Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Discovering Wholeness Through Healing with Dr. Gabor Maté

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

I’m beyond excited to welcome Dr. Gabor Maté to this Language of Love Conversation. As an author, physician, and renowned addiction expert, Gabor has spent years working to break down societal norms and traditional ideals about the connection between trauma and illness. His book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, explores the relationship between and influences of mind and body.  Together we get into the many ways our current physical and mental health is rooted in childhood.  In today’s Conversation, we talk about: Ways in which our mind and body are interconnected  The unique ways stress impacts women’s physical health Why ‘no’is crucial to physical health How to understand the feeling of guilt and what it means  The gifts of sensitive children and why society doesn’t always recognize them How healing is the natural movement toward wholeness Two different kinds of pain Check out Dr. Gabor Maté’s website for more information on his career, books, and courses available. They are chock-full of valuable information regarding addiction, ADHD, trauma, mind/body, and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. And that way, my goal is to awaken your mind, body, and soul. It's time to become fluent in the language of love.

I am so grateful to have you here, Dr. Mati. So let's just start. The book is The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And to me, like the big headline here, which is so important and is inherent in the title, is what we think of is normal, as normal, right? And also those things that we aspire to celebrate and reinforce in our society is really rather toxic, right? And goes back to our collective traumas,

our consumerism, our capitalistic ideals that create competition and division instead of collaboration and connection. But you obviously have said this so much more eloquently than I am right now, but can you explain that just as a baseline so that we all understand what we're talking about when we say the myth of normal? Sure. So usually we conflate or confuse the idea of normal with what is healthy and natural, which I wish there's a certain basis because in medicine, I'm trained

as a physician. When we talk about a normal range of temperature, we're talking about the body temperature range within which human beings can live and outside of which we die. If it's too high or too low. They don't exist. Within the normal range, it's healthy and natural. Now, we make the mistake of thinking that. So, what we're used to then is also what's healthy and natural. Now, we make the mistake, though, of transposing that to our idea of society. So, the things that we're used to, that we consider normal, we think are also healthy and natural. But as you've just summarized, many of the things that we're used to as norms in our society are actually neither healthy or natural in fact they run quite contrary to our needs as human beings so what we have to

understand is human beings evolved over millions and hundreds of thousands of years with certain needs built-in needs if those needs are met we thrive if they're not we don't and what i'm saying is that today's culture in many ways tramples on and denies some essential human needs and that's That's a source of much pathology. So when we consider diseases of the body and mind as abnormalities, I'm saying they're actually normal responses to abnormal circumstances. Let's dig into that a little bit, because like, for instance, you really get into I mean, you know, I like to geek out and I was geeking out because reading this book, because

there's so much evidence and you lay out the science so beautifully and you sort of tell the story, kind of spread it out for us and walk us through it. But you make a pretty good argument for the idea that illness, and let's just talk about physical illness for a moment, we'll get to mental issues in a minute, but that physical illness, especially chronic illness and disease as a result of trauma. I love the examples you gave of obituaries, right? And how those things that we celebrate about people in their obituaries is how they have no ego or how they tirelessly continued all of their family responsibilities, even while battling stage four cancer, you know, these ways in which and then you kind of go over the risk factors, right,

for illness. And there are things like identification with social role and duty and automatic and compulsive concern for the emotional needs and for others overdriven externally focused repression of healthy aggression or anger harboring acting out the belief that i'm responsible for how other people feel i can't disappoint anyone but these are common denominators and you really lay out this argument for chronic illness am i summarizing that correctly? Well, you summarized it very succinctly. In family practice, in which I worked for over 20 years and then seven years of palliative care work before I went into addiction work, I noticed that there were certain personality patterns that people with chronic illness had. And as a family

physician, I had an advantage over my specialist colleagues because I knew people before they got sick. I saw who got ill. Also in palliative care, I saw the personalities of the people that were dying of chronic illness and they're just what you outlined essentially an abandonment of self for the sake of pleasing and serving others while ignoring one's own needs and there's the expression in english the good die young well they often do because what we consider to be goodness often amounts to suppression of self now the trace that you outlined sacrificing

for others ignoring your own needs repressing out the anger when you look at the major genders in our society which gender is expected to be like that it's women they're cultured that's why physicians we don't seem to understand why eighty percent of autoimmune disease happens to women rheumatoid arthritis multiple sclerosis colitis colon disease chronic fatigue fibromyalgia and so on and so forth in fact there's a lot of evidence first of all scientifically that these are related to these emotional traits and secondly it's women who were expected to be that way yes that's why women who were expected to absorb the stresses of everybody else you know and so it's women who suffer most autoimmune illness and if you're

a woman of color or in canada an indigenous woman even more oppressed even more suppressed you're going to have even more autoimmune disease and so what's missing here from the front of me of medicine is that even though some great pioneers of medicine have for 150 years pointed out these observations and we have 100 years of deep science showing the relationship the oneness of mind and body western medicine separates the mind from the body so for example i know that you've served on a faculty of obstetrical faculty of a university so lots of studies have shown for example that women sexually abused are much more likely to have endometriosis. A study out of Harvard showed three years ago that women with severe PTSD

have double the risk of ovarian cancer. Yet, a woman goes to a gynecologist with any of these problems, nobody's going to ask them about stresses or traumas in their lives. It's so crazy to me. When I was on the faculty there and even at UCLA, a big part of my role was educating the medical students. They barely gave me any time because the mental health piece isn't that important. But they had no real understanding or and it was not at all integrated into the intake. And I always ask women when I talk to groups of women, when they go to the OBGYN, not only are they not asked about their stresses, their past trauma. And I want to put a pin in that because a lot of women are defensive about that because they've been told one too many times that

their problems are all in their heads. That's not what we're saying, guys. We aren't saying that your issues aren't true medical conditions and that they're in your mind and that you're crazy. We're not saying that, but people, you know, kind of get defensive because that's what they're expecting. But also the doctors, you know, especially in this country have five minutes with managed care. So they're not asked by their mental health. They're also not, I know this isn't your expertise, but they never get asked or they never even have their clitoris looked at. Like, you know, they look inside, but they never look at the outside. And the clitoris is like, you know, So I have all these women who have sexual dysfunction and none of them have ever been asked about any of this or had their clitoris examined, which often there are real medical issues there, too.

But that's a side note. Not to mention, and I know that you're a relationship expert, when a woman has a problem or anybody has a problem, it's reduced to the isolated individual. Yes. But a sexual problem doesn't happen in isolation. It happens in a relationship. Absolutely. Here's the point. It's not a question that's in your head.

The biology can't be separated from the mind. The human mind and human body are one unit. Science has shown that. So certain conditions like endometriosis, you can have pathological findings. You can identify. Certainly ovarian cancer, there's pathology there that you can identify. But even in the case when there isn't, such as pain on intercourse or irritable bowel syndrome where you can't find certain physical evidence, it's still physiological. yeah and that's because of the mind and the body can't be separated and we're what's called

biopsychosocial creatures which means that our biology is inseparable from our emotions and from our social relationships because our emotions happen in social relationships so that the average physician just is not prepared to understand any of that their training completely misses it lots of studies for example well let me give you another female related example the range of the rate of multiple sclerosis in the 1930s was about one to one each man for one man diagnosed there'd be a woman now it's three and a half women to every man what does that mean well you can't understand it if you look at it strictly as isolated biology because biology doesn't change over 80 years you know so genes don't change over 80 years the climate and the diet didn't change

more for one gender than the other what has changed if you recognize that since multiple sclerosis was first described in 1870 by a French neurologist whose name was Charcot and Jean-Martin Charcot said that this is a disease caused by worry and stress. Now, since then, there's been lots of evidence relating childhood trauma, adult stresses to the onset of multiple sclerosis. Stress inflames the nervous system. It's that simple. Well, almost that simple. And we've had lots of evidence you know why women three and a half times because what's happened is that the stress on women has increased in the last 80 years how so they've always played the roles in this culture of being the shock absorbers the stress absorbers of their families and their spouses

yes you know when a woman takes the medication for depression or anxiety you know what they're doing they're taking the medication for both themselves and their spouse yes because that is true i've often thought about that yeah so the anxiety and stress and depression happens in the context of a relationship so women have played that role of being the shock absorbers the stress absorbers but not all since the second world war especially they've also had to play a role in the economic life of the family either because the family needs it i mean 25 percent of american women this is shocking have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth which is unbelievable for economic reasons and some women very legitimately some women legitimately just

want to be out there contributing and expressing themselves yeah and they're fulfilled like me i was working you know for fulfillment i mean i wanted the money too but it was for fulfillment but it's still even working you still and there are all those studies that show that even you know working both partners working it's the woman that has the bulk of the responsibility for the home and the children on top of work even though they're both working full-time that's the point i'm making so now you double double the responsibility but you haven't shared the stress and and then number three there's more isolation now family so you double the stress you isolate people it's going to be the gender who's carrying all that who's going to have more

multiple sclerosis yeah and other chronic diseases i mean i've talked a lot i had breast cancer I'm such a perfect poster child for what you're teaching because my mother died of breast cancer, what was ultimately breast cancer. And I was completely beside myself, devastated. It was the greatest loss I could ever imagine at that point in my life. And this was about 11, 12 years ago. And within a year, I went right back to work. I was filming a show for OWN. I was, you know, going to just like, OK, you know, I'm just going to work it away. I'll not really feel my feelings. I don't have time for that.

And within a year, I had breast cancer in the same breast she did with no risk factors. It just was like came on suddenly. Mammogram was clear the year before. next year riddled with breast cancer in the left breast and had to go have a mastectomy and chemo and everything else and had to stop my life. You write a lot in your book about, allude to this, but this idea that I often speak of in terms of the gift of cancer and how when the body can't get through to us in other ways, it sometimes gets through to us in disease. And that really is what happened to me that I had to stop my life for the first time in my adult life.

A previous book of mine is entitled When the Body Says No. Yes. When you don't know how to say no, literally your body will say it for you. And breast cancer is a typical example. Now, a small percentage of breast cancers are genetically potentiated. But out of 100 women, I take it you didn't have the gene yourself, did you? No, I did not have any genetic risk factor. Out of 100 women with the breast cancer, 7 will have the gene, 93 will not.

And in all those cases, it's literally the body saying no. because the woman has been the woman won't say no yeah and that's what i learned to do and one of the greatest gifts and it's even compounded over the past couple of years with my more recent trauma that we'll get to in a minute but that is was the gift and and you talk a lot and you write a lot in your book about all of these beautiful examples not only of what seem like miraculous healings from terminal illness that happen and our mutual friend anita morjani writes about this in her work as well. Her healing happened when we decide not only to start setting those boundaries and no longer being the shock absorbers and really attending to our emotional well-being, but also

when we are able to heal those deep wounds that set the foundation for abandoning yourself, being a shock observer, over-pleasing everyone else, under-attending to your own emotional needs, living in isolation, taking on the weight of the world on your shoulders. And all of those things we learn through our traumas, our big T traumas, but also all those little T traumas that happened to us early in childhood, right? So essentially, here's the thing. I know you've been a mother of three children. Have you ever met a one-day-old baby that doesn't express their needs no every middle one the old baby that doesn't know how to say no no they don't know how to say it but they let you know that's what i mean that's what i mean try feeding them something

they don't want and by the way what's the word that kids start saying compulsively at age one no no yeah why why does nature do that why doesn't nature say to the kid come on just say yes hey time for dinner yes you know there's a reason but unless we don't know how to say no our yeses don't mean anything at all yeah say that again that was a good one unless we know how to say no our yeses don't mean anything yes now so we have to say no to set a boundary for ourselves so we can decide what we want and what we don't want so we're born with that capacity why do we lose it because we learn that our families our parents bless their hearts with all the love they may have for us and do have and all the best that they can do for us they're kind of relying on us to meet their needs

by suppressing our own and this happens sometimes overtly in homes where there's alcoholism sometimes it happens more subtly if the parents are stressed traumatized the child will pick up a night and suppress themselves not to bother the parent too much to be able to be more acceptable to the parent so the point is or more specifically if the parents follow the utterly stupid parenting advice of a lot of so-called parenting experts about how child's anger and so on needs to be suppressed and punished you know then the child learns to fit in i better be a pleaser i better serve other people's needs so it becomes a survival mechanism for the sake of maintaining the attachment relationship with their parents the child gives up their own self and they do so

unconsciously and now they carry this automatic self-suppression into their adult lives and it becomes their so-called personality their so-called second nature but notice the phrase second nature implies something it was never your first nature it's not your true self and often as in your case in the case of many other people i've known disease comes along as kind of a teacher I don't recommend it, by the way. No, me either. But it can serve like that. So people wake up and say,

and the disease becomes almost like a route back to themselves. That's what happened to Anita and Rajani. That's what I take happened to you. And those are the fortunate ones, where the disease isn't just seen as a terrible misfortune. Not that, again, either you and I would recommend that to anybody. But if it happens, it can wake you up. yeah the whole idea is to wake up before the disease happens yes that would be the goal and

you know let's i want to talk about this whole idea of how we fuck up our kids because i was reading the bulk of your book i had already started it but the bulk of it because i knew we were having this conversation i read while all my you know while both my kids were home over thanksgiving and i had to keep looking up and being like i'm so sorry and i know you you work so hard in this book. I think you must have said it 80 times in 80 different ways that we shouldn't feel guilty and that you aren't here to push guilt. But boy, did I sure as poop feel guilty because, you know, I know obviously, and I've said this to my kids since they were little, that we have the best intentions. I used to say to them, look, I'm doing the best I can.

I'm trying as hard as I can. Everything I'm doing, I'm doing with love. And I know I'm still screwing you up. So I'm just trying, doing the best I can here. But because we project, you know, our own unresolved traumas and our social repression and our social expectations and our fears, we almost parent against our fear. I have to admit, I'm ashamed, but I was one of those parents who we had this pediatrician in Chicago when my two youngest were really, you know, were babies they were 14 months apart and this doctor was like the best pediatrician in town and he wrote a book about sleep training and he had this whole program around sleep training and i let my kids i was one of those parents you describe in the book who let my kids cry and and

i was a good student and wanted to do what the doctor said and i came from a medical family and you listen to what the doctor said, I felt so bad because they need that connection. You're not talking about Ferber, are you? No, it wasn't Ferber, although he might as well have been Ferber. So first of all, as a parent, I used to do the same thing. And as a doctor, I used to advocate the same thing. You did? All right, that makes me not feel as bad.

Yeah, I did. No, no, as a family physician, I did until I learned better because I realized human infants have a need to connect physically with the parent you tell a mother gorilla not to pick up their kid when they're crying you know yeah what's going to happen you know so basically go against their own instincts when we don't pick up our kids but as a doctor i would tell people oh no just let them sleep it up damaging to the child because the message the child gets is that they don't matter and yeah and that their needs won't be met and that you're not safe and that they have to repress they have to give up or become apathetic right and just like accept that

their fear and sadness doesn't matter that's why they go back to sleep because they become apathetic now that makes me so sad yeah but listen first of all i did my best you did your best we all did so guilt is displaced here we're not blaming anybody here we're looking at a whole culture and your parents are trying to parent against odds and furthermore i would say even more provocatively, your guilt has nothing to do with your kids. So let me ask you this, if I may. Of course. When in your life have you not felt guilty? We got to talk about guilt. Guilt is definitely one of my close companions and was a massive

tool of control that my parents used. Okay. Stay with me for a minute then. So when in your life have you not felt guilty? Never, right? Yeah, never. Okay. Right. That means that the guilt was long before you had kids. Yeah. No, it definitely was. okay so where does that guilt come from okay you know what the guilt comes from because you failed as a child yeah what did you fail at you failed to make your parents happy yes i did many times

yeah and then i put myself into a pretzel to make them happy but yes yeah no was it ever a child's job to make your parents happy should ever be a child's job no okay so you were given an i was and you were and a lot of kids are given an impossible job it should never be theirs to make their parents happy we fail at that because their happiness is not in our hands no so inevitably we fail and then we feel guilty so your guilt came along long before you had kids so when people talk about their guilt about as parenting i said listen i get it i have a remorse too about what I did or didn't do when I was a parent, when my kids were small. But the guilt, that corrosive feeling of guilt, that's got nothing to do with you as a parent.

It's got to do with you as a child who were given a job you should never have been given. That's what it's all about. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey. And it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. And I am so thrilled to announce that I am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near

Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig. We've got Catherine Woodward Thomas. We've got me. We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us. So stay with me on guilt for a little bit. And you write a lot about guilt. And I love how you sort of referred to it as you thinking about guilt is just like a stupid friend, right? That isn't getting the memo that that's something like you're saying, that's a very old answer message that was put on you versus something you really deserve. But, you know, and, and when we

were about to start this interview, you immediately made me cry or I immediately cried. You didn't make me cry. When you asked about how I was handling the loss of my son, Sammy, who died from fentanyl poisoning. And as you can imagine, I thought of him a million and 20 times while reading this book. And as my husband, who handles his grief and guilt differently, he says, look, the one job we have as parents is to keep our kids alive. And I didn't do that, right? Like that in his mind is his great failing. I think I have some of that too, but for me, it's more, you know, you write like, cause our middle one, Sammy who died was all of my kids actually were bullied a lot, but he especially was really bullied. And I thought about that as I was

reading, because you talk about how the kids that are susceptible, like if I understand you correctly, cause it really affected him. And he was kind of like Jesse Thistle, who you wrote about the book. He wrote a memoir from the ashes about his own substance abuse. And Sammy was just starting to experiment. But he did share with me he was severely bullied and the only kids that would hang out with him or give him the time of day were the druggie kids. And he would beg me, you know, like, can I smoke pot? Can I? You know, because this is the only way these kids will hang out with me. And this guy, Jesse Thistle, kind of said the same thing, that substance use gave him access to friends, which on some level our son was doing, which is why he accepted the Snapchat

menu from that drug dealer. But if I understood you correctly, the kids wouldn't necessarily be so over-identified or susceptible to the pain of bullying if their primary relationship with their parents were more emotionally attuned. Right. So first of all, I didn't know Sammy, but here's what I would guess about him. He must have been one of these highly sensitive kids. He was. Yes. Very. Probably supremely sensitive, probably very spontaneous and creative and capable of great joy, playfulness. You know, is that what he was like? He was. He was. And adults adored him, but kids never understood him. Exactly. They didn't have any attention problems. Yes. All my kids, which also I was cringing about because you talk a lot. I know you've written books on ADHD, but yes.

My first book was on that after I was diagnosed with it myself. So I know that condition from the inside out. So these kids, because they're sensitive, they're capable of greater feeling and intuition, insight and creativity, but they're also prone to greater pain. Yes. So they're more likely to be hurt. Now, an essential need of the child is the safe, attuned connection with the parent. When parents are stressed, distracted by their own traumas or their own careers or their own relationship issues or stresses in their culture, I mean, I came to make it personal so that nobody feels blamed. You know, I was a really good doctor and I was highly respected and I was a workaholic and my focus was very much on my contribution to the world.

Why was that? Because as an infant, a Jewish infant in Hungary, I was given the message that the world didn't want me under the Nazis. You know, I don't want to go into the details, but that's what happened. Yeah, no, I think actually that's I loved that part of your story. I thought it was so powerful. Not only were you an infant and a child during Nazi when the Nazis were and your grandparents were killed in a concentration camp, but your mother to save your life gave you to another family for a while. Exactly. So the message I get is I wasn't wanted. Now, one way I compensate for that later on, because I haven't resolved that trauma yet, is that I make myself wanted. How do we do that? By becoming a good doctor who's available for everybody. What message do my kids get? That they're not wanted, because dad's not around. Right, and that their needs aren't important. Now, the child needs that collection with the parent, that attuned, grounded connection with the parent.

When a child can't get it from the parents, they'll seek it from the peer group. Now they're desperate to be accepted and loved by the peer group. And I talk about that in this book, The Myth of Normal. I've also written another book about that called Hold On to Your Kids, where parents need to matter more than peers. and these children who become bullied are the ones who are desperate to be accepted but they're lacking the confidence in themselves that could only come from a relationship with the parents now i'm not blaming the parents here because two of my kids were bullied as well

so again i'm not blaming anybody else i'm just saying that's what happened so your son sammy one of these really sensitive kids probably lacking something not because you didn't love him but because of issues that you've talked about very openly yeah maybe it is available for him as much as he needed you to be he then goes to the peer group for that connection and then falls victim to the peer dynamic and then in order to belong he does these drugs and then he gets on snapchat which is any one of these terrible there's a new book uh reviewed in the new york times just last week about how the pernicious influence of these tech companies and kids how they addict these kids yes they do and and so your son falls into that pit he gets a hold of

some drug he's got no idea the next thing he overdoses and it's very painful for parents but i think it's essential for us to recognize what was missing for these kids and i tried so hard like i knew i read you know that that's always been my joke that as a therapist and someone who deals with adults and so much of my work is helping them unpack exactly what you're talking about, because I view this the same way you do. Whenever someone's struggling in a relationship or has these stories about their partner or these triggers that trigger them, I know it's always related to those early life experiences they had and their sense of worthiness of love, right? That's what it always comes down to. And I tried so hard, like I was so invested.

And I really, before I had kids, I stupidly thought, okay, if I just do everything right, You know, if I just, you know, say the right things and teach them the gender acceptance and, you know, I tell them how wonderful they are and I invest. And even though I'm working a lot, you know, I have these girlfriends who are stay-at-home moms and they don't even play with their kids. They're dragging their kids around all day long on errands and don't actually ever sit on the floor and play with them. You know, they're just dragging them. And I sit for at least an hour a day in child-centered play, and I'm spending and asking them about their lives, and I know all their friends. And, you know, I was trying so hard. And despite all of that, right, I still fucked them up.

By the way, often when I talk to fan groups and sometimes I'm worried about that I screwed up my kids, I always say to people, don't worry about screwing up your kids. Of course you have. But the issue here, Laura, is not just what we do right, but who we are when we're doing it. Okay, so talk about that. What do you mean? Well, there's never any question that I love my kids. I mean, I would have thrown myself into a fire for them. But the problem was nobody ever needed me to throw myself into a fire.

What they needed me to be is to be emotionally present with them, really get to be with them. And because of my own distractions, ADHD mind, unresolved traumas, and relationship issues with my spouse, I couldn't be grounded and attuned. And so I was with them, played with them, but I couldn't really be present to who they were. Yeah. It just wasn't in me. Sensitive kids, they pick up on that.

Yeah. Why do you think so many sensitive kids are being born? It feels like, because I feel like my kids, but also all the kids, I see them. I see, like Sammy, when he was little, if I took him to the circus or one of those concerts, he would look at me and go like, mommy, too much noise. like his senses were so much more highly he was more sensitive my other kids too what do you think that's about i have lots of spiritual theories about why that is but i'm curious what your theory is or why why you think that might be happening well first of all my son daniel with whom i wrote this book was one of these kids then of course he turned out to be a musically

extraordinarily talented creative person who's had his challenges you know as an adult well i think sensitivity is is a benefit to humankind you know given the right circumstances sensitive people are more intuitive they're more creative they become leaders they become artists they become shamans they become priests they become writers you know and they're also the canaries in the coal mine they can warn us of what's going on they are so i think a certain percentage of kids are born like that the issue is not why are more kids being born sensitive the issue is why are these kids sensitive kids suffering so much more than they used to you know and that has to do with the nature of our culture because our culture basically hurts these kids the way we parent

the distress that parents are facing what happens to them in school what happens to them in the peer group so it's not so much that more kids are born sensitive it's that the sensitivity is insulted in so many ways by the culture that we live in i think that's what's actually going on right now. Yeah. I thought I was really touched. I mean, I've read it takes a village and, you know, a lot about community parenting, but when you, I loved the way that you were describing this, you know, this idea of normally in, in, in our human history, it's only been in recent human history that we live in such isolation from community, you know, but in an, in the way we're designed is that there are all sorts of people there to take your kid when you need a

break or to get up with them in the middle of the night. Cause that's what I was thinking about. Like I was so exhausted, even when I wasn't working, I was so exhausted with these 24 hour need machines, you know, but that's not what we're supposed to do. We're not supposed to be alone with our kids. We're supposed to have a whole community coming in and bringing food and taking the kid from us and watching the kids so we can go out with our partners and, and be with our partners and so we can get some sleep and so we can get some rest and we can get some distance and that's not how our world is designed anymore no so how we evolved over millions and then hundreds of thousands of years uh is in small band hunter gatherer groups for all those conditions for

what's called allo parenting allo means others other parents coming along to parent your child that's what actually used to work and even in existence around species homo sapiens we've been on the earth for 200 000 years until 15 000 years ago all of us lived in small band hunter groups which means that if our own species has been around for an hour then until five minutes ago we lived in those communal settings that's what we're designed for so today's culture and in today's culture isolation alienation dislocation and loneliness are epidemics in the last 40 years especially so what's happening is that parents are struggling in an almost impossible environment to provide to their children what nature wants them to provide to their children but the culture

is making it so difficult and that's one of the reasons i say that we're living in a toxic culture because it just doesn't meet human needs you know it means all kinds of physical needs but not emotional and heart-centered and human needs yeah or spiritual you know or spiritual needs And I want to ask you about the spiritual piece in a minute, but let's just, I want to talk about healing because you do spend a good bit in the book. And I know you've written other books that address this and starting with the guilt thing, right? Because I thought your discussion about how to move with guilt, you know, and you, I share your philosophy 100% of, this is my paraphrasing, not you, but that what you can't be with is going to run your life. And it's not about separating ourselves out from our guilt or our shame or our trauma. You know, that just makes it worse. It's about really becoming friends with it because they really represent those younger parts of ourselves that are hurt or scared.

And those parts of ourselves that are, quote unquote, dysfunctional are really expression are really those parts of ourselves that are trying to express or those dysfunctional attempts we made as sweet, innocent children who thought that everything that happened to us was because of us, right? We come up with these strategies to keep ourselves safe or to keep our parents happy or to get the love or approval we needed because we confused love with approval. And so that just kind of sticks, right? And guilt, we've already discussed for me, but for millions of people, is a really constant companion. So I'm wondering if you can share how to work with those pieces of ourselves, how to make friends with them.

You and I are both Jewish, I think. Have you heard the Jewish definition of Alzheimer's disease? No, what is it? You forget everything but the guilt. That sounds about right. And that's true. You know, when my grandmother was really starting to spiral with dementia, she went off the rails. We were extremely close. And unfortunately, a very nefarious family member. When someone first started losing their mind, they're very impressionable. And this person started telling her all these random, weird, horrible things about me. And she just went off the rails on me. And I was really hurt, but I understood. And I just

backed off. Well, fast forward a month, and this was right at the precipice of when she was really losing it. And I was fixing her hair for my cousin's wedding. And she stopped, and she barely knew anything she knew who i was and she turned to me and she's like i'm really sorry i know i did something bad but i don't know what it is and it just totally broke my heart no oh no well so the point about guilt if we recognize that first of all as you said earlier the guilt's been your companion all your life then you have to ask well why did it come along because you weren't born with it it was yours long before you really could have done anything that bad when you were a small child. So what I said earlier, it's actually about you're not meeting your parents' needs and

expectations. The child, as also you indicated earlier, takes everything personally. So children in that sense are narcissistic. And I don't mean in a negative sense of disorder. I just mean they think it's all about them. When things are going great, hey, I must be a great person. My parents are stressed, unhappy. If they're angry with me, it's got to be my fault. And that's a defense mechanism for two reasons one is if i feel guilty enough then i'll comply with my parents expectations and that'll maintain a relationship on which my life depends yes but there's another side to it even deeper as a child if your parents are not capable of giving you not that they don't love you because they do but if they're not able giving you the love that you need which is being seen and

heard and understood and accepted for exactly who you are exactly accepted exactly who you are you can tell yourself two stories unconsciously one is my parents are incapable of loving me the way i need to be i'm all alone that's one belief you can take on or you can take down the belief is this is all my fault and if i work hard enough maybe i can make it better then there's something you can do right then you're not totally alone because you can somehow save yourself right that's the myth that's the whole point if so the guillotine comes along as you quoted me earlier there's this sort of stupid friend this friend that wants to save your relationship with your parents and wants you to do better so that you can earn the love of the world the stupidity comes in

as you said earlier also it doesn't get the memo that you're not that helpless kid anymore and you can take care of yourself in other ways so for example going back to your breast cancer and and the difficulty saying no when people don't know how to say no one of the reasons is if they say no to other people's expectations they're going to feel guilty and and what i say to them is when you feel guilty celebrate it it means you're finally doing something for yourself have a party and all your friends that's a good sign hey i'm feeling guilty because i said no and i'm finally saying because when you say no in that way what you're actually doing is you're saying yes to yourself yeah and as a child you learned that you mustn't say yes to yourself right not if someone

else wants you to say yeah you know no to yourself right in order to meet their needs so you can say yes as long as you're meeting other people's needs exactly but other than that so that's the whole point so i'm saying to people now when the guilt arises don't try and make it go away welcome it as the friend that it's been all your life who just as you said doesn't get the memo so that's one that's one way of working with it yeah and i love how you say that healing is really about a natural movement toward wholeness, right? And I love this so much that it's really about self-retrieval

rather than self-improvement. And actually the indigenous people in Canada, but also in the United States, they talk about soul retrieval. And it is about self-retrieval because as I made clear in my discussion of trauma earlier in the book, is that the essence of trauma

is disconnection from yourself. So the healing is becoming whole again or reconnecting with yourself, with your true self so right and with those parts of yourself that you squelched or repressed or ignored or left behind or made wrong in order to survive your childhood and with the tour self that's underneath all that and so i've worked a lot with addiction i worked with highly addicted population here in mancouvers and i've had my own addictive patterns in my life i think most of us have if not the drugs something and we use this word recovery when it comes to healing no language

is interesting because what does it mean to recover something it means to find it but if you found it it means it was never destroyed in the first place so when you talk to people when you ask them when you recovered what did you find again you know what they usually say they say have found myself and that means that that self that they found was never destroyed you lost connection with it you lost sight of it you even lost belief that it exists but when you find it there it is and you've recovered you've healed so healing is becoming whole again it is recovering your true self like you have to give up long ago in order to belong to a toxic culture yeah and a toxic family on some level because of the toxic culture and families can be toxic like mine was

yeah i'm talking about me as a parent a family can be toxic despite all the love of the parents yeah it's unintentional toxicity that just comes from emotional wounds and emotional maturity of the parents and it's hard to come to terms with i'm telling you it's hard to come to terms with And maybe a lot of that is because I'm prone, as we've discussed, to guilt anyway. And I do know, like I know intellectually, and I've had a lot of conversations with grief healers about this, that there are millions and millions of parents who did the exact opposite of what I did and their kids died. And there are millions and millions of parents who did exactly what I think I should have

or could have done and their kids died. And so in the end, it happens, right? And I may even have a role to play. I do have a role to play with it in it. We all did, whether we want that to be true or not. But it's a struggle to make friends with that aspect of guilt. And I do think you talk a lot about healing. We won't get into all of it here. You guys definitely have to read the book. But one of the things that you get into, and it's come up a lot in this conversation, is this idea of a compassionate inquiry with yourself or asking yourself, in what important areas of your life are you not saying no, right? And how does not saying no impact your life, right? And what body signals have you been overlooking? A lot of your work, and mine too, when you talk about healing is about sort of that somatic piece as well. Can you speak to that?

Well, as my friend Bessel van der Kolk says in the title of his book, A Perennial New York Times Bestseller, the body keeps the score. Drama isn't just an event in the mind because the mind and the body can't be separated as I keep stressing. So the traumatic imprints are carried in the body. And so when I work with people through my compassion inquiry therapy modality, it's not just about the ideas and the emotions that you have in the abstract, it's about what are you carrying in your body, you know, so sadness, anger, grief, repression, these all have their body physiological correlates because you can't separate the mind from the body, so it's very important to work with the body. in fact you can't heal unless you do you know so talking about something as you said just a few minutes ago intellectually understanding it is helpful but it's not sufficient you have to work it through through your whole being you know and that's a challenge because unfortunately a lot of

therapists focus only on the ideas like there's certain therapies that are very famous and very popular but i think they're very shallow because they focus on on the cognitive part the part that we can understand intellectually they don't deal with the body at all yeah i mean i joke because my kids when they were little called me a talking doctor because i'm a therapist you know and now i say i'm a talking doctor who does a lot less talking because what i've come to realize over the past many years and even in my own life immensely and intensely over the past couple of years as I heal from this huge trauma is that, I mean, obviously you have to think too and talk too, but there's only so much of that that's going to resolve the trauma that it must move through.

And I'm wondering if you can speak to this. I know you do in the book, this idea, this is part of the problem is that we tend to repress this stuff because we're so scared of it. And we imagine that there isn't a bottom. We don't really want to go there to the feelings that our body needs to feel or process or release in order to heal because it's so freaking scary and we imagine which spoiler alert or hint it turns out not to be true but we imagine that there'll be no bottom that it will carry us away that will lose herself that it's so immense that it will swallow us whole and so how do you attend to that well first of all you have to validate that fear and that fear is based on the original experience as a child when you're a child and these things happen to

you it wasn't unbearable it was more than you could handle that's why you developed all these defense mechanisms so that the fear is totally valid however what i tell people is first of all it's never going to be as bad as it was in the first place you've already survived it i've got good news for you that thing that you're afraid of you've already survived it because here you are. And you survived it when you were helpless, resourceless, alone, vulnerable, not particularly strong. Now here you are with help, with resources, with a much stronger sense of self. So while the fear is understandable, given your original experience, the reality is never going to be as bad. It's going to be painful perhaps, but it's not going to be as unbearable

or unbearable at all as it was when you were a child. So that's the good news here. Yeah. And I always like to say that, you know, there is a bottom at each experience of the emotions. You're not going to hit the bottom of the ocean, but you are going to hit a sandbar. You will find the ground. Right. Once you start practice, it's just that first step. I found that once I really was brave enough to actually allow myself to process that, which I, you know, and feel that which I didn't want to feel, it was a short process. It only took 10 to 15 minutes to move that energy through and then the pressure valve released and then I felt lighter and then I could feel the ground under my feet and I could immediately feel a benefit, which then makes you willing to do it again and again. Absolutely. Again, the point is that you've already been through the worst of it. It's never going to be as bad. And people have a choice to make.

It's going to be maybe painful to go through this. But how much pain are you creating for yourself by not going through it? I mean, we create more pain for ourselves by trying to run away from the pain. I mean, addictions are a typical example of people trying to run away from their pain, and they create so much pain for themselves. So you can have two kinds of pain. the pain of suppressing yourself or the growing pains such as you described so which pain would you rather have you have no choice not to have pain yeah your choice is which kind of pain would

you rather have so for example to go back to our theme of saying no when you say no there's gonna be some pain why because some people won't like you but which pain would you rather have that pain of being authentic and some people not wanting to put up with that because that's not what they want from you or whether you have the pain of suppressing yourself and then getting depressed or physically ill so there's a kind of what's been called a noble pain which is the pain of growth and transformation or the ignoble pain of trying to run away from all that right the only decision you got to make is which pain would you rather have yeah and what's the outcome you want want because in the noble pain as you refer to it you're working towards something right that

you're actually healing and you're creating a more complete authentic self-actualized enjoyable fulfilling peaceful life for yourself right and the other you're it's a short-term gain for long-term pain i think that's exactly what it is which is by the way the essence of addiction is a short-term gain for long-term pain. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much there to talk about with addiction, with mental illness that we haven't even gotten to, but it all kind of stems from the same places as we were talking about physical illness. It's those parts of ourselves we can't be with. It's those old traumas and societal traumas that we're not really willing to look at or feel or process and that the healing really comes in creating a partnership with those parts of ourselves.

And I think it's really important to emphasize what you just said about the societal traumas, because these things aren't personal. They're created by the whole culture. Lots of studies show that racism, experiences of racism, affect the biology of racialized people, because the mind and the body can't be separated. So racialized people of color, for example, they're more prone to getting infected by COVID or to get sick from it or to die from it. They might have more autoimmune disease, more high blood pressure, their biology, their cells are age faster. These aren't genetically determined. These are the impact of social traumas.

Again, I talked about women, about an indigenous woman in Canada has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than that of anybody else. These people never used to have rheumatoid arthritis at all prior to colonization. And so we have to keep in mind the larger, and women in general, why they have all this autoimmune disease. It's because of the show socially engendered, not trying to make a pun here, but the socially engendered gender role of being society shock absorbers. This can all be reversed both on the emotional and on the social level, but we have to recognize them. Right. We have to attend to it in our own little microcosms, but also on the macro societal level

as well. I have a big whopper of a question to ask you as we wrap up. I could talk to you for hours about all of this. But I don't know why I wanted to ask you this. You alluded to it a little bit toward the end as you were talking about psychedelics and healings. And you said you don't often use the word miracle. What are your spiritual beliefs? And I'll tell you why I'm asking. It's not only to intrude upon you by asking you that, but because I have found for myself that such a huge part of my ability to heal and move through this horrific trauma has been finally, I mean, I feel like this is a big part of what will ultimately be the gift of this, although the gift is still revealing itself, is ultimately finally creating more of a two-way

relationship with God, spirit, Allah, Jesus, whoever ones, you know, but for me, it's holy oneness is really my term for God. Do you have a relationship with spirit? Is that something that has evolved for you over time? I'm just curious because I feel it. I feel it in your words and in your actions and in your work, but you don't talk about it, at least from what I've seen. No, I totally get what you're saying. Well, when it comes to spiritual practice, I'm really so undisciplined. So I say, I said in one of my books, not in this one, Or maybe in this one, I don't know. I have a profound relation with meditation.

I think about it every day, you know, but I don't do it. I'm the world's worst spiritually disciplined practitioner, you know. At the same time, people do tell me that they feel kind of a spiritual sense emanating from my work and from my presence. Other people are more aware than I am. I have not, now look, behind me you can't see it, but there's a shelf of books, nothing but spiritual reading. that's there because I'm comfortable

with my mind and through my mind I can read these books and I can agree with them and understand what they're talking about but I don't think

I've had the depth of experience that I'm conscious of that for example you describe about yourself or about some other people my wife

other friends of mine they've had deep spiritual experiences they could actually describe the closest I've come to it is when I've done various psychedelic shamanic

healing practices I talk about in the book so yes i'm very much aware of appreciate believe in but on the experiential level i'm not there that's the best i can tell you about it and people say maybe you you've had these experiences just maybe my mind is just resisting yeah i do have a very thick skull you know and and it's hard to get through it and and so it's quite possible that my mind even dismisses yeah my maybe i'm afraid of something of losing my little ego itself if i open myself up to spirit i even aware of that fear but i surrender yeah honest to god on the my my slogan is i don't do surrender you know

i'm aware of it it's there i believe in it not just in my life intellectually but at the same time experientially i've had glimpses of it yeah that's all i can say yeah that makes sense to me also because you're so intelligent, right? And you operated so strongly in that left brain, that huge left brain of yours, right? And so, I mean, I was the same way. I think honestly, it was the desire to connect with Sammy to the fact that I know energy never dies. It just changes form. I do know that for a fact. And so, I really wanted to connect with his energy. And as I started to do that, it opened up connecting to oneness, right? And to the energy of all. And so that's how it sort of started for me. So sometimes it comes out of necessity,

but I do thank you. And I don't mean just in this conversation, because I've watched many of your videos and read your books, but your intuition is divinely inspired. It's not just intellectual and not just because you're as Malcolm Gladwell would say, an outlier who's done thousands of know ten thousands hours of work in this it is a channel and so you know what my intellect would never figure all this stuff out i know it's not coming from me but through me yes not that i haven't done some work to get me here but do you know when nijinsky was the great russian dancer yes yes so you know but 100 years ago he was the bershnikov and noreb of his day and he was once asked i love this he was once asked how he accomplishes one of these incredible leaps

on stage. And he said, I don't, he says, when the ginseng is there, it can't happen. Yes. And so I know that when I'm really grounded and speaking, something is coming through me that I'm not the source of. I'm quite aware of that. Yeah, I feel that. And I think we all feel that. And we are so grateful for the beautiful soul that you are, for all that you offer us and all that you're doing in the world. And I see how hard you're working, even talking about this amazing book this amazing work that you and your son we didn't even get to your son but that you and your son have worked on and you have another you're going to be bringing out another book together right about which i love this idea i think it's so important because i hear from so

many parents recently who are estranged from their children it's about parents and adult children right so we just did the workshop here in vancouver this weekend and we've done it in new york a month ago it's called hello again a fresh start for adult children and their parents with my son daniel and it's really is a powerful breakthrough we're going to write the book about it we're going to have a website about it we're going to have a podcast about it in two years we're going to have a book about it and even now there's some talks of us on youtube hello grand gabor and daniel mate so that's the next book that we're doing yeah and i think how wonderful that you're doing it together it's really you know and of course in the process of getting to do it together believe

me there's a lot of stuff to get to work through you know yeah i'm facing that with my 26 year old and i just always remember what my mother always said to me when i would bring these things up is that i want to be the kind of parent that can hear and listen to and own the ways i've messed up and it ain't fun but it's good well the next time you do the workshop you might want to come with your son if he's open to it i would love to i would love to you'll have to let it where can people learn more about what's coming at my website drgabalmatia.com uh all my events are on there but we'll probably do it in california in this coming year oh good i will be there with bells on for sure great i would love to thank you and and thank you for having me it's wonderful to

meet you you too i am so so we're all so grateful to you for who you are what you bring and for your beautiful heart and mind. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here.