How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - The F-Word Miniseries: Gabor Maté on Feelings

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Welcome to The How To Fail F-Word miniseries! Three days, three guests, three different F-words.Today, we start with Gabor Maté...on feelings.Gabor is a renowned speaker, physician and author; a practitioner who has revolutionised our understanding of stress, addiction and childhood development. He has written four bestselling books, including the worldwide best-seller When the Body Says No which argued - controversially at the time - that stress had a major role in the onset of most chronic diseases. His latest work, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, is co-authored with his son, Daniel. It outlines how true health is possible, but only if we are willing to embrace authenticity and acknowlege our true feelings.--The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté is out now and available to buy here.--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpodGabor Maté @gabormatemd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to this How to Fail mini-series. Now, as you'll know if you're a regular listener, this podcast is dedicated to a greater understanding of what failure really is, what we learn from it, how we grow from it, and whether, if we choose not to be defined by our mistakes, it actually helps us become the truest versions of ourselves. Inspired by failure, I'm now bringing you the F Word miniseries. Failure is still the overarching theme, and two of these episodes have the conventional how to fail interview structure. But within that, we explore three different F words, feelings, friendships and fuel. By fuel, I mean what motivates us, by the way.

I'm not talking about oil or gas or, well, cheese. We'll be talking about ambition, motivation, and what drove the army sergeant's son who left school at 15 to found one of the biggest banks in the world and become a billionaire. Has money made him happy? And is his ambition a blessing or a curse? We'll also be talking to one of the foremost experts in addiction and trauma about the importance of understanding our feelings and what can happen when we ignore them. And we'll be chatting to a How to Fail favourite about the power of friendship. Three days, three episodes, three F-words. It'll be effing great. Welcome to the How to Fail F-word mini-series. Today we start with Gabor Mate on feelings. My guest today is Dr. Gabor Mate, a renowned speaker,

physician, and best-selling author, a practitioner who has revolutionized our understanding of health and whose work on stress, addiction, and childhood development has reshized our understanding of health and whose work on stress addiction and childhood development has reshaped our understanding of what it is to be human. As a doctor he spent 20 years in family practice and palliative care working for over a decade in downtown Vancouver with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. What he learned went into his four best-selling books, including the worldwide hit, When the Body Says No, The Hidden Cost of Stress, which argued controversially at the time that stress had a major role in the onset of most chronic diseases.

Born in Budapest in 1944, Dr. Mate's early childhoods were spent in the terrifying shadow of Nazi occupation, an experience that would impact the rest of his life in ways that took him many years to understand. He touches on this in his new book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, co-authored with his son, Daniel. It outlines how true health is possible, but only if we are willing to embrace authenticity above social expectations. It has already been described as a masterpiece by critics and by Gabor's son as his father's magnumus opus yet. Dr. Gabor Mate, welcome to How to Fail. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

It's so lovely to have you. We were chatting before we started recording about how often you are quoted on this podcast, because so much of what you write about tallies exactly with the premise of this show, which is essentially that authenticity is the key to everything. But what's brilliant about your book, The Myth of Normal, is that it shows how hard it can sometimes be to find our authentic selves. Could you explain to us a bit more about that? Well, yes. And also the resonance with your program is that it's through our difficulties that we actually learn. It's when we experience setbacks that we find out what is not authentic or authentic about us.

But that original tension comes from an unfortunate circumstance in modern life is that a lot of children have the experience that their true selves are not accepted by their parents, not seen, not heard, not appreciated. As a matter of fact, when trauma happens, the true self is actually squelched and we're disconnected from it. A lot of people find that in order to be acceptable to their families of origin, they need to suppress some aspects of their essential emotional life to present a face that's acceptable to the world. This society then feeds on that. It loves image. It loves art of its success success it loves compliance it loves people working hard to be accepted by society so that both from the point of view of personal original development in childhood

and then social expectation we increasingly lose contact with our true selves so as a matter of fact since suppressing ourselves was a necessity in childhood in order to be accepted, we actually unconsciously identify inauthenticity with survival. Yes. Now, once you identify inauthenticity with survival, you're not going to give up very easily. And sometimes it takes failure or disease or some suffering to knock us on the head and say, well, this inauthenticity is costing us. But those are hard lessons and scary ones for a lot of people.

The particular culture and society that you're investigating is a modern one. Do you think, I mean, I understand that the rise of social media and the importance of image and aesthetic has definitely had a deleterious impact. But do you think it was ever thus? Do you think in cave men and women times, there were still people who struggled with authenticity? I doubt it. I mean, first of all, the whole idea of cavemen, I mean, mostly we weren't cavemen at all. We were people living in the wild, hunter-gatherers. That's how we evolved. The caveman

thing, I suppose we did live in caves because there's some evidence for that, but that wasn't ever the essence of our existence. We lived in nature in small-bound hunter-gatherer groups, very much connected to our gut feelings, which is the essence of authenticity. Because if you think about it for a moment, any creature living in the wild, animal or human or human and other animal, I should put it that way, how long does it survive if it's not connected to their gut feelings? So we had no choice but to be connected to their authenticity.

But I gave a talk this morning. There were, you know, multiple hundreds of people there. And I asked them, as I often do, raise your hand if you've had the following experience, that you have a strong gut feeling about something, powerful gut feeling, you ignore it, and you're sorry afterwards. Now, whenever I put that question to people, virtually everybody puts their hands up. Now that means something happened to them that made them give up their authentic connection to themselves.

And you've never met a one-day-old baby, have you, that is not authentic, that doesn't connect with their feelings and doesn't express them immediately. So something happens. And that's something that happens, I think, is very much a phenomenon of civilization, and increasingly so in modern civilization. So that, no, I don't think in our original state we could have evolved as a species if we were that disconnected from ourselves. You mentioned one day all babies there.

Let's go back to you as a baby. Because you start the book with this very deep anecdote that appears superficial to begin with, which is what your work is very good at, about arriving back home on a plane. And your wife, Ray, had said she was going to pick you up. But then she said, oh, I haven't left yet. Do you still want me to come? Yeah. And how did you react?

So you have to understand when I was young and stupid at age 70 or 71. Your adolescent years, I was still a promising young man. And I reacted with pain and rage. And when I saw her, when I underwent the ultimate indignity of having to take a taxi home, all of 15, 20 minute ride from the airport, I barely even talked to her. And I kept my distance for about a day until she finally said, knock it off already. So I reacted, in other words, like a young infant does when they're separated from mother. And then on reunion, the infant will actually look the other way. There's British studies that actually showed that, that these young children on prolonged

separation from mother, when the mother shows up, instead of being happy, which is what you'd expect, are actually distressed.ressed they cry their heart rate goes up and often they won't even look at the mother sometimes not even recognize her which is simply a defensive response of the part of the brain that says that you were so hurt when you abandoned that you'll never be that vulnerable again you're going to john, John Bowlby, the great British psychiatrist, called this detachment. It's a defensive maneuver on the part of the organism not to be that vulnerable again. Now, that, of course, parallels my own infant story

of five or six weeks separation from my mother. And when I saw her again, I wouldn't even look at her for several days. That shows up 70 years later in my marriage because she's not there for me the woman I'm relying on and so I take it as a it's not how I take it is it's how my organism takes it as I'm an infant again being rejected and I react that way I don't look at her so that's the impact of trauma the past shadows and dominates the present explain to us why you were abandoned by your mother I was just in Budapest last week,

a few days ago, and every morning I went to swim at a swim facility on a particular street, just around the corner from my hotel. Across the street from the swim facility, I mean directly across the street, as far as that window in this room is from us, where we're sitting now, was the house, which was a house of relative refuge for Jews under Swiss protection during the most vicious period of an anti-Semitic government in Budapest, still under the Nazi occupation, where multiple hundreds of people were crowded into a house

that might have comfortably housed maybe 100. The excrement on the floor, the lack of food. My mother took me outside on the very paving stones that are still there and across the swimming pool. And she gave me to a Christian woman who had come to visit a Jewish friend and asked her to take me to some relatives still under relatively safer conditions living somewhere else. So this abandonment, as I experienced it, was really her attempt to save my life.

Not her attempt, probably her successful endeavor to save my life, because I would not have survived under those conditions. I was very ill, 11-month-old. But the abandonment, or at least how the infant's brain interprets the event, which really, when you think about it, was an act of immense love on the part of a 24 year old young woman to give up her baby to a stranger but the infant can only experience it as abandonment and so when that shadow arises in me because my wife is not there to meet me i react like that one year old baby doesn't look at the woman it's so interesting hearing you as an expert in this field who've devoted so much of your

professional life to this raising of awareness that you have this awareness but still at the age of 70 or 71 yeah you couldn't immediately act on that awareness and in a way i think that that's very reassuring for people to hear that even you will have those moments of being all too human yeah so does the space between awareness and action get narrower well it needs to here's the thing i've written all these books and you know published all over the world and i get people coming up to me saying thank you i read your book and it changed my life and my default response has always been well maybe i should read it myself. Because to understand something very deeply is not the same as having worked it through.

Yes. So the awareness is not enough. You know, the intellectual awareness is not enough. I mean, one also has to deal with how that emotion and that reaction is still lodged in one's organism. That's what has to be worked through. Knowing what happened, while helpful, is not sufficient. I quote American psychologist called Rollo May, a citation that's often misattributed to another psychiatrist called Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning, but Frankl never said it. It was Rollo May that said

that freedom lies in the capacity between stimulus and reaction to actually choose how I'm going to respond. And what trauma does is it gets rid of that space. There's no space. There's the stimulus. There's the reaction. And so the actual idea is to widen the gap between stimulus and reaction so that the present self with its awareness can show up so that the unconscious childhood programming is not pulling your strings like you're a puppet. Fascinating. That's a fascinating definition of trauma. And another one that you've given is that trauma is not what happens to you,

it's what happens inside you in response to what happens to you. Yeah, yeah. So the trauma wasn't that my mother gave me to a stranger. That's what happened to me. That was the traumatic event. But the trauma is the wound that I sustained, which happens inside me, which is that I make the interpretation that I'm being abandoned. And who gets abandoned? Somebody who's not worth it. Somebody who's worthless. That's who gets abandoned.

So then I make the interpretation that the world is not safe and furthermore that I'm just not worth it. I'm not important. I'm not loved. I'm not lovable. That's'm not important I'm not loved I'm not lovable that's the trauma which is a good thing because if the trauma was that my mother gave me to a stranger under those terrible conditions that will never not have happened yes that happened now 77 years ago it's never not going to have happened but if the trauma is the interpretation

I made of it that wound of worthlessness or unlovability that I sustained. Well, that can be healed at any time. So it's very important to make that distinction. And it also removes the sting of blame from the parent, which I know you write so much about, that actually it's not what you're saying is not blaming parents and it's not blaming people for their own diseases. It's seeking to explain.

It's things to understand, yeah. This may seem, I don't know, heretical or strange to say, but even parents who abuse their kids often love their kids. It's just that that's the best they can do. They don't act lovingly, but it's not that they don't have love. Very few parents lack love for their kids. I'm sure there are such parents in whom the love has been really extirpated by their own traumas but all kinds of parents including myself who really love their children can still transmit their traumas to them not for any willing conscious purpose but because we can't help it until we find out otherwise so many

questions i want to ask you i want to ask you first whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about human nature well there's a chapter in the book on human nature, and essentially, I quote the Stanford University neuropsychologist Robert Sapolsky, who says that the essence of our nature is not to be constrained by our nature. Humans are almost infinitely adaptable. We don't have a nature that says, you're going to behave this way. No, that's the only way you're going to behave this way. No, that's the only way you're going to behave. There's no such nature. I mean, if Buddha was a human being, if Hitler was a human being, then what the hell is human nature? On the one hand, this society has a certain definition of human nature, a certain depiction of human nature as being aggressive and competitive and selfish and self-aggrandizing. That's popular language will manifest that

when somebody does something particularly dastardly or selfish, we say, oh, that's just human nature. At least in North America, they use that statement. When somebody does something generous or kind, we never say, oh, that's just human nature. So that means we have a certain jaded view of human nature. There's no such human nature. What there is is human potential. There's no such human nature. What there is is human potential.

There's human needs. When the needs are met, that potential is realized. And that potential really is to be communal, collaborative, compassionate creatures. That's how we survived. That's how we evolved. Couldn't have evolved otherwise. So that if there's a nature, it's not determined

in the sense that we're obligated by our nature to behave in particular ways. It's that we have a nature in the sense that we're obligated by our nature to behave in particular ways it's that we have a nature in the sense that we have certain needs like any creature does you know i mean you might say the analogy i use in the book is an acorn has it in it it's nature to become an oak tree but not under any conditions put it on this wooden table there'll be no oak tree it needs the right soil and irrigation for it to manifest its true nature. Same with human beings. So it's not so much so that there's human nature

as a definitive and defined set of characteristics. There's human needs and there's human potential. And as for any organism, any living organism, if you want that organism to manifest its potential, you have to give it the right conditions, meet its needs. So that's the sense in which I talk about human nature. How do you feel about failure generally? How do I feel about it? Well, how I feel about it is that I don't like it. What do I think of it? And how do I want to relate to it? It's always a learning opportunity, which is the essence,

I think, of what you talk about. And I've never had a failure that didn't end up teaching me something very important that i needed to learn so from that point of view there's a wonderful quote that i'd like to read you if i could so this is one of my spiritual mentors you might say not that i follow any kind of disciplined fashion but i learned a lot from this guy he says your conflicts all the difficult things the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They're specifically yours, designed for you by a part of yourself that loves you more than anything else. That part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going to go in the right direction unless there's something pricking you on the side, telling you, look here, this way. That part of you that loves you more than anything else,

that part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up. It will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose. So in that sense, our failures are designed for us by a part of ourselves that's incredible to teach us something i make the same case about a lot of illnesses as well like these difficulties these challenges relationship breakups whatever they happen to be they're all designed for us by a part of ourselves that wants us to wake up and if you don't listen there'll be more suffering down the line if you you do listen, you move forward. Who's that quote from?

A.H. Almas, A-L-M-A-S. That's his teacher name. His real name is Hamid Ali, and he lives in California. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Just on the illness front, I know that there are some people who take exception to the premise of my podcast because they do not believe that all failures can be easily assimilated which is absolutely true but I think there's also a misapprehension that I'm lumping all failures in together so I'm saying oh you can just get over the grief after the loss of a loved one which I'm not saying at all and I think that you get that sometimes as well when you talk about illness. There's a misunderstanding of your work, which is not that you're blaming the patient for their illness.

No, I mean, I don't go out of my way, but I certainly make it my way to explain to people that there's no blame attached. But I do say that certain dynamics in people's lives, always as a result of childhood traumatic circumstances makes us behave in certain ways, makes us take on certain character traits. Those character traits then make us function in certain ways in the world, which then creates stress, and that stress causes illness. But there's no blame there because no child ever decides to suppress their feelings, for example, which later on can lead to all kinds of illness. But no child ever decides that consciously. It's a survival mechanism, just like your competitiveness or me trying to compensate for my sense of lack of worthiness by being a workaholic physician. That's not a conscious decision on my part.

It's an adaptation. You don't blame people for adaptations they unconsciously took on when they had no choice in the matter. So there's no blame here whatsoever. But it does open up your perspective and mind is the sense of responsibility. So I may not be blamed. I may not be blameworthy. I'm not. But if I understand these dynamics, I can now respond in a new way.

I can be response-able. I can now live a different kind of life. That's what the liberation is and that's where failure or very often setbacks in terms of health can function as teachers and lead us back to ourselves brilliant response able i love that and that's why your wife ray can say after you've ignored her for a day knock it off and you can take that on board now yeah and i knocked it off after 24 hours which as i say in the book is a great step forward because years ago it might have been taking me

days to knock it off you know so that's a sign of progress which leads us on to your first failure actually which is that as a parent you failed to provide your children with a home environment where they felt safe and unconditionally loved gab Gabor, that is a huge and brave and honest admission. And I thank you for making it. And what's brave about it? Well, there are lots of people... I'm just pushing back against the brave designation. Yeah, I think there are lots of people who haven't done the work that you've done and

still want to project an image of their perfect selves and parenting would be part of that. That means they haven't done the work that you've done and still want to project an image of their perfect selves and parenting would be part of that. That means they haven't accepted themselves yet. I mean, preach. You know, it's not a question of bravery. It's just a question of saying this is how it was. You know, not only that, I fully understand that when I talk about these things in myself,

people really appreciate it. They feel permission to be themselves, to examine themselves without shame. So there's nothing brave about it. All I get is appreciation for it. Okay. Well, it's very cowardly of you, but explain to me why you chose this as your first failure.

Because it's the one that, if I could undo anything in my life, that's the one I would live over again. And owing to my own traumas, which I've talked to you about at some length, it also means that when we choose our spouses, inevitably, and only 100% of the time, we choose somebody at the same level of traumatic wounding that we're at, which means that now two people who are traumatized are coming together. And to the degree to which

they haven't worked it out yet by the time they have children almost inevitably they'll pass it on to their kids almost inevitably and so that's what happened so that if at any time you'd ask me would you throw yourself into a fire for the sake of your kids of course I would have unhesitatingly unhesitatingly do so but unfortunately nobody ever needed to throw myself into a fire that they just needed me to be present as a emotionally attuned self-regulated present loving adult and not because of my own drives and traumatic legacies I wasn't capable of doing my wife being just as traumatized as I was now you had these two traumatized people

in conflict with each other not knowing how to create a home where there was real safety for our kids. How many kids do you have? We have three children. And how old were you and your wife when you... I was 30 perhaps, still in medical school. My wife would have been four years younger at 26. And so what was going on for you at this stage? Were you a workaholic? Well, at this stage, I was a medical student, which immediately meant that I was by definition a workaholic because you cannot be going through medical school unless you really

ignore everything but the work but that wasn't all there was to it along with the traumatic imprint of workaholism there was also poor impulse control on my part i had a lot of suppressed anger that would just break out sometimes out of me one time i hit my wife one time in my whole life she was cutting my hair and I was saying something and she said shut up and she didn't mean all that viciously but I just reacted violently because my sense of importance was not being wounded which is was precisely my wound I'm not excusing anything I'm just saying that's what happened that never happened again but as my son daniel and my co-writer in this book

says in when he talks about his own childhood he used to have a nightmare that the floor was not the floor that the floor would just disappear from beneath his feet but just to say that the emotional atmosphere in the home was so volatile that could be playfulness and safety in the sense of lovingness and then all of a sudden there'd be a very tense, conflictual, intra-parental situation, and the young child is sitting through all that, feeling anything but safe. That episode that you recounted where you were violent with your wife, how did you feel after that?

Did you immediately recognize it as wrong? Well, that one I recognized pretty quickly. You know, I never did it again. But it just spoke to the degree of suppressed pain and rage that I had. But yeah, I certainly recognized it was wrong. I mean, I never recognized where it came from. And you've spoken before about that sense of conflict with your children and your son Daniel not singing happy birthday to you

and you hit him. I ended up hitting him that's yeah. At these moments now that you look back on them do they come from wounded ego? Well what is the ego? The ego is kind of a very fragile structure that we develop you can talk about the ego as a healthy ego which is just our sense of self that's capable and making decisions and executive functions and reacting in a sane way to the world. But a wounded ego is very fragile and is always trying to protect itself and is always trying to aggrandize itself. So my three-year-old son militantly refuses to sing happy birthday to me. I'm getting the sense again that I'm not worthy that I'm not

lovable and that won't hurt so much end up taking my anger on my little boy that's what happened how did you work through all of that how long did it take you oh it took me 10 minutes 20 minutes you know and I mean look when when you when you a child, you realize that you're off base. So by the time he got home, I said, look, Daniel, please have your birthday cake. You don't have to sing anything. And my three-year-old son phoned every relative that is at that birthday party, and he called my parents and his other grandparents and my brothers and their wives and said, I had the cake and I didn't have to sing, you know.

So that happened right away. But as to what made me do it, so the wrongness of what I had done, I mean, the shame of it flooded me almost immediately. But why I had done it and where that impulse came from, that took me much longer to understand. And it's really been your life's work. That's been my life's work to understand that. And in that sense, the failure with my own children has been a, by the way, by talking about my failure to provide a safe environment for them,

I'm not saying that they're failures. No. They're wonderful beings. But that really was an impetus for me to learn about trauma and about child development. Because if I could behave that way quite contrary to my deepest urges to nurture them and to love them there had to be some reason for it either I was just randomly troubled or there was some reason why I was so troubled that I would behave in these

troubling ways so do you think you've become a better parent the older you've become well I'm a much better parent now to my adult children than i ever was to my young children much much better having to do that internal work also allowed me to learn a lot that i've been able to teach the rest of the world those that will listen anyway and in that sense people who follow my work have benefited from that failure as i have in terms of learning about myself i'm a much wiser and insightful and non-intrusive parent and loving parent than I used to be. Loving not in the sense of how much love I felt for my children, but how loving I'm able to be in action.

Yes, consistent action. Yeah. And have you ever apologized to your children? Oh, till the cars come home. I mean, actually they got sick of hearing the apologies because a lot of that apology came from a sense of guilt. And nobody wants to be seen as somebody else's guilt. My children don't want to be seen through a lens of, I failed. Nobody else wants to be somebody else's

failure. So in my family, those apologies were made to the point where almost too compulsively, actually, because it took me a long time to let go of the guilt. I mean, I had the insight, but it took me a long time to let go of the guilt i mean i had the insight but it took me a long time to let go of the guilt so they didn't want to hear that too much anymore do you love yourself well i can talk about that in two senses one is inaction so when you love somebody it's not enough that you have a feeling of love i mean people talk about self-love they think we're talking about some gooey new age concept. It isn't. What it actually is, when you love somebody, you'll extend yourself to support their growth. And that's not my definition. It's F. Scott Peck in his book, The Road Less Traveled. He talks about love as when you're willing to extend

yourself for the spiritual growth of the other. So do I extend myself to support my own growth? I do. I look after myself reasonably well. Not that you'd notice on this book tour, but even there, you know. So there's that active sense of love. Do I act lovingly towards myself? Much more than I used to, for sure. In an experiential sense of do I feel love towards myself? I haven't much, except earlier this year. I talked about this experience once before, and it's not in this book, because the book was done by the time this experience happened. But I was taking part in a psychedelic ceremony with some Indigenous Canadians

who have a horrific history, if anybody knows anything about Canadian history, and British colonialism knows how devastatingly these people were treated and what the continued impact that is. So because they knew my work with healing, and I talk a lot about indigenous issues in Canada, and because they knew my work with psychedelics, they invited me to a ceremony to help support their work. And so we used psilocybin, magic mushrooms.

I took a rather heroic dose, which is, that's me because I have a very thick skull and it's hard to break through it. And I experienced self-love, not as a concept and not as action, but just as a state of being. That here I am, just here I am, and nothing more is needed. I had that experience. Now, has that stayed with me? I think the impact of it has.

I don't think the sense is, it's not immediately available to me anytime i call on it but when i do call on it at least i get a sense of it so it was an experiential active or not active spiritual experience of self-love but that was very recently that's amazing so you know the fact of the possibility is there absolutely and you know there's nothing special about psychedelics a lot of people are quite capable of having that experience through various spiritual practices. And to some people, it comes spontaneously. But it's certainly available to all of us.

The thing that's coming up for me is the TED Talk by the neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, who had a stroke. I just talked with her recently. Did you? She's a hero of mine. Yeah. Please tell her. She's a hero of mine. Yeah. Please tell her. She's a wonderful, wonderful person. But she talks about having this stroke and this aneurysm

and feeling for a brief moment completely at one with the universe in a state of bliss where she suddenly understood that she was part of everything and every fiber around her and it was this feeling of nirvana that's right what happened was that her linear smarty pants left brain yes got knocked out and she was left with the right side of the brain which is the holistic connected you might say more feminine aspect of all of us which this world as part of its toxicity really suppresses but jill had this experience of the right brain just manifesting its wisdom.

Yes. Which is the connectedness and belonging and wholeness and oneness. Amazing. Yeah. It's sort of that overriding the thinking. That's right. Yeah. Do you think we think too much?

She asked thoughtfully. Both in human evolution, animal evolution, I should say, and human evolution specifically, but also in the development of the individual human being, the right side of the brain develops first, months before, and years in some ways, before the left-sided intellectual brain. Right. Now, if the right side of the brain develops properly, where the template for a healthy sense of self is provided by the early environment, then the right brain never gets dominated by the left brain.

But the two are in balance. In fact, the right brain actually governs the scene. It sees the whole picture. And the left brain becomes its very efficient and necessary and often brilliant servant. But if the right brain's development is interfered with because of conditions that are lacking in emotional support. Then, as a therapist once said to me, if your parents didn't know how to hold you,

you'll develop the mind to hold yourself with, so that the left brain then becomes the holding tank for our sense of self. Yes. In the right brain, Jill has to have a stroke to have the right brain assert its wisdom. And a lot of us never get there because the left brain is just too busy thinking all the time. It's too busy thinking because it's always trying to figure out how to be safe in this world, because it wasn't when it was developing. And is that the premise of psychedelics,

and using them in the way that you have used them, that you embrace your right brain, that it doesn't have the intellectual basket? I haven't thought of it that way. What I have thought of it that way what i have thought of it is maybe very connected to that which is that the psychedelics kind of strip away the membrane that keeps the unconscious from our awareness and so that we get to experience in a walk in an awake state in an adult state in the sense and if ideally in a state of safety if the

environment and the guidance is appropriate we get to experience all that we're harboring in our unconscious. But we get to experience it with some awareness so that it doesn't dominate us anymore. So that all the rage, hatred, pain, joy, playfulness, whatever is in there can now emerge. And I can be aware of it and I can be in relationship to it rather than just pulling the strings from behind the scenes. That's what psychedelics do. Yeah, and a lot of that is stored in the unconscious right brain. So, yeah, that's a good way to put it. I want to do psychedelics with you.

Yeah? Well, right after the show. Okay, great. Can you bring some magic mushrooms? We'll just phone up our local psychiatric provider. Your second failure is that you were fired. I was fired, yeah. What were you fired from and why were you fired?

So I was the medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver Hospital, which is the unit where we looked after terminally ill people, people dying usually of malignancies where they had days to live or weeks. Sometimes they would come in a few months before their death just for some respite care or to get their symptoms under control and so on. So I was the ineffective director of that unit at Vancouver Hospital. And at a certain point, I was fired. Why? What was that reason? Well, I've always maintained that I was fired for gross competence,

you know, I was just too good at it, you know, which in a sense I was, because I was really good at the job, the patients loved me, the nurses loved working with me, although they did say that working with me was like working in the eye of a tornado, that was my style of work, but I was intuitive and I was not bound by medical convention. I did whatever I thought would help a patient, often very effectively. I also knew how to sit with people and to listen to them and to help them understand the process that was now ebbing their life away. So I was quite good at it. However, I was also very arrogant and very defensive

so that when other physicians who didn't have my particular intuition or they didn't share my vision or they didn't understand why I was doing things unconventionally, which sometimes I was, they would question that. Now, given my own defensiveness, when I was questioned, I didn't see that as questions. I saw them as an attack. And so I reacted like I do when I feel under attack,

like a bulldog, very aggressively. So what got me fired was nobody intended to fire me. Some people may not have quite liked the way I did the work or they didn't understand it, but there was never any intention on anybody's part originally to fire me. So things escalated because I got more and more defensive and more and more aggressive as a result in my language. So that's what ended up leading me to be fired, and I was. What were some of the unconventional things that you did? I used medications in ways that weren't necessarily the way they were originally intended. The way I would sometimes talk with patients,

physicians weren't used to that way of managing people's emotional states like I did. They were more often inclined to medicate people than I was. I don't want to be unfair to my colleagues. They were all very dedicated, good people. They didn't like my rapid style, the way I made quick decisions, and they certainly didn't like the terrible way that I kept notes and didn't explain why I was doing what I was doing. Ultimately, it was the difference of working styles,

which, again, I'm being questioned. I reacted so defensively that the situation got really envenomed, and I got fired. And that defensiveness, quite often defensiveness and arrogance actually comes from base insecurity. That's the whole point. But did you ever question how you were doing what you were doing? I was very confident in what I was doing.

Yes. Because it was working. Once I see something, I see it, you know, and I work with it. But to go back to my sense of lack of importance, lack of worth, when I was being questioned, that's the wound that was being poked at. And that's why I reacted so defensively. So I wasn't insecure about what I was doing. I was insecure about how I was being perceived.

Yes. Okay. And have you always wanted to be a healer? Because for me, hearing you talk, you are a healer and you were working in an environment where there were effective clinicians, but you are a healing physician. And it sounds to me that that is a calling. It's a vocation. It is a calling. And I wonder how early in your life you were aware of that calling. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I couldn't have maybe told you why. Part of the reason I think was unconscious, which is that my grandfather who died in Auschwitz in his

50s was a physician. And there was a huge hole left in my mother's heart after her parents' death. And I think I wanted to fill that gap for her. I really think that was part of it. There was also the fact that it's a beautiful profession. It's a beautiful calling to provide healing and assistance in this life. And that's always what I wanted to do. I didn't follow it originally when I graduated from high school, but it was always in me.

But in a larger sense, like when I first got into student politics in the 60s and the Vietnam War was going on, I just wanted to end this unconscionable conflict that was inflicting suffering on so many innocent people. So there was that, in the Hebrew they talk about tikkun olam, tikkun olam, which is healing the world. There was that, in the Hebrew, they talk about tikkun olam, tikkun olam, which is healing the world. There was that drive in me to heal the world, not just through medicine necessarily, but also through just social action and politics. And one of the most manipulative

and at the same time, truest things I've ever said, I'm still, I still don't know how I came up with this, but it was when I was applying for medical school after having been a teacher for a couple of years my reputation as a student radical was still very much alive at the University of British Columbia where I went to school and the head of the admissions department at UBC at the medical school asked me why is it that a student radical such an anti-establishment figure such as yourself would want to join one of the most establishment-oriented professions. And that's when I came up with one of the most false and most true statements. I had still no idea where it came from.

But I said, oh, Dr. Graham, well, as a student radical, I wanted to make the world better for people, and of course that's what doctors do as well. No, the line was, in a sense, purely manipulative because I wanted to say what I thought he would want to hear, but it happened to be true yes you know you've talked about the psychological need possibly unconscious to fill that absence in your mother's life do you think that there was an epigenetic need as well do you feel that you genetically carry the trauma of your ancestors specifically the ones who were killed in the Holocaust?

That would not be the case in the sense that my grandparents' genes had been passed on to me before they were killed, before they were traumatized. So that when I was conceived, they hadn't been traumatized yet. So although there's increasing evidence about the epigenetic transmission of trauma, I think the evidence evidence still very much needs to be understood and debated and put in its proper context. I don't know that it's as big an effect as we fashionably like to think. I don't think that the researchers who are engaged in it are able to say definitively yet.

But certainly in my case, the genes were passed on to me before the specific trauma to my grandparents happened great point yeah the purity of that logic yeah now we'll get on to why the firing was actually the best thing that could have happened to you because what happened after you lost that job well it was the best thing that ever happened to me for two reasons one is that external one that i think you're referring to which is that no more than four weeks later i had the phone call from the downtown east side in vancouver from this facility that work with the lowest of the low in the social sense people drug addicted and drug addled and hiv ridden and sick with all manner of mental and physical health conditions and had i still been in

my palliative care position i could not have have accepted. And as a result, because I also, you know, with my ADD-type brain, I just like change and like to move on to new things, so I was just ready for a change. And so when they phoned me and said, will you come and work down here in the downtown east side, it took me like one second. It didn't even take me a second.

So that was one benefit, which led to my work with addictions, which led to my rethinking of addictions as a trauma response, which led to the writing of that book, In the Realm of Hunger Ghosts, which I know has had an enormous impact out there in the world, not as big as the impact that I'd like it to have. I'd like it to change the institutions, but institutions are very resistant to change. But certainly, I've had a lot of feedback from a lot of people that it changed their lives, it saved their lives, and from colleagues and people in the addiction world that it transformed their understanding of addiction in a very positive way.

That would not have happened had I not been fired. So there's that. And also, I would never have had this incredible experience of working with these people and learning so much more about life. But that's the one sense. In other senses, more internal, in that for weeks after the firing, I was just seized with vengeful rage. I was going to take these people to court and guide their faces into the dust.

I was going to collect all the evidence about what a good job I had done, about how unfairly I was treated. I was just full of revenge fantasies and just seized by this urge to triumph. And then I started to realize, oh, there's something familiar about this. This tape that's playing in my brain that I'm hard done by and it's not fair. It's not a new tape. It seems very familiar to me. So I got to understand that this is old stuff that's going on.

It's got nothing to do with the firing. It's got to do with how I perceive things. I also got to understand over time how I had just explained, I had created my own firing. It was a part of me that created the firing in order to teach me something. That took me a while, but I got that as well. I got that it didn't need to have happened. I could have had the same stimuli, responded totally differently.

No firing would have happened. So I began to question what this old tape is and what's that about, had the same stimuli, responded totally differently, no firing would have happened. So I began to question, you know, what this old tape is and what's that about? And it really is old, old stuff going back to infancy. And finally, I just got my first book contract for my book on ADD, Scattered Minds, and I had a decision to make. I said, okay, well, I could devote my time

to fighting this battle and going to court and engaging in all this wrangling and proving and disproving and defending and attacking. I could write a book. What would I rather do? Because I can't do both. So what would I rather do? So in gradual stages, it led to real new work for me and new insights,

but it also allowed me to let go of a lot of old stuff. So interesting. And you mentioned anger there. And in The Myth of Normal, you talk about the four A's and how important they are for promoting healing. And those four A's are anger. Healthy anger. Healthy anger. Okay. We'll come back to that. Acceptance, agency, and authenticity. Can you explain to us the importance of each of those? Sure. So in my work as a family physician, and also in palliative care, I began to notice who got sick and who didn't.

And in fairness to my specialist colleagues, as a family physician, I have an advantage. I know the people that get sick. They don't. They only know them after they get sick. Otherwise, people wouldn't go to them. But I knew people in their actual lives. I knew them in their families of origin.

I knew very often the multigenerational family history. I knew people's work and how they get to see how people feel about themselves. And I began to notice that there were certain inescapable patterns in the people that got sick with chronic illness. What I mean by that is malignancy and autoimmune disease. And these patterns included, among other personality traits, the repression of healthy anger. These are the very nice people who are always giving, always there for everybody except for themselves. And these people tended to get sick. Now, what I didn't know, there'd been a whole lot of research supporting the same observation that I had long before I was aware of it.

But nobody teaches you this stuff in medical school. So I began to notice that certain ways of functioning in the world, certain personality traits, were providing some significant degree of risk for chronic illness. Others were putting other people's emotional needs ahead of yourself, repressing healthy anger, the belief that you're responsible for what other people feel and you must never disappoint anybody. Did I just see you shudder a little bit? Yeah, you saw me shudder in recognition. Yeah. Now, how do these patterns lead to illness? The name of the book, When the Body Says No, the subtype is the cost of hidden stress. Hidden stress being stress that people generate for themselves without being aware of it.

Now, when you take on other people's emotional needs, when you suppress your healthy anger, when you believe that you must never disown anybody, when you identify with your socially determined role and duties and responsibilities rather than the needs of the self, you're creating a lot of stress for yourself, unwittingly. Now, these patterns are not conscious, deliberate, culpable. They are responses to childhood experience. They're trauma responses. But once they get ingrained in a personality and a person acts out of them, they invite

illness because of all the stress that they generate. Yes. So people don't know, which, by the the way explains why it's mostly women who get autoimmune disease because if you take those four traits of self-suppression and being nice to others and ignoring your own needs who's acculturated in this patriarchal society to manifest those characteristics you know and it's women that they expected to do that that's why they have more immune disease not because of any other factor, as far as I'm concerned. So I began to notice these patterns, that inescapably they were there.

I forget which question I'm answering anymore. No, you're answering about the four A's, which I think you've totally covered, that sense of agency. So healthy anger, well, so let's take healthy anger for a minute then, or take any of them you want. Which one would you want to look at? No, healthy anger. Okay, all right. So what is healthy anger? Our brains are wired for anger.

So we have not only anger, we're wired for a number of emotional responses to the world. One of them, which is healthy anger, which is good because if I'm an animal and somebody encroaches on my territory, I better show some healthy anger to protect my boundaries. So healthy anger is simply a boundary defense. That's all it is. And it's in the present moment. It's healthy in the sense that it preserves your health. If I were to encroach on you in some way, emotionally or physically,

you better get angry with me and say, no, that's it. Once you express the anger and I've backed off, the anger is gone. It has no other function. It's different from sort of chronic rage, which keeps feeding on itself. So I'm talking about healthy anger. So on the one hand, repressing healthy anger causes illness. Chronic rage also causes illness. But healthy anger is just a boundary defense. Now, when you consider for a moment what's the role of the immune system, it's another boundary defense.

It's meant to keep out what's toxic and unhealthy and let in what's nurturing. So emotions let in love and let in what's nurturing. So emotions let in love and let in support, but they keep out invasion. They keep out intrusion. That's what the immune system does. Just hearing you speak reminds me of two periods of my life. One was when I was 10 and I went to a weekly boarding school in Belfast in Northern Ireland and I remember having a temper and someone had left me out of a game and I remember feeling that rage and locking myself in a cupboard and giving myself a good talking to as to how my temper made me an unpleasant person and in order to be accepted I would have to not be angry. And that promise to myself lasted for decades. And what was the impact?

Well, it got me into a very dysfunctional marriage. Yeah, where you didn't set boundaries. I didn't set boundaries. Looking back, I realize certain things about it. And I never was in touch with my anger. I didn't understand what it was. I thought I was sad. But actually, it would have been far more appropriate for me to be angry.

Sometimes, yes. And now I am angry about it, which is good. Yeah. But during that time, I was getting repeated bouts of tonsillitis. I got pneumonia year after year. And when I got out of that dynamic, and I'm not saying that it's as easy as this, and it was a long time coming, but those periods of illness dissipated. Yeah, well, so that's why I wrote this book called

When the Body Says No. When you don't know how to say no, the body will say it in the form of exactly the way your body was saying no when you were not. It's that simple. In this new book, The Myth of Normal, we actually talk about before the body says no. So how to realize these patterns before the body has to come knocking at our door telling us to wake up already. But yeah, I mean, that's a very typical story. And it's also typical that once you realize it and you no longer follow those patterns, you should get a lot healthier. Yeah. And actually going back to what you were saying at the beginning, I'm in a great marriage now because we've both been through stuff and we've both worked on our stuff. And that's why I'm a big advocate for second marriages.

I've been married eight times. To the same woman? To the same woman, yeah. Brene Brown says that too. I love that. I think that's exactly right. You need to continue to grow. But it's certainly true.

So it's what I said earlier, but we always marry somebody at the same level of woundedness as we are. So once you've both done your work, now you're naturally going to marry somebody who is at a much more elevated level of self-awareness and health than you did the first time. Yes. That's the consequence. By the way, Ray, your wife sounds completely wonderful in this book.

Yeah. She really does. Your third failure is about the myth of normal, which is that you almost gave up and returned the advance for this book. Yeah, so this book has been gestating and brewing inside me for over 10 years now. Over that 10-year period, I collected 25,000 articles, really, and I filed them under many different categories, read multiple books, I mean hundreds probably, and interviewed many people. And I had a contract

to write the book, but it just wasn't happening. And I just felt like a pressure, something I had to do, but something was missing for me. And at some point, I said, I can't do this. And maybe I just, I'm done with writing. Maybe I've written my four books and maybe that's it. And, you know, at that moment, that felt like a failure. A necessary one because I just wasn't going to push myself hard enough to do it. I would have had to push myself. And at least I was smart enough not to do that. So at that moment, it felt like a failure. It turned out to, of course, to be a success. And in retrospectively, I look back, I didn't write the book then because I wasn't ready to write it. At that point, my healing hadn't advanced enough for me to be able to write a book with essentially a positive message.

I mean, the original title of the book was something that was guaranteed not to sell any copies at all. What was it? It was called Toxic Culture, How Capitalism Makes Us Sick. Not a very inspiring title, you know. But because my own process hadn't gone far enough, and why not? Because I was still a workaholic. I was working too hard. There wasn't enough space in my mind to really create something fresh and something positive.

When I was more rested and I'd given up on the project and I just had a beautiful holiday with my wife and we're sitting in a hotel in San Francisco on our way home and all of a sudden the myth of normal popped into my head and demanded to be written. And within two months I had a major New York book agent and within six months I had a significant contract with publishers in Britain,

Canada, and the US. And it happened. Not that it happened all that smoothly, but it happened. So in other words, that failure, again, was something in me telling me, you're not ready to do this yet. You have to go further before you're ready to fulfill on this project. Yes. So that's what happened. I said in the introduction that your co-author, Daniel, your son, called it your magnumist opus yet. Do you agree? Is it your magnumist opus yet?

Well, yes. It encompasses everything I've ever learned so far about myself and the world and about the nature of human nature that we talked about, nature of illness and health, the process of illness and the process of healing. It really does encompass everything, both when it comes to physical or mental health. Originally, when we finished this manuscript, by the way, it was double the length that you're looking at now.

I didn't know what to leave out or what not to leave out. So, yeah, in every sense of the word, both in the sense that it's the longest work I've written, but it's also the most encompassing and holistic and complete work that I've done. And it will remain that way. Nothing I'll ever write again will be as great. When I say great, I don't necessarily mean people have to decide for themselves

how great it is, but nothing will be as encompassing and as comprehensive as this book was. How old are you now? 78. How do you feel about age? It's a good thing. What's the alternative? How do you feel about death? How do I feel about age? It's a good thing. What's the alternative? How do you feel about death? How do I feel about age, first of all? Look, I wish my hair was thicker and blacker.

You have great hair, can I just say. You have great hair. Thank you. But it's starting to thin, it's starting to gray. Don't I wish that I had the body I had at age 50? Only then I got nothing to complain about, you know. So in that trivial sense, you might say, I wish I could grow older without the body following me along, but it's not going to happen. I feel about age actually is that I'm much more complete,

I'm much happier, I'm much more at peace than I ever used to be. There's that expression growing older, which usually means getting more decrepit. But no, you can actually grow as you get older. And I think I'm certainly not the first one to say that or to experience it. So in that sense, aging, although it brings its challenges, can also be a very healthy process of growth and awareness and coming to peace with yourself and the world. So how do I feel about it? I would say I'm conflicted.

I like to swim my 2K every morning or whenever I have time for. I look forward to having a body that maybe can't do that anymore. But you know what? That'll be a growth process as well. Then I'll have to come to terms with that reality, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot from that as well. So I would say I feel conflicted about it, but on the whole rather accepting of it.

I'm not resentful of it. I'm not rejecting it, and I'm not terribly worried about it either. Your curiosity is a great characteristic, I feel. Yeah, well, curiosity is the thing, isn't it? Yes. And the other thing is, I think I was telling you before the podcast,

one of my favorite books, Winnie the Pooh. Yes, and how you're naturally an Eeyore. Yeah, how I'm basically Eeyore with my default setting. There's a passage at the end of that book, it's so beautiful, where Christopher Robin now has to grow up and go to school, and now he won't have a chance to play with his toys anymore so much. And this is something that always used to bring tears to my eyes when I thought of this passage.

The book ends with, whatever they do, wherever they go in the enchanted forest, that little boy on his bear will always be playing with each other. And I used to feel so sad about that, because it seemed like it's an ending. It's the end of an age of innocence, an end of play. And you know what? I said we have an anger circuit in our brain. We also have a circuitry of a play in our brain. But you know what? I still get to play that's the reality you get to play at any age you get to be curious at any age so that's how it is dr gabble mate i can't think of any better note to end on i cannot thank

you enough for your work for everything that you've given this world, because I know it's come at a cost. You work phenomenally hard and your intuition and your adventurous curiosity and your wisdom are a gift to us all. So thank you so, so much for coming on How to Fail. Well, very kind of you. Thank you. if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist