The Resilient Mind - Being Too Nice Can Be Harmful - Gabor Mate

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Dr. Gabor Maté is a renowned speaker and bestselling author, highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, stress, and childhood development. Rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Maté weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experiences to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people. His approach promotes both personal healing and the well-being of those around them. In this episode, tune in to gain valuable wisdom from one of the leading voices in holistic health and personal development. Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Being Too Nice Can Be Harmful with Gabba Marty. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. There's a deep need to belong, a deep need to be loyal and a sense of betrayal. When that loyalty is somehow insulted, if you didn't feel to get the love that you needed, you'll be consumed by being liked.

and then you be very likable and very nice. And you might become a helpful, very helping individual, which is a coping pattern. Now, you can be genuinely nice and genuinely supportive of others and still look out to your own needs. That's human nature, I think. But a lot of people are very nice and likable and helpful by suppressing their own needs.

That's a coping mechanism. Everybody says how nice they are. And when they die at age 50 of cancer, Everybody shows about their funeral and they weep, about how nice they were, how selfless they were. The child basically is two needs. You have the need for attachment, which is the seeking of closeness and proximity with another human being,

and fundamentally the attachment dynamic is the most powerful dynamic in human life. And its basic purpose is the protection and nurturing of the young, so that infants attached to their parents and parents attached to infants forward the purpose of in one hand of being taken care of and the other of taking care of. So that's attachment and we're wired for attachment all our lives. It's the most important dynamic we have and as General and Patreras could tell you, you know, that we're wired for attachment and sometimes

when our attachment needs get sent in certain directions, it'll trump everything else. That's one need that we have is for attachment. Without attachment, there's no human life. It's just impossible. And without mating, without communities, we would not have survived as a species either. As rugged individuals,

we will not have got off the first evolutionary base, let alone come to where we are right now. So the whole idea of human beings is competitive and aggressive, total nonsense. But the other need that we have is for authenticity to be ourselves. And that again has to do with. survival if you're not in touch with yourself out in the wild you don't survive so authenticity is being in touch with yourself and being able to be able to act on your

awareness of self in relationship to the environment I mean that's just authenticity so if I feel something I pay attention to that if I don't I'm in danger so we have this need for authenticity but if a child is confronted with dilemma, that if I'm authentic, express my feelings, then my attachments are threatened because my parents can't handle it because they're too stressed, depressed, or traumatized themselves, then perforce the child will not automatically, I should say, will automatically but not consciously suppress their authenticity. And so that the suppression of gut feelings and authenticity is a coping mechanism. That means I'm no longer in touch with my needs. I no longer

pay attention to my feelings, my emotions. I will no longer be aware of them. I won't express them. I won't know what I need, which is all kinds of implications. But one of them is, is that they'll be compulsively then, I may then compulsively serve the needs of others, ignoring my own, hence disease. Or I may then develop on kinds of false needs, which then really are where addictions are all about. So that it's that irresolvable tension between authenticity and attachment

that many children in our society are faced with that results in their self-suppression. And that's one of the outcomes, not the only possible outcome, but one possible outcome is then that niceness is a coping mechanism. Almost anybody

when they're being authentic has a sense of them being inauthentic. How do we know that we're being inauthentic? Years before I had any of these concepts formally worked out in my mind or had read much about it, but I already knew when I was betraying myself and being less than myself and being other than myself. How did I know that?

There's some inner knowledge from many of us simply because the authentic self, not that it disappears, and then when we're not in touch with it, there's a kind of a shame, there's a kind of a suffering that happens. So that shame and that internal suffering, that sense of self-betrayal is our sure guide that we're not being ourselves. On one level, that happens to a lot of people.

And then we may look good in the eyes of others, and yet internally we suffer shame because we know that we're not being ourselves. When we say how do we know that for many of us is an internal knowledge that arises. Why? Why? Because that essential self hasn't gone away and is calling to us. us and we don't feel right when we betray it or when we're out of contact with it. Now, that doesn't happen for many people. That doesn't happen for everybody. For some people, then, it takes some catastrophe. So what I'm saying is that at some point or another, if you're not in touch with that inner

voice, if you don't hear it, the body will speak to you a lot and clear. You're going to get something happened to you. And sometimes that'll happen in the form of illness or something. symptoms, then the body's talking to you. The body's saying no when you're not saying no. If the voice doesn't speak to you directly or if it speak to you don't listen, your body at some point is going to kick in. Or you're going to get depressed or anxious or something else.

Or something will happen in your personal relationships. And at that point you can say, well, I'm not with the right partner. Screw them, it's all their fault, which many of us say. for some people, it becomes the opening of a door where we begin to look, okay, what in here wasn't authentic, what in here wasn't genuine? How did I create this situation? How do I keep creating these situations over and over again? Am I just a victim of bad luck? Or is there some pattern here? In other words, something happens, some difficulty happens to shake you out of your complacent belief that things are just fine the way they are.

And as the California-based great, great teacher, H. Alma says that the most difficult thing, things that happen to us are also the most compassionate things. Because basically, there are ways of a part of it, how he puts it, a part of us, a part of us that loves us more than anything else, post these roadblocks in our way saying that's not the way that's not the way that's not the way you better know that you know

so there's roadblocks in a way to bring us to ourselves you know and so we can look upon our difficulties as problems to get rid of or we can look at them as the teachings to bring us to yourselves

that once you reconnect with your authentic self, a lot of medical conditions can abate and even remit completely. I'm not promising that, I'm just saying I've seen it too often, and there's too many examples also written up in the literature. So that, yeah, healing is always possible. But out of a hundred women with breast cancer, only seven carry the gene. 93 do not. Out of 100 women with the gene, not all of them will get the disease. no they are much higher risk no question about it

it just means that for the most of what Jesus don't determine illnesses what then does and by the way this is true for whether we're talking about most physical analysis and mental analysis so to talk about genetics is kind of a lazy person's way of trying to explain something because scientifically there's a very little basis to it so for example all these genitals

determined mental health health conditions. They say about ADHD, which is something I've written about after my own diagnosis in my 50s, that it's the most heritable mental illness there is. Well, as I say in this book, to say that ADHD is the most heritable mental illness is like saying that quartz is the most chewable crystal. Because it's not true. It's neither a disease nor is it genetic. Nobody has ever found a single gene that determines any mental health condition. Nobody's ever found a group of genes that determine any mental health condition. Nobody has ever found a group of genes that if you don't have them, you will not have a certain mental health conditions.

There are a large group of genes that the more of them you have, the more you risk, and more at risk you are for any number of mental health conditions, but no specific ones, which It's reasons that the genes cannot cause the disease. Because if they did, when they showed up, so should the disease in every case. But it doesn't. And you can have the same disease, or if you want to call it that, but even without the genes. Because the fact is, scientifically speaking,

that genes are turned on and off by the environment. So it's a question of what kind of environment is acting on certain genes that will promote one kind of... kind of development or less healthy kind of development. And so that loss of authenticity for reasons I will not go into explaining now, but maybe you'll intuit to a significant degree and you'll certainly get that information in this book and my other books is that lots of authenticity is a significant cause of illness and distress, physical and mental.

And I love quoting Hungarian doctors for some reason, I don't know why. And Dr. Yano Shohans, Celia, S-E-L-Y-E, who was the preeminent research of stress. In fact, he coined the word stress in the way that we use it today. And he's the one that showed in the laboratory of stressing animals will have physiological impacts on their immune system, on our hormonal apparatus on their intestines. And Selyer was not only a brilliant physician, he was also a brilliant researcher, He was also a humanist, and he wrote in his book on stress. He said that most of our tensions and frustrations

come from compulsive needs to act the role of someone that were not. So in authenticity is our biggest source of stress, he pointed out. But that in authenticity, he may not have realized it wasn't a fault, it wasn't kind of a mistake, it wasn't a moral failure, it was an adaptive. response to our early environment. So the question then becomes not to judge ourselves for being an authentic, not to judge ourselves from being disconnected from ourselves,

but to understand that actually those are normal responses to an abnormal environment. But if you want to become healthy, guess what? The word health originates in a word for wholeness. So if trauma is the disconnection from ourselves, then health is the reconnection, which is entirely possible, entirely available for those. Because that capacity for healing is simply in our nature as organisms. And there's a part of us that can never be destroyed.

It can be obscured. We can lose connection with it. I certainly have for long periods of my life. But it's always there, as long as there's consciousness, this capacity for healing, for rejoining our... disconnected parts and to become whole and to heal, that's just with us all our lives. And so that I don't have a negative message for you. The message I have is that healing, trauma daunting and damaging is it can be both on a social

and certainly on the individual level. It can also be healed. Because trauma is not what happened to you, but what happened inside you as a result. And if she's still carrying the imprints and residues over, what happened to you, that can be healed. If I got the message that I wasn't worthy and important, just for existing, that I had to prove my worth to the world, and that created certain behaviors and on my part,

I can actually come to the conclusion. It was never true. It was never true that I wasn't worth it. It was never true that you were not worth it. It was never true. It was simply a conclusion you came to as a result of what happened to you. And if you stop trying to prove to the world

by being a hard worker or being extraordinarily pleasant or focusing on your looks all the time or focusing on your successes and achievements, but just dared to show up as the vulnerable creature that we all are and reconnected with your true vulnerable self, which at the time,

adaptively, it was too painful for you to experience, no longer that helpless child, well, then they just means that healing is possible to you. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.