The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 210: Dr. Gabor Maté: Your Trauma Is Secretly Controlling You! (Until You Try This)

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

What if your anxiety, people-pleasing, or need to prove yourself isn’t a flaw… but a wound? Dr. Gabor Maté explains that trauma isn’t just about abuse or neglect - it’s the psychological injuries we carry from not getting our emotional needs met as children. This moment explores how those hidden wounds silently shape our adult lives - and how to finally begin healing them. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/3TMeC0BjPSb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/lnb9VOJjPSb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr. Gabor Maté: https://drgabormate.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking about our early experiences, the first word in the sort of subtitle of your book is the word trauma. It's a word that I've talked about a lot on this podcast and I've had a lot of people here that have opened up about their traumas. How do you define trauma? I know society has defined it in its own way, but how do you define it? I define it very specifically. It's not something bad that happens to you. It's not that, you know, I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized. No, you weren't. You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized. Trauma means a wound. That's the literal meaning of the word.

It's a Greek word for wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain. And it behaves like a wound. So on the one hand, a wound if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts. So if I have a wound around not being wanted, then or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound. So in one sense, trauma is an unhealed wound that touched, we get triggered.

That's what triggering means, by the way. Some old wound gets activated or touched. And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over. And scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick. It has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it. So people traumatized, disconnected from their feelings. Scar tissue is rigid, it's not flexible, so we lose kind of response flexibility. So when something happens, we tend to react in

typical stereotypical, predictable, dysfunctional ways because of the rigidity and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh. So people who are traumatized tend to be stuck in emotional states that characterized their development when they were traumatized. So when somebody says to you, don't be such a baby, it doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's some truth to it. It means that you're probably reacting according to the lines of some wound that you sustained as an infant and now you're reacting as if that wound was happening all over again. This is what one of my friends in the trauma world, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past.

So something happens in the present and we react as if we're back there in the past when this first happened. And we're not in the present moment at all. And I was trying to figure out how many people as a percentage of the population have a have trauma. But then I read this stat with 60% of adults say that they've had a sort of a traumatic early upbringing or whatever or traumatic events from their childhood. But then I thought maybe everybody has trauma. It depends on how we understand trauma. So if we understand trauma, it's only the really terrible things that happen to people, which do

happen to people. You know, in the book I talked about a British friend of mine, living in Canada. a British friend of mine who was no living in Canada. They are a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher and a psychologist and an artist actually. And they grew up in some orphanage here in Britain where they were racially taunted every morning. You know, words that are in the book, by your permission, which I'm not gonna cite here publicly.

And that gave her a sense of deficient, a sense of self that I'm just not good enough, that I don't belong and so on. There's those obvious traumas, or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused. So, men who are sexually abused, according to Canadian study, have tripled the rate of heart attacks as adults.

You know, and all kinds of physiological reasons. But that should be the case. So there's those self-evident large big T traumas that we call big T trauma, T with a capital T, trauma with a capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that. If you include all the known factors such as physical sexual or emotional abuse spanking by the way has not been shown to be as traumatic as Harsher forms of physical abuse spanking which is still recommended by so-called experts who should remain

remain unnamed for the moment the death of a parent violence in a family violence parental violence against each other a parent being jailed, a parent being mentally ill, did I say a parent being addicted, a rancorous divorce, these are the identified big traumas, big deep traumas, not to mention poverty, not to mention extreme inequality, war and so on.

But then, if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you is the wound. People can be wounded not just by bad things happening to them, but small children can be wounded in loving families where they don't get their needs met. I mean, that's obvious in the physical sense. If a child doesn't get proper nutrition, their body will suffer, their mind will suffer.

We're also creatures with the emotional needs as important as our physical needs. So when the child's emotional needs are not met, that child is wounded. And that's what we call small-T trauma, which is not the big ticket events, such as I described, but just the child's need to be loved unconditionally, to be held when distressed, to be responded to, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed their full

range of emotion without them being stamped on in the name of so-called discipline, the right to play creatively, spontaneously, out there in nature, not with these damn digital gadgets that subvert and hijack the child's imagination, but spontaneous play that's essential for brain development. So what I'm saying is that when these needs are not for the unconditional loving attachment relationship, when those needs are frustrated, children are also hurt. And I call that trauma as well, because it shows up later in life as the impact of painful wounds. So trauma in this society, for all kinds of reasons, is far more common than we imagine. From sitting here and speaking to, I don't know, somewhere over a hundred different people that come from all walks of life, but specifically people that are successful in their industries.

And you talked about, you know, how an anomalous early upbringing can create sort of abnormality in an adult. A lot of people I sit here are successful because of some kind of abnormality, or at least their interpretation of some kind of early event that caused them to have some sort of abnormal belief about themselves that they're not enough. So they become a billionaire or a gold medalist or whatever it might be. One of the things that I thought I could predict is I thought I could, if they told me, I thought after doing a hundred episodes, if they told me the traumatic event they'd been through, I could predict the outcome in them. But there's a disconnect there because, you know, I'd sit here with a guest who went through one of your tall capital T traumas, like domestic violence. And one of them might become incredibly angry. And one of them might become the most peaceful, loving

person I've ever met. And that taught me that there's this thing in between the event, which is what you call interpretation. And I found that really, I found that as, that kind of makes it really difficult to diagnose. Well, now look, so the two examples you gave, that really peaceful person may be really peaceful for genuinely good reasons, such as they found the milk of human love flowing through their veins and they've had some spiritual reconciliation with the world, or they may have let genuinely learned compassion for themselves and others, but they could also be very nice and peaceful because they're

suppressing their healthy anger, because they're actually sitting on their rage unconsciously, which is going to show up in the form of some kind of health manifestation, I guarantee you, later on. So you can't tell from the outside without asking some questions. Or I can give you the example of a Donald Trump who had a really traumatic childhood. I mean, his father was a, this as described by his psychologist niece, Mary Trump, his father, Trump's father, who is Mary's grandfather, was a psychopath, and who really demeaned and harshly treated their children.

So Trump decides unconsciously that, by the way I'm not talking about his policies here, this is not a political debate and in the book I point out that his opponent was also traumatized, Hillary Clinton. This is an ecumenical view of trauma in politics, I'm not choosing sides. I'm just saying that you can see his trauma in every moment he opens his mouth. His grandiosities need to make himself bigger, more powerful, aggressive and he needs, as much is said in his autobiography, that the world is a horrible place, a dog-eat-dog place

where everybody is after you. Everybody wants your wife and your house and your wealth and this is your friends, never mind your enemies. But that's the world he lives in. Now that world that he lives in reflects his childhood home. He developed that world view. He came to it honestly, you might say, because that's the world that he lives in. And he gets to be really successful in this crazy world. You know, financially, although people question, you know, was he really as big a success as he says he was? But he

certainly was successful politically, if by success you mean the attainment of power. His brother on the other hand, Mary Trump's father, Trump's niece's father, drank himself to death. And they were both responses to the same, you can never say it's exactly the same for two kids, but there was that toxic home environment. One ends up dead as an alcoholic, the other ends up at the pinnacle of power. And when I look at them both, I see dysfunction there, significant dysfunction there. So one of the consequences of that early upbringing was it materialized itself as sort of addiction

and the other got the same psychological reinforcement or the thing missing from power and work and money. Well, the other thing, well, Donald Trump learned that the way to survive is to be aggressive and harsh and competitive and to get the other before they get to you. Which is a faithful reproduction of his early childhood experiences. So for him these were not choices so much as survival techniques. And when they talk about his lying, well, I don't know when he's lying and when he's not, but my sense is that often he actually believes what he's saying. And actually he's a biographer or the person who co-wrote his quasi-autobiographical The Art of the Deal. This writer says that he's never

met anybody who's so capable of believing something that's not true to be true if he wants it to be true. But that's the mark of a traumatized child, you know, a denial of reality. It is an inauguration. There was a certain number of people that came today. He couldn't stand it that there weren't as many people there as came to Barack Obama's inauguration. There were a much smaller number of people there. He created this reality where many more people came to his inauguration. Now what age behavior is that? That's a four-year-old where more kids came to his party than to my party.

That can't be true. But that's Donald's way of dealing with reality. It's not a moral failing as such. That's how he survived. And these survival mechanisms then get to form our personalities. And again, in this world, sometimes they pay off in certain ways. Is that often the case with pathological liars? They've learnt to lie as a way to survive. Oh absolutely.

The German philosopher, writer Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche said, people lie their way out of reality who have been hurt by reality. And so I've lied. You know, like when I had my shopping addiction, I lied every day to my wife. You know, and even afterwards, when she tried, when she stopped trying to change my behavior, I said, just tell me, if you're going to shop, you're going to spend another thousand dollars on music. Just tell me. I still couldn't. Cause I was so ashamed of it. And so the lying became like a way of survival for me.

Defense against reality. It's a defense against reality and it's a defense against being judged. You know? Well, that says something about my childhood. You know, nobody's born a liar. As we say in this book, there are congenial liars, but there are no congenital liars.

No one day old baby tells any lies. No one day old baby pretends anything. If we end up pretending in any way at all, to the extent that we do, it's because we have to learn, that's what we must do to survive. You said something at the start, when I gave the example that I have this, I sat with a guest here who went through domestic abuse, and they are the calmest person. And then you said, well, maybe they're suppressing it. And in fact, the minute you said that, it reminded me of something they said, which is they said to me on this podcast, that they had angry outbursts all the time. So sometimes their child will come up to them and want to play when they're working and they'll snap.

And they're trying to deal with that. Yeah, that's what I meant that they're sitting on this crater of volcanic crater of anger which sometimes births out of them. So their demeanor is like a really developed suppressed way of handling rage which rage when they were children had they expressed would have got them into more trouble. So suppressing it, repressing it became their survival. It's all about survival, you see. So it became their survival mechanism. Now, that person, as long as they keep it that way, they're at risk.

They're at risk for mental health diagnosis like depression. Because what is depression? It means you're pushing something down. That's what it means. What do we push down? Our natural emotions. Why do we push them down? Because we have to survive. So that person, I don't know, I can't prognosticate what's going to happen to them, but if they don't work it out in general, they're at risk for some kind of mental or physical manifestation. That's my experience. You've said before, before this book, that awareness is the starting point.

Yeah. I found that to be so true in my life, but it's not very easy. I feel like awareness is a luxury or a privilege that is very hard fought. Yeah. Because you're guessing. Yeah. You're guessing based on pattern recognition. So I was guessing 25 years old, I can't get into a relationship.

Anytime a girl comes near me, even if I've pursued her, I run off. And to figure out why I was doing that, to even identify the behavior pattern and go, that's not helpful. That's not gonna lead me to feeling whole. Where does that come from? Took 25 years and a lot of like introspection.

But most people, they're living unaware of the Puppet master yeah of trauma that is driving their life. That's a really good analogy It's the trauma really is like a puppet master behind the scenes or any unconscious pulling your strings and you're not aware of it, you know Do you remember Pinocchio? Yeah, so you remember what? Pinocchio says at the end way when he finally becomes a real boy real boy. Yeah. He says how foolish I was when I was a puppet and to the extent that we're being activated by these

Unconscious strings that are traumas pulling behind the scenes and we're acting in our lives and we think we're autonomous free beings But we're actually being controlled by something in the past that we haven't worked out. We're puppets. We're actually puppets and there's not much freedom in that. There's no freedom in it at all. So I mean I suppose the opposite of trauma if you want to revisit that question is liberation. of trauma, if you want to revisit that question, is liberation. Interesting. Liberation and by reconnection. By reconnection, but liberation from the inexorable power of the unconscious. Which is like cutting the strings in a way. It kind of brings me to, there's kind of two ways I want to go with that, but the first question I have about trauma and the puppet master analogy

I want to go with that. The first question I have about trauma and the puppet master analogy is do we ever really cut the strings or do we just kind of learn to pull against them when they try and tell us to do something with more force than they're exerting in the opposite direction? That doesn't work very well pushing against it because they're still reactive. You're still not in charge. You're just in automatic resistance mode to something. There's no freedom in that either. So, yeah. But awareness that you mentioned is huge

because once you're aware that there's this, see the thing about these things may not fray right away, but once you're aware that, ah, this reaction of mine, it's not about what's going on right now. There's something old being activated here. That awareness alone weakens the, it slackens the strings a bit. They're no longer taught, they're no longer automatically capable of pulling on you. So it does have to begin with awareness of them. Ultimately, if we realize that this puppet master is just a desperate little person trying to get you to survive

the only way he, she, they knew how when they were small, if we make friends with it, but we relieve it of its duties, say thanks very much, but I can handle it now. It eventually becomes our friend rather than sort of our master. On that first step of just acknowledging, just understanding that there is a puppet master, they're controlling us, and exactly which strings that puppet

master is pulling in our lives. How does one go about awareness, the process of awareness? Is that, I mean, is it introspection, keeping a diary, therapy? What is it? Well, all that. I mean, all or any. But even when you ask how you go about it, what is the it? Well, for you to say how to go about it, you already must have some degree of awareness. If you didn't, you wouldn't even be asking the question. So that's the very first step of realizing that there's something here to work on. There's something here to work through. It does not need to be the way it is. That already is the biggest step. The Buddha said

that to recognize the source of your suffering is the first step towards relieving the suffering. And so as soon as you ask how you go about it, you've already taken a huge step. Because a lot of people don't even know that there's an it. They just think this is a reality, that this is life. So realizing that this it doesn't have to be the way it is, that's already a huge step. No, beyond that, yoga, meditation, nature, therapy of all kinds, bodywork of all kinds

like somatic experiencing or craniosacral treatments or even massage therapy. It's incredible what can be revealed just through body work like that. Then all kinds of forms of therapy, the ones I teach, the ones other people teach. Journaling, certain exercises in this book that we recommend, like just ask yourself, where you have trouble saying no in life to things you don't really want to do and Working that through on a regular basis. So there's lots of ways once you open the door, you know I have a chapter on psychedelics here, which is Again, it's not like a panacea or for everyone but sure needs a helpful modality for a lot of people. So

Some people may actually benefit from taking pharmaceutical medications if their situation is dire enough but not as the final answer but as a way of getting respite that allowed them to go to work on real issues that caused them to be depressed or anxious or tuning out you know so any and all of these things.