Saturn Returns with Caggie - *Part 1* Renowned Physician Dr. Gabor Maté on Understanding ADHD, Navigating Relationships, and the Power of Emotional Authenticity

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

This exciting episode of Saturn Returns features an insightful conversation between Caggie and the renowned physician and author, Dr. Gabor Maté. This two-part interview delves deep into Maté's wealth of knowledge and experience in the realms of addiction, trauma, and mental health. Key conversation topics: 🪐 Understanding ADHD: Dr. Gabor Maté challenges the medical view of ADHD as a genetic brain disease, arguing that it is a coping mechanism for stress and trauma, often rooted in early childhood experiences. 🪐 Challenges of Parenting: Maté reflects on his journey as a parent, acknowledging his mistakes and the importance of integrating intellectual understanding with emotional awareness. 🪐 The Role of Emotions and Authenticity: Maté emphasises the biological need for belonging and the equally vital need for authenticity, highlighting the dire health consequences of suppressing emotions. 🪐 The Impact of Gender Roles on Health: Maté explores how societal expectations, particularly for women, can lead to emotional repression and increased risk of autoimmune diseases and other health issues. 🪐 Navigating Relationships and Personal Growth: Maté shares how his marriage has been a powerful arena for his own personal and spiritual development, driven by his wife's insistence on truth and authenticity. 🪐 Balancing Work and Personal Life: Maté discusses the challenge of maintaining a healthy balance between his public persona and his personal life and the importance of setting boundaries to prioritise his well-being. Don't miss the second part of Caggie's conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté, out next week. Follow or subscribe to the Saturn Returns podcast to be notified when the episode is live, to hear more of Dr. Gabor Maté's wisdom on healing, trauma, and the path to authentic living. — We're so excited to be partnering with WoodWick this season. Check out their timeless, elegant collection that's bursting with indulgence here. If this episode resonated with you, we’d love your support - please take a moment to comment and share your thoughts. Your feedback means so much and helps us reach more listeners! Keep up with Caggie: 🪐 Follow Caggie on Instagram: @caggiesworld 🪐 Subscribe to Caggie’s Substack: You Are Not Alone for insights into her personal journey. Discover more from Saturn Returns: 🪐 Instagram, YouTube and TikTok 🪐 Order the Saturn Returns book: Click here 🪐 Join our community newsletter: Sign up here 🪐 Explore all things Saturn Returns: Visit our website This episode was made possible by our friends at East Healing. Visit easthealing.com today to explore their full range of acupressure products and start your journey to enhanced well-being. For a limited time, you can enjoy an exclusive discount with the code ‘SATURN15’ at checkout.

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Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. Today I have the absolute honour of sitting down with Gabor Mate, a renowned Hungarian-Canadian physician and author, widely recognised for his expertise in addiction, trauma and mental health. With over four decades of clinical experience, he has worked extensively with patients facing addiction, chronic illness and mental health challenges. Dr. Matej's groundbreaking insights connect early childhood experiences and unresolved

trauma with the development of physical and mental health conditions later in life. He is the author of several bestselling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts on Addiction, When the Body Says No on Stress and Health, and The Myth of Normal on on addiction, when the body says no on stress and health, and the myth of normal on trauma, illness and healing in modern society. As sought after speaker, Dr. Mate advocates the compassionate holistic approaches to health and emphasizes the importance of understanding the mind-body connection. In this episode we cover a range of different topics, including ADHD, the importance of belonging, emotional expression for our overall wellbeing, plant medicine, and also Gabal's own personal relationship,

and how that has been the biggest expansive tool for his personal development. As this conversation was filled with so much wisdom, we have decided to split it into two parts. So this will be part one with Gabo Mate. Well, Gabo, welcome to the Saturn Returns podcast. How are you today? Well, thank you. I'm a bit short of sleep because of jet lag, but otherwise feeling good.

Well, it's such a joy to have you here. For the audience that might not be familiar with your work, I'm sure most of them are, would you be able to explain in your own words what you do? So I'm a retired medical doctor. I was in family practice for 20 years, working with people from birth to death. I worked for 12 years in the Western world's most concentrated area of drug use with people in Vancouver, downtown Eastside, in Canada, which is an area that has more people injecting, inhaling, ingesting drugs of all kinds, suffering mental illness, HIV and multiple illnesses, all having

suffered severe trauma in childhood, which is what's driving their addiction. I also worked seven years in palliative care, looking after terminally ill people. And all that medical work and plus my own personal struggles made me realize that there's more to people than just symptoms and that underlying every condition of mind and body, there's a personal history. Very often there's trauma and that without understanding a person's relationship to their lives, their multi-generational family history, you can't understand the health challenges either.

So I've written five books on various aspects of this overall perspective beginning with my book on attention deficit disorder with which I was diagnosed myself in my mid-50s. And then I've written addiction, stress and health. And most recently, I wrote the myth of normal, which basically argues that illness in this society is not aberration but a function of the way we live and the way this culture is organized. The subtitle is the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture. So fundamentally human beings are what's called biopsychosocial creatures, which means to say that our biology is inseparable from our emotions and our social lives. Therefore, you can't understand anything in isolation, nor can you heal people

without looking at their whole lives rather than just their diagnoses. I mean, that's a small nutshell in which you just squeezed 40 years of experience. But there you have it. You did it perfectly. Well, that's why I always like to start with the guest kind of thing, because they always say it slightly differently to the way that the host would. So that's fantastic. Thank you for that.

So the ADD thing, you said you were diagnosed with that in your 50s. That's correct. And then that led you to kind of research what the underlying cause might be. Would you be able to kind of, because I feel like that's something at the moment where so many people are being diagnosed with ADD. Well, that's the whole point is that the medical mantra around addiction, sorry, around ADHD, by the way, there's a huge link between addictions and ADD, not just because they both begin with the same three letters, but there's actually a causal link.

So the medical mantra around that is that it's a brain disease that's largely inherited genetically, which from a scientific point of view is complete nonsense, and also which doesn't make any sense because if something was genetic it wouldn't be increasing because genes don't change in a population over 10, 20, 30, 40 years. So a lot more kids and adults are being diagnosed now. There's got to be some other reason than some genetic epidemic which doesn't happen. Now if you look at it from the functional point of view, tuning out the absent-mindedness, which is the essence of ADD,

which I've had all my life, is not a disease. In fact, it's a coping mechanism. So, Gaggy, if I were to stress you right now, threaten you right now, you'd have several healthy options. There's somebody here in the room with us, you could ask for help. You could leave, or you could fight back and tell me to stop whatever intrusive behavior I was engaged in.

But if there was no help available, you couldn't leave and you couldn't fight back, and you're feeling very distressed, then your organism, your mind, your brain would actually dissociate as a way of protecting yourself from the stress of it. You tune out. Now, what's actually happening is, if I look at my own infancy, which I've talked about often as a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in Hungary for the first year of my life with a terrified mother who's depressed and barely able to secure our existence. She was stressed a lot, which means that the baby's stressed.

Now when babies are stressed, what can they do? They tune out. But when do they tune out? When their brain is developing. So it turns out that the brain, rather than being genetically determined from the scientific, from the neuroscientific point of view, the brain develops an interaction with the environment and that the circuits and the neurotransmitters and the systems in the brain develop as conditioned, particularly by the emotional relationship with the

nurturing caregivers. So stressed parents have stressed infants and stressed infants one of their recourses is to tune out which then gets programmed into the brain because that's when their brain is developing. So if we're seeing a lot more people with ADD nights because societies have become much more stressed. It's not the fault of parents. Parents love their kids, they do their best, but they do their best under very strained circumstances and the kind of conditions where parents have social support, communal support, extended family is less and less available.

Parents are struggling to make a living, they're struggling to maintain relationships, they often have unresolved trauma in their lives and that gets transmitted on to sensitive kids who then tune out as a defense mechanism, which means that what we have a problem is not of a genetic disease but of development. And so the question how to approach it is not just here, this pill to suppress your symptoms, but how can we promote your healthy brain development even later on in life? It's a very different way of looking at it. And that was my first book, Scattered Minds, and that was published 25 years ago. And all the research since then has just validated what I was saying then.

Because I know you make a lot of connection between our early childhood experience and the experience we have with our parents and how that informs us and often leaves us with a lot of trauma. But with this particular piece around ADHD, would it be fair to say that that's actually not so much to do with the parenting, but actually to do with the society that we're living in today? But the influence of society is transmitted through the child, through the parent. So it's accurate what you said, but the medium through which the child receives the stress is through the parents.

So for example, this is a laboratory study. If you want to find out how stressed a marriage is, there's two things you can do. You can ask the parents, or you can measure the stress hormone levels in the urine of the child. And the child will have elevated stress hormone levels, indicating the stress in the parents. Parents who are stressed are much more likely to have kids who have asthma.

So the inflammation of the child's lungs and the narrowing of the child's airways has to do with stress on the parents. Now, the stress didn't originate with the parents. As you suggest, it starts with society, but the medium of transmission is the parent. Again, we're not blaming parents. I passed on my own stuff to my kids. I didn't mean to, but I did.

But it's just a case that you can't look at an infant in isolation from the social milieu in which he, she, they are reared. And those influences are transmitted through the moods, interactions, reactions, emotional states of the parent. You mentioned about how you impacted your children. Obviously with the work that you do and the position that you're in now, people kind of hero worship you in many ways. You've done some phenomenal things,

written some incredible books, helped heal so many people. You've reached this level of success and fame in a way that I feel is quite new for someone that's working in your area. How do you manage those two dynamics between being a husband and a father and being Gabor Mate, who is the expert? Well, who you call Gabor Mate is just an image that people have.

It doesn't help me much when I'm, you know, dizzy with my wife, you know. She doesn't much care that millions of people love me, you know, she just wants me to show up as a reasonable human being, you know? And so my kids are adult kids, so now it's, in fact, my eldest son and I, who helped me write the myth of normal, him and I, our next book together is called

Hello Again, a fresh start for parents and adult children. And we're just working on that. And so, but look, my kids are proud of the work that I've done, but they're not impressed. You know, like for them, I'm just, they should be their father. And if I show up as a father, they appreciate that if I show up as some kind of an image or persona, they don't appreciate it. And how do you sort of deal with moving between those two personas?

I don't take my public image very seriously. I mean, I know that I've helped a lot of people. I mean, without boasting, but my books have been published in 40 languages now. There's almost nowhere in the world where I go where somebody doesn't recognize me. Last night I was in a restaurant with my friend, Reagan Chatterjee, who's a physician here in Britain and a podcaster. And within a space of five minutes, four people came up to thank me for my work. You know?

Do you enjoy that? Well, I appreciate it, and I'm just glad that I've had that kind of impact, but I don't take it too seriously. Like, it's not, it doesn't change who I am, and on a bad day, it makes no difference whatsoever. If I feel down, it doesn't matter that millions of people have read my books, it just makes no difference whatsoever.

You know, so that external stuff doesn't change my internal dynamics. I'm glad that I've lived long enough to see my work accepted and validated and, you know, making a difference in the world. But who I am and how I feel as a person, that's got nothing to... it's peripheral to that. Those are internal things. I have long been a fan of Chinese medicine healing tools, so I am delighted to share our partners for this season of Saturn Returns, the amazing East Healing. Formerly known as AcuSeeds, East Healing is the UK's leading ear seed brand and a luxurious

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was that experience like for you? But look, when I had kids, I wasn't all that conscious. I wasn't all that aware. I had not even considered that I was carrying a lot of trauma. And let alone that I'd be passing that on to my kids. So I did. And part of my awakening, in a sense, had to do with the difficulties I was having with my kids. My kids were afraid of me. And. At what sort of age? In their pre-teens.

They also felt loved and supported, but as my eldest son Daniel writes in our book, The Myth of Normal, he never knew when the floor became not the floor. In other words, when the floor would just disappear, when the loving and playful parent, the atmosphere would turn into conflict and he just would sink into a quagmire of emotional uncertainty. So I was very inconsistent as a parent and I was a workaholic doctor intending to, intent on proving my value in the world, which also means I neglected the emotional needs of my kids very often. I mean, when I say I made every mistake in the book, I literally mean I made every mistake in my own books. And I had to learn. I mean, if I could do my life over again,

I'd be a very different parent. Do you think that people, is one of your hopes for the books and the work that you do, that people will be able to sort of intellectualize it and then embody it and not make those mistakes? Or do you think that it just unfortunately happens? Not intellectualize it. Intellectualization doesn't do very much.

As a matter of fact, so the most saddest people are the intellectuals who try and figure things out through their cognition and rationation rather than through their hearts. So it's actually not, I'm not trying to intellectually convince people I'm going to wake up their hearts, I want to make them up to their own reality, I want them to feel their humanity and to understand themselves from within, of which intellectual understanding is one aspect. But it's not purely an intellectual process and nobody heals through the intellect, purely. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is

was do you have a huge amount of success that people are well like you say everyone in the world is familiar with you you also have well not everyone I mean Rishi Sunak never forms me I mean I don't know what I don't know what you know Joe Biden Biden never caused me, Benjamin Netanyahu never caused me. I mean, all these characters are doing terrible things in the world. They never phone me for advice. Okay, now that you've mentioned that, I feel that the way that the world is going and the direction that we're heading in as a society is that the structures in place that govern us and the people that have dictated a lot of how we live our lives, people are slightly losing faith in.

And yet there's this new movement of people coming in. And I would put you in that category, that allowing people to live a more heart-centered life and to give them the tools so that they can make these decisions for yourself. Do you think that that's something that's happening in the world? I think what is happening in the world is that the crisis and contradictions of this culture are becoming more and more apparent and less and less tolerable for a lot of people. I mean, if you look at even the so-called developed world,

inequality is rising, the poor have less. The rich have a lot more. Power is concentrated in very few hands. Everybody knows about climate change. And to deny climate change, you have to be either emotionally disturbed or be an oil company executive or be a politician. And so the latter two deny it because of venal reasons. If you're emotionally disturbed, you just can't see reality. But everybody else knows what's happening to the earth. I mean, the seas are rising, people are getting sick, all the warnings are there. And we're totally passive in the face of it.

And people feel totally helpless to the point that they don't even pay attention. So we live in a world where the contradictions and the problems are really becoming more apparent. People are looking for an alternative. And so they're looking for their own agency, their own sense of belonging, their own sense of liberation from these pressures. That's where my work and the work of others comes in. But I wouldn't say that this work that I do is an ultimate answer to everything. It's helpful, but the changes really have to be social on a much broader level than any individual can anticipate or effect.

And you mentioned about, you know, this need we have for belonging, and that's something that I've always loved about your work, and quote it many times, of the dance between our need for authenticity and belonging. Would you be able to expand on that particular piece? Yeah, well, belonging is simply a biological, instinctually driven aspect of human life. I mean, the capitalist ethic and this myth about human nature that were individualistic, aggressive, selfish, manipulative, and greedy. Had that been the case, we never would have evolved as a species. We evolved in species as members of small communities,

very much belonged together, loyalty to each other. Children were reared in communities where they spent the whole day around adults and a group moved together. And this is how we lived for millions of years. And so it's part of our nature. We would not have survived otherwise. And until very recently, I'm in the blink of an eye ago, historically speaking, that's how we lived. So not only that, we're wired for attachment. Literally our brain circuits are wired for attachment, meaning the drive to be close to somebody.

Why? Because the human infant, not just the human infant, the mammalian infant in general just does not survive without that connection where the parent wants to connect with the infant and the infant is driven to connect with the parent. So that's called attachment. And you see it in all mammals, from wolves to whales to voles to apes to human beings. It's a biological drive.

So that's indispensable because the infant is absolutely helpless and vulnerable and dependent and cannot sustain their existence without that connection. Yeah. Having said that, nature also decides to be individuals. We have to become our own persons, connected to ourselves. And one of the needs of children is to be able to experience all their emotions and to be able to express them. And we're wired for all kinds of emotions from anger to playfulness to seeking to curiosity to fear to caring for love and all that. We're wired for all that. It's in our brains.

Now in nature, there's something very obvious, that no creature in nature survives much at all unless they're connected to their gut feelings. Now, if I speak to most people, I mean, I can ask you, I don't know what your answer would be, but have you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something, ignoring it and then regretting it afterwards. Yeah.

Yeah. In a room of a thousand people when I speak, 999 will put their hands up. Now, that gut feeling is something that in nature we would not have survived without. No creature survives in nature without the strong connection and the capacity to heed their gut feelings. I call that authenticity, that connection to ourselves, all to the self. Now what happens in modern society, a lot of families, is that kids have gut feelings. Well, let me give you an extreme example, but it's only an extreme example, because it happens under much less dire circumstances.

So let's say a child is being sexually abused, which happens a lot more than we actually acknowledge in this society. But that's just one example. Their gut feelings are telling them to do what? To fight back or to escape or to scream for help. But can they do any of those? They can't, because each of those would bring further danger.

So to survive, the organism will suppress the gut feelings for the sake of safety and being accepted. Or in a family where the parents are unfortunate enough to listen to the stupid parenting advice of a lot of so-called experts who tell parents that angry children should be punished or separated and given timeouts. Well, that anger is a healthy natural response of the child to frustration. If the child gets the message that if I express my anger, I'll be not be accepted, message that if I express my anger, I'll be not be accepted, I will not have my attachment needs served, then the child will automatically repress their anger, push it down for the

sake of being accepted. And that then becomes a lifelong dynamic with dire health consequences, so that there's this tension between what you mentioned, what I call attachment, which is our need to belong in authenticity, which is the need to stay in touch with ourselves. And if you look at, I can tell you a couple of interesting facts. There was a book written by an Australian palliative carer

who worked with dying people, which is what I used to do as well. And she wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of Dying People. These are people, and I knew these people as well, because I looked after them myself, as a physician. These are people who died before their time. I mean, people who developed chronic illness, malignancy, autoimmune disease, not in old age, but you know what the top regret was of dying people?

Not living a life true to yourself? Exactly, yeah. Not living a life true to yourself? Exactly, yeah. Not living a life true to themselves. My next question was actually going to be what is the cost of living a life that's not true to yourself? Well, the cost of living a life true to yourself, at the very least, is that you get into midlife and you say, who the hell am I anyway? And whose life am I leading?

There's a deep sense of alienation and disconnection. But the cost can be far more dire. So people that suppress their emotions, there was a study done in the States that looked at 2,000 women over a 10-year period. And those women that were unhappily married and didn't express their emotions were four times as likely to die in a ten-year period than those women who were also unhappily married,

but did talk about their feelings. Wow. And there's a straightforward physiological reason for that, in that from a scientific perspective, I mean, I'm here to speak at a medical conference in London in a couple of days and the talk might as well be entitled, What They Didn't Teach Me in Medical School, What They Should Have. And what they didn't teach me in medical school, what they should have, is that from the scientific, from the strict scientific point of view, mind and body can't be separated.

And the emotional system is part and parcel of the same apparatus that runs our nervous system, our hormonal system and our immune system. So whatever happens emotionally has an impact on the immune system and the hormones and the nervous system. The repression of healthy anger actually undermines the immune system, because it's the same system when you think about it. Not when you think about it, when you study it scientifically.

But even when you think about it, it's the same. Because healthy anger is nothing but a boundary defense. It's meant to keep out something that's dangerous or toxic. No, get out, it's my space. That's healthy anger. I'm not talking about rage, I'm talking about healthy anger. No, what's the role of the immune system?

It's the same thing. It's to keep out unhealthy influences, bacteria, viruses, toxins, and let in what is nurturing and supportive and nutritive. The immune system and the emotional system have the same function. Normally, do they have the same function? They're the same apparatus,

so that naturally when when you suppress emotions, you're also repressing or confusing the immune system, which is why 80% of autoimmune disease happens to women, because they're the ones who are supposed to repress themselves more for the sake of fitting in and being accepted. Yeah. Well, the lion's share of our audience is women. So I would love to expand a little bit on that because I think that, like you said, society sort of tells us that we can't express anger and various emotions and so it all gets pushed down

and suppressed. And also women, I don't know whether it's a natural thing or whether it's socialized, but we do tend to put ourselves at the bottom of the list. And then when kids come along and family, that just intensifies. So what are some of your... What's your understanding of that and how can we kind of start making a solution? Well, let's begin with the facts, which is, like I said,

if you look at autoimmune conditions where the immune system attacks the body itself. So the immune system is meant to protect you, but it can turn against you. And if it does, it destroys your own tissues. Right. So just to kind of echo what you said a second ago, it's like if we're not defending ourselves, our own system actually actively turns against us. Yeah, so in rheumatoid arthritis, there's antibodies against our own joints and our connective tissues.

In multiple sclerosis, the immune system attacks the nervous system that it's meant to protect. In all these autoimmune conditions, it's the same thing. Now, 80% of autoimmune disease happens to women. If you look at the characteristics of people that develop autoimmune disease, and what's interesting here is nobody taught me this stuff in medical school. But when I was in family practice, I had an advantage over the specialists in that I knew people before they got sick. So I could see who got sick and who didn't. But what I didn't know is that there were other physicians and researchers

who'd noticed and documented the same thing, but nobody ever tells you this stuff. So the people that, according to my observations, but also according to research, tend to develop these conditions, tend to be people who are extremely nice, they suppress their healthy anger, who's automatic concern is for the emotional needs of others while ignoring their own, who identify with their duties and responsibilities rather than needs of the Self, and people who tend to believe that they're responsibleible for other people feel and I must never disappoint anybody And they tend to take on the stresses and take responsibility for the emotional needs of others

So women when you look at which gender is Acculturated it's not Determined biologically which gender is acculturated in their society to take on those roles. It's women and it's very typical in a marriage for a woman to manage the kids, but also have to manage and kind of swallow and absorb the emotional stresses of the spouse. I mean... Well, I would love to ask you about your marriage if you're happy to talk about it. Well, I'll tell you about my marriage. We were here in London five years ago on a speaking trip, and I was doing my usual, what

can I say, eloquent and helpful presentations on stage to hundreds of people. And one of the books I've written specifically on this subject is called When the Body Says No. And my contention being is that when you don't know how to say no, your body will say it in the form of illness. So illness is not an accident. It's actually a manifestation of your programmed, it's not your fault, but your early childhood programmed difficulty asserting yourself.

So when the body says no, my wife said to me, buddy, you've written a book called When the Body Says No, now you better write one called When the Wife Says No. Because I'm not putting with the study. And what she was talking about was the gap between my public persona and the way I showed up at home. Because I was working really hard, and when I work really hard, I get kind of down and dour, and the target of my hostility is Mummy,

and Mummy is the woman I'm married to. And in a lot of marriages, that's the same dynamic. As Christmas approaches, there's no better time to embrace those small rituals that ground and center you. One of my favorite rituals is lighting a woodwick candle. The soft crackle of a wooden wick, like a comforting fireside glow, helps me pause and reconnect with myself, creating a sense of indulgent calm. This Christmas, woodwick's luxurious fragrances add even more depth to my rituals. Take fireside for example with its rich blend of amber vetiver and smoke mahogany it captures the essence

of a crackling fire. On a personal favorite cashmere it's this beautifully unexpected combination of sandalwood, tonka bean and quince. A scent that's luxurious and utterly calming. Lighting a Woodwick candle is more than just a way to bring light into a room. It's a way to create an atmosphere. It's a moment to pause, indulge, and reconnect with yourself or with the people around you. So this Christmas, why not add a little more depth and warmth into your holiday rituals. Explore the full collection at woodwick.yankycandle.co.uk. That's woodwick.yankycandle.co.uk and make every moment this Christmas one of tranquility and luxury. We're naturally drawn to those that sort of mimic the characteristics, the best and the worst of our parents.

Well, totally, totally. And a lot of men, I don't hate to say it, it's just an observation. Their relationship to women is kind of twofold. I mean, they want a lover and an intimate partner, but they also want a mummy who will take care of them. And women make themselves sick trying to play that mummy role, and especially when there's actual children around. So that the real situation in our house was,

when our kids were small, well, when we had two boys, and later on we had a girl, but when our boys were small, there were three children in the house. One of them was three years old, the other was five. And the third one was 38 years old, you know. And my wife took on the role of mothering all of us. Yeah. And were you aware that that was happening in your own? No, we weren't aware.

This is a dynamic we've had to work on all our lives. Because I'm sure that's incredibly common, but people don't talk about it. It's that when you go from being a partnership to then having all our lives. Because I'm sure that's incredibly common, but people don't talk about it, that when you go from being a partnership to then having children, and I don't have kids, but I can observe and I'd be interested from your perspective that the husband or the father suddenly feels a bit demoted. Absolutely. All of a sudden the 35-year-old child has their nose out of joint because now there's a real little baby around and the mother and

and any energy that the woman then directs towards the 35 year old baby is taken away from the real little baby. Which goes against her natural instincts. It goes against your instincts and is bad for the child and it's a very common dynamic and again, it's not to blame individuals, it's a social phenomenon. Partly has to do with the fact that we're parenting kids in isolation now,

away from the extended family and the community. But the result is that children get deprived and women get overstressed. And until they finally learn how to say no. But very often it's a disease that will wake them up. Yeah, because if you think about that sort of, if that plays out in so many households, whilst women might be able to listen to this and go,

I can understand that I don't put myself first and I can understand the consequences of doing that, but here I am with a husband that's now turned into a toddler and two actual children. How can you, what can you do? Whose work is it? Well, I tell you, the woman at some point has to decide, do I still choose attachment over authenticity?

In other words, what's more important to me? Like ideally, the couple can grow together. Ideally, they can both recognize this dynamic. Ideally, the man can let go of their childish need for being emotionally coddled. I'm not talking about, I mean, couples are meant to support each other. That's fair enough, and it's 50-50. But that sort of chronic, compulsive coddling of the male ego by the woman is toxic for the woman. And at some point, if they can both grow, that's great. As you suggested, we always marry somebody at the same level of traumatic imprint that we're at. So relationship can be a wonderful ground for growth and consciousness and awareness.

But if the other partner is not willing, then she's got a decision to make. Do I still keep making the same choice of giving up my authenticity, my own needs, and the needs of my kids for the sake of the attachment relationship? Or do I choose authenticity? And it's a painful choice because sometimes all you can do is choose which pain you'd

rather go for. The pain of losing the attachment or the pain of giving up authenticity. Pain of losing yourself in a way. Pain of losing yourself. And very often losing yourself ends up manifesting in autoimmune disease, in malignancy or depression. If you look at even a simple word like depression, again this is a big miracle mystery, genetic disease, just nonsense. What does it mean to depress something?

To push it down. Yeah. What gets pushed down in depression are emotions. Why do people push? No infant is born pushing down their emotions. So if somebody develops the habit of pushing down their emotions, it's because they had to in order to be accepted. And then later on, you've got this disease, you know,

so that the consequences of surrendering your authenticity, which then is reinforced in school, you have to be a good student, you have to fit in, you have to comply, and you get rewarded for doing so, punished for not doing so. On the job again, you have to, you know, and especially in women, there's all kinds of expectations of how they should behave, what they should look, what their demeanor should be. To be good.

Yeah. But bringing it back a sec, what happened in the container of your marriage and relationship, because you guys have been married for how many years? It's coming up 55. It's incredible. Yeah.

So you must have gone through so many different seasons. I've been married eight times. Exactly. So how did that play out, if you don't mind me asking, when you kind of were faced with your own trauma and your own triggers? Well, you can pull a rubric, a murder rock, so that you marry a new woman every few years, or you can actually grow up. What do you mean by that?

Well, look, I had a wife who, I had, I have a wife, who blessedly refused to suppress herself. I actually listened to an interview she did, which I think was the only one she's done with Harvest series, and it was so interesting to hear from her perspective. She sounds incredible. Yeah. Well, she demanded that I grow up. And I had a decision to make. Do I grow up or do I get kicked out of the house? So she was the one that kind of drove that.

I mean, one thing we've always shared, we really have honestly shared this, is that we're interested in the truth. That the truth is more important to us than any other consideration, just for its own sake. Drives my work. It drives my- Truth-seeking, yeah.

Truth-seeking, you know, so that's, I can give myself credit for that. But within the marriage, it was very often her refusal to just succumb to my childish expectations that would cause me to have a strong look at myself and say, well, what am I doing here? What's my real intention? So it was a dynamic, but it was really driven to a significant degree by her refusal to just accept the given role.

Because through the work that you've done, you've acquired so much wisdom and knowledge professionally. I like to think so. But what are some of the wisdom and knowledge that you've gained from the container of being in a relationship for that long? What has it taught you about yourself and your own, how do you get triggered with each other? How do you work through that?

Well, see, triggered is an interesting word. I did used to be an English teacher, you know? And so I paid a lot of attention to language. And when you think of a trigger, how big a part of the mechanism of the weapon is a trigger? Tiny. Tiny. So for the trigger to work, there has to be an explosive charge there.

A historical one, often. Yeah, yeah, that you've been carrying. I mean, if I don't carry an explosive charge, you can say whatever you want. I'm not going to get triggered. So it's less about the person, it's more about... It's just not about the external trigger, it's about what's inside me. So when you get triggered, that's a good time to learn something. About yourself.

Yeah. Now you might say something I don't like, but I want to get triggered. I'll just say, okay, I don't like what you just said. I don't want to be talked to that way. But that's not being triggered. Triggered being triggered is a reactivity. I can be responsive, which is, I'll just tell you exactly what I think. But being triggered means there's a big charge goes off inside you,

your body gets tense, your whole physiology changes, and your brain gets into a state of reactivity and hostility or fear. Now, no trigger can do that unless you're carrying an explosive charge. So what we've learned and continue to learn is that being triggered means that there's something for you to work out within yourself. Mm-hmm. And we get most triggered with the people that we're closest to. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's a book years ago, decades ago, called Intimate Enemies, you know, which is about marriage. And nobody is more calculated to trigger you than the people to whom you're looking for

love and support and on whom you rely. Because it brings back all the stuff that's not resolved from childhood. So do you see a relationship as a container for your own spiritual work? Oh, I've often said, look, I've done meditation retreats and I've done psychedelic work and I've listened to all kinds of spiritual teachers and I've read all manner of spiritual books and I've learned a lot. But I've always say that the most important spiritual developmental arena for me has been my marriage. And you said a second ago about, you know, your wife Ray joked about that you should write a book when the wife says no.

How you are so in demand, probably more than ever at the moment. How do you manage that, I hate to use the term, but the sort of work-life balance of the boundaries of how much you give of yourself and how much you kind of keep? Well, again, language is very interesting because you said the work-life balance. What was the assumption there? That there's life here and there's work here. And that's already an interesting assumption. In this society, everybody talks about work-life balance, like work is just something we do, but it's not really our lives.

Well, it's about integration, isn't it? It's about not dividing yourself. So there used to be a time when, first of all, out of a kind of insecurity, I would not say no to any invitation or expectation, because I just want to, oh my God, somebody wants to listen to me, oh my God, you know?

I mean, I've always had kind of a double relationship to my work and like on one hand I always knew that what I was saying was important and and and Not always accurate but by and large true, you know, and so that I Just expected the world to listen, you know, because it's it's true, you know, that's I saw it I expected the world to listen, you know, because it's... It's true. You know, that's how I saw it. But at the same time, there was always a part of me that was just sort of this little ego trying to prove itself, you know, that I'm important and it matters and please listen

to me, please listen to me, you know. So that that part often drove my behavior. Quite apart from the validity of what I was saying, there was this part that just wanted validation, which is just an imprint of trauma. Well, that part is, as long as that part was in charge, I wouldn't know how to say no. Now it's, you know, I appreciate the imitation, I appreciate the listening I get, but I'm not going to sacrifice my inner peace or my relationship for the sake of yet one more platform on which to speak my truth.

And anyway, the work is out there now. If I should hop the twig tomorrow, as they say, the work will still continue without me. Some of my favorite takeaways from this conversation was about Gabel's core message in terms of his need for freedom, both personal and societal societal from the constraints of unconscious patterns and societal norms, his unique insights on the power of gut feelings, especially around the heightened sensitivity of women, and also the potential of psychedelics when used responsibly. There is so much food for thought in this episode, and it was such an honour to sit down with such a legend who has made such a valuable contribution to society and give so much of himself to his work.

So thank you Gabor for your time and for sharing your wealth of knowledge and wisdom with our audience today. As always remember, you are not alone. Goodbye.