The One You Feed - How to Find Healing From Trauma with Dr. Gabor Mate

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Dr. Gabor Maté is a highly sought expert on a wide range of topics such as addiction, stress, and childhood development.  He has written many books, of which several are best-sellers, including the award-winning “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” , “Close Encounters with Addiction”, and “When the Body Says No:  Exploring the Stress-Disease Culture.”  Gabor’s work has been published internationally and in more than 30 languages. In this episode, Eric and Dr. Maté discuss his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Dr. Gabor Mate and I Discuss How to … His book,  The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture Defining the myths of normal How the increasing anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues are a result of toxic culture Stress and trauma can begin for a child in utero, at childbirth, and throughout childhood The modern stresses of our world contributes to a toxic culture How parents pass down their traumas to their children Defining trauma as a psychic wound that happens inside of you The healing process is the recovery of self Understanding the clash between attachment and authenticity How emotions and immune systems are part of the same system The importance of understanding the important link between emotions and physical health Trauma imposed self beliefs are the main obstacles of healing Remembering that healing is a lifelong process The 4 A’s of healing:  authenticity, agency, acceptance, and anger (healthy)  Dr. Gabor Mate Links: Dr. Gabor Mate’s website Twitter Instagram Facebook By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr, Gabor Maté, check out these other episodes: Dr. Gabor Mate’s Interview from 2016 Healing Trauma with Dr. James GordonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Responsibility, if you break down the word, response-ability. Nobody else can respond to your circumstances but you. Nobody else can respond to the imprints that you carry but you. You are response-able, but you're not at fault. 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. Thank you. will 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. On this episode, we are happy to welcome back Gabor Mate, a highly sought expert on a range of topics such as addiction, stress, and childhood development. He's written many books and several of them are bestsellers,

including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, and When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress. Gabor's works have been published internationally in more than 30 languages. On this episode, the topic is his new book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Hi, Gabor. Welcome to the show. Nice to be with you, Eric. Thank you. illness, and healing in a toxic culture. parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, 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. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. How you'll answer the question today will be very different how I might have answered it some years ago. What I stand now is that hungry wolf is the part of you that was denied and hurt and scared and traumatized. and traumatized. So then, rather than starving it, we have to befriend it and remove its need to be that aggressive and to be that destructive. So we have to befriend all aspects of ourselves. So I would say we have to befriend and feed both wolves in the right way, because it's not in the nature of the wolf to be that way. Something made him that way. Well, that certainly speaks to a lot of your work summarized pretty succinctly there. Let's talk about the new book and tell me about The Myth of Normal. Why did you title the book

The Myth of Normal? Yeah, it has two meanings. We tend to assume that what is normal is healthy and natural. Rich in human evolution was also the case, because what was healthy and natural was also the norm. That's how we evolved as creatures. No creature can evolve against its own nature. But in modern society, what is normal, in other words, what passes for daily life and daily human exchange and interaction and social structures, they may be the norm in a sense that they represent the average, but they're no longer healthy or natural. So that's the first myth of normal. The other is that as a physician and also as an individual, when I understand people's illnesses, including their

addictions, including their mental distress, including their physical illnesses, we see these people as abnormal. But actually, their illnesses, their addictions, their ailments are normal responses to an abnormal society. So that the normality is not an individual. The pathology is not an individual. It's in the social conditions and the personal relationships and the context that evoke those ailments. And if I can give you like one example, the more episodes of racism a Black American woman experiences, the greater the risk for asthma.

Now, asthma is a stress-driven condition. That's a normal response to what is abnormal, which is that one human being should be considered less than the other. Yeah. You say chronic illness, mental or physical, is to a large extent a function or a feature of the way things are and not a mysterious aberration. Exactly. And so I would say that a lot of what you're proposing in this book, and again, correct me if anything I say is a misstatement, is that it is the traumatic experiences, and we're going to get into what trauma means in a minute, but it is traumatic experiences, big T, little t trauma that are a big part of why our mental and physical health is deteriorating. And we need to treat that trauma both collectively and individually.

Exactly. So there was an article in the New York Times four days before this interview, front page headline article. There was a teenager on 10 different psychiatric medications at age 17 or 18. Yeah. Now, that's an increasingly common phenomenon. And there's been articles recently in the New Yorker and the New York Times about the mysteriously rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides. the mysteriously rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides, and the number of children being diagnosed with depression, anxiety, self-cutting, so-called oppositionality, ADHD, etc., etc., is going up and up and up. Now, what that tells us is that these conditions can't be genetic because genes don't change over 10 years or 20 years or even 100 years. So there's something about being in the environment.

And what's going on in the environment is that more and more young human beings are growing up under conditions that don't meet their essential needs. And so the anxiety and the depression and the self-cutting and the addictions and even the desperation that will drive a young person to end their lives, these are responses to abnormal circumstances. And that's why I say that our culture is a toxic culture, because it actually poisons people psychically. So I want to get into some of the trauma that happens within a family system or to a person, you know, they are sexually abused, they are assaulted. We'll get to that in a second, but let's talk broadly, more broadly, culturally.

What are the broad cultural things that are making the environment toxic? Well, let's begin with conception so that we know that the mother's emotional states during pregnancy have a hormonal impact on the child's brain physiology and even on the child's genetic functioning. And these effects can be traced for decades after the pregnancy, scientifically speaking. Now, when you think of all the stress that's on women these days, as they're trying to hold on a job and take care of a relationship and in a very stressed and fractured culture that's affecting the children in the uterus already and we know this from all kinds of physiological studies now as a physician i was never trained when i was looking after pregnant women nobody ever trained me to ask about her emotional states or her mental states or what the states of her relationship.

We just pay attention to the body, weight gain, measurements, ultrasound, blood tests. But we don't ask, how are you feeling as a human being? What's your life like? What's your job like? What's your relationship like? So already the toxicity begins in utero. Yeah. Then there's childbirth.

Our nature evolved human beings is that childbirth isn't just a mechanical event of getting the infant out of the womb and into the world. It's also an event that under natural circumstances promotes bonding and the release of a whole love cocktail of chemicals in both mother and infant that prepares them for the bonding experience that must be present for healthy child development. Now, modern obstetrics can do miraculous feats in saving maternal and infant life and health, but in a small minority of cases, about 10 to 15% of the time. Now the cesarean section rate here in British Columbia where I live is close to 40%, and it's going up internationally, especially in the developed world, which means that a lot of infants no longer have the experience of the birth that nature intended for them.

of the birth that nature intended for them. Then we get into parenting. A lot of parents these days are given advice such as ignore the baby's crying, let them sleep it out. Or a two-year-old child, if they're angry, make them sit by themselves. Now you tell a mother baboon or a mother bear to ignore the baby's cries. You tell a mother elephant to ignore the baby's cries. You tell a mother elephant to ignore the baby's cries.

So human beings are now increasingly divorced from their own parenting instincts because of the pressures of the culture. And that means children are not getting their developmental needs met. Children have certain basic needs, like any creature, like an acorn. The nature of an acorn is to become an oak tree, but not unless it's given the right soil and nutrition and irrigation and sunlight. Same with human beings. We have essential needs. The human child has the need to be accepted and loved for exactly who they are unconditionally.

They have the need not to have to work to gain the esteem and love of the parents, but for that to be there naturally. They have the need to experience all their emotions, whatever they happen to be. Joy, pain, grief, anxiety, anger. In modern world, parents are often programmed or taught to deny the right of the child to have all their emotions. That is traumatic for kids. So then I could go on about the way schools deal with kids. Then there is the stresses of modern life that impose the three essential triggers for stress, uncertainty, conflict, and loss of control.

That characterizes so many people's lives. Those are physiologically stressful. That physiological stress undermines the immune system. So I could just go on forever. But there's so many features of modern life that actually are toxic to healthy human life. You mentioned the let the baby cry it out model. I certainly experienced that as a baby. I know you did.

It's a horrifying sort of thought, but it seems to me, and maybe it's just the circles I travel in, right? This is what I never know. Like what is more broadly culturally happening and what is just in the small circle I'm in. But there seems to be a real knowledge now of children's attachment needs. Yes. And that there's less of that than there seems to have been maybe in 1970. Do you see, broadly speaking, some aspects of our culture getting better?

Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I think many of our parents are aware of the child's attachment needs. And in the 1940s and the 50s, the dominant influencer of parenting was Dr. Spock, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who told parents to leave the child alone in his room, shut the door, and don't go back. And he talked about the chronic resistance to sleep of the infant the infant wasn't resistant to sleep the infant was resistant to being left alone no animal leaves their infants alone yeah and mother baboon will not do that and he talked about the tyranny of the infant now we've seen the consequences of that and so there's been a

certain degree of reaction against that. But it's not broad enough, that reaction. And although there are more parents who are recognizing that now, thank God, the dominant advice of psychologists and parenting coaches and so on is still along those behavioral models, which ignore the child's needs and focus instead on what the parent wants the child to be like. So the emphasis is not on the child's developmental needs, but on parental convenience, which I understand parents wanting desperately in the stress world, but we've forgotten the needs of the child. Right. I think so much of what you just talked through and you point out in

the book is that all this stuff is so interdependent that the modern stresses of our world to parents working, having to work essentially in an environment where their work is coming at them constantly 24 hours a day via phones, you know, that then impacts their ability to be a good parent. If we look at the way my mom parented me, so much of that came from her experiences, what she was going through, how she was parented. So all this stuff becomes really interdependent and very difficult to tweeze apart. Absolutely. And I wrote this book, The Myth of Normal, with my son, Daniel. In the book, Daniel talks about how he was traumatized by his parents. And he's had his mental health challenges. And I know where they came from. They came from here,

from me. I'm the last person to be able to deny the impact of my parenting on my children, given that this is the work that I have studied and pursued for so many years. Daniel talks about how when he was small, he used to have this recurrent nightmare of the floor disappearing. All of a sudden, the floor disappears from under his feet when the floor was not the floor. What that had to do with was that two stressed parents who had not worked through their own traumas

before they had kids would create an environment of tension and conflict in their home, which the small child experiences the floor disappearing. And so we loved our kids. We did our best, as all parents do. But inevitably, we passed our traumas on to them. So this is not pointing fingers or blaming anybody.

It's to recognize the larger picture of how in this stressed society, we almost invariably passed on or inevitably passed on our traumas to our kids. Oftentimes people talk about from generation to generation, like breaking the cycle. I'm going to break the cycle. My son's 24 now. And so I look at what I did well and what I didn't do well. And you know, I think breaking the cycle might be a little too binary. What seems to me is it's like maybe if there was a hundred units of trauma flowing down through the generations, he only got 25 of it, right? Instead of all hundred, you know, so like breaking the cycle, I doubt that that happened.

And so I think that's an interesting way to look at it too, is that like we took what we were given and passed on something better, you know, to the best of our ability. Well, that that happened. And so I think that's an interesting way to look at it too, is that like, we took what we were given and passed on something better, you know, to the best of our ability. Well, that's great. And it was actually, it's very much akin to what a therapist once said to me. He said, if your parents gave you this much shit and you only gave your kids this much, then you did a good job. I would say that in our case, we weren't aware of how traumatized we were when we had kids. We had not done the work yet. I had not worked through my own work at all, my anxieties, my eruptions of rage. And my wife had not worked through the particular stuff that she brought to our relationship.

So our trauma showed up in a significant way after we had kids. And not because we didn't love them, but because we weren't devoted to them. Yeah, exactly. I feel fortunate. I had my son, I don't know, four years after I got sober from heroin addiction. And so I was deeply embedded in my own recovery and wellness. And I'm, again, I'm not saying like if we had a 10 pound bag of trauma shit, I passed down, you know, maybe three because you learn more, right? The healing journey, the nature of

it, you say at one point in the book, and I absolutely love this talking about the healing journey. You say, in my experience, we're never as close as we hope and never as far as we fear, which I think is a beautiful way of summing up. Like this kind of goes on and we have our moments where like I've come so far. And then another moment where like I got so far to go, you know, but we are where we are on it. Exactly. And as long as we're conscious, you know. Yeah. conscious you know yeah so if i have a moment where i revisit some old traumatic imprint if i can be aware of it i can very quickly transform it and move past it yeah so it's

the consciousness of it that really makes the difference yep so let's quickly move through trauma defining kind of what it is at a basic level. I think we hear the word a lot, but you've got some fairly specific ways of defining it. Yeah. So as a former English teacher, I pay a lot of attention to language, and trauma has got a specific word origin. It's a Greek word for wounding. So trauma is a psychic wound. That's important to understand, because wounds can show up as a rough spot that really hurts every time you touch it or it can scar over and become thick and hard and unfeeling and inflexible. So trauma shows up in both of those ways, both of those characteristics of a

wound. Number one, it also means that trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is what happened inside you. So trauma is not the event. In my case, being given to a stranger by my mother when I was 11 months old, or somebody might have been sexually abused, or somebody might have been neglected. That's not the trauma. That's the traumatic event. The trauma is the wound that we sustain as a result, which is good news. The trauma is the wound that we sustain as a result, which is good news. Because if the trauma was that I was given by a stranger to my mother to save my life, but I experienced it as an abandonment.

If that was the trauma, that'll never change. That happened. That'll never not have happened. But if the trauma is the wound that I sustained, which is the belief that I wasn't loved and I wasn't lovable. That can be healed at any moment. So trauma is not what happened to you. It's what you sustained internally as a result. And we can traumatize people in two major ways. One is when bad things happen that shouldn't have, such as my core were abandoned by my mother under conditions of wartime,

Nazi-occupied Hungary. But you don't need that. You don't need genocide or war. You just need parents who are like we were, my wife and I, unconscious of our own traumas. Or you need parents who are very stressed and who are not able to meet the child's needs, as I've outlined them.

And not having your needs met can be traumatic as well. It can wound you as well. It can hurt you as well. And then what people do with the wound, what small kids do, they can't help it. It's too painful. So they disconnect from their emotions and their body. So that disconnection from self is the essence of trauma. Yeah, I love that point. The disconnection is really, you say it's the most prominent thing

in trauma. And that's a really interesting thing to think about because we can be disconnected from lots of different things in lots of different ways. But it's interesting when people ask me to define spirituality, I say spirituality is connecting to what matters, right? So it's kind of opposite, right, of that. It's recognizing what's important to me and how do I connect to it. Or spirituality is connected to what isn't matter. Yeah, yeah. But you talked about recovery.

You said that by the time you had your son, you were four years in recovery. Yeah. Let's look at that word. What does it mean to recover something? What does it mean? It something? What does it mean? It means to get something back. What did you get back? I guess I got back some of my own agency and authenticity, to use a couple of your words that we'll get to.

I got back a sense of my own ability to control my life within reason, and I got some access to you know my authentic self i mean you know i'm still in recovery right i mean so i i know but i'm looking at them so actually what you did is you began to recover yourself yeah now you when we said about trauma is a disconnection from the self yep their healing process is the recovery of the self yep that's the whole point that's what the word means we use the word recovery but we often don't ask ourselves what is it that we're finding again yes but we're actually finding ourselves that true self that never got destroyed which is why the potential for healing exists in everyone yep jumping around a little bit here but talking about addiction, I loved this line.

You said all addictions and sendos can be summed up as an escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane lived-in experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one's skin. So it's ironic that we're recovering ourself, but part of so much of what addiction is is trying to escape that self. No. That that self. No. That damaged self. Yeah, addiction is trying to not to escape from the true self. Yeah.

It's actually trying to get a taste of the true self. Yes. Through the addictive process. Yes. Addiction is an escape from the alienated self. Yeah. So when Keith Richards, who's the world's most famous ex-heron addict, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. Has he given it up?

He's given it up a long time ago. Okay. And I read his biography called Life. Okay. Only Keith Richards would write a biography and call it Life. I mean, what a narcissistic title, but it's a great title. And he says, when we talked about his addiction, he said, the contortions we go through, just not to be ourselves for a few hours.

Yep. And by that that he meant they alienated this uncomfortable self and and what the heroin does or the alcohol does or the pornography does or whatever or the workaholism does the momentarily we feel alive and present and at peace which is aspects of the true self so addiction is an attempt to escape from the alien itself to get a temporary taste of the real self yep it's a self-destructive self-defeating method but that's the intention totally i've often said you know people talk about addiction as an escape and i understand that but for me all my drug use it didn't matter what it was yeah made the world come alive for me.

It made me feel connected to the world. It made me interested in the world. It wasn't this internal thing. It was coming to life because I didn't know how to do that otherwise. That's beautifully said. And that's why the disease model of addiction is so shallow. What kind of disease makes you feel more connected to life? Yep.

Agreed. The problem was the disconnect. And that's the trauma that we're talking about. Yep. So that's why my mantra on addiction is not why addiction, but why the pain? What's the pain that's driving the behavior? The addiction is only an attempt to solve a problem imposed by trauma. Yeah.

I've heard that one that you've used, you know, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And there's another question that you say about addiction that I love, which is another way to think about it is not to ask what's wrong with it, but what's right about it. Yeah. What is it that the person is getting from that and then recognizing, okay, that tells us something about the nature of what needs healed. Exactly. And then you just said it.

You wanted connection. Yep. Yeah. That's what it was giving you. And then the question we have to ask is, how did you lose that? Yeah. And how can you regain it without that addictive drive? Yep.

How can you genuinely have those qualities, not just temporarily under the influence, but actually in your life? And that's what the recovery is all about, isn't it? Yeah. And I think in my case, particularly, that leads us well into talking about this clash between attachment and authenticity. I do think that's the heart of my particular wounding was, you know, I can't be authentic to how I'm actually feeling. I can't deal with what I'm actually feeling without putting my need to be close to my family. I had to choose one or the other. And you say that as a young person, we'll always choose the attachment. Talk a little bit

more about that clash between attachment and authenticity. Well, we talked about the need for attachment and attachment is the drive to be close to another being for the purpose of being taken care of or for the purpose of taking care of the other in the case of the infant to be taken care of in the case of the parent the parental instinct is to take care of the infant now so that attachment relationship for birds and mammals, including human beings, is essential because we thought the young doesn't survive for a day. So it's not negotiable. The human need for attachment is much longer than for any other creature because we're immature for much longer. And of course, it's with us for a lifetime. Didn't we just find out during COVID

how important attachment is? Didn't we suffer because of the social isolation that was imposed by the COVID epidemic or their response to it? Attachment is important throughout the lifetime, but never more crucial for survival than in infancy and early childhood. So that's one drive that we have. But we have another drive, and I've talked about the child's essential need to experience all their emotions. Now, why is that the case? Because the emotions came along to support our survival.

So we evolved out there in nature. How long does a creature in nature survive if they're not in touch with their gut feelings, their authentic feelings? Not very long. Not very long. So that's not a luxury. It's another survival need. However, when we have the experience that I had as a child or that you had as a child, that in this culture, many children have, that if they're authentically present with all their emotions, they're not acceptable to the people on whose their life depends, they will automatically and unconsciously

suppress their authenticity for the sake of being attached. And then for the rest of our lives, we're consumed with pleasing others, placating others, impressing others, being attractive to others, being acceptable to others, being approved of by others. And we forget who we actually are. And those dynamics impose both physical and mental illness on human beings. And this society feeds on people's desperation to be accepted. The 50 billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry, what is it about but people's desperation to be attractive

to others so they'll be accepted. I could give you many examples, but the point is that that surrender of authenticity costs us severely in mental and physical health. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No 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.

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a key idea in the book, which is that features of our personality or features of our non-authentic self, and we could also use that phrasing, can contribute to our disease state, right? You know, I think we all know most people at this point will accept to some degree that what we think and feel has an impact on our physical health. You talk a lot in the book about a type C personality, a type of person who is likely to get sick. This scared the crap out of me, you know, because I look at it and I'm like,

well, okay, I've got a fair amount of that in there, right? So tell me about the type C personality and how that contributes to disease states, both mental and physical. So first of all, it's not quite accurate to call it the type C personality because these are character traits, which are learned and developed, but they're not a fixed part of the individual. They can be transformed. And that's the whole point. Yeah.

They're a recurring part. I love there was somewhere in the book you talked about that where these things aren't fixed, but they are recurring. So they appear fixed. Right. That's exactly the point. Yeah. So let's take the repression of healthy anger.

Now, healthy anger has got a purpose in life. You look at an animal. When an animal enters its space, you get an expression of healthy anger. You're in my space. Get out. That healthy anger prevents violence, actually. So human beings have this healthy anger as a boundary defense. So if I were to invade your space physically or psychically, a healthy response is, you're in my space.

Get out. That's healthy anger. Once it's done its job, it's over. You don't go into a rage. You don't carry it with you, resentment for the rest of your life. You just expressed your anger. It protected your boundaries. Now it's gone. Now, the scientific fact is, which is unfortunately completely ignored in medical training, is that mind and body are inseparable. So just as anger is a boundary defense, what is the immune system? It's a boundary defense. The job of the immune system is to let in what is healthy and nurturing, such as nutrients, vitamins, healthy bacteria,

and to keep out toxins and unhealthy bacterial invasion. That's the same job of the emotions, is to let in what's welcoming and nurturing and conducive to growth and health and to keep out what isn't. That's why we developed emotions. Now, it turns out that from the physiological and scientific point of view, the emotions and the immune system form part of the same system. They're not separate. They're part of the same apparatus. When you repress your healthy boundaries by suppressing your healthy anger, you're also undermining your immune system.

Now, what happens to a healthy anger that you don't express? It doesn't disappear. It doesn't evaporate. It turns against the self in the form of depression or self-loathing and so on. In the same way, the immune system can turn against you and now you've got autoimmune disease or malignancy. And so if you look at the people who develop autoimmune disease and malignancy, and this has been studied not just by me, but by many others, and it's been well documented. These are people who tend to ignore their own emotional needs for the sake of placating others. I would never do that.

Oh, good. Never, right? Never, huh? Me neither, never. Or they repress their healthy anger. So they're very, very nice people, always trying to please others. Or they identify with their duty and role and responsibility and how they look to others and how they serve the world while ignoring their own needs. And they tend to believe that they're responsible for what other people feel, and they must never disappoint anybody. So I give the case in the book of this physician in Ottawa who died of cancer. And his obituary actually said that Stanley and his mother or Sidney and his mother had an extraordinary relationship, a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives. So as a married man with young children, Sidney had dinner with his parents every day. married man with young children. Sidney had dinner with his parents every day. And then he'd go home to be followed by yet another dinner to eat and to enjoy with his wife and his four children.

Until over the years, gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions. So this guy could not say to his mom, Mom, I got incredible news. I got four kids, kids and i'm gonna have dinner with them most nights and he also couldn't say to his wife sweetheart my parents are aging they need me once or twice a week i have to have dinner with them he just took on trying to please everybody at his own expense and these characteristics lead to wellness yeah i've often observed in myself it used to show up in early sobriety as i need a drink i need a drink drink, I need to, and that sort of faded. And then it turned into on the surface, not a better thing, which is I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. What I realized was that cycle kicked off whenever I was in a situation where I had two people in my life who wanted different things for me and I was not going to be able to please them both. Right. And my response to that was I want to die. Yeah. It felt so psychically overwhelming. And if we call it a character trait that's changing one that's changed

a fair amount, but still recurs, but that speaks so strongly to me that that's what would plague me with the most despair. Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say that not that I don't know in detail about your childhood, but I would say it's an imprint of your childhood, which is the impossible. Like, for example, in a bad divorce, the child is put in an impossible situation. example, in a bad divorce, the child is put in an impossible situation. If I please one, I displease the other. If I displease one, I lose the contact with them. But I need that contact. So I don't know if anything really happened to you, but it's something like that. That's the first point. The second point is, in your question, you're not even asking, what would please me? your question you're not even asking what would please me right oh yeah it's not even on the radar yeah yeah so the idea here is that this type of submerging our own needs for others needs

yeah can lead to physical and mental illness now part of what happens when we start to say my physical illness may be to some degree caused by my emotional state or all that is that it's very easy to go into blame. Yeah. Right. It's very easy for me to suddenly go, oh, my God, I caused this and now I've got to fix it. Like it's almost as if when you think that, oh, my God, my mental state is causing me to not be well. Now I've added another layer of stress onto the whole thing. So how do we work with that in a skillful way where we don't actually increase our stress level by having some of those realizations?

Well, the question I would ask somebody who's blaming themselves like that is, what day did you consciously decide to suppress your emotions? Were you one year old or one day old? When did you make that decision? You didn't. This is an automatic adaptation pattern to childhood circumstances over which you had no control whatsoever. So that self-suppression actually played a beneficial role in your life because it kept your relationships going.

Without those relationships, you couldn't have survived. So actually, that self-suppression was part of the wisdom of your organism. It's just that it's no longer serving you. So it's not a question of blaming yourself. It's a question of understanding that these patterns are helping to make me sick, but I didn't create them. I'm not guilty about them. I'm responsible for changing it. Who else can? But there was no culpability because I had no choice in the matter. In order to survive, I had to choose attachment over authenticity. That choice saved my life or my existence at that time. It's no longer working for me. Blame has nothing to do with it. And that's why so much of the healing sections of my book are focused on the

need for self-compassion and how to achieve that. So we don't attack ourselves for anything. We understand where these patterns came from in order to better transform them. But self-blame has no role in the matter. Yeah, you have a line I love in the book. You say, no matter how far back we look in the chain of consequence, great-grandparents, pre-modern ancestors, Adam and Eve, the first single-celled amoeba, the accusing finger can find no fixed target. And I think that also then applies to ourselves, right? Absolutely. There is no blame. I love this line.

It's entirely possible to embrace responsibility without taking on the useless baggage of guilt or blame. I think that is so important and yet really difficult to do. Well, especially in this society, because this is a society that worships blame. When there's something wrong, we always want to find who's guilty, who's responsible. I mean, who's responsible in a culpable sense, you know, so that we live in a culture of blame. I mentioned in the book, literally the saddest letter I ever received

was from a guy who had read my book on addiction in the realm of Langerbos, in which I talk about childhood trauma being the template for addiction. And he writes to me, I find your book very interesting but i can't blame my mother it's because it's my own fault that i became a shit you know and there's such a lack of self-compassion i never blamed the mother in the book i point out that

it's not proper to blame parents because they were just acting out their own childhood traumas like mark woolen the family therapist says in the title of his book, it didn't start with you. So that's why the blaming finger finds no target. But this person was blaming themselves so harshly, which kept them from recovery. Yep. Yeah, I think it's interesting because when I got sober in Columbus, Ohio,

in a 12-step program in 1994, you can imagine it was not an extraordinarily trauma-informed culture, we might say, right? And the idea there, which was drummed into my head very strongly, was it's nobody's fault but yours. You need to take responsibility. There was a kernel of truth in that that was helpful, which is I do have to take responsibility for this and nobody else is going to stop this addiction what i found though over time is that then i also had to incorporate this other element which says you know what what happened to me imprinted on me and caused me to be the way I am. And no blame, but it still needs addressed. It happened to me and it affects me.

Yeah. So the distinction we have to make here is between fault and responsibility. Yes. And I'm not the first one to make this point. Responsibility, if you break down the word, response-ability. Nobody else can respond to your circumstances but you. Nobody else can respond to the imprints that you carry, but you. You are response able, but you're not at fault. You make a point in the book, going back to this repression idea a little bit, you know,

that we repress. You talk about a study where there was a really large gap in between what was happening to someone and what they reported their response was yeah so when we talk about well repression we think oh i consciously i'm pushing that away but the mechanism is entirely maybe not entirely but is to a large degree unconscious we don't know we're doing it yeah repression is unconscious suppression is conscious okay chronically they're both harmful but repression is even more harmful for example in a study they were studying people's physiological stress responses in response to some negative stimulus and these people who had malignancy actually there were melanoma patients.

Their physiological responses to stress were the same as everybody else's, but they reported that they weren't stressed at all. And that goes back to that disconnection that I talked about. Yeah. Is that one of the ways we survive childhood trauma is to disconnect from our feelings. Now, if you don't know that you're stressed, you're going to be walking into stressful situations all the time without any capacity to protect yourself. It's like if you had no sense of heat, you'd be putting your hand in a fire all the time. And that would burn you. Suppression is when I'm angry, but I'm going to suppress it. Now, sometimes that's necessary. I mean, if I had a gun at your head, you might be

very angry with me, but that might not be the best time to express the anger. To give a very triggering example, you might say. But if you chronically suppressed it, that would have a negative effect on you. So I talk you know james baldwin the great black american writer he talks about that to be a black in the united states is to live in a constant state of suppressed anger and in the long term chronic suppression even if you're aware of it can be harmful suppression sometimes is okay chronically it harmful. Repression is always harmful in the long term. And so how do we start to even know that we're repressing? Let's take this study. These people were being insulted and physiologically we're seeing stress response. But if you ask them,

they say, it doesn't bother me. Right? They're not lying. They're not lying at all. They're not lying, but there's lying at all. They're not lying, but there's a disconnect and it's very difficult to even know what's happening. Yeah. How do you start to identify like, oh, you know, there's repression. You say in the book, and I think this is so interesting. You say one of the healthiest things about me, my capacity to take it, to survive, to bounce back, to prosper is intimately connected with my biggest neurotic liability, my facility in disconnecting from my feelings.

So we've got this thing that on one hand, to a certain degree, is a virtue, but taken too far becomes a great enemy of ours. Well, let's put it into context. That phrase is from Susan Sontag, who died of cancer. Yep. And she denied the connection between emotions and physiology. So I used that quote to show how ironic it is. Here she's actually describing the very mechanism that triggered her cancer, and she's describing it as a virtue. Now, here's the thing. If only poor Susan Sontag

had had a physician who could have told her, listen, we're going to deal with the physiological aspects of your cancer. But once we've done that, let's also look at the emotional factors that may have contributed to it. And yes, repression is one of them. And your repression, as she knew, was caused by the fact that she learned to do that in response to her mother who abandoned her. So what I'm saying is the body will send you signals. The body will make you sick. The body will say no when you didn't say no. It'll show up in a form of mental health condition like depression,

or it'll show up in a form of anxiety, or it'll show up in a form of back spasms or stomach aches or chronic colds or skin rashes or dry mouth or migraines. The body will give you these signals. The problem is that people are not trained to listen to their bodies and to recognize that these symptoms aren't random misfortunes. They're the body talking to you, trying to tell you to pay attention. Now, if only the physicians understood this, if only medical doctors understood the scientifically demonstrated links between emotion and physiology,

if they actually understood that disease and symptoms are very often the body signaling our a loss of connecting to oneself and repression and all that then when disease shows up that could be a learning process and unfortunately physicians are not trained to do that they only deal with the biological aspects but not the whole unity now in the book i have a chapter called diseases teacher and many people who actually, through their illness, learned what their body was trying to tell them about the loss of authenticity. We also give exercises to people. Like, pay attention to yourself. Like, at the end of the day, just check in with your body.

How are you feeling? What is your body trying to tell you? Make that a regular exercise. No infant is separated from their bodies. Have you ever met an infant who says, I got this stomach ache, but I'm not going to bother my mommy and my daddy because they work so hard and I don't want to stress them any further. So we're born connected. Our bodies keep trying to bring that connection back to us by speaking to us in the language of symptom and illness. So we can learn from the body.

We don't have to get sick. We don't have to wait for that. We can learn to listen to our bodies before some illness forces us to wake up. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No 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.

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senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Is your intention here to correct for, if we're all the way over on this extreme where we say when we're dealing with illness, the only thing we're dealing with is, you know, the body and the actual symptoms and, you know, our current medical model where we don't take these emotional aspects in at all. You're not saying that we should go to the other extreme where we go. The only reason that anybody ever gets sick is because they had a bad thought. You're saying that we're so far over to one extreme. We need to treat the whole situation. It's all important. The medical is important,

all that, and so is the emotional. We need to make this a more holistic treatment. That's the whole point. Look, I'm a trained physician. I have nothing but awe at the capacity of modern medicine to perform miracles. I'm not here to denigrate or deny the value of modern scientific medicine, but it's one-sided, it's narrow, it's shallow. And my knock against medical training is that we don't look at all the evidence that challenges our purely biological outlook, all the evidence that shows the relationship of personal relationships, trauma, the mind-body unity, culture, and their impacts on health or illness. We ignore that completely in medical training. So therefore, we're functioning with half our brains tied behind our backs.

Our capacity to help people heal is so much deeper and so much more empowered if we looked at the whole picture. That's all I'm asking for. Yeah. I wanted to make that important clarification because, you know, some people would worry that we're going too far away from any medicine and that's not what you're talking about. Let's talk a little bit about the healing path. We said earlier, you know, I love that line.

We're never as close as we hope. We're never as far as we fear. You talk about some universal obstacles to healing. Yeah. One of the universal obstacles to healing is trauma itself, which imposes a shame base of the self, which actually makes you believe that you're not even worthy of healing, or that you're not capable of it so that me as a physician and healer and best-selling author and somebody that a lot of people turn to for guidance had this fixed belief that i can help everybody else but i can't heal myself that my trauma was surly and so deep and so entrenched that it was beyond repair.

Now, intellectually, I always knew that wasn't true. But on the emotional level, it's how I operated, you know. And so one of the biggest obstacles are these trauma-imposed self-beliefs about our potentials and who we actually are. That's the biggest. How did you work around that? I think that's a really important point. You will hear people say, and I know we've all thought this at point, I'm too broken. Yeah, that'll work for you. Yeah. But I'm too broken or deeper. I'm not worth it. How did you get around that? Because you had a ton of knowledge at your disposal. Yeah. all the intellectual knowledge that I had wasn't enough to rid me of that particular emotionally stamped belief.

Well, somebody once said to me that I have this brilliant intellect that knows how to cut through all kinds of nonsense to look at the truth. But the same sharp knife of my intellect ends up cutting me. But the same sharp knife of my intellect ends up cutting me so that in some ways I had to recognize that I can't just listen to my intellect. That's the first point. That's an important tool as long as I'm wielding it consciously. But if I'm unconscious, it'll turn against me. That's the first thing. And then, you know, throughout the course of my life, in my marriage, there's been a lot of healing, a lot of repair. So I've learned, you know what? I can heal. I could be more present. I can be intimate. I can open up. I can be vulnerable and not be destroyed.

So that's been an important ground of healing for me, my relationship with my wife, to whom the book is actually dedicated then there are healing experience that i've had from mentors and and healers and therapists and so on then there's the psychedelic work that i've done there's a spiritual work that i've done if i had to choose one area that's dominant i'd say it's the relationship but that was all supported by all these other modalities as well. So that's how. And also you have to develop, I think that probably you understand very well, which is patience, which is that it does not have to happen all at once.

It doesn't have to happen as a buggy, epiphany, cataclysmically transformative experience. It's a lifelong process. Some of those experiences, which can be so mind-opening, there's still an integration period that comes after that. Like, okay, I saw this truth, but okay, how do I actually start to now live this in the moment-to-moment part of my life? I mean, sometimes those things are so big, there's a major psychic change and it happens kind of right away. But my experience has been those things need a lot of integration time.

I've known people, very few, who've had those absolute, unitary, transformative experiences. I'm not wired that way, at least not so far. So for me and most people I know, it's more of a process where we have glimpses of the truth and then we have to integrate that into our lives. The truth doesn't automatically start manifesting itself in a way that we're fully present to it. So it's a process. And that's why I've said this before, but I've written my own epitaph. And what I want engraved on my stone that will mark my earthly remains is, this was a lot more work than I anticipated.

It's a process, people, and it's a lifelong process. Thank God. You just made me think of a song I love by a musician. I love Frank Turner, and the song is called Eulogy. And at the end, the basic thing on his eulogy is, you know, at least I fucking tried, but that's really a beautiful sentiment when you kind of boil it down is, you know, I did the best with what was given to me. I made a conscious effort. And I think so much of what

you're talking about is about bringing conscious intention, because one of the things, this idea of the repression that these people who care about the emotional needs of others, care about duty and responsibility, you know, all these things are closely linked to positive traits like compassion, honor, diligence, you know, kindness, generosity. And so it's really about that conscious question, what's happening here? Why am I doing this? You know, I've talked about this on the show a lot between when I say to myself, I have to go see my mother. Versus when I go, I'm making a choice to go see my mother based on values that I've examined about what's important to me. Now, again, there's a lot of work to do that.

But that conscious intention, like what's really going on here? I love the idea in Buddhism of near and far enemies, right? You know, if we talk about a term like equanimity, it's far enemy is being a jerk, right? Or being a drama queen. It's near enemy is indifference. That's right. And to take your example of your mom and apply it to say my own work as a physician. To take your example of your mom and apply it to, say, my own work as a physician.

Am I being driven to be wanted by people and to be respected by people and to be admired by them? Or am I being called to help them because that's what satisfies me? Yeah. No. When I'm being driven, I'm not in charge. Something else is in charge. Yeah. When I'm called, I can consciously decide, are we being driven or being called? Two different propositions, even though the action from the outside might look the same.

Yes. And my experience has been, there's an element of both, right? And I have to try and work with that. It's never quite so clean as like, all right, this is completely a calling because I'm like, well, yeah, there's still those emotional guilt messages that are in there too. And so, you know, what's most prominent? What's the lion's share of it? You know, it would be nice if it was just that cleanly cut. Well, I think that's the work is to distinguish the two and to go back to your question about wolves. Which one are you going to feed, the calling or the drivenness, you know?

And when you're being driven, that's going to have an calling or the drivenness you know yeah and when you're being driven that's going to have an impact not only on you but also on the relationship because if you're driven to see your mom how are you going to feel about it afterwards you're going to resent her yes yes and so you go you don't say no because you want to be closer to her and then you end up resenting her which drives you further apart so the driven part will also always have negative consequences yeah the calling part will only have positive consequences yeah so let's talk about the four a's that promote healing you actually add two more on at the end which maybe we can get to but can you share what those are yeah i don't know what order I put them in,

but the first one would be authenticity, which we already talked about that need to be ourselves, which begins by noticing where we're not being authentic and just asking ourselves, well, why not? What's happening here? What belief do I have that keeps me from showing up as authentic? So that's the first one, authenticity. Agency, which is that i'm the one who is in charge of my life i'm the one who decides what happens to me in my psyche in my body

then there is acceptance which is not tolerance for what's intolerable but accepting this is how things are now what do i do about it in other words, we don't deny reality. You know, if I lose an election, I'm going to accept that I lost the election. I'm not going to deny it. You know, that's what acceptance will look like. I'm not going to rail and create hostility because I can deal with reality. If I'm not strong enough to deal with reality, if my ego is so weak that I have to win every contest I ever enter, then you're not into acceptance and you're going to create a lot of

conflict within and outside yourself. So that's acceptance. Acceptance doesn't mean that you have to put up with it. Acceptance just says, this is how it is. Now, what do I do about it? So that's acceptance. You make an important point about acceptance too, that it's not just accepting externally what's happening. It's accepting internally what's happening. I'm angry. I'm sad. When we think of acceptance, I think we often think of just, we have to accept what's out there, but you make the really important point that it's also accepting internally what's actually occurring. Yeah. So if I lose the election, I might be sad. And then I'll say, you know what? I'm very sad I

lost this election because I really wanted to serve you longer. And I have certain ideas that I wanted to put into practice. Now I won't have a chance. I also feel sad for all the people that supported me. So I'm going to be with my sadness. sadness i'm not gonna deny that i'm sad and pretend that i'm somehow instead outraged and angry and so on so i don't mean to keep harping on that one very obvious example of a very traumatized man yeah but uh that's what acceptance looks like is you accept the internal state you accept grief you accept the fact that no i wasn't loved the way i needed to be loved. And that hurts. I'm going to accept that pain rather than to run away from it into drink or opiate. Yeah.

Or into seeking sexual satisfaction at every turn of the page. You know, so that's acceptance. And then anger. We talked about the importance of healthy anger. If I were to do the book again, I would put in a fifth one, which is awareness. And I somehow missed that one, but it should be in there as well. Yeah. It's almost the meta skill, right? That makes all of this possible. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it was so obvious that I just didn't see it.

Yeah. Yep. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about a meeting you had. I don't know that I'm going to get her name right here. Bettina Goering? Goering, yeah. Share that. I just found that an absolutely fascinating thing that happened to you and a beautiful thing. And Hermann Göring was Hitler's second in command. He was the head of the Luftwaffe that killed hundreds of thousands of people, the German Air Force. He was also the head of the Gestapo, I think, at some point. And he was Hitler's designated heir for a long time. He was also an opiate addict and a food addict and a highly traumatized person. Now, his grandniece, Bettina Göring, was born after the war from a very traumatized person. Now, his grandniece, Bettina Gurian,

was born after the war from a very traumatized family. And there are some filmmakers that made a documentary about her, but also about me. So they thought, you know, her and I would have something to say to each other. So me as a Jewish infant who almost lost my life and certainly was deeply traumatized during the Nazi genocide that took place in Hungary, where five million people were killed in three months, including my grandparents.

And as I said earlier, including almost myself and my mother as well. It's very close. So growing was a big pillar of that criminal regime. And his grandniece carried all the guilt. She's one of these empaths that just absorbs everything. So she had a very dark psyche. And she actually knew about my work and reached out to me. Could we talk? So we did.

So we did. And she told me that she had this healing experience where she actually consciously decided to enter the psyche of her grand uncle. She said it was horrendous. She's an empath, so she can do that. But she said it was the darkest night of the spirit that she could ever have imagined. It was horrible, she said said to be inside his psyche but in doing so and in coming to the other side she cleansed herself as well and that experience and the very contact with her the very fact that i am talking to this human being who comes from this terrible legacy of criminal insanity and me who are almost a victim to it with my life but certainly has been stamped by that same criminal insanity now we're talking to each other about

healing and about understanding each other i thought boy the sky's the limit yeah i thought it was a beautiful part of the book also and a really touching story and when you were talking about her inhabiting grand uncle's psyche you know I got chills about how dark it must have been in there to be that man. Yeah. And the darkness that he imposed on the world as a result. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an awful chapter. Well, Gabor, thank you so much for coming on. It is always such a pleasure to talk with you. I really loved this new book. I got a lot out of it personally, some things I need to be continuing to look at and working on, and I appreciate you and your work. So thank you. Likewise, and it's always a pleasure to speak with you. And thanks for the close reading of the book you seem to have done

that allowed us to engage in this deep conversation. So thank you for that. You are very welcome. It was a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely

thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

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