And it was incredible because even as she was saying it, you could see the light bulb moment in her own head.

This wasn't physician healing the patient. This was me simply being a guide to help her find her own truth. And as she came to terms with that, as she did a variety of things to help process that, honestly, six months later, she ends up in a relationship with a man her own age who treated her really well. Three months later, all the symptoms had gone relationship with a man her own age who treated her really well. Three months later, all the symptoms had gone and they haven't come back since.

Wow. Right? This is real. Emotional stress is real. Which is what you would expect if you understood the science. Yeah, exactly. But it's not something we're taught. And also something you said, Gabor, I think is really powerful, this idea of agency. Yeah. You know, you say, what would you prefer? I mean, not to share with you what the science is?

You just keep going in this disempowering model? No. Or explain. And that's something, you know, I mentioned competitiveness before. Yeah. Competitiveness is, if you'd ask any of my friends, they'd say, Rong is really competitive.

He won't lose. They're right, I wouldn't lose. I would not. I would do anything I needed to do to not lose. But're right. I wouldn't lose. I would not. I would do anything I needed to do to not lose. But it wasn't because I enjoyed winning. It's because it was too painful. Loss was too painful for me. But now, hand on heart, I'm not competitive. So it wasn't my personality. It was a behavioral adaptation. And I no longer need that behavioral adaptation. And I think people don't get that. They think the personality, who they are now,

is who they have to remain. Well, let me just say, I phrase that a little bit differently. I mean, the concept we totally agree on. I would say it was your personality, but your personality wasn't who you were. In other words, the personality is an amalgam of genuine aspects of ourselves with these adaptations. And what we can actually do is to purify the personality

so that there's no distinction between ourselves and there's no contradiction between ourselves and our personality. So certain personality traits are not us at all. They're simply who we learn to be in order to get through. And we can unlearn them. We can absolutely unlearn them. And sometimes, of course, illness comes along just again. to be in order to get through. And we can unlearn them. We can absolutely unlearn them. And sometimes, of course,

illness comes along just again. If somebody got sick, I'd never go to them and say, listen, congratulations, this is a great wake-up call. Learn from it. I would never say that to anybody because people have to come to that realization themselves.

But I would ask them, have you considered the possibility that along with the physical treatments we're going to give you, have you considered the possibility that there may be aspects of your life that have contributed to the onset of this condition that would be worth investigating so that you can become empowered to do something about them? And I want to go back to something you said earlier about the 10-minute visit. You know, that needn't be a barrier.

Yeah. You know, because the barrier is not the 10 minutes. The barrier is the lack of awareness of the physician. Because even in 10 minutes, you can say to a person, you know, there's some considerable evidence that your rheumatoid arthritis that your lupus that your multiple sclerosis that your inflamed bowel is related to emotional factors is that something you'd be willing to explore in addition to whatever treatment i'm going to give you are you willing

to talk to somebody i'm not expected to talk about that i wasn't trained to do that but i'm aware of those relationships are you willing to talk to somebody that. I wasn't trained to do that. But I'm aware of those relationships. Are you willing to talk to somebody? So the physician doesn't have to do it all. The physician just has to be aware of it. That's all. And let me just say one thing, something else that occurs to me that's really important to say here.

It's not exactly apropos, but it does come up for me. This is not just individual. It is also social. If you look at here in Britain, who was more prone to develop COVID, it wasn't just they say that we're all in the same boat, we're all in this together. No, we weren't. People that were black or immigrants of color, they were at much higher risk.

In the United States, people of color are at much higher risk of COVID. People of color in my country, Canada, an indigenous woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than that of other people. This is amongst the population and never used to have autoimmune disease whatsoever. And so we're not just talking about individual choices or even individual personality traits. We not just talking about individual choices or even individual

personality traits, we're also talking about large social trends that exclude or oppress or put extra burden on certain segments of the population. So we have to really, I just want to make sure that we broaden the conversation beyond the individual to the social level as well. And I think your book beautifully makes that case, doesn't it? That a lot of this is driven by the world around us and culture. But of course, within that, there are things that if we empower ourselves that we can do. I also want to just say I totally agree on the 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be a barrier.

Sure, more time would probably be optimal. But even having a physician who's aware and then says, and points into one of your books, for example, that's useful. I know there are thousands of medical doctors now who, certainly in the UK, because they talk to me and they contact me

and they say, yeah, I've only got 10 minutes, but I just raised something and then I point into one of your podcasts or one of your books. And so it's a way that you can, because this information, this can help patients in their own time when they're gardening at the weekend or going out for a walk, they can be learning. And that's one of the things that gives me hope at the moment

is that this information is not behind locked doors in universities and research institutions. People are consuming this content. If you look at your talks on YouTube, millions of people have watched them and are then empowering themselves. So, Gavros, we come towards the end of this conversation. Just to close the loop on something you mentioned earlier,

which is women and increased rates of chronic disease. I don't want to leave that open-ended. Could you just explain maybe why you think there may be a relationship there? Well, if you take something like multiple sclerosis, which I've mentioned a number of times, the gender ratio in the 30s was about one to one. So if each man diagnosed to be a woman, the gender ratio now is three and a half women for every man. Now that tells us a few things immediately. It can't be genetics because that doesn't change over a short period of time.

It can't be the diet or the climate because that doesn't change more for one gender than the other. What is it? It's stress. Now if you look at those four character traits that I said contributed to the onset of illness, the emotional concern for the needs of others, the suppression of healthy anger, the identification with duty, role, and responsibility, the belief that you're responsible for the people's emotions and you mustn't disappoint anybody. Which gender is acculturated in our society

to take on those traits more than the other? Of course, it's women. So women have 80% of autoimmune disease. Yeah. 80% of autoimmune disease are women. Big mystery. It's not a mystery. They're acculturated to play a certain role.

Their role has always been to absorb the stresses of their families and also of their spouses. And certainly that's a role that my wife took on early in our relationship and she had to rebel against it to stay healthy. that my wife took on early in our relationship and she had to rebel against it to stay healthy. You know? There was a study in Sweden that showed that, this is remarkable,

that if a woman was depressed prenatally, that increased the risk of a late premature birth. 32 weeks to 36 weeks. If the man was depressed, the father was depressed prenatally, that increased the risk of an even earlier premature birth. Why? Because the woman was absorbing the stress of the man.

And so women do that automatically, not biologically necessarily, but because that's the role they've been given in the society. Plus that they have to go out and work now as well to make a living and make money for the family to survive or just to succeed out there in the workforce. And people are more isolated than ever were. So in Britain, they appointed a minister of loneliness.

So greater stress, more isolation. That's why women are getting a more autoimmune disease. And during COVID, there was an article in the New York Times about women who took on the emotional stress of their husbands and their children during COVID. And they felt guilty because of the suffering of their men and their children, because it was somehow their job to eliminate or alleviate it.

Well, that socially appointed and then automatically assumed role that women have been thrust into has physical implications. That's why women get most autoimmune disease. What if we just recognize this? You know, this is a big mystery. No mystery. recognize this. This is a big mystery.

No mystery. This is a particular dramatic example of the biopsychosocial nature of human beings. Our biology is inseparable from our psychological functioning and our social relationships.

And who has the brunt of all that? Women of color. They're much more likely to develop these diseases than caucasian women why because of the added stress of social and and racial uh oppression or exclusion i guess the culture the society around us impacts so much of how we experience the world and what we chase and what we pursue and how we are. And of course, it can take a long time for culture to change. Yeah, yeah.

I'm not saying that people have to wait for the society to change. If they did wait, it'd be a long, long wait, I would think. There's a lot that we can do, even in the context of this culture. I would think there's a lot that we can do even in the context of this culture now, of course what we can do is not totally Freely Available equal to everybody. Let's face it Certain class of people have much less fewer options than others That's just the reality of this culture that we have to really look in the face

Yeah, you know, but there's still a lot that people can do and But if I can go back to the confluence of your book and mine you have these three concepts of the healing concepts of alignment Which is I call authenticity being being becoming true to ourselves That's available to all all of us you talk about contentment, which I talk about in terms of acceptance, just actually recognizing how things are and being with them. Not necessarily that we don't want anything to be different, but that we don't stress ourselves about things. Thirdly, what you call control, which we've already talked about,

what I call agency. Those are some core principles that interestingly enough, both you and I, without any discussion or awareness of what each of us is writing, why did we come up with that? Because they're real. And we've seen them both in medical practice and the function of them. Now, I add anger, another A called anger, which I think is very important for people to be able to say no.

We have a system in our brain for healthy aggression. Just as we have one for play, for love, for lust, for fear, for grief. We have a system in our brain for anger. Why? Because it has to protect us. I think people need to be angry, not enraged, not chronically resentful, but they have to be able to say, no, you will not do this to me. No, you will not enter my space.

No, you will not manipulate me. No, you will not use me. So that's a small microcosmic statement of my healing principles, but I certainly think that healing is possible and let's face it if you didn't think even what's possible would you write your books you know I mean if all you want to do is tell people that terrible things are you wouldn't write it back we both write books because we actually believe in human beings yeah in the capacity of

human beings for transformation and that there's some guidance that can be provided to promote that transformation. That's why we write. And that's why I wrote this book. And so yes, healing is possible, but we have to be aware, as I think you said earlier, we have to wake up to what's going on. Until then, we're just working in the dark. And until then, we're just working in the dark. Gabor, it's always a pleasure spending time with you. You're quite a wonderful man. The work that you are articulating so beautifully that you're putting out there,

this latest book is, it is a masterpiece. I really hope everyone listening, everyone watching goes and picks up a copy. It really is transformative. I think everyone will think differently about themselves and their lives after reading it. Thank you so, so much

for all the work you're doing. I feel very honored these days to call you a friend. Well, the sense of being honored is mutual. And I'm just so glad we've met, that fate brought us together and not for the first time. I really hope not for the last time.

For sure. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life.

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