The Resilient Mind - Is an Unhealed Wound Secretly Ruining Your Life? - Dr Gabor Maté

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Dr. Gabor Maté is a Canadian physician and author. He has worked in family practices and specializes in childhood development and trauma, including long-term effects on physical and mental health, such as autoimmune diseases, cancer, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and addiction.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to is an unhealed wound secretly ruining your life with Dr. Gaba Marty. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. How do you define trauma? I know society has defined it in its own way, but how do you define it? Yeah. I define it very specifically.

It's not something bad that happens to you. It's not that, you know, I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized. No, you weren't. You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized. Trauma means a wound. That's the literal meaning of the word. It's a Greek word for wounding.

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

We get triggered. That's what triggering means, by the way. Some old wound gets activated or touched. And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over. And scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick. It has no nerve ending, so there's no feeling. in it so people traumatized disconnected from their feelings.

Scarred tissue is rigid, it's not flexible. So we lose kind of response flexibility. So when something happens, we tend to react in typical, stereotypical, predictable, dysfunctional ways because of the rigidity. And scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh. So people are traumatized tend to be stuck in emotional states

that characterized their development when they were traumatized. So when somebody says to you, do me such a baby, it doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's some truth to it. It means that you're probably reacting according to the lines of some wound

that you sustained as an infant, and now you're reacting as if that wound was happening all over again. This is what one of my friends in the trauma world, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past. So something happens in the present, and we react

as if we're back there in the past when this first happened. And we're not in the present moment at all. And I was trying to figure out how many people, as a percentage of the population, have a trauma. But then I read this stat with 60% of adults say that they've had sort of a traumatic early upbringing or whatever or traumatic events from their childhood. But then I thought maybe everybody has trauma.

It depends on how we understand trauma. So if we understand, and trauma is only the really terrible things that happen to people, which do happen to people. You know, in the book I talked about a British friend of mine about no living in Canada. They are a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher and a psychologist and an artist actually. And they grew up in some orphanage here in Britain where they were racially taunted every morning. You know, words that are in the book, by her permission, which I'm not going to cite here publicly. And that gave her a sense of deficient, a sense of self that I'm just not good enough that I don't belong and so on.

There's those obvious traumas or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused. So men who are sexually abused, according to Canadian study, have tripled a rate of heart attacks as adults, you know, and all kinds of physiological reasons. But that should be the case. So there's those self-evident big T traumas that we call big T trauma, T with a capital T. of the capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that.

If you include all the known factors such as physical, sexual or emotional abuse, spanking, by the way, has not been shown to be as traumatic as harsher forms of physical abuse. Spanking, which is still recommended by so-called experts, who should remain unnamed for the moment,

the death of a parent, violence in a family. violence, parental violence against each other. A parent being jailed. A parent being mentally ill. Did I say a parent being addicted? A rancor's divorce. These are the identified big traumas, big T traumas,

not to mention poverty, not to mention extreme inequality, war and so on. But then, if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you, it's the wound. people can be wounded not just by bad things happening to them

but small children can be wounded in loving families where they don't get their needs met I mean that's obvious in the physical sense if a child doesn't get proper nutrition their body will suffer their mind will suffer we're also creatures with emotional needs as important as our physical needs

so when the child's emotional needs are not met that child is wounded And that's what we call small T trauma, which is not the big ticket events, such as I described, but just the child's need to be loved unconditionally, to be held when distressed, to be responded to, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed their full range of emotion without them being stamped on in the name of so-called discipline, the right to play creatively, spontaneously, out there in nature, not with these damn digital gadgets that subvert and hijacked the child's imagination, but spontaneous play that's essential for brain development. So what I'm saying is that

when these needs are not for the unconditional loving attachment relationship, when those needs are frustrated, children are also hurt. And I call that trauma as well, because it shows up later in life as the impact of painful wounds. So trauma. in this society, for all kinds of reasons, is far more common than me imagine. At 70 years old, having that psilocybin experience, coming to that realization or having that sort of having that response to your therapist where they take the role of your mother and you're a one-year-old,

how does somebody at 70 years old go about correcting that, that sort of interpretation you had of that traumatic early event? Well, by bringing up to the conscious level, then when I noticed that sense of guilt or responsibility in me, I say, oh, that's what it's about. So it's the meaning, see, trauma as I define it, is not about what happens to us. It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. And so the wound in my trauma means wound. So the wound in this case is my sense of deficiency or not being good enough, not being worthy enough.

Once I realize that, oh, this has got nothing to do with anything except. this interpretation that I made of my own experience all those years ago, then when I noticed it, I can no longer believe it. I don't have to anymore longer be a subject to that interpretation of myself in the world. So awareness is one step. It's not adequate, but it's an essential step towards letting go. That one belief that you weren't good enough. Yeah.

How did that rear its ugly head throughout your life? It made me a workaholic physician because they had to keep proving my worth. And it doesn't matter. Now, I don't know if you ever had an addiction, but the nature of it is that we're trying to get from the outside something that only can arise and fulfill us from the inside. So when you're looking at it from the outside, it's addictive because you get it temporarily, but then that internal emptiness,

that whole never goes away. So it has to be filled over and over and over again. It can only be done so temporarily. So it becomes runaway addictive. So then work becomes an addiction because I keep trying to prove my worth. And it doesn't matter how many times, you know, I may show up in a positive way at the beginning of someone life or at the end of somebody else's life or any time in between. It never fills that emptiness that my sense of lack of worthiness creates.

So that's one way it shows up. Another way it shows up as if in my relationship I don't feel as satisfied. My wife doesn't please me the way I like her too. Then I get angry. But what am I getting angry? I'm getting angry because it's my sense of not being good enough that's being now revealed. It gets uncovered, this self-accusation. but I get angry at her

because her job is to make me not feel that you know we get into this relationship for all kinds of reasons some of them are conscious some are not some are positive some are come out of trauma and in my case I want that relationship to prove to me how good I am

so when it isn't proving not then I get upset with my partner you know well except the gap is inside me not inside it's not coming from her so it shows a showed up in my parenting. It shows up all over the place.

Well, part of the toxicity of the culture that I talk about in this book is that it actually rewards that kind of emptiness or that desperate seeking to fill that emptiness. Because, you know, you get rewarded. You make a lot of money. A lot of people admire you. You get to feel good about yourself. Mind you, my guess is that good feeling is only temporary, at least if my example, is any guy that feeling good because somebody from the outside values you is only a temporary

salve for the for the wound that's inside but the world actually rewards it you know so you're a work-collar like doctor great you make more money and all these people respect you meanwhile you're hollowing yourself from the from the inside and you're not available for your family you know so that that's part of the craziness of this culture and it's like the it's like the hedonistic treadmill in a in a sense because you just never enough is never enough as you say. So the last achievement needs to be surpassed by a greater achievement for me to get an applaud or a clap. I've never really made the connection that the reason why I'm a workaholic is because

I'm trying to prove to the world that I'm enough, but I think that it's entirely true. Yeah. So in your case, like race and class in this society of inequality are certainly traumatic, potentially traumatic inputs, as I pointed in this book and, you know, to the degree that it affects people's physiology, you know. But also then, I don't know, your family of origin or what kind of relationship you have with your parents, but there also may have been a sense, like I got with my mom for, you know, reasons and for whatever it might have happened in your family, maybe you got the sense

as well that even in your family of origin, you weren't good enough somehow. So my mom would scream at my dad for like seven hours a day. My dad would just sit there. Okay. And so my early memories of like looking at my mom and dad are. of this kind of violent verbally, not like physically, this incredibly stressful screaming, one person screaming at the other. That's what I remember.

But from reading what you've written in this book and from what you've said now, I actually might have learned that I was the problem to some degree. Children interpret it that way. That's just the whole point. That's what I mean about kids being narcissists. I don't mean that in the negative sense. I just, I mean, actually, they think it's all about them. So if your mother is unhappy, it's your fault.

You know, and you're not good enough. So then you have to go out there and work to prove yourself, to prove to the world and to yourself that you're good enough. So that, going back to your first question about how these things show up in our lives, that's how they show up. I was so compelled by that when I read about that because I've started to really understand the value of creativity in all of our lives, regardless of whether we have the luxury of being called an artist on

not. And so what in your view is the importance of... Well, you're singing my tune here, if I may say it that way, because I quote in this book, there's a great Hungarian-Canadian stress researcher called Janusz S-E-L-Y-E. Celia is the one who actually coined the word stress in the sense that we use it today. And he's the one that showed in a laboratory of stress diminishes the immune system and disorganizes the hormones and ulcerates the stomach and all this kind of stuff. But Salli also said, and I quote him here, what is in us must out?

What is in us must out? That we all have to follow our key of your urges in the way that nature prepared for us. Otherwise, we can be hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. I'm paraphrasing very closely. So we are created in an image of God. I mean, what are your religious views are? But that sense that we created in images of God means that we are creators

because the essence of God is creation. In fact, we call God the creator and we call the result of that creation. If we're created and if we're offshoots of that creative dynamic in the universe, then it means that it's in us to create. and whatever form that takes I mean you know you don't want to see me

do art you know unless you I can do a pretty good stick figure you know but I'm married to an artist so that creativity doesn't have to take the form of formal art but it does have to take some flow of something that's inside you

that needs to come out otherwise as Celia says you get hopelessly hemmed in by frustration and so in that sense everybody's got that creative urge and that may take the form of social intercourse it might take the form of gardening I don't care

communing with nature athletic expression I don't care what but there's somebody everybody's got it and if people don't realize they have it it's only because life has hemmed them in and they're too busy

and sometimes they are trying to make a living or trying to survive or too disconnected from themselves but it's in all of us and to the extent that we don't give it expression we suffer. One of the things that really hemps it in is the prospect that we might not be good at it

because we think to express ourselves creatively, we kind of join a competition of sorts. And that's a trap we can fall into. So if I'm going to DJ, I need to become a good DJ, but in social comparison or else I don't want to... But what I've come to learn is, in fact, the act of DJing alone in my kitchen at midnight is the reward, regardless of outcome

or whether there's a crowd there, if it's just me and my dog listening. That is, the expression is the reward, not the achievement or the medal that I might get. Yeah, not the external. Well, look, I went through that in the writing of this book. So here I am this, you know, a writer who writes about, you know, trauma and, you know, healing.

And all of a sudden, I'm in a panic because I'm writing a book. And I realized that the problem was that you talked about identifying with your work. So I had identified with this book. So the problem wasn't the book. because let's say I write the book and it's not a success. I mean, okay, big headline in the Sunday Times.

Book, not a big success. How big a big deal is that in the history of the universe? But if I identify with the book and it's not going well, then if the book fails, then I'm failing as a person, which then goes back to my very earliest concern about not being worth it. So once I disidentified,

once I say, no, this is just a book. It may be a good book, it may be an important book, maybe a book that doesn't hit the mark. But it's only a book. And how it goes, says nothing about me or my worth. Once I could decouple that, then I could confidently and much more comfortably go back to the writing of it. But I went through that crisis. It seems like a bit of a paradox that the lack of self-worth would motivate someone to create great things because they want the approval. But at the same time, make the process so agonizing because their self-esteem seems to be on the line.

Yeah. Well, this sense of self-worth is on the line. Well, that dynamic was in me. Once I realized it, I let go of it. You know, so it didn't dominate me in the end. And honest to God, by the time I finished the book, I'm not just saying it's in retrospect. It's a best seller now in several countries.

But I actually said to myself and I meant it, now I've done the book, that's what matters. I've said what was in me to say. How the world reacts? I can't control. and it doesn't actually matter on a fundamental level it's not that I don't want this book to be excess

I mean success of course I wanted to sell 10 zillion copies but that doesn't define my self-worth or how I function in the world or how I feel about myself honestly does not and I understood that by the time I finished working on it so once it's done it's out there doing its work

or not doing its work but I don't have to hang my own sense of self on how the book does. Because at that point, that's an outcome you can't control, right? So trying to control that would be anxiety. Yeah. Well, you can't control it, no.

As it relates to treatments, how do you think that the medical profession and the psychological profession would respond differently if we removed this idea that there is a normal? How would our approaches change to treating people? Well, that's, it's a, a multi-layered answer.

First of all, we would recognize that our diagnoses are not explanations for anything. So, you know, I've been diagnosed with ADD, you know, legitimately so. My first book was on it. But it doesn't explain anything. So I tune out easily, very easily, you know, and sometimes when I don't, often when I don't want to, but, you know, unless I'm highly motivated. So you might say this person has ADD, how do we know because he tunes out a lot? Why does he tune a lot? It's got ADD.

How do we know he's got ADD? Because he tunes out a lot. So first of all, we have to understand that our understanding of normal and what's outside the normal, they don't, doesn't explain anything. They can describe, if you describe my mental functioning as that of somebody who's got an automatic tendency to tune out, you'd be accurate. So as a description, it's helpful as an explanation as to why this person isn't behaving quote unquote normally. It doesn't explain anything. Now if you understood that I spent my infancy under very difficult circumstances where I was very stressed because of all the stuff

I already talked about. And that tuning out was a normal response to those circumstances as a way of protecting myself from the stress of it all. And this is happening when my brain was developing. Then you'd understand there's nothing abnormal by tuning out. In fact, it is the normal response to a set of abnormal circumstances. So that's the first point. And I could go through the same kind of dialectic with all manner of physical and mental diseases, by the way, so-called. The second point is...

Why do you say so-called? Well, look, the disease model is, as long as we understand it's a model, it's okay. When I think it describes reality fully, it doesn't. So, for example, we talk about mental illnesses. And we're assuming that there's a kind of definite pathology there, just as in rheumatoiditis, you can describe the inflammation of the joints and the blood levels of certain antibodies being abnormal and hormonal levels being disturbed.

You know, we're making the same assumption in mental illness. There's no such evidence in mental illness. There's no physiological parameters that you can say somebody's got mental illness. There's just been a study a few months ago of thousands of brain scans of people with mental illness diagnosis. there's nothing diagnostic about the brain scans.

It's not like I can take an x-ray of a lung and say that this lung is what we call consolidation or fluid indicating inflammation. There's nothing like that in mental diagnosis. There's no blood test you can do and so on. So illness is a model. I mean, it might, somebody's really depressed, even suicidal perhaps

and then might need pharmacological intervention which would really save their lives that may be true and in that sense you may say that they're ill as long as we realize that this is a construct that we're applying here

but that there's no actual measurement of that that's at all similar to what we call physical disease but even in physical disease we make certain assumptions for example somebody had

as rheumatoid arthritis. Now, nothing wrong with that statement on the face of it, but there's an assumption there. The assumption is that there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis. And this person called me. And this person has this thing. Now, you know, the example I often give, here's my cell phone, I'm holding it in my hand.

I have a cell phone. It's not part of me. It says nothing about me. It's a discrete object. Its nature doesn't depend on my nature. nothing is that true but room of arthritis or is it more true to say as i found out that this is a condition that shows of being people with certain life experiences and certain ways of functioning in the world and that because of the science documented unity of mind and body and the impossibility

of separating the activity or emotional apparatus from serum immune system because it's all one organismic unit. Therefore, when the immune system turns against the body as it does in the rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system actually attacks the body, is that a thing that's got a life of its own? Or is it a process that's happening inside that person because of certain aspects of their lives? Now, if I say it's the thing that happens to you, then that thing has got a life of its own. And that's how most doctors see it. They see somebody with rheumatoiditis.

They say, okay, this is the car. kind you've got. This is what's going to happen. This is the only thing we can do is to mitigate the symptoms. I find that's not true. I find that the rheumatoid arthritis, by them not just I find it, the science finds it, that the rheumatoid arthritis is very much related to stress and trauma. And the more stress there is, the more likely it is to flare up. And if people deal with that stress, if they know how to prevent it, their illness abates. Which means that it's not a thing that's separate, it's a process that happens inside them. This is a subtle concept.

I'm wondering if I'm explaining it clearly. No, you are. And it's really making me question how much we misunderstand the relationship between the mind and the immune system. Yeah. Because that's the real, that's the important connection to understand if you, if you are to accept all the things you've just said. Yeah.

Which we don't, we don't understand. I don't think typically we understand that my mind and my immune system have such a close relationship. Well, there's a whole new science that studies those relationships. It's called psycho-neuroimminology, which studies the interlinked unity of the emotional apparatus of our brain and body with the immune system, with the nervous system, and with the hormonal apparatus. I mean, it's just so obvious. I could change your hormonal state in the split second right now without touching you just by screaming at you and threatening you. That would necessarily create a change.

I mean, it's just clear that our emotions are inseparable. And the other funny thing is, well, several funny things. How do we treat most conditions in medicine, by the way, inflammations? If you go to a dermatologist with inflamed skin. If you go to a rheumatologist with inflamed joints. If you go to a gastroenterologist with inflamed intestines. If you go to a respirologist with inflamed lungs. If you go to a neurologist with the inflamed nervous system,

as in multiple sclerosis, to give you steroids to settle the inflammation. Now, what are steroids? They are stress hormones. And you would think that as physicians, we would ask ourselves, gosh, we're treating everything with stress hormones, the stress may be something to do with this condition. Now, when you look at the scientific literature, yes, yes, yes, and yes. So there's a great Canadian physician actually united by Queen Victoria, one of the great

medical teachers of all kinds, Sir William Osler. And he said in 1890 that rheumatoid arthritis is a stress-driven disease. The French neurologist Jean-Martan Charcot who first described multiple sclerosis, he said, this is a stress-driven condition. And since then, there's been so much research. So what I'm saying is that this way of looking at what we call disease as a process it's so much more accurate scientifically actually and understanding the mind-body unity

and then naturally when people are traumatized that has a huge impact on their physiology their psychological trauma has a huge impact on their physiology it's just science but it's science that's not taught to medical doctors it's just for some strange reason well the average physician

never hears a single lecture about say trauma and its relationship to illness and yet the studies international thousands of them showing those relationships so there's this strange gap between science and and medical practice but it would it would change medical practice for the better because what would happen if you went to a physician and you presented with the symptom and they'd say okay look we'll give you such as medication to deal with your symptoms and then let's look at your life in the context that you live it and see how

that the stresses that you may be taking on the traumas you may be carrying might be affecting the physiology of your body. No, they don't have to be all trauma therapists to do that. They just have to raise the question and to start and then to begin the inquiry. That'll make a huge change to that person's life and to their disease process. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.