Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - [Revisit] Who Gets Sick and How to Prevent it, with Dr. Gabor Maté

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

The Dangers of Being Too Nice: Dr. Gabor Maté (renowned speaker and bestselling author) on another Thursday Bite-Sized Breakdown. Revisit the powerful nuggets of wisdom from our episode with Dr. Gabor that could literally change how you understand health and well-being. Many people have said this is their favorite episode of MBB! Dr. Maté explains who's most prone to chronic illness and practical ways our childhood trauma is impacting us now and might lead to disease. Dr. Gabor breaks down how attachment, autoimmune disease, loneliness, and emotional regulation are all connected. Enjoy the best moments of Dr. Gabor Maté, and tune in on Tuesday for a brand new full episode of MAYIM BIALIK’S BREAKDOWN. Check out our full episode with Dr. Gabor Maté: https://mayim.simplecast.com/episodes/dr-gabor-mate-your-biggest-resource-is-internal BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of mental health conditions and addictions and so on, the pain is already inside. And in fact, it's the attempt not to feel the pain that makes people sick. Then there's the whole adverse childhood experiences. A list of physical, sexual, emotional abuse. A parent dying, a parent being mentally ill, a parent being addicted, violence in the family, a parent being jailed, a rancor's divorce, neglect. The link between these adverse conditions and... mental health problems later on in life as in the words of one leading British

psychologist is as well established in the scientific literature as the link between smoking and lung cancer and yet you go to most psychiatrists right nobody's gonna ask you about that stuff so let's establish our shared respect for the achievements and and contributions of Western medicine yeah we're not talking about that we're talking about what it misses so we're talking about the narrowness of its perspective and its ideology and that narrowness limits its capacity to heal. There is a physiological basis,

but that physiology is related to emotions. It's Myambiolic's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. Hi, I'm Myambiolic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. Welcome to our Thursday,

bite-sized edition of The Breakdown. This is a very special one. A lot of people have said that not only is this episode that we are giving you a bite-sized version of, one of the favorite episodes that we've ever done, many people have said that it's their favorite episode of any show that this guest has ever done. That person is renowned speaker and best-selling author, Dr. Gabor Matay.

And if you don't know who he is, I highly recommend you listen to this. He specializes in addiction and stress and trauma and childhood development, his book, The Myth of Normal, I have sung the praises of this book, and Jonathan and I really, really took it to heart. It's like about like the culture that we're all living in that we think is normal in terms of, you know, how many of us have autoimmune disease and how many of us are lonely and taking antidepressants and taking this and taking that. But it really ties together everything and shows really the larger paradigm that we're all living in. If you've already listened to this episode, what I'm going to tell you is,

is listen again because there are so many ideas in here that you need to let them soak in. Once is not enough. At least it wasn't for me. So that's the first part. The second part is he touches on what is one of the biggest concepts in medicine today, which is that adverse childhood experiences when not dealt with and processed actually are one of the biggest contributors to potential chronic disease in later life. Let that sink in. And also, in case that sounds depressing, he's also a delightful person to listen to.

There's a lot of hope in this, and a lot of people reported that this really allowed them to shift their perspective. So we highly recommend that you listen, enjoy the best moments of Dr. Gaborma Tate, and tune it on Tuesday for a brand new full episode of Myambiolics Breakdown and enjoy this Bitesites.

goodness. Break it down. When I talk about a map to ourselves, I'm talking about a map to the unconscious drives that really motivates so much of our experience, whether we're talking in the realm of politics, a realm of personal relationships, and the experiences that create those unconscious dynamics. You wake up and you say, I've been dreaming. What I thought was reality, wasn't reality. David Foster Wallace at a commencement address that he gave. before we committed suicide. These two fish that are swimming along

and they're accosted by an older fish who says to the morning, boys, how's the water? And the two fish for a while, and one of them turns to the other one and says, what the hell is water? These things that are so close to us and so big, we don't even see that they're there. We think it's just an inevitable reality,

but so many things in this culture that are considered to be normal or criminally abnormal from the point of human needs. I know it's difficult to go there, But would you rather hear that you got this mysterious, so-called idiopathic, we haven't got a freaking clue what causes this condition? There's nothing we can do about it except to try and control the symptoms? Or would you rather hear that this disease that you got is not the thing with the life of its own?

But actually it's a process that's happening in your body in response to your life, in response to what happened to you as a child, in response to how you treat yourself as an adult. And if you understand all that and gain some agency over it, you can actually gain some regulation over that process. People's biggest resource is internal. Whether it's breast cancer, whether it's multiple sclerous or rheumatoly arthritis, there's been oodles of scientific research showing the relationship between being stressed in those conditions. And yet, most people, they go to a physician, stress, trauma never comes up. When people understand the connection between what happened to them in childhood, the traumas they endured, the stress is. the stresses they generate for themselves, how does their body saying no when they don't know

what to say no, either in work or in personal life? And actually they learn to set some boundaries for themselves. There's actually a change in the physiological process. Why wouldn't there be, given that mind-body are one and inseparable? So I don't find that people are that resistant to this message once they understand it. The real problem is that you can go to physicians trained like me in the Western medical tradition. And despite all the science, you never hear this information. We're not talking about causation here.

There's multiple causes. We're talking about a contributing factor, but a reversible one. And if we reverse it, that can have a positive impact on the condition. That's the whole point. People are prone to get chronically ill are ones who tend to put other people's emotional needs compulsively ahead of their own. Number two, they tend to be over-identified with duty role and responsibility. rather than the needs of the self.

They tend to repress healthy anger. They don't know how to set a clear boundary. I worry about people that are very nice. The fourth is this belief that you're responsible for other people feel, and you must never disappoint anybody. You know that the mind and the body can't be separated. The healthy anger is a boundary defense.

It says, you in my space, get out. Whether that's emotional or physical, in fact, or emotions in general, They have one fundamental function, allowing what is healthy and nourishing and supportive, the love, you know, and keep out what is toxic and dangerous. What is the role of our immune system? Keep out what's toxic and letting what's nourishing. Letting the nutrients, the vitamins, the healthy bacteria in the gut. Not only do they have the same function, they're part and parcel of the same apparatus.

They're not even separated. So naturally, when people repress themselves emotionally, that's going to have impact on the immune system. How could it be otherwise? It's women in this culture who have to suppress their authenticity even more than men do, and that's why they have more autoimmune disease. That's why they are more prone to non-smoking-related cancers. That's why they have much more depression and anxiety. It's not gender determined.

It's a culturally determined gender role that determines it. Have you ever met a one day old baby that represses their feelings? Okay. In other words, we're born with that capacity. Entry into the world, fully embodied, fully in touch with our gut feelings, fully capable of actually communicating exactly what we're experiencing, not in words, but in gesture and tone and so on. And the time of become adults who repress ourselves, something happens.

We've got these two needs, the need to attach and to belong to the parents. In fact, without that need being met, the child can't even survive, especially for humans because we're the most dependent and the least mature, the most helpless for the longest period of time. So that attachment relationship is not negotiable. Attachment is the drive that pulls two bodies together for closeness and proximity so that one can be taken care of or take care of the other. It's hormonal, it's emotional, it's neurological.

The healthy development of that organism depends on that attachment. What do we tell parents in this culture when we tell them to sleep train their babies? We tell them not to pick up their kids. Now, you tell them what a mother baboon not to pick up their kid. You're going to find out what mother rages all about. So human beings are trained to go against their own instincts.

There's the thing with instincts. They have to be evoked by the environment. This environment doesn't not only not evoke parenting instincts, it actually suppresses them because we're told to separate from the kids, giving them timeouts when we don't approve of their behavior. Now, one of the essential needs of children is their freedom to feel all their emotions.

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Make sure to mention myambiotics breakdown to help support the show. What would you rather hear again that you've got this sort of mysterious, biological, maybe genetic brain disorder, and all we can do is give you these pills for that to your life. Or as a result of what happened to you, you develop certain emotional and psychological ways of being that we call now a disease. But actually, if you learn about how you were traumatized

and how to deal with that trauma, you can actually ease those conditions. Like, which message would people rather hear? I'm saying that people would rather hear that second message because people would rather have some agency, rather than just be passive recipients of health care. Now again, I'm not even rejecting the use of medications. I've taken them myself and they've helped.

But I think this whole idea that mental health conditions are simple diseases that are biologically based according to the research, scientific nonsense. Secondly, even worse, they disempower people. I think people would rather be empowered. It's painful to look at that. but it's a kind of noble kind of pain a pain that's what we call growing pains by the way most of mental health conditions and addictions and so on

the pain is already inside and in fact it's the attempt not to feel the pain that makes people sick then there's the whole adverse childhood experiences a list of physical sexual emotional emotional abuse a parent dying a parent being mentally ill a parent being addicted violence in the family a parent being jailed a rancorous, divorce, neglect, the link between these adverse conditions and mental health problems later on in life,

as in the words of one leading British psychologist, is as well established in the scientific literature as the link between smoking and lung cancer. And yet, you go to most psychiatrists, nobody's going to ask you about that stuff. So let's establish our shared respect for the achievements and contributions of Western medicine. We're not talking about that. We're talking about what it misses. So we're talking about the narrowness of its perspective and its ideology, and that narrowness limits its capacity to heal. There is a physiological basis,

but that physiology is related to emotions. Exactly. So again, it's the non-separability of emotions and physiology. So it's the wisdom of the organism that's protected, that represses the anger. But that same protection, that same adaptation, There will be a price we paid later on. I don't question most parents love for their kids.

Very few parents don't love their kids. And very few parents don't try and do the best for their kids. But the best is limited, number one, by any traumas that they're still carrying, that they haven't worked out. So my wife and I, you know, when we get kids, we hadn't even known that we were traumatized, let alone work out our traumas, which means that our relationship was very conflicted. My trauma would bump against hers. and of course they'd be rancour. So we loved our kids.

We would have done anything for them, but just their own traumas and stresses, they couldn't help but absorbing them. And trauma means, doesn't necessarily mean something terrible happening. Trauma just means a wound. That's the actually meaning of the word. Kids could be wounded,

not by terrible things happening, but just by the insecurities and emotional unavailability of the parents. Furthermore, I was a work call like doctor because the message is a Jewish infant under the Nazis in 1944. The message that I got from the world through the anxieties and tears of my mother is that I wasn't wanted. Now, if you're not wanted, a wonderful way to deal with it is to try and make yourself important in other people's lives, so now they want you all the time, whatever tools you got.

Work-hawism means that I'd rather be on a job than at home, that are fully alive and active and kind of activated when I'm working. but I'm rather listless and depressed at home. And the beeper is always going. And what message you're going to my kid's getting? That they're not wanted. And that's the last message you ever want to give them. So it doesn't take abuse.

They just express parents, especially in a society where people have become so isolated. There's a psychologist that once said to me that children swim in their parents unconscious like fishing in the sea. So when the parents are upset and stressed, because of inequality or economic stress or their own unresolved trauma. It's in the water.

That lack of connection with the nurturing parent has a negative effect on the child's brain development. The human brain develops an interaction with the environment, Harvard's center in the developing child. They point out that the human brain develops by an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. and sets all the conditions for healthy learning and behavior that follow.

They say that the most important quality that affects the circuitry of the child's brain, I'm talking about the neurotransmitters, the biochemistry, is the quality of parent-child relationships, especially in the early years. So the emotional relationship with the parent actually programs the physiology of the child's brain. So when you look at what's happening now in our society, with these millions of kids being diagnosed left, right and center, with all manner of diagnosis. The doctors are still holding on to this idea

that, you know, there's a genetic conditions. The health have genetic conditions. Genes don't change in 30 years, you know, or 20 years or, you know. What's actually going on is that the loss of that attuned, non-stressed relationship with the adults is affecting the healthy development of the child's brain. And no wonder you're seeing more kids with depression, anxiety, ADHD, and so on. The New York Times and New Yorker both have had articles in the past,

six months about the alarming rise in childhood suicides and it's unexplainable it's not unexplainable people it's because of despair of children at having lost those healthy essential relationships because of the toxicity of this culture the tune means that the one person gets the emotional space of the other and communicates that I get it now we do this automatically until we don't but if you see every sit on an airplane with the baby, when the baby starts crying. Almost everybody goes, aw, you know, that awe, that sort of pulling of the face and that sort

of empathetic noise that we make, that's attunement. But the emotional response to the child is to share the child's emotional space. When you look at the prison system, most people there are highly traumatized people. And so what we're fundamentally doing in this society is really, creating conditions that traumatize people through the pressure on families, through the stress on parents, through the fact that in the United States,

25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which amounts to a massive abandonment of the child, is what it is. It's the only way the child can experience it, through then, not to mention racism and inequality and so on. And then, so we traumatize people. People then act out there traumas. and all we do then is we lock them up and control with the key

and we punish them for the trauma. If we have to isolate people from society because there might be dangerous, rehabilitate them. You do the work that's necessary. Those killers, they transform. It's trauma that drove them there. When you heal the trauma, they become different people. For the last 12 years of my medical path,

I worked with North America's most concentrated area of drug use. It doesn't matter where people, people come from and they see that area is shocking. So there's thousands of people within a few square block radius injecting and inhaling and ingesting drugs of all kinds. And these are people living with HIV often hepatitis C, poverty, multiple jailings and so on. That was the physician at what was at that time, North America's first supervised injection site where people would bring their drugs and inject under safer conditions using sterile water, and clean needles. I didn't have a single female patient, hundreds of them in 12 years who had not

been sexually abused, and all the men had been severely abused, some of them sexually, some of them other ways. The studies still show that more of those experiences that you have, the greater risk of addiction later on in life, by the way, also the greater the risk of autoimmune disease and mental health conditions and so on, but specifically addictions. So by the time a male child has six of these, sexual, physical, emotional, emotional abuse, et cetera, his risk of becoming an injection using drug addict is 4,600% greater than that of somebody else. A 46-fold increase. Now, why?

Two reasons. First of all, as we said, the brain develops the impact of the environment and the circuits in the brain that are prone for addiction get affected by that early trauma. Something happened to you. So the addiction wasn't your problem. Your addiction was your attempt to solve the problem. It is the symptom, yes, but it's also an attempt to solve a problem. The problem of pain.

My mantra here is not why the addiction, but why the pain? Why didn't you feel alive? Because something happened to you that cut you off from yourself. And that's trauma we're talking about. Something happened to you that gave you a lot of pain that you needed to numb. That's trauma. So that's the essence of addiction. It's trauma.

It's not genetic. The whole idea of addiction being genetic, which is still the mantra. Just scientific nonsense. There's a group of genes that the more than you have, the more prone you might be to be addicted. or to have a mental health condition. At the same time, you can have those same genes and have no condition whatsoever, depending on what the environment does.

So what are these genes then? In fact, you can have a gene that under certain circumstances make you more violent, under other circumstances make you less violent. So what do you think the gene is for? The gene is for sensitivity. Our capacity to be affected by the environment, and the more sensitive you are,

sincere is from the Latin word, sincere to feel. The more sensitive you are, the more you feel. Well, the more pain you have, the more likely you want to escape from the pain by numbing yourself. That the more pain you have, the more you have to harden yourself. This is where hardened the criminal comes from. They harden themselves because of the trauma. Then you have no empathy and you become ruthless.

So that sensitivity can lead you to all kinds of different outcomes depending on what happens in the environment. Where in your life do you have trouble saying no? The second question is, what is the impact on you of your difficulty saying no? Then the third question is, what is the belief behind my difficulty saying no? That tension between attachment and authenticity. Something in you wants to say no, right? But you don't say it for the fear of losing the attachment. As an infant, as a young child, you have no choice in the matter.

You have to choose attachment. You don't anymore. You can choose authenticity. The next question then is, who would you be if you knew how to say no? And there's a final question, which is, what are you not saying yes to? when we're so busy not saying no, there's often a yes inside that wants to be expressed where we don't make space for it.

We call that the terrible twos because we want our kids to be compliant. But actually, that's nature's way of helping to develop the child's will. Because if we don't know how to say no, our yeses don't mean anything at all. What do people need to do? They need to commit to their healing.

Not just to talk about it. I'm very good at talking about healing. I'm much more reticent than actually engaging in it. know we all are. So this is where we have to just actually make a commitment. I have to be ask yourself, what is important to me? There's all kinds of resources out there. And you don't need necessarily any fancy retreat, any big cathartic experience. Thank you for joining us for this very special Thursday episode of Mind Bialliolix Breakdown.

If you like what you hear, please rate us, review us, and make sure to follow us on Instagram at Biolic Breakdown to tell us your favorite parts of this episode. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.