The One You Feed - Dr. Gabor Mate´

Episode Date: March 8, 2016

This week we talk to Dr. Gabor Mate´ about addictionGet a free download of Eric's key quotes and ideas from Dr. Mate's work. A renowned speaker, and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress and childhood development.For twelve years Dr. Maté worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, including at Vancouver’s Supervised Injection Site.As an author, 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: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, and co-authored Hold on to Your Kids. His works have been published internationally in twenty languages.Dr. Maté is the co-founder of Compassion for Addiction, a new non-profit that focusses on addiction. He is also an advisor of Drugs over Dinner.Dr. Maté has received the Hubert Evans Prize for Literary Non-Fiction; an Honorary Degree (Law) from the University of Northern British Columbia; an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Simon Fraser University; and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from Mothers Against Teen Violence. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology, Simon Fraser University. Our Sponsor this Week is FractureVisit Fracture and use the promo code “wolf” to get 10% off!! In This Interview, Gabor Mate´ and I Discuss:The One You Feed parableThe degree of choice we have in lifeWhat is the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts?What is addiction?The characteristics of addictionRecognizing what addicts get out of their addictionThe fundamental question is not "Why the Addiction" but "Why the Pain"How all addiction comes out of some hurt or traumaThe different types of traumaThe role of neurotransmitters in addictionHow drugs and alcohol destroy the parts of the brain that allow us to make sound decisionsWhether or not genetics play a significant role in addictionWhether our culture breeds addictionHow our children get most of their leadership from other childrenHow the breakup of family, community and clan is contributing to addictionThe critical role of the culture in our the development of our brainsRecognizing our inherent valueTo what degree we have freedom over our choicesWithout consciousness, there is no freedomPaths to recoveryHow compassion can help with recoveryDeveloping compassionate curiosity towards ourselves Get a free download of Eric's key quotes and ideas from Dr. Mate's work.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You cannot separate the individual from the environment, and you cannot separate the mind from the body. And so when people are living in a stressed culture, they have stressed minds, and stressed minds result in stressed bodies. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really no really dot com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts thanks for joining us our guest on this episode is a renowned speaker and best-selling author, Dr. Gabor Mate. He's highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. For 12 years, Dr. Mate worked in Vancouver's downtown Eastside with patients challenged by hardcore drug addiction, mental illness, and HIV, with patients challenged by hardcore drug addiction, mental illness, and HIV, including Vancouver's supervised injection site. As an author, Dr. Mate has written several best-selling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, and the book When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress. His works have been published internationally in 20 languages. To get a free download of Eric's favorite Gabor Mate quotes, go to 1ufeed.net slash me.

And here's the interview with Gabor Mate. Hi, Gabor. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I am really excited to get you on. You're known as a real expert in the field of addiction as a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic myself. It's a topic that comes up a lot on the show and we talk about and we'll talk a lot about your book in the realm of the hungry ghosts, as well as your forthcoming book that's yet to be released. But first, let's start like

we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, Well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. The parable is a helpful teaching tool as a metaphor. But truth to tell, and despite the fact that this is the theme of your program, I don't find it a compelling understanding of what life is all about. Because it would all be rather easy if feeding the good wolf would be a matter of choice. And then we could all thrive and do well and have great relationships and great jobs and great bodies and great souls, for that matter.

But is it a matter of choice? I've never found a single addict who actually chose to be an addict. I don't know anybody that wakes up one morning and says, My ambition in life is to become a drug addict or a sex addict or a shopping addict or a food addict or an internet addict or a gambling addict or any other kind of addict. So first of all, the metaphor implies freedom to make that choice. And of course, freedom is a subtle thing, but it's not as clear as that metaphor in that story would have it. We can talk more about where I think addiction comes from, but let me just make the first point that it's not as clear as that metaphor in that story would have it. We can talk more about

where I think addiction comes from, but let me just make the first point that it's not so much a matter of choice. Secondly, the good and bad implies an acceptance and celebration of the one and a rejection of the other, a condemnation of the other. So there's a judgment involved, different parts of ourselves, some of which are good, others are bad. On the contrary, I find that it's those parts that we consider bad that we have to be most compassionate with. That's the part of us that we have to understand. That's the part of us that we have to recognize what role that so-called bad wolf actually played in our life why he or she came along and why we became so attached to it now that takes understanding and some what i call compassionate curiosity and some willingness to accept so

the split between the good and the bad uh the good wolf and the bad wolf psychologically to me is hurtful and secondly as i said in the beginning it's not so much a matter of choice as a matter of actually seeing where both those parts of ourselves arise from so i I could say more. And yes, by all means, we should as best we can feed the wholesome, healthy parts of ourselves. But we have to have a lot of understanding and compassion for that other part as well. Without that, we will never liberate ourselves. Well, that is a great way to lead into it. And one of the things I did want to talk about, we'll get to in a little bit, is that idea of freedom or choice and how much freedom and choice do we really have in certain situations. To start off, I would like to just read a paragraph from very early in the book to give

people a sense of what the title of the book means. And I think it's a really beautiful description of a really awful state. You say, the inhabitants of the hungry ghost realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs, and large bloated empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction, where we constantly seek something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects, or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need. And I think that is a great description of a really awful state and paints a real picture of addiction. But the first question I'd like to ask you is,

what is addiction? That's a widely disputed topic, and there's lots of different ideas on it. But I'd like to see if we can come up with a working definition for the rest of this conversation. That's great. And that'll also allow me to go back to your quote about the hungry ghost and make a comment about it. So addiction for me is, well well it's a complex physiological psychological neurobiological social cultural phenomena but the essence of it shows up in behaviors which may have to do with substances but it could also be non-substance related like sex or gambling food and so on such as i've said before So any behavior that a person craves, finds temporary pleasure or relief in,

and then suffers long-term negative consequences as a result of, but is incapable of giving up despite those negative consequences. So the features of addiction are craving, relief, temporary pleasure, negative long-term consequence, inability to give it up. That's what addiction is. Any addiction. And I don't care, again, whether it's the substances or what it's to, that's what the essence of addiction is. Then, though, if you ask yourself this question, and, you know, you've talked about your own substance addiction, let me ask you a question, if I may.

Sure. If I asked you not what was wrong with your heroin addiction, and what else did you mention? Was it cocaine you said? No, alcohol. Alcohol and heroin, okay. If I asked you not what was wrong with those behaviors, which we know, we don't have to spell it out, everybody knows,

but what was right about it? What did it do for you? What did it give you in the short term? What was the value of it in your life? Can you tell me that? Sure. I mean, I think the value in it for me was it changed the way I felt in any given moment. And I was not really capable of feeling anything. I think originally the drugs and alcohol brought me to life in a way. And you talk about that in your book about the emotional deadening that a lot of us do. So I think it brought me to life initially. And I think after enough time, it was also then used to kill the pain that was continuing to rise.

Okay, so it did two really important things for you. It gives you a sense of vitality, aliveness, vivacity. And secondly, it soothes your pain. Now, those are, are they not, perfectly normal human aspirations? Absolutely. Who does not want to feel alive? Who does not want to have pain relief? And so therefore, the real question is, what realm were you escaping from?

Now, in order to get into the hungry ghost realm, which is the addiction realm. Now, this is a Buddhist concept. These are separate realms. One of them is the hungry ghost realm. Buddhist concept, these separate realms, you know, one of them is the hunger ghost realm. Another is the hell realm, where we experience fear and dread and pain and terror and isolation. In other words, the hunger ghost realm served a role for you, served a purpose for you. Your entry into the hunger ghost realm, in other words, into addiction, was you attempt to escape the pain of being in the hell realm of pain and isolation and fear and deadness. In other words, the addiction served a purpose.

And so that to call it a bad wolf is to miss the fact that already there was suffering before that so-called bad wolf came along. And I'm saying that the first question in addiction is never why the addiction, well, why the pain? Because all addictions ultimately, and again, I don't care what they're to, they could be to power, to profit, to relationships, to physical looks, to anything in the world. All addictions are a matter of escaping pain. And so the mantra that I propose is not why the addiction, but why the pain. In order to look at why the pain, we have to look at people's lives and what actually happened to them. And then we can see, once we do that, that it really wasn't a matter of choice at all.

You say that hurt is at the center of all addiction. Let's talk a little bit about what that hurt is, where it comes from, the things it has in common with everybody, depending on where you are on an addiction scale, so to speak, from being extremely addicted to something very harmful to moderately obsessed with something less harmful. Where is this coming from? What's the root of it? Well, first of all, it's important what you just said, because what you just pointed out was that addiction exists on a spectrum, on a continuum. So it's not that there are the addicts over there and the rest of us over here, is that most of us, if you look at my definition of addiction, we'll find ourselves somewhere on that continuum. However, the fundamental source is always in some life experience of pain and always in childhood and that pain can be caused broadly speaking by two types of

experiences one is direct trauma such as sexual abuse parents who beat you, parents who abandoned you, parents who screamed at you, parents who were absent because they were jailed or because they were mentally ill or because there was a lot of fighting amongst the parents and the child felt alone and frightened as in the case of a bad divorce or a parent dying. It's any number of these traumas and there's been a lot of research on this so I'm not making this stuff up. This is just what the research shows and it's astonishing to me that the addiction world in general including the 12 step groups which I in many ways support and respect and including most addiction treatment

programs have got no concept of trauma whatsoever. So that's one kind of way of being hurt. Now the other way of being hurt is more subtle. It's what's called developmental trauma. This is not a question of bad things happening but of good things not happening. The child has certain needs and the greatest need for the child is to be emotionally held and met and understood and to be communicated with in such a way that the child's feelings are received and respected and held by the parent. Now, all kinds of really good parents who love their kids, who do their best, can't do that for their children because they're too stressed themselves. They can't be emotionally present for the child. It's not a question of do they love the child. It's a question of are they, from the moment to moment, in that interaction with the infant

and the small child, are they able to be present emotionally in such a way that the child feels received and seen and heard and understood and accepted for who they are in our distressed society a lot of parents are incapable as much as they want to providing those qualities of the child and that's called developmental trauma so that's got nothing to do with bad things happening it's just the necessary good things not happening now the more sensitive you are and there could be genetic sensitivities here. Addiction is not caused by genes, contrary to all the nonsense that a lot of people speak about that. But the sensitivity could be genetic.

And the more sensitive you are, the more you'll be hurt by the bad things that happen or by the good things that don't happen. or by the good things that don't happen. Now, if you look at populations of severely addicted people, such as I worked with in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the Downtown Eastside, which is North America's most notorious and concentrated area of drug use, by the way, there was nobody there who wasn't hurt in that first sense. There's not a single female patient, as I keep saying,

who had not been sexually abused. I didn't meet a single one in 12 years. All the men had been similarly traumatized, some of them sexually, some in other ways. And that's also what the large-scale study shows, again, is that the more trauma there is, the greater the risk of addiction, exponentially the greater the risk of addiction. And then there's a lot of other people whose addictions may not be quite so severe or who cannot look back on a childhood where these terrible things happened.

In every case, though, you'll find that those good things that should have happened didn't happen, and a very sensitive person was hurt by that. So that's at the rest of the interview with Gabor Mate. critical these developmental stages are, even all the way back to being in the womb. And you make it more concrete than, oh, you know, somebody's feelings were neglected. You talk about the actual parts of the brain that do not develop, where you end up with various systems in the brain that aren't functioning properly. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really

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And those tend to be a lot of the systems that are directly affected by addiction. affected by addiction? Well, there's a new film out directed by Kathleen Gillian Hall who's married to Stephen Gillian Hall who's the father of the two very famous actors and it's called In Utero

and it's all about the impact of stress in the womb on the developing fetus so already stress womb on the developing fetus. So already, stresses on the mother while she's pregnant, carrying the infant, will in fact affect the child's brain development. And then, during the first few years, the essential brain circuits that are implicated in addiction,

such as stress regulation and the body's internal opioid, endorphin regulation, and the emotional self-regulation, and the tension, and the sense of aliveness, reward, motivation, the circuits that have to do with the chemicals dopamine, or the circuits, or the chemicals endorphins, or the chemical serotonin, which is implicated in mood regulation. All these key circuits develop actually an interaction with the environment. And as an article from Harvard published in 2012 showed, or summarized it up, that the most important quality of the environment in shaping these brain circuits is the mutual responsiveness of adult-child interactions. So whenever parents are stressed and unable to be emotionally present

for their children, these circuits are impaired within their development, let alone a child who's actually traumatized. So it's not a question of just emotional hurt. It's also a question of that key brain circuits that later on become enrolled in the service of addiction just don't develop properly. And then when the addictive behavior or substance comes along, it feels like a huge relief. As a matter of fact,

I would wager that for somebody like yourself, probably when you did alcohol or heroin, you probably felt normal for the first time in your life. Oh, yeah. I always say that, you know, two drinks was the best antidepressant I ever found. Unfortunately, it never stayed at two drinks, but it was it definitely worked. What the substances were doing for you was giving you what your own brain chemistry should have given you had the circumstances being the appropriate ones for your brain to develop. But clearly they weren't. And I don't know what happened to you, and I don't know how much you want to talk about it, but I can, just from the fact that you were addicted to alcohol and heroin, I can tell you what kind of childhood you had. Yep. Now, I've got a pretty good idea of that. The other thing that I think happens as addiction goes on is we start out with these chemical issues in our brain, let's call them that.

And so then we start taking drugs or alcohol that make us feel better. But those very drugs and alcohol begin to further erode both the ability of our brain to make the chemicals that make us feel good, as well as the parts of the brain that are able to exercise impulse control. So we're taking a bad situation and the actual physical changes that happen as we move into addiction and alcoholism make the situation worse in regards to our brain's ability to even stop what it's doing. That's exactly how it works. And you know who said it best? It was Jesus. When he said, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

You know, that those that have more shall be given to them, and those that have little, even the little they have will be taken away. And that's what addiction does. So that, just as you stated it, if you do brain scans, a lot of adults, and medicine pays a lot of attention these days to these brain scan studies, and we look at the abnormal brains and we think, oh yeah, it's biological, therefore it's got to be genetic.

No, it's not true. The biology is actually shaped by the environment. oh yeah, it's biological, therefore it's got to be genetic. No, it's not true. The biology is actually shaped by the environment. So yes, it's biological, but that doesn't make it genetic. Then when you add the burden of addictive substances, but not just addictive substances, even addictive behaviors. Like if you are, let's say, a shopping addict addict and the reason you're a shopping addict is because your brain lacks enough dopamine which is the incentive motivation chemical but when you go shopping your dopamine levels go really high that's that's the incentive that means you're

artificially increasing your dopamine levels and that also means when you're not shopping your own withdrawal not to the same degree of course but in the same way as if you were cocaine addict and increasing your dopamine levels through the stimulant cocaine so yes in the long-term addictive behaviors and especially addictive substances of course, especially addictive substances. They further erode the ability of the individual to make rational choices, to hold on to relationships, to regulate impulses, to deal with their emotions, to handle stress in a healthy way, so that these things were impaired to start with because of maldevelopment in childhood and now they're further impaired by the addictive behaviors and substances themselves. So it's a double whammy. And then again, when we come back to the question, which wolf do you feed? Well, that so-called bad wolf, which came out of deficiency and came out of a desperate attempt to feel better for a short time has become very very powerful you mentioned genetics and so i was you know one of the things as i read your book that i really found comforting and i'm curious if the science sent you since you wrote the book continues to

support it is that there isn't such a genetic base and i have a son who uh i'm an addict his mother is an addict and i've always worried about his genetic predisposition. But based on what you're saying, it's really more about the environment that we've raised him in and the way we've raised him than a particular set of genes that he inherited. Yeah, there are no addiction genes. There are genes that make it more likely that a person might become addicted simply because certain chemicals are not handled the same way as the average person or because the child is more sensitive. But here's a study from the Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology, 2009, February. They looked at the long-term study in Georgia, African-American youths residing in rural Georgia. Georgia, African American youths residing in rural Georgia, and they looked at their genes, they looked at DNA analysis of their saliva, and there was a couple of genes that were linked with increased substance use over time, but look what it says here. However,

this association was greatly reduced when youth received high levels of involved supportive parenting. This study demonstrates that parenting processes have the potential to ameliorate genetic risk. And I would say that when children receive the parenting they need, you don't just ameliorate, you actually eliminate any genetic risk altogether. Even in children where things didn't go well in the beginning, if you then provide the right kind of parenting, you can still greatly reduce that risk.

Genes may pose an increased risk, but they cannot determine a predispisposition is not the same as a predetermination, and the insistence of the medical profession and addiction specialists and the 12-step groups that you got this genetic disease is just bad science. Well, like I said, I find that to be comforting. In the section in your book where you talk about that, we don't have time to go into, but the way that you explore where people have thought that it's genetic and the way they arrive at those through a variety of twin studies and different things, you really talk about how that's not an effective mechanism. And so if people are interested in that, that would be a great, great part of the book to check out. You've talked a

lot about the role of the parents and, and that the parents can be stressed or they can be depressed or lots of different things. And that sort of leads us into cultural issues. And the book that you're working on that will be coming out is really about the culture that we live in and how that culture breeds dysfunction. And so I'm going to read something else that you wrote and then maybe let you take it from there you say a sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture the drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people and has limited

means of escaping it the rest of us find other ways of suppressing our fear of emptiness or of distracting ourselves from it. So what's happening in our culture that you think is breeding this dysfunction? Well, if you permit me to be self-referential here, I'd like you to make you aware of another book I wrote, a core book called Hold On To Your Kids, why parents need to matter more than peers. So one of the things we point out in that book, in fact, what we do point out in that book, in fact what we do point out in that book is that children have this primary need to attach to a parent, to attach to nurturing adults. That's just a need of all mammals and birds for that matter.

Without that the child doesn't survive. So as long as the culture provides an environment in which children are related to nurturing adults, especially in a village or a clan or community setting, that child is very secure. One of the things that our culture has done is it has broken up the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood. And it has also put tremendous stress on the nuclear family so that the parents don't see their kids most of the day. And very often, of course, children come from broken families where there's not even two parents. Children have to attach to somebody. They cannot handle life without being connected to somebody.

And who do they attach to? Who do they connect to? They connect to the peer group. to who do they connect to they connect to the peer group so now you have this phenomenon of peer attachment where children are not getting their modeling and their values and their mentoring and their emotional nurturance such as it is not from adults in their life anymore but from other children and of course immature creatures cannot lead one another to maturity. So this has all kinds of negative consequences. So any parent who's bringing up kids, adolescent or at any age or below,

that's just a book that I think it's important to read. It's not my work, actually. It's the work of a psychologist friend of mine, a brilliant man called Gordon Neufeld. I did the writing with him. But one of the things that happens in our culture is the breakup of family and community and clan. And that leaves children without the proper modeling, mentoring and cultural guidance. Talk about a depressed mother, for example, who, you know, postpartum depression, whatever, you make the point that in the past when there was more, as you said, clan or village or bigger family, there would be other people to pick up that slack, so to speak. There would be other people to help give the child maybe

what they weren't able to get in that period with the mother. But in the culture we live in, sometimes that's the only person. It goes beyond that. First of all, we know that postpartum depression in the mother is associated with an increased risk of behavioral problems, ADHD, and a whole lot of other things that predispose to addiction in the child. But it goes beyond that because in a society where there's proper support from mothers, you don't have the risk of postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is not an automatic biological thing that happens to women. It happens in a context. And the context is lack of emotional support. And I can tell you that as a husband whose wife had a postpartum depression.

And at a time when I was a workaholic doctor who was not available to support her. And that had an impact on our children. And so even the risk of postpartum depression, and the rates of which is going higher and higher in our culture, has to do with cultural factors. And the book I'm working on, and I don't have a working title for it yet but the general theme is toxic culture and what I mean by that is that a culture is the context in which we live the social emotional relational interactions that we have the work that we do the entertainment that we

pursue the practices that we engage in, that's broadly speaking what it means to have a culture. There's another meaning for the word culture which is simply a laboratory broth in which you rear or you nurture microorganisms. And what would you call a laboratory culture in which many of the microorganisms were sick. You would call it a toxic culture. I'm suggesting that our culture, if you look at the rates of disease, 60% of American adults are at least on one medication or another.

This is in the richest and the most medically advanced society in the history of the world. What's going on? What's going on is that the culture that we live in and in a whole lot of ways some of which we've talked about others of which i'm writing about actually undermines people's health and so that when we look at individual disease individual addiction whether we're looking at mental health issues, childhood development issues like ADHD or so-called oppositional defiant disorder or depression, anxiety,

whether we're looking at cancer or autoimmune disease, we're actually looking at the impact of the culture on the individual because you cannot separate the individual from the environment and you cannot separate the mind from the body. And so when people are living in a stressed culture, they have stressed minds, and stressed minds result in stressed bodies. In the book that you're working on and in the research that you do, do you have recommendations for those of us who live within that culture today

of how we can be more immune to it or how we can avoid some of the more toxic parts of the culture? The first point, of course, is to recognize the culture that we're living in, to see it, not to absorb it uncritically, but to see in what ways it actually undermines human needs. As much as it has provided in as creative and as economically dynamic and scientifically advanced this culture has been at the same time in some ways it significantly ignores and even insults some deep human needs and so we have to understand that and not buy into it. Now, the various books that I've written,

whether it's on ADHD or stress and physical health, like cancer or immune disease and so on, those recommendations are my prediction book that you've been mentioning. There's recommendations in each of them. And the new book will be more focused on, yes, what we can actually do, because we can't, you know, obviously, just because I publish a book or anybody publishes a book, that's not going to change the culture. So we're going to have to live with this for a long time,

certainly in my lifetime. But the more aware we are, the more we set up conscious practices that in our lives that do not feed the bad wolf back to your analogy now in a positive sense the more mindful of you where we are the more we recognize that our value and our worth as human beings is not dependent on what other people think of us it's not dependent on how good we look it doesn't depend on how much we own

or what we can do the more we can actually respect and honor our own value the more immune we are to the blandishments of a culture that for the most part, would have us believe that our value depends on externals.

And of course, what is addiction but a desperate way to fill in from the outside that emptiness that you mentioned that we experience from within. So what I'm saying also has, of course, social and cultural implications, political implications. I'll talk about that in my new book, but probably that's a discussion I would defer for some other time. Sure. You talk about how important conscious awareness is, and that's sort of what you were just saying there, being aware of what the culture is, being aware of our decisions. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason

Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say that when not governed by conscious awareness, our mind tends to run on automatic pilot. It is scarcely more free than a computer that performs pre-programmed tasks in response to a button being pushed.

Exactly. So that question of freedom has to do with levels of consciousness. People who are not conscious simply have no freedom. They may believe they do, but they don't make decisions. The decisions are made for them by automatic emotional reactions that are the result of early experiences. reactions that are the result of early experiences so there's a I think Austrian Swiss or German so this writer and psychologist called Alice Miller who was one of the first ones who wrote about the impact of childhood trauma on adult dysfunction and her most famous book is called The Drama of the Gifted Child. But the original

title, the German title of that book was actually much better. It was called Prisoners of Childhood. And what she was implying is that until we are aware and create some gap between our emotional

reactions and our behavior, we're actually held prisoner by what happened to us in childhood. And I find myself at age 72 still very often reacting like I was a two-year-old child unless I create that gap of consciousness in which I have a moment to reflect upon and make a conscious decision. And in our society, which makes us unconscious in so many ways, that's constant work. That's, for most of us, I would say, that's significant work.

And that's why I think so many people are increasingly drawn to practices that support mindful awareness. Because they just want to be free. They're on the automatons. And even for me, as a middle class, successful person, I cannot claim freedom as long as my reactions and behaviors and preferences are governed by unconscious factors that come out of a childhood sense of insufficiency that goes back to my first year of life. So freedom does demand consciousness. And Eckhart Tolle, who's a great spiritual teacher, you probably know of his work. And he lives here in Vancouver as well.

You know, he says as much. He says, well, you can't talk about freedom without consciousness. He says, no. There's no freedom without consciousness. So, again, that feeling, the good wolf, takes a lot of consciousness. Yep. And I think for me, that's what the parable mostly speaks to. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons why it's a story and not a truth.

But I think for me, the story is about having that awareness. What am I doing? You know, like moment to moment, day to day, what am that awareness. What am I doing? You know, like moment to moment, day to day, what am I doing? What am I thinking? What am I acting? What am I, because I love your description of, um, being on autopilot. That's such a great description of, of the way I get, I just sort of, I just go, I do what's in front of me and not necessarily thinking about what's important to me or who I want to be or all those things that consciousness implies. Yes, what am I doing? And also, who am I being? I'm going to give a talk in Vancouver in a couple of weeks called, Who Do You Think You Are? Or Who Do I Think I Am? Who Do We Think We Are? So let me give you a quick example.

I am? Who do we think we are? So let me give you a quick example. I arrived home from a speaking tour from Baltimore to Vancouver four months ago. I gave a great talk, well received. I think I'm just great. I arrived in Vancouver. I get a text from my wife who had said she'd taken it off that she hasn't left home yet i immediately feel hurt rejected and i go into a rage why what's the problem i was 71 years old at the time i can't take a taxi home what's the big deal here right or can't i understand that my wife maybe got caught up in her paint she's an artist wife maybe got caught up in her painting? She's an artist, so she got caught up in her painting. Artists do that. They get caught up in their painting or their artistic creative work,

and they time your schools. What am I so upset about? Who do I think I am at that moment? Well, the upset part of me, and you might call that the bad wolf because it's full of rage at that moment, but what it actually is, he thinks he's a one-year-old child who's being abandoned by mommy. So this constant question of who do I think I am, it needs to come up at every moment almost. Right.

Where am I coming from at this particular moment and just because i answered the question appropriately one time it doesn't mean that five minutes later the same question does not arise again in a different way so that awareness uh and ultimately i think whatever people have to do to overcome their addiction i would say of all, get in touch with your pain. Don't run away from your pain. Your whole addiction is an attempt to run away from pain. And it just creates more pain. So don't be afraid of it.

And if you're one of these people that you think you had a really happy childhood, let me tell you, if you're addicted, that tells me you didn't. Which doesn't mean that happy things didn't happen. It just means that you've repressed, you haven't dealt with, you haven't allowed yourself to experience the child's feelings that you distance yourself from as a way of surviving it. So be aware of your pain and get some help with it. And have compassion for yourself.

Don't judge yourself. Don't, metaphorically, it's fine to talk about the bad wolf, but don't reject the bad wolf part of you. Have compassion for it. Understand that it came along, really, to meet needs that otherwise were not being met. And then create that gap of awareness,

that mindfulness that you and I have been talking about in which you can make free choices to feed that good wolf. So last question, we're nearly out of time and this is the last and hardest question, but I'm just, I don't think there's an answer, but I'm interested in your thoughts on it. And as someone who is recovering, I've been around recovery for a long time now, most of my adult life, and I see a lot of people who get sober, and I see a lot of people who never do, and I see people that die, and I can't help but have that why. And I know there's not a simple answer for that, but do you have any thoughts on, is it simply level of trauma? Some people

are so damaged that the recovery process is too much. Do you have, I guess, what do you think? Well, you're right. It's a very difficult question. I don't think anybody is so traumatized that they're beyond redemption. We've seen examples of people who endured traumas that we can't even comprehend, and yet they find redemption in one way or another. So there's nobody beyond redemption. At the same time, the greater the degree of trauma and the greater the defenses that you've erected against the trauma, the more you've had to escape from that hell realm, the more difficult it will be for you to recover. That's totally true. I'm going to make a guess here, that at some point or another in your recovery process, you either encountered people that treated you with compassion, despite all the self-loathing you might have had, or somehow you found a way to develop compassion for yourself. Or maybe both.

Oh, I think it's definitely both. I mean, I that's the at the heart of 12-step recovery for me that's absolutely that's the heart of it right there is that is that community that one alcoholic talking to another that that ability to see like oh i'm not i'm not the only person that's like this exactly uh and i think that is the strength of the 12-step group so among the specific strengths of their the 12 steps themselves which I think are just steps for a healthy life addiction or not addiction but but quite apart from that it's that being received and heard and not judged that compassion and I think some people just don't meet that. And unfortunately, it's even true that depending on where you go to the tall step group, you may or may not find that compassion. I agree.

You may come across a lot of judgment and rejection. That's not the intention, but that's what you're going to receive. So to go back to your original question, I think the people that have been redeemed and have recovered, I think they're the ones who found some compassion along the way, which ultimately led them to some self-compassion. That doesn't fully answer your question, because as you said, there's no full answer to your question. But as a way to move forward, compassion is it. Imagine if the prison system, if the legal system,

never mind the prison system, the legal system, the educational system with all these troubled kids, the medical system, the addiction treatment industry, what if they had this huge infusion of compassion? How many more people could be redeemed? The numbers are infinite. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to end. I agree with you. And, you know, my hope is that, you know, part of what certainly not everybody listening to this identifies in it is an addict, but we all know people who are.

And to your point, a lot of us have that in ourselves. And I think that idea of compassion, you say that the best attitude is one of compassionate curiosity towards ourselves. Why did I do that? Why did I, you know, instead of judgment? Well, you know, and the why did I do that? You can ask it in two ways. You can say, why did I do that? Which is not a question at all.

It's a statement. Right. But you can actually say, huh, why did I do that? Right. And then that's the way to ask it. Incidentally, as to your reference about many, not all of your listeners may have self-identified addicts, I just wonder if they tried on that definition of addiction that we proposed earlier, how many

really are who've never had those kind of patterns in their life? I'll grant you there'll be some, but I doubt there'll be too many. No, particularly not people who listen to this show. Any show. Any show. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the fact that we relate to these

concepts and people come back is a sign that we're recognizing some degree of wishing we were more conscious and in control of our lives. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking with you. I loved your book. I'm looking forward to the new one, and maybe we'll get a chance to talk more then. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Bye. Bye. You can learn more about Gabor Mate and this podcast at oneuf.net slash Gabor.