On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Dr. Gabor Maté ON: Understanding Your Trauma & How to Heal Emotional Wounds to Start Moving On From the Past Today

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon.Today, I talk to Dr. Gabor Maté. A celebrated speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, such as addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction; When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress; and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. He is also the co-author of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in more than thirty languages.Dr. Maté generously shares his deep understanding of childhood trauma, vulnerability, grief, and emotional distress. He explains what real trauma is and how time doesn’t necessarily lead to healing, how vulnerability is ingrained in us since we are young and the importance of these formative years to mold our emotional health, and the societal expectations we always try to meet but have never truly given us real fulfillment. We also exchange thoughts on dealing with grief, how we struggle to identify with the people we look up to, and how childhood experience varies for every child even when they are raised in a similar environment.Trauma is a wound that has not fully healed which can be triggered at any point in our life so it matters that we are able to find a common ground and stay firm in what can give us healing, emotional stability, and happiness.What We Discuss:00:00:00 Intro00:03:12 How do you define trauma?00:06:32 How is healing defined?00:08:45 Time itself does not heal emotional wounds00:11:38 We are all born vulnerable00:13:55 The inherent expectations we all have00:20:00 The societal standards we try to live up to00:25:15 It’s not possible to love kids too much00:29:35 Grief is essential for life00:32:19 When the past dominates the present reactions00:35:16 There is no healthy identification00:42:11 Why are we set on things staying the same00:44:38 No two children have the same childhood00:50:19 The difference between loneliness and being alone00:53:54 How do you see human nature?01:02:24 Suffering has to be acknowledged01:06:27 Getting closure and start moving on01:10:04 Spirituality becomes commoditized01:15:56 Dr. Maté on Final Five:Episode ResourcesGabor Maté | WebsiteGabor Maté | InstagramGabor Maté | TwitterGabor Maté | BooksThe Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic CultureDo you want to meditate daily with me? Go to go.calm.com/onpurpose to get 40% off a Calm Premium Membership. Experience the Daily Jay. Only on CalmWant to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much. Like, easy listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of cozy. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the iHeartRadio app,

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Just do it better. Besitos. Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable. So a crustacean animal like a crab inside a hard shell, it can't grow. It has to molt and make itself very vulnerable to be able to grow. A tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable. So vulnerability is absolutely essential for growth. and for vulnerability, you gotta let go of those defenses such as being right. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks

to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. And I'm so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audio book. If you haven't got it already, read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audio book. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to 8rulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules. Go to jsheddytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you

this year. Now, I know that if you're listening right now, you're here because you want to improve your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. I know that you're trying to heal from trauma, from stress, from pressure. you're trying to heal from trauma, from stress, from pressure. You're trying to heal challenges you experienced early in childhood or ones that you're going through today. And it's my job and it's my duty and it's my honor and joy to introduce you to incredible people that I believe have answers, have insights, have helpful approaches to navigating the challenges we all experience. And today's guest is someone I have been so excited to speak to for a long time on On Purpose.

I hope this is not just his only time on the show. I hope this starts to become a regular guest on the show. I'm talking about none other than Dr. Gabor Mate, who's a celebrated speaker and bestselling author. He's highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics such as addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Mate has written several best-selling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No, the cost of hidden stress and scattered minds, the origins and healing of attention deficit disorder. Now, today we're talking about his new book called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And we have the link to this in the notes.

I want you to go and order this book right now. It is going to blow your mind. The insights of this individual about what we're going through as a culture and a society are going to be really powerful. So the book is called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Please welcome to the show, Dr. Gabor Mate. Thank you so much for being here. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for being here. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I love sitting down with people who are deeply immersed and obsessed with ideas and observing human behavior. I admire obsession deeply and admiration deeply, and I admire the ability to sit with something for a long enough time.

But I want to start off broad and I want to move in deeper. And I think this is a question that me and my friends often talk about. I think we hear the word trauma more often these days. It's thrown around sometimes. Sometimes it's used effectively. Sometimes it's used in conversation around things that some people would perceive as small and insignificant sometimes it's used to describe life-defining things in your words how would you describe trauma and why is it so misunderstood even though it's so widespread it's a deep question because on the one hand, trauma is sometimes used somewhat loosely and promiscuously to refer to things that are not traumatic. So people will have a difficult experience and say, I was traumatized. No,

they weren't. They just had a difficult experience. And as one of my colleagues points out, all trauma is stressful, but not every stress is traumatic. So sometimes people use the word to refer to difficult experiences, which is not the same as being traumatized. And on the other hand, where it really matters, which is in the area of health that you and I are both concerned in, whether it's physical or mental health, trauma is not understood nearly enough or used nearly enough. So that, to my mind, a lot of conditions of mind and body are actually very much trauma related without the healing profession particularly the medical profession actually recognizing it so trauma then is it comes from the greek word for wounding trauma is a wound

it's a psychic wound that leaves a scar it leaves a an imprint in your nervous system, in your body, in your psyche, and then shows up in multiple ways that are not helpful to you later on. So in its basic sense, trauma is a psychic wound. And if you look at the nature of a wound, on the one hand, if it's raw and open, it really hurts. So when somebody touches that wound that you sustained a long time ago, but it hasn't healed yet, you'll react like you're just being tormented all over again. This happens in relationships all the time. On the other hand, wounds scar over, and the scar tissue has certain features.

It's very hard, it's rigid, so it's not flexible, so people tend to be rigid when they traumatize it also doesn't grow so trauma very often stops emotional growth and development so on the one hand it's very raw and painful on the other hand it's even lacks sensation because scar tissue doesn't have nerve endings in it so trauma then just to finish is not what happened to you. So trauma is not the difficult incidents, like trauma is not the war, it's not the, in my case, the second world war when I was born or what happened to me. Trauma is not the abuse that people experienced. Trauma is not the pain that they felt. Trauma is the wound that they sustained as a result.

So the trauma wasn't, for example, the sexual abuse. Trauma was the wound that the person sustained as a result of having been abused. That's the good news, Jay, because if trauma is the wound that we sustained, it can be healed at any time. If trauma is what happened to me 75 years ago or 78 years ago, it happened it never not will have happened you know the partition of india wounded a lot of people but it never would it'll never not have happened but if the wound is what happened to people inside as a result that can be healed that's probably the best differentiator that i've heard and you're right it is good news because it means we can heal it exactly what do you think are the biggest going the opposite way we're talking about a wound

and i want to come back to that but going the opposite way how would you then define healing because that's another word like trauma that is also just everywhere now right self-healing healing from this healing from that i think healing is such a interesting concept in and of itself which again is rarely defined or made clear to us and from your studies i would love to hear your thoughts in the same way as you did for trauma what is what is healing sure so you mentioned to me that uh you spent some time in my homeland of Hungary, where I was born. And the Hungarian word for health actually begins with the word for wholeness. So health literally means wholeness.

And the English word for healing and health also come from an Anglo-Saxon origin meaning wholeness. and anglo-saxon origin meaning wholeness. So for some reason, languages internationally have intuited the essence of healing, which is a sense of completion and wholeness. Now, what trauma does is it disconnects us. It splits us off from our true self and disconnects us from our emotions, even from our bodies.

So if that disconnection is the essence of trauma, then the healing is that coming together of the self to become whole again. And healing is often used synonymously with cure, fair enough, but strange enough,

in my view, and not just in my view, people can be cured from an illness without becoming whole, without healing. People sometimes also become healed without being cured. So in essence, healing is not the absence of a physical illness, but it's the integrity of a person who's no longer split off from themselves.

I think what we find is that trauma is so, as you said, a wound that is long-lasting. It can often be that way yeah but healing is a process that we want to happen now yeah or today yeah or tomorrow yeah i'm intrigued by how does time we've always had time will heal right like that's a it won't yeah right so so let's go back to the wound and talk about is there any relationship between time and wounds or unhealed wounds and what what is that relationship how is that wound being formed internally as you said trauma is not what happens to you it's what happens inside of you that which is happening inside of you, what is happening with that wound over time when it's left?

What happens is that it may lie dormant for a long time and then something occurs that touches it. It's when we talk about people being triggered, for example, something touches an unhealed wound inside you and you react, you've just been wounded for the first time. And certainly I can tell you that's been the case for me for example in my marriage relationship is that the unhealed wounds you may think you've gone past them but then something will happen that touches that wound and you react like you're being tormented

all over again for the first time. And time does not automatically heal. Time maybe scars it over. Time maybe makes it less available to immediate memory. But should something happen to evoke it, it's going to show up in its full painful impact until you do some work to heal. Time by itself does not heal, not spontaneously, not automatically. How do we uncover those? Because I feel that, and maybe this is something to address, it's that at least what I find

is that a lot of our beliefs that we have about ourselves and about others are wired to try and make us feel safe to some degree. So I believe, and I'm hypothetically saying this, I believe that I am right in my opinion, because that makes me feel safe and secure. But often to unearth a wound, we have to be okay with the vulnerability of saying, well, maybe I'm not right. Maybe this response is coming from some wound that I gained in the past. So for example, when you were speaking about your marriage, you sparked something for me. I found that a lot of the love I received when I was younger was then followed by guilt. So when I received love when I was younger, the idea was

if I couldn't reciprocate with that level of love, I'd be made to feel guilty that I didn't love someone enough. And I found that I would repeat that in my own relationship with my wife, where I would over love. And if she didn't match that level of love, I would then make her feel guilty. And it took me years to really discover that pattern and that's just one tiny pattern and whether that's trauma or difficult experiences a different conversation but the idea that spotting that pattern only came from me saying well maybe i'm wrong maybe me wanting to make someone feel guilty is not the right thing how do we assess that how do we gain the vulnerability in safety

to create that future stability? Does that make sense? Well, it makes absolute sense because vulnerability itself is absolutely essential for growth. So vulnerability, the word itself comes from the Latin word vulnerare, to wound. So vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded.

Now, the reality is that as human beings, we're all vulnerable from conception until death. But when we're hurt in childhood and the vulnerability is too painful to bear, we will try and shut down our vulnerability. And for example, by being right. Because if I'm right, then I'm powerful and I can't be assailed anymore, you know? But when we do that, we stop growing. Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable so

a crustacean animal like a crab inside a hard shell it can't grow it has to molt and make itself very vulnerable to be able to grow a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick does it it goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable so vulnerability is absolutely essential for growth and for vulnerability you gotta let go of those defenses, such as being right, that you developed as a child in order to protect yourself from the pain. So that's why we talk about growing pains, because vulnerability is necessary for growth. Without vulnerability, there's no growth. Wow.

That, what you just said, that is so beautiful. You just said vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded that's what it means yeah that's an i mean that's an incredible definition of the word i think we hear so many definitions of vulnerability but that that vulnerability i'm just going to say that again everyone write that down vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded how do we develop our capacity so actually let's go back to childhood we'll come back to that so if we go to childhood yeah what are the things happening currently that you perceive and i know you talk about this in your new book the myth of normal by the way everything we're talking about is in this incredible book the myth of normal trauma

illness and healing in a toxic culture if you don't have it please go and order it now what is happening in our childhood in society i guess when you say things are not happening and healing in a toxic culture. If you don't have it, please go and order it now. What is happening in our childhood, in society? I guess when you say things are not happening to us, there are still environmental impacts that are imprinting the potential for this wound to grow. What are some of those things that are distorting our development in unhealthy ways in childhood? There are two things. One is obvious. Like when the children are mistreated, maltreated, abused sexually, physically, emotionally, when there's violence in the family or a parent is caught up in addiction or where there's a rancorous divorce and a lot of conflict in the home, children are just wounded, period.

But it's more insidious and more ubiquitous than that, because children have certain basic needs. Now, if we understand human, if you want to understand a zebra or a whale, where would you study those creatures? In a zoo or an aquarium or out there in nature? Same with human beings. So you have to actually look at what are the evolutionary determined needs of human beings as inculcated or instilled in us through our evolutionary history. And so we evolve with certain needs. There used to be this belief that children are what are called a tabula rasa, you know, an empty slate.

You can just write whatever you want on it, program the child in any way you want. That used to be the prevailing belief. It's not true. Children are born with not only certain needs, but certain inherent expectations. So to give an example, your lungs are an inherent expectation for oxygen because they've developed in response to oxygen. If there had been no oxygen in the environment, we'd have no lungs. In the same way with the human child, it has certain inherent expectations. And you can wound kids not just by maltreating them, but by not meeting those expectations.

When I say expectation, I don't mean a conscious expectation. I mean an expectation inherent in the organism. So children need unconditional loving acceptance by multiple adult caregivers, which is how we evolved in hunter-gatherer groups and lived that way for millions and hundreds of thousands of years. Children have a need not to have to work to make the relationship with their parents work. So a child, children need rest from having to struggle to make the relationship with the parents work. So a child doesn't need rest from having to struggle to make the relationship functional. They don't have to be pretty or cute or compliant or clever or successful or any of that stuff. They just need to be,

and they don't have to work at getting the parents to accept them. That's an essential need of the child. When I say essential, I mean if it's not met, that'll distort child development. The third need is really crucial, and in our society it's hardly ever met, which is the child needs the freedom to experience all the emotions

that nature has endowed her or him with. So we have certain brain circuits for anger, for love, for play, for lust, for seeking curiosity. All these circuits are there for a reason. We share them with other animals. We share them with bear cubs and puppies and little whales, you know, elephant. They need to develop because they're there for a reason. Evolution gave it to us in our society parents are often advised and taught to suppress

certain emotional experiences on the part of the child that's a wound to the child which distorts their development and has significant implications for health later on the fourth need fourth essential, is free play out in nature. Free play, spontaneous, creative, imaginative play. But that's essential for healthy brain development. We share that with other animals. Baby elephants play, bear cubs play, puppies play, lion cubs play. Crucial for brain development, we know that now. In our society, we put cognitive development way ahead of play, and we deprive our children of play

by giving them gadgets, which deprives them of imagination. So we're actually undermining their brain development and their healthy unfolding as human beings. So children can be wounded, not just by bad things happening to them, but by their needs not being met. And in our society, when you ask about the environmental conditions that undermine health and and child

development these environmental conditions in our society are inimical to healthy human unfoldment no wonder we have so many children in trouble with anxiety and adhd and depression and the rate of childhood suicide is going up and the number of kids being medicated with heavy duty medications, multiplicity of medications is going up. Why? Because the conditions for healthy development are less and less available to them. Not because parents don't love their kids, not because they're not trying to do their best, but because of the conditions under which parenting takes place in this society. Yeah, just to share some of those stats that are in the book that Dr. Matej is referring to, we have in 2019, more than 50 million Americans, over 20% of the US

adults suffered an episode of mental illness. Rates of obesity, along with the multiple health risks it possesses, are going up in many countries, including Canada, Australia, and notably the United States, where over 30% of the adult population reached the criteria. And then this part, millions of North American children and youths are being medicated with stimulants, antidepressants, and even antipsychotic drugs, whose long-term effects on the developing brain are yet to be established. So, you know, you share all these insights and research and work. What I'm interested by is, let's say a child today is raised in that way. I find it fascinating that if you then migrate that child into the real world, and for everyone who's listening i'm doing my quotation marks like real world they walk into this conditioned world that we currently have if we almost raised a village of children in in a i don't know what the right word is but i guess in a more natural way but then they evolved and had to get a job and work in the world how would they function what would be your take on how they would do?

I mean, is there any research on that? Or what would be your thoughts about how they would deal with the then capitalist society that is drilled around results and performance and being beautiful or smart or cute? How would they react to that? That question actually has been studied to some degree. And they would not automatically buy into the values. So they may need to get a job, but they wouldn't identify themselves with the job.

And they wouldn't judge themselves based on the external values of success. They would also enter the world with a sense of purpose. And I know purpose is very important to you so a sense of purpose can only arise from us if we're in touch with the real selves so they would be in the world but they wouldn't be of the world in a sense they wouldn't identify themselves with the values that society would push on them so I think they struggle, but they would do reasonably well, and they'd hold on to themselves in the process. They wouldn't live a life that's based on,

what do other people think about me? Am I pretty enough? Do they find me attractive? Have I collected enough goods and objects to make me feel okay about myself? They wouldn't buy into all that. And to the extent that this has been studied, and it has been, those people that can be in this society without buying into its values tend to be healthier and more grounded emotionally the reason why i love hearing that is because it's the first time i've connected these ideas together that when i was born and raised in london i was i was born and raised in London, I was born and raised with all the usual pursuits. I have a good

education, a good home, a good financial situation, et cetera. Those were the ways I was raised and success was a big part of my culture. And I chased the validation of my family and the external surroundings and my community and what my aunts and uncles thought of me. And when that validation was dissatisfying or didn't feel like it was actually coming my way, and when I was finally introduced to the monks at 18, I then seeked the validation of the monks, only for them to teach me that the issue wasn't who you seek validation from,

the issue was seeking validation in the first place. And so what you've just said to me is in three years, I got a crash course in what you're saying where we spent more time in nature. We were trained in unlearning the behaviors and habits that I'd developed for 21 years at the time. And then when I came back into the world, the way you just described that is exactly how I felt.

Like I almost felt like a new person coming back into the same world that I left with a completely different approach and a different map of how to navigate it. And you're spot on. It's still hard. It's not that it's perfect and it's easy, and it's not that I've got it right. It's just that when I am challenged, I have a toolkit or I have some ideas, as you said, with purpose that helped me think about the problem differently. You're not governed by the same thing. So when I went into the world of work, and I just want to give people a practical example of what Dr. Mate is saying is spot on. When I went into the world of work, we were all told that we had to be good at a list of like 10 things in order

to succeed. And I looked at that list of 10 and I was like, I can do one of those things really well. And I'm only going to focus on that one because these other nine are not, not my nature. They're not my purpose. And it's so strange because that one thing made me extremely successful at the company I worked at and then has become how I built my career. And it's so true that had I gone in and done what 90% of people did, I would have become what 90% of people are doing. That really deeply resonates. What is the difference, though, with, and I can't wait to read some of that research on that. I think that's fascinating. and I can't wait to read some of that research on that.

I think that's fascinating. When you have a culture where I think most people who read this book today, The Myth of Normal, will say that they can relate to having trauma, illness, and trying to be on the path of healing, especially our community here. They are absolutely gonna love this book. This is exactly why we have this show.

But I find that we would all agree, I think if I asked everyone to put up their hands and say, how many people feel they experienced a traumatic environment at home? I think most people would raise their hands. If I asked how many people felt when they were children that they had unhealthy relationships with their parents, to some degree, I think most people will put their hand up. The challenge I find is that I really feel with what you're saying with the book, there's a difference between what you're saying and then the other extreme, which is mollycoddling. So there's neglect and then there's mollycoddling. And I find that as humans, our brains are wired for extremes. So if we've

seen that being mistreated or neglected is really bad for us, we go the opposite way and we go, okay, now I'm going to make sure that this kid has like 24 cushions around it. My Abuelita First, part of iHeartRadio's My Cultura Podcast Network. Each week, host Vico Ortiz and Abuelita Liliana Montenegro will play matchmaker for a group of hopeful romantics who are putting their trust in Abuelita to find them a date. Your job right now is to get on Abuelita's really good side. Our Abuelita definitely knows best. On Date My Abuelita First, three single contestants will vie for a date with one lucky main dater, except to get their heart, they have to win over Abuelita Liliana first. Hi, Liliana. Yes, we are ready for love.

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Hear it now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'd be curious to know, I like to answer that question because it's a very important one, but I just want to know exactly what you mean by Molly Codling. What I see, and I'm talking about people that I know and people that will speak to me, is that anyone who had a tough childhood are then trying to create a scenario for their child where that child experiences no pain. They no longer respond to their child needs.

They're coming from their own anxieties. Yes. So mollycoddling has got nothing to do with the child. It has to do with the anxieties of the parents. That kid is going to download the anxieties of the parents. So mollicottled kids become very anxious and very scared and very ungrounded in themselves. On the other hand, it's not possible to love kids too much.

In fact, there's a very interesting study where they looked at a large number of mothers and their infants in the early few months. And most mothers in this study were seen as really good mothers. And some were a bit distant and because of their own traumas, not as available. And a small group were seen as like super loving in how they doted over their infants. 30 years later, they looked at these infants now as adults. super loving in how they dored over their infants. Okay? 30 years later, they looked at these infants now as adults.

The ones that were most emotionally grounded and healthy were the ones who received the super loving. So there's a difference. You can't love a child too much. So the modicalling that you describe is not a child being loved too much. It's a child who has to endure the anxieties of the parents. And you know there's a very famous example in world history of someone whose parents

wanted to protect him from suffering was the Buddha. He never saw death, he never saw illness, he never saw old age until he goes out and sees a dying person, sees a very poor person, a very ill person, a very old person, he realizes there's suffering in the world. So all the mollycoddling he received could not ultimately protect him from the awareness of pain and vulnerability. Although, if I talk about the Buddha,

I also have to say that his own trauma is often not talked about, because his mother died when he was a week old, or right after birth didn't he didn't she so even they tried to protect her him they couldn't you know but so anyway molly codling has got nothing to do with the needs of the child yeah that's a great differentiator it has to do with the unmet needs of the parents and as soon as parents project their needs onto the child no

longer see the child as they exist they see their own anxieties their own their fears and their own fantasies naturally that's going to hurt the child yeah that's such a great differentiator that's again it's a trauma response it's a trauma yeah it's a trauma response away make suitcases bags and other travel accessories designed to make moving through the world a lot more seamless. So no matter where you're going, you can rely on Away's range of travel products to get you there. Away products come in a variety of colors and sizes that are built to last, with durable lightweight exteriors that can withstand even the roughest of baggage handlers.

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anyway? It's the nature of life. There's no reason to deliberately expose children to pain because they're going to experience it. The question is how do we support them, and they do. You know why? Because their puppy's going to die. Because grandfather's going to die. Because some neighborhood friend won't want to play with them. Because they're not going to get the toy they wanted. Because some disappointment will happen.

some disappointment will happen. So pain is inevitable, but it doesn't have to become traumatic if the child is supported in experiencing the pain and moving past it. So we don't have to impose or bring pain into a kid's life to train them. Life's going to do that. The question is how are we to interact with them

while they're enduring the pain yeah and what would you say those are obviously there's the love part which you spoke about but when when a child is going through something like that let's talk about loss because i think that's a big one right like whether it's losing a parent or losing a puppy as you said or uh or even if it's not losing a parent to death, it's losing a parent to a divorce. For example. Correct, yeah. So grief and loss doesn't have to be the end of life.

It can be everything. Exactly. Or a loss of a country. What are the steps that someone should take in order to help guide through anyone through loss, not just a child? Well, interestingly enough, when I talk about these brain circuits

that we share with other animals for play and for loving and seeking, Well, interestingly enough, when I spoke about these brain circuits that we share with other animals, for play and for loving and seeking, we also have a brain circuit for panic and grief. Why do we have that? Because life brings loss. And so grief is essential for life, because grief is coming to terms with the fact that something is gone, it's not going to come back. So a child experiences grief and you know I said that the the need of the child is to be

able to experience all the emotions they need to be able to experience the grief as well and it doesn't matter whether from adult eyes we see that loss is major or minor it's a question of how's the child experiencing it and for a small child even what looks like small losses can be very painful well then we don't make the child wrong for it we don't say get over it there's nothing wrong think of all the other children who are suffering all that kind of relativistic uh shaming stuff you say oh it really hurts doesn't it? You really wish grandpa would be here with you. You really wish mom and dad weren't leaving each other.

It hurts. In other words, you just validate their emotions. By doing so, you help them accept the loss and you help them move through and you help them learn that they can endure difficult emotions without having to become falling to pieces. so we have a circuitry for grief in our brain for grief in our brains it needs to be allowed to do its work i find that a lot of us today are reflecting on that inner child right like that language is again more widespread today

or is growing the idea of like oh we have this inner child who has this wound or this trauma what what do you find is the difference between analyzing and over analyzing or thinking and overthinking these experiences and how would you define the difference because i i and i'm being very honest and vulnerable because it's the only way to have this conversation really like i often think about events in my life that happened that would be considered generally as either difficult experiences or as traumatic right they could be seen as either or there are some of them that i've worked through myself or with with people that i trust or with guides and and and obviously through my monk life, there were things that I looked at and worked on. There are certain things that I don't feel a need,

like I don't feel a desire to dive into. The question I'm asking is, should I dive into them or is that considered overanalyzing and overthinking? And I ask that for everyone else who's listening to this going, gosh, if I thought about everything that happened to me, I could be there for a while. Yeah. What's your take on that? Well, first of all, in my world, there's no shoulds. Okay. There's no? There are no shoulds. There's no shoulds, yeah. So I would never say anybody, you should, you know, because that itself is intrusive so the question is whether it's helpful or not to delve into the past depends on what's happening with that individual and if some of the in fact effects of trauma as we said earlier is that the

the wounds of the past keeps showing up in the present so from my point of view is not so much about delving into the past and dwelling on the past, but on dealing with how the past is showing up in the present. What a psychologist friend of mine, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past, where the past dominates my present reactions. It doesn't matter how many times I go back and think about my childhood story, that's not going to help me. What I have to deal with is what's happening in me now right now at this very second which is a shadow of

the past so thinking about it is not gonna be of much help what's gonna help is to deal with the emotions that are arising now as a result of what happened and how those emotions affect my life in the present moment so it's not about the past it's about the present yeah so it So it's not about the past, it's about the present. Yeah, so it's really about the choices we have now. Exactly, what's available to us now. Yeah, what's available to us now, because I feel like we didn't have a choice in the past

because we were either too young or too incapable of making a choice. Exactly. But the choices that happen right now can transform everything. It is possible. Some people do make themselves into victims. They kind of identify with the victim role.

All this stuff happened to me, and therefore I cannot do such and such, or I'm hurt and I'll never get over it. It's possible to identify with the victim role. It's even possible to identify with the survivor role. I'm a survivor. Well, no, that's not who you are you survive but who you are is much greater than that particular experience and who you are is much always much greater than than your suffering you know and so it is possible for some people to identify with the suffering and the past to such a degree that they stop

moving forward. Yes. I think you've just raised a really important component of all of this. On a deeper level is that what we identify with, right? Even earlier, you were talking about people who would be raised in this hypothetical village we were talking about, but even through research, they won't identify with the values of a capitalist society. Identification, you just said people could identify as a victim, they could identify as a survivor. What is a healthy identification? There isn't one.

Right. Because if you look at, again, the meaning of words, I just find words fascinating same yeah identification comes from a Latin word edem which means the same and facere to make as soon as I make myself the same as something like if I identify with my role as a doctor I immediately limit myself if you identify with your experience as a monk, and I don't mean not to learn from it or to grow from it,

but if you identify with it, that's what I am. You've now narrowed yourself. So there's no healthy identification. If I identify myself with a state or a nation, I could be loyal to that state or nation. I could love that state or nation or any group. But if you identify with it, such as you have no independent existence, you've limited yourself already. So when you say, is there healthy identification? Not really.

Isn't the challenge though, that I think all of us are pursuing some sort of identification, like that seems to be a massive human need. Like I support this football club or I'm a fan of this band or I'm a member of this car club or I go to this shopping grocery store. Like I feel like we're all wanting to be members. Like that seems to be like a human need of wanting to be a member of a community,

wanting to identify with something. It is a human need to belong but can we belong without identifying to the point that we're have no independent perspective you know in other words can we be authentic and and i talk a lot about this tension between authenticity being ourselves and attachment which is belonging ideally we can both be authentic and belong yeah but that kind of identification often leads to suffering i mean it's what the buddhists call belonging. Ideally, we can both be authentic and belong. But that kind of identification often leads to suffering. I mean, it's what the Buddhist call attachment, isn't it? And let me

give you an example. So you mentioned sports team. So in the night, you wouldn't know this. But in the 1950s, the Hungarian soccer team was the best in the world. We never lost. That's it. I did not. I love soccer. And I don't know. We went to Britain, and we beat-3 in Wembley Stadium. Wow. The first time that it was a... Sorry, Brit fans.

Yeah, sorry about that. And it was a huge national holiday in Hungary and small country goes to mighty Britain and beats them at their own game. And the next year, the whole country was joyful and I've still got great memories of my childhood. The next year we're in the world championships and we're the heavy favorites because we haven't lost for years. And we meet the Germans in the final and we lose 3-2. Yeah. National tragedy. I'm telling you, it still hurts.

You know, it's just a football game played on the pitch by 22 guys uh in 1954 so what you know but when you when this is over identification yeah then that itself brings suffering now you know yes you can support your team in vancouver british columbia where live, it's a very peaceful place. But the Vancouver Canucks, which is a local hockey team, made it to the Stanley Cup finals and they lost. There were riots in the streets. Why? Because people had over-identified. You can enjoy the team and be a sports fan, but the identification that your joy or satisfaction depends on whether your team

loses or wins. Well, why? It doesn't matter. Yeah. I love that answer for many reasons because I've had to go through the grief of letting go of past selves, adopting new selves, past selves adopting new selves and then having to realize that none of those were me as my identification so as you rightly said when i took off the garbs of a monk when i took off my robes it was really tough because there was a part of my identity especially at a young age that was attached even to the outer covering and i had to realize that I had to extract the inner beliefs and leave the outer covering behind and the outer name and what that meant and even in my career today like I've had to let go and and even now I don't even know how to identify in one sense whenever I'm sure you I'm sure you feel this to some degree in your work as well it's like whenever

they say like oh when you're on tv and they want to put like your your title and they'll be like jay what's your title i'm like i i'm more defined by my purpose than my profession like you know what i what i do for people and the service i want to offer in the world is far more important to me than author or podcaster or former monk or like those things don't really define me. Well, I get that totally. What I'm thinking about is you telling me when you left those monks' robes, we talked about the crab, didn't we?

With the hard shell. To grow, you have to let go of the shell at some point. So each of those moltings represent the point of growth, but at the time it's difficult. So when I left family practice to go and work with a highly addicted population in vancouver and it was a loss of identity for a while i was a bit disoriented for a few days because all these people these families that had relied on me to be the kind of

the linchpin of their linchpin of their health and all these people that had come to me and trust me and um who's that who i would see in the office. And all of a sudden, I left that. Now who am I all of a sudden? So I totally understand that. No, the reality is that I'm so grateful that I did. What then I got to experience in the next realm of work helped to further define my purpose in life and taught me so much about myself and human beings.

But at the time, it was difficult. Letting go of that identification was difficult. And there was really that sense of, well, if I'm not that, then what am I? This is what happens when we identify with roles. Yeah, if anyone's listening and wants to go at figuring out what your subconscious answer is, ask one of your friends. Ask them and then get them to ask you, who are you? Yeah.

And your answer to that question, 99% of the time when you ask someone, who are you? They'll say, I'm a lawyer. I'm an accountant. I'm a Brit. I'm an American. You know, always the answer is on such a material level. Well, as one spiritual teacher said, I think, unless I'm making this up, but I think he said it, that the problem is not not knowing who you are.

The problem is thinking that you know who you are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible, isn't it? That the things that are true safety feel unsafe to the mind. Yeah. And I'm intrigued by that because you've studied the mind.

You've studied addiction. You've studied healing. You've studied trauma. Why is it that we seek certainty and stability when you earlier also said that the only time we experience growth is the opposite when we're vulnerable why is it that we're so addicted to things staying the same or things not changing like that seems to be a core human addiction well a therapist once said to me that it has to do with the nature of the mind that you're referring to um a therapist once said to me that if your parents didn't know to hold you you developed a mind you hold yourself

with so you find safety in this mind that you created and so the human mind the ordinary egoic human mind is basically a defensive structure it's in significant ways it's a response to pain it's in significant ways it's a response to pain that's not all it is but in significant ways it's a response to pain it's a fate of pain and it's designed to keep you from experiencing pain so it's worried and it's anxious and it's defensive so when it comes to change and vulnerability the mind wants to defend against it and so it's it comes of fear, which comes out of childhood experience, where the pain that you had wasn't held. And therefore, you develop these mind structures to keep you from experiencing it. And I mean, one of them clearly is addiction. And Keith Richards,

the world's most famous former heroin addict, the Rolling Stone guitarist, said about addiction, for example, his heroin use, that the contortions you go through just not to be yourself for a few hours. Now, why would somebody not want to be themselves? Because it hurts so much at some point to be yourself. And then the mind comes in and tries to protect you from the pain of being yourself with its ideas and its beliefs and its certainties and its endless desires

and its artificial needs. And it's our fate to let go. Because if I let go, I'll be helped as a a child again but the mind largely is a defensive structure and then often will react that way that defensive structure obviously sets us up for so much what is happening inside that makes two people react completely differently to the same thing right you could have a parent that's a drug addict and one of the children goes, I'm never going to have drugs ever again

because I saw what it did to my parents. And the other person actually imitates the behavior and goes down the same path. What have you found or seen that at a young age creates that different journey? Well, the first thing to say is that no two children have the same two parents and no two children have the same childhoods even though they grew up

in the same biological family because first of all one of them came along at a different time so they had a different set of experiences is the birth order that affects our children experience the parents then there's degrees of sensitivities so some people are born more sensitive than others. Sensitive, again, comes from the Latin word sincere to feel. The more sensitive we are, the more we feel. Given the right environment,

a nourishing, supportive, grounded environment, that sensitive child just becomes an intuitive, a creator, an artist, an actor, a leader. But in an environment where there's pain, that sensitive child suffers more pain than the less sensitive one. So he'll have more of a reason to escape from the pain. It's not so much that he imitates the behavior of the adult, it's that he takes the same escape route and addictions are always a in my view at least an escape route from pain so it has to do with birth order with family circumstances degrees of sensitivity having said that the other child who doesn't become an addict hasn't

necessarily escaped they just may have developed different coping mechanisms they might have become one of these people that are going to make a big success in the world out of themselves and they're going to never going to fail and they have to be the best and they're going to suffer too they just might suffer in a different way that sensitivity you're talking about is probably one of the biggest questions i get asked right now and i want to ask it to you because I feel your experience could offer some real light on it. I feel people are experiencing so much sensitivity and empathy that they just can't stand the world we live in today. There are people like that. And I hear this

again and again, where it's like, whether it's the political climate or the economic climate or their family have addictions or friends, like everything that you talk about in the book. And people feel this can't be my home. Like this is not the place I want to live in. And so just as you were saying earlier that someone may have the thought, I don't want to be myself or feel like myself for a few hours people say well this doesn't feel like the world i want to live in i'm sure you've met many people who've felt that way seen that way or maybe even talked that way have i met people let me tell you something or worked with people i i had an experience with ketamine a few years ago this is a ketamine training for healers and i was injected

with ketamine it was taking me where it was taking me and all of a sudden i found myself screaming i hate the world that was good that it came out of me so i totally know what you're talking i'm just saying that that person i personally know what you're talking about okay so here's the thing i think a lot of that has to do with that first of all the world is getting more stressed it's getting more split everybody sees that getting more hostile in a lot of ways. It's getting less welcoming and more dangerous, more alienating. On the other hand, we're more and more alone with it.

Isolation and loneliness are rising. So if people experience pain and change and stress or even danger communally, it's bearable. But when we're alone with it, it becomes less and less bearable. And so one of the major factors driving, I think, the sensitivity that you're describing is just how alone people feel, which is not how we're meant to be. So that the capitalist values of aggressive, individualistic, ruthless greed and competition against everybody else, that doesn't reflect human needs or even human nature, not as we evolved. But the more the world gets that way and the more isolated we become,

the more vulnerable we are to be hurt by the world that we live in. And I think that's what people are talking about. Listen to Comeback Stories. I'm Darren Waller. You may know me best as a tight end for the New York Giants. You may also know me for my story of overcoming addiction and alcoholism. You may have heard a few of my tracks as an artist or a producer. You may have seen the work that I've done through my foundation.

And you may know my friend and co-host Donnie Starkins as well. He's a mindfulness teacher, a yoga instructor, a life coach, a man fully invested in seeing people reach their fullest potential. And we've come to form this platform of Comeback Stories to really highlight not only our own adversity, but adversity in the lives of well-known guests with amazing stories. Catch us every week on Comeback Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, this is fun.

I'm AJ Jacobs, and I am an author and a journalist, and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my new podcast, The Puzzler. Dressing. Dressing. French dressing. Exactly. Oh, that's good.

That's good. We are living in the golden age of puzzles. And now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears for 10 minutes or less every day on the puzzler. Short and sweet. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is. And now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird. This is fun.

Let's try this one. Listen to the puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's awful. And I should have seen it coming. Hi, I'm Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And I'm Sarah Hart Unger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families. On the Best of Both Worlds podcast each week, we share stories of how real women manage work,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I think one of the biggest things for me i was really fortunate that the clients i coach and the people that i work with i got to experience a lot of individuals who were vulnerable with me but they experienced being lonely and successful and lonely success didn't bring happiness and i know that one thing that me and my wife are always talking about especially because we're And lonely success didn't bring happiness. And I know that one thing that me and my wife are always talking about, especially because we're in a country where we don't have any family, we had to start from scratch in our friendship work and everything was. I heard you say in a podcast of how important family is to your wife, for example. For my wife, it's huge.

Like her personal family is like everything to her. Like that's her greatest value. But here we had to build our family. Yeah. And I think one of the things we constantly do is we try and make a concerted effort in order to cultivate and curate our community in LA. And it's fascinating to me because again, perception comes in where most people say to me, well, LA is a very shallow place. Like LA is a very shallow place. Like LA is a very fake place. And also, well, I found some of my best friends here and

incredible human beings. How much does that perception of a place or a space or a person actually also make us more lonely? Because I find sometimes that loneliness is created by perception. Like if we're scared of being vulnerable with someone, it's hard that someone will be vulnerable with us, right? So what do we need to do in order to build deeper relationships for healing and in this path that you're suggesting? Well, first of all, it occurs to me that loneliness is obvious perception.

There's a difference between being alone and being lonely. Alone is just a fact and that we can embrace and make decisions about. Loneliness has got an emotional charge to it. And that's very much a matter of perception. You can be alone and not be lonely.

And you can be surrounded by all kinds of people and be completely lonely. So that explains how open am I? How vulnerable am I really willing to be? What defenses have I erected around myself to protect myself that keeps me from really contacting other people? I think we unwittingly generate loneliness. There's also something else that happens, and you referred to this earlier. You talked about elders. In our society, we don't talk about elders. We talk about the elderly. It's not the same.

In our society that defines people so much in terms of their economic value, we tend to discard people that are not perceived as having economic value, either as producers or consumers. So this society generates a lot of loneliness, just because of its materialistic values. And in other functioning cultures, elders are not only respected, but they also have a purpose. They have the wisdom, they have the wisdom. They have the experience.

They have the vision. They have let go of a lot of the attachments that youth invariably engages with. So they have a lot to offer. So loneliness is also created in a society that has a very rigid and limited set of values. Yeah, I love the change in the language again of the elders and the elderly. And I always go back to that time in my life because it gave me so much. But growing up around people that were the same age, younger, older, and elder gave you so many different visions of life. And when I look back at my childhood or my young adulthood, I was constantly surrounded by people

that were older than me, younger than me, much older than me and wiser than me and being able to have everyone's vantage point created a beautiful 360 degree picture of life. But most of today we're only seeing one degree. If you spend time with only people your age, you're getting a very limited viewpoint of life versus if you're spending time with a much wider age range. And you tend to get a much less mature and rounded view of life. One of the books I helped to write, the core word, is called Hold On To Your Kids, Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers.

And the point made in that book is precisely what you just articulated, which is that for so many people, their world begins and ends with their own age group, which is a developmental disaster. Because again, we evolved as creatures in touch with people of multiple ages. And we've spent our time around people of multiple ages. When you isolate people by age, as this culture largely does i mean there's

subgroups within subgroups within subcultures within subcultures in a society all based on very shallow identification with age it just limits our development and limits our possibilities and and with that development how do you see human? Do you see human nature as muddied, trying to become pure, or beginning at pure and then getting muddied and then trying to go back to purely? How do you see that? Well, we do happen to have a chapter on human nature in this book, and pondering that same question that you just raised,

I more or less come to the conclusion it's not that there's a definable human nature, not that you can say, because I mean, look, Buddha was a human being, Hitler was a human being. One is full of compassion and love and giving, the other is full of greed and aggression and hatred. They're both human beings, so how can you talk about a defined human nature? However, what I think we can say confidently, that there's a certain human potential based on human needs.

If those needs are met, development will be healthy and those potentials will be realized. If those needs are frustrated, which they severely were in the case of, say, a Hitler, a terribly abused child, then what you get is the hatred and the rage and the murderous venom that characterized that personality now when you couple that with political power you see what happens but that's not human nature it's just human nature thwarted because the needs of that child were not met in a society that was completely incapable of meeting people's needs, in fact, totally abused them. So human nature to me is not a given. What we have is a human

potential. Based on human needs, if these needs are satisfied, we can be reasonably confident that people will be connected and generous. Most people want to be kind i mean it's interesting in this society when somebody does something selfish or greedy we say that's just human nature do we say that when somebody's kind or generous yeah never the the educator alfie cohen points that out and if you ask most people when does your body feel more at ease when do you experience more peace when you've been kind and generous and giving authentically not for not out of a sense of duty but because that was just the impulse or when you're grasping and greedy when is there more tension and more discomfort inside so that should tell us something about our nature that our nature

wants to be aligned with connection and generosity and giving because our bodies will tell us something about our nature, that our nature wants to be aligned with connection and generosity and giving. Because our bodies will tell us that. That is so true. That is so true. I mean, there is no time in life when you're bitter at someone or angry at someone that makes you feel good inside. Like it does, yeah, gut-wise too. I'm not just meaning in the heart space, but in all areas of your body,

the tension, the stress, the holding, the tightening. But like we were talking about earlier, society is set up in a way for false identification and divisive identification, whether it be two sets of soccer fans who now hate each other or rioting, or whether it be political parties or whether it be businesses at war with each other, right? Everything's set up in a way to get you to identify with something in order for you to be against something. Like that's what naturally ends up happening. Even schools, like I went to this school, you went to that school, we competed. Competition seems to be something that has been carefully crafted by capitalist society. And then when you see the rise of, and by the way,

carefully crafted by capitalist society. And then when you see the rise of, and by the way, I love competition. So health competition is great. So I'm not talking bad about competition, but it's interesting to see how, again, it's so hard to compete without identifying as that being your worth. And that requires so much mental,

spiritual strength, in my opinion, to be able to differentiate between identification and attachment. Well, it's really interesting because let's take the example of sports that you just mentioned. What do we call the people who participate in the sports? We call them players.

What do we call the process that they're engaged in? We call it a game. But we don't treat it like players're engaged in? We call it a game. But we don't treat it like players. We don't treat it like a game. Because real games and real play has no agenda. There's competition in the process and you want to do your best, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

It was just, it's for the process and for the joy of it. That's genuine play. Well, when you think about these multi-billion dollar sports industries and the strategy and the hype that goes into it, these are not players anymore. These are warriors, almost as if they're engaged in some kind of a battle. And winning or losing becomes everything. Like the famous Vince Lombardi, winning is not the only thing, it's the only thing. Well, that's not true, people.

That's true for the purposes of playing, as long as you recognize that you're only playing, as long as you don't confuse the game with life itself. But once it becomes a business and becomes cutthroat, that confusion is really prevalent, and people take it so seriously. So when you think about it, like you have these terrible conflicts in the world,

like the war in the Ukraine right now. The average person, how much time are they induced to spend thinking about those large issues? Or say about climate change, that only the blindest of the blind or the wickedest of the wickedest can at this point deny as a reality

but how much of our life do we spend actually pondering and engaging with these larger issues compared with analyzing which quarterback should have played in which quarter of which particular nfl game you know so that these so-called games and these so-called players have assumed a far larger importance in our lives, whereas the real things we tend to ignore. You've just sparked something for me that I was blown away by this experience. I recently went to Rwanda and I went there with Ellen DeGeneres in collaboration with the Dian Fossey Fund has opened up a gorilla sanctuary and a conservation center. Yes. And we went there to trek with the gorillas, learn about gorillas, learn about Rwanda. And I had never been to Rwanda before.

I didn't know if I would have visited if it wasn't for her. for her and the biggest thing i took away obviously trekking with gorillas and being in nature with a form of life that has no interest in us but we're totally fascinated by them was an incredible experience and i'll talk about that separately but the reason i brought it up here is i also took time to go to the genocide memorial museum yes and it was fascinating for me to learn that it's been around 20 years from what i remember a tenth of the population of the country so like a million people of like 10 million people died in the genocide were killed in the genocide yeah and most of the people who live there today it was their parents it was their ancestors that that did this just 20 years ago which is not a long time at all. And I met some of the survivors.

I sat with them in the museum. I talked to them. We talked to the locals. We talked to people that were helping us with our travel and arrangements and the hotels we stayed at. And it fascinated me that the people were so healed. Like there was such a genuine sincere conversation that they have now let go of this two tribe culture they've let go of the names the identification that they're living by a principle they call ubuntu i am because you are i believe or you are because i am like that's i'll get that right but ubuntu is the word that they use. And it was so special. I was totally. I'm curious to ask, did you delve into what allowed them to do that?

They said a lot of it came through the leadership. Like they said that that was how they were being, it's what you're saying. Like when you said like they were asked to, you're saying we don't make time to focus on these huge issues because we're too busy wondering which player played in which position yeah that's they didn't say in that way but that's what they were saying that our leadership encouraged us to think in this way and i couldn't believe that in 20 years when your parents have probably killed their parents that you were standing next to each other not worrying about the lineage that this,

this culture was set up. And it was the Europeans who set up part of that anyway. But I just wanted to understand from you, like, what does it take to get to that level of healing? Because that's, you know, people would say, okay, well, that's a 10 million population. To me, that's still a humongous win for the world yeah um i was wondering if you've seen cultures have you seen even smaller groups or even living through the war where you've seen that kind of healing before i don't know how the healing happened in rwanda um yeah really encouraged to hear what you describe here i think at the very least of it the suffering had to be acknowledged and had to be heard and fully acknowledged.

And then the healing can take place. Yeah. Without that, it can't. Of course, absolutely. Which is why it's so important to understand trauma. The suffering has to be acknowledged. Now, in my country, Canada, like when you talked about Rwanda, of course, that tribal hatred didn't just arise from nowhere,

nor is it necessarily in the nature of those people to be like that. A lot of it was the legacy of colonialism that quite deliberately, and you would know something about British colonialism, it quite deliberately set one group against another. The legacy of which was often tremendous struggle and hatred and violence. In Canada, as in the United States, the legacy of colonialism falls more particularly on our indigenous peoples so that to this day they suffer so much. The addiction rate is much higher amongst them. Fifty percent of the women in jail in my country are indigenous people.

Wow. They make up five% of the population. Wow. An indigenous woman takes six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis. They never used to have rheumatoid arthritis prior to colonization. There's been some apologies in Canadian history, but there's been not sufficient acknowledgement of what actually happened and what continues to happen.

And I'm saying that an essential condition for that healing would have to be acknowledgement. So the Pope came to Canada just maybe six weeks ago because the church cooperated with the state to abduct children from their homes, indigenous children from their homes, for over 100 years, into the 1990s, into these residential schools where our native children were not allowed to see their parents, where their culture was extirpated. They had pins stuck in their tongue if they spoke their tribal language. They were sexually abused. Often they died. They were physically abused. They were starved, and the Pope came and apologized. And you know what the apology was? I'm so sorry for what some Christians did to your people. Well that's, he means well as a person, but that was an apology uttered by an institution, because it wasn't, or it should have been uttered by the institution,

but they said it wasn't some Christians, it was the state, and it was the church. And what I'm saying is, that was a good first step, but until there's full acknowledgement and we are fully willing to hear the suffering of the people that we hurt, and that's why in the 12 steps, what do they do? They do this moral inventory. How did we hurt somebody and how can we, without imposing on them, how can we acknowledge if that's appropriate? So I think for healing, whether for myself or people that I've hurt,

there has to be acknowledgement of the suffering itself. I think that's the first essential step. The challenge we have though, right, in society is that I fully agree with you, but for most people, we will never get the apology we deserve because again, we live in an unhealed environment where people are not coming out of the woodwork

and saying, I'm so sorry for what happened. And even if they do, it's a bad apology or an incomplete apology or a 10% apology. So how do we function in a world where often the closure doesn't come from the person who hurt us or the person who created the wound or that we received the wound through and it really comes down to us like i well that's true yeah so i work a lot with indigenous groups in canada um when they ask me to and first of all i often say well who the hell am i to offer you advice because in your traditions there's so much healing wisdom that the best advice I can give you is to follow your own traditions but I often say to them as well don't wait for the acknowledgement from the

government or from society because it's going to take a long time coming but you need to acknowledge your own suffering you need to acknowledge your own pain and then there's so many rituals there's so many traditions the dance and the chanting and the drumming and the sweat lodges and the the sun dancing and the going back to the land and the wisdom circles and the and the restorative justice so much wisdom so what I'm saying to people is acknowledge your own suffering, but to look to the wisdom within to go on to healing. And it's there.

That wisdom to heal is inside cultures, inside peoples, and inside individuals as well. So we both have to acknowledge the suffering and not get stuck on it. Yeah. But then to look for the healing capacity within yeah and you certainly can't wait for the world to it's nice but you can't wait for it otherwise you're dependent on somebody else for your healing yeah and i feel like when you're

healing most apologies are dissatisfying like when you you're healed or, and we'll talk about that, what that means, but I feel like when you're more along the process of healing, you can receive an apology. You can receive a vulnerable piece of information from someone who may have hurt you. But when you're in the thick of the healing process, I find that validation and apologies rarely really feel that good. And I'm saying that for myself. I know that validation and apologies rarely really feel that good like you know and I'm saying that for myself I know that when I've worked when I've been in the thick of like working really hard in my life or trying to make something happen and someone says yeah you're doing great it doesn't feel like anything because you almost feel missing you don't feel fully

understood I got that it doesn't make sense yeah and even they're not quite seeing you yeah and you don't feel seen they don't feel seen they've seen some aspect of you yeah but we need to be seen that's that's a human need there's a psychotherapist here in california called edith egger oh yeah absolutely yeah i know yeah so i read edith was on the same train probably or quite likely on the same train, probably, or quite likely on the same train to Auschwitz that my grandparents were, along with her family. She's in her nineties now. She describes, uh, because they came from the same town in Southern Slovakia, Northern Hungary.

Her parents were killed in Auschwitz as my grandparents. Edith describes in one of her books that she goes back to the Berghof, which is in the Bervain alps where hitler lived to forgive hitler which is not to say to make it okay what he did but to release him from the cage that she kept inside her own heart because that limited her so the forgiveness wasn't it's okay what you did. The forgiveness was, I wasn't going to hold this hatred and this resentment in me anymore because it's limiting me. So the work really is internal.

Where do you see the connections between, you talked about the practices and the healing of the indigenous people, etc. How much do you see a connection between spirituality and healing and where has it gone right and where does it sometimes go wrong? So of all spirituality is one of these words that again gets thrown around it gets thrown around who knows what somebody means when they talk about it yeah so we can only talk about it in terms of what you mean by it yes and what i mean by it so yeah i i liked what you said that there are ancient traditions yeah that focus heavily on inner healing. Yeah.

And I'll explain my challenge. The challenge I see is that often even these ancient timeless traditions have now become externalized and institutionalized, so they've lost their purity of the inner healing that's required. And they become commodified. Correct, right. Yeah, which is what will happen in a materialist society. Yeah.

I spent time with some indigenous people earlier this year in a ceremony. What I was struck by is the deep, deep, deep connection with nature. In fact, even the connection is inadequate a word. I'm talking about unity. Like they just felt so alive to every blade of grass and every tree and the mountain that overlooked our ceremony and the bison that were in the field so for me spirituality if it means anything at all it means sense of connection to something larger which is difficult to define and may be different

for every person or for every group but it's something beyond the limited confines of both body and the egoic mind. Now, I think that's our nature as human beings. I can't prove it, but that's my sense. And certainly when you talk about indigenous traditions, they talk about the medicine wheel, which is the quadrants involve our emotions and our physical bodies and our social relationships and our spiritual selves. And we have to be sort of grounded in all four of those quadrants

to be fully whole. So I think there's something in that spirituality that is really essential to us. What that is, I think each person has to discover for themselves. If they don't have a tradition, that already grounds them in in it yeah yeah you're reminding me of my time that I spent with some groups in Hawaii and they had a song for the sun and the sea and they had a beautiful ritual where when a child is born the umbilical cord is placed on the earth and then they carve almost like a pattern there to remind the child that this is your

connection to the earth and i always thought that was such a beautiful ritual i was wondering whether you've seen or whether you've looked at at all any aspects of reincarnation or past lives or trauma across lives or or seen any connections or study in that space i've had people talk to me about their experiences and there's a rabbi I met once who told me that in ancient times he was a priest in Egypt. Wow. He was in no way a lunatic or a psychotic. He was a very grounded, lovely man.

He was convinced, my mind doesn't go there. I've read something about these traditions, the Tibetan tradition of the bardo and you probably know a lot more about than i do but i've not personally experienced it and my mind as i've experienced my mind so far hasn't found a space for knowing what that really means i understand it intellectually yes yes yes but. But there's nothing in me that resonates with it as far as I can recognize. Yeah. Maybe at some point I'll have some huge awakening,

or maybe after I die there'll be a huge joke on me, you know, saying, you didn't believe, buddy? Well, here it is. But frankly, right now, if you ask me, I'd say nothing in me goes there or even wants to. That's my truth. No, I appreciate that. Yeah, no, i always find it

fascinating for people who study trauma especially when we when you as you said that you know no no child starts at a blank slate they start with uh makeup to some degree and so that's why i was intrigued but uh dr mate it's been it's been so beautiful talking to you because I feel like I get to ask you questions that I wouldn't often receive the answers and the quality of answers, the depth of answers that you can provide. I see you as a true elder, as a wise person in our society,

and I respect you a lot for that. Well, thanks so much. I can tell you quite honestly that this is not an interview like I've ever had before. Thank you so much. No, well, thank you. And I hope this is the first of many uh and i want to make sure that everyone who's been listening and watching i would love for you to order a copy right now of the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture we touched on

subject matter from within the book we touched on ideas from within the book. We touched on ideas from within the book, but as you can see, these are my favorite books. It's a real deep study book. Please go grab a copy. I cannot recommend this more. I will be posting from the book as I read more deeply through it as well on my Instagram. So if you want to see my notes or takeaways, then they'll be there as well. And please, please, please follow Dr. Matej on Instagram as well. We will put the links in the show notes. Follow him, share all the insights that you got from this. If there was something that stood out, I mean, there were so many beautiful descriptions of words, definitions, clarity between ideas that I think have just words that we use every day and we don't know what they mean. So if something stood out to you, tag me and Dr. Matej on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok.

Let us know what you've learned and what you've taken away. And I promise you that this will be a great investment this year. Dr. Mateo, is there anything that I haven't asked you before we ask you the final five, which are our fast five questions? Is there anything you'd like to share that I haven't given you an opportunity to share?

Honest to God, I can't think of anything that you haven't asked. I love it. Okay, well, these are five questions that have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. So you have like a very tight, like almost think of like Twitter. These are your final five.

The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever received on healing or trauma? Authenticity. Expand, I'm going to ask you to expand because I want to hear now. Be yourself yourself you know um when i was a very confused young man and i was acting out all over the place i had an aunt

who herself was a very traumatized person she was an auschwitz survivor and she came back weighing 80 pounds she was an ophthalmologist and she saw me being inauthentic and she quoted she sent me this passage from Hamlet, that famous phrase, unto yourself be true. And it follows this night today that thou canst be false to any man. So be true to yourself. Without going through the details, that poor aunt of mine couldn't be true to herself because of the nature of this culture.

But that advice has always stayed with me. So authenticity has been a major theme in my life. That's amazing. I love that. That's a great answer. Okay, question number two. What's the worst advice you've ever heard or received around trauma and healing?

Is it okay if nothing comes up for me? Yeah, if you've never heard any bad advice, that's good. What is something that you once valued that you no longer value? This is almost true. What other people think of me yeah i'd be lying if i said but at the same time i can do without it so it's still there but i'm not attached to it yeah question number four how would you define your current purpose in life my My purpose is that people are free. Free from limitations of culture

and also the limitations of their own past and of their own minds. And also free politically. So my purpose is that people are free. It's beautiful. And fifth and final question. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? One rule? One rule, one law, one principle that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be one rule one rule one law one principle that everyone in the world had to follow if i was coercing and creating

the impression that one had to do anything that already would defeat its own purpose because as soon as somebody has to it's almost like just lean forward for a minute would you yeah and put out your hand yeah what do you do as soon as they push on your hand? You resist. You resist. So as soon as people sense that there's a had to, there's going to be resistance. So I want to decline answering that question.

That's a great answer. We've never had that on the show. I love that answer. That's a brilliant answer. That's fantastic. I love the way you think. The Myth of Normal is out right now. Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture.

Dr. Gabor Mate. It's been an honor. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. And we'll do it again. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much. Like easy listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of cozy. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy.

Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is your space to explore mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation

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