How To End SELF-SABOTAGING HABITS & Stop WASTING Your Life Away In 2024 | Dr. Gabor Maté

I think for a lot of individuals there there is a quote of yours that I shared the other day on social media and your work for a lot of individuals is the detangling of their life experiences and what they see of themselves now and the quote that I shared which is one of your quotes was anything that is wrong with you and you wrote wrong in quotation marks begin as a survival mechanism in Childhood I would love if you could expand on this quote in the context of your work so take anything like addiction so

eviction is a bad thing right and it's it's a sin or it's a mistake or it's a bad choice it's a disease it's none of that when you ask people when I give people my definition of an Addiction which is a process that's manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary relief or pleasure in and therefore craves suffers negative consequences in the long term but doesn't give up despite negative consequences so it's craving relief pleasure in the short term negative consequence long-term inability or Refusal to give it up that's what an addiction is drugs

sex gambling eating I don't care what so Drew I don't know personally I wish to be here but can I ask you according to that definition have you ever had an addictive pattern in your life absolutely okay and I'm not gonna ask a lot and I don't care or or or or or for how long I'm going to ask you this Question not what was wrong with the addiction but what was right about it what did it do for you in the short term what did it give you that you needed or wanted at that

time and I'm happy to be open I've never had a uh in what people might consider a traditional addiction look through the Western lines of substance but in looking it through your lens I absolutely have and that was the seeking and the needing of approval of other People and the severe sort of drive to people please people and to answer your question what did I get in return I became known as I was surrounded by individuals I never felt alone so you got recognition and companionship is that the case absolutely absolutely [Music] um is human

contact companionship a good thing Of a bad thing it's it's it's a beautiful thing yeah so you know there was addiction wasn't your problem addiction was your solution to a problem the problem was your isolation your sense of not being not having value having to have that value of knowledge that was your problem an addiction came along in a certain way to solve that problem for you but how did you Get the sense that you weren't valuable weren't worthy weren't worthy of contact or isolated that has to do with something that happened to you in

childhood in other words the addiction was simply a compensation for something that you lost in childhood something that you had every right to expect life to give you something that this essential human need and all addictions are like that whether it's the gambling sex work shopping I Don't care what they always give you something that you lost so addiction is really a compensation for something lost in childhood as to the people pleasing well um at a certain point there was a time in your life when your life depended on pleasing people absolutely I know it

very clearly okay well is that a good thing or a bad thing it's a compensation right now it Shouldn't have had to you would have ideally life would have given you the circumstances where you accepted and valued for exactly who you were as a young child that's in need of ours when we don't get that we become people Pleasers and let me tell you I've written a book called when the body says no and it's all about all these people these chronic people Pleasers who suppress themselves to please others That's the source of so much

physical illness because that's so that that pleasing of others and suppressing our needs to please others actually undermines your immune system I'm talking science here so that I'm saying so many diseases or so many afflictions so many mental health conditions originate as compensations for for what's lost in child that takes something like Depression I don't know finish my illustrating my point with this what um what does it mean to depress something literally physically what does it mean you had to push down to suppress it exactly right any idea what people pushed on in in depression

feelings there's fluorescence right now Why would somebody why would a human being push down their feelings you know I I think about it to probably survive the moment right to not avoid conflict overweight conflict avoid the pain so when a child is not allowed to have their emotions and it's not held with their emotions or there's not a lot to express anger they learn for the sake of staying in relationship with their caregivers to Push these things down and then 30 years later they're diagnosed with this illness so-called illness called depression it all began as

a compensation so I hope I've illustrated my point absolutely and which brings to to my next you know point that I wanted to bring up with that is that you always ask the question which isn't it's it's not about the addiction but why the pain not why the addiction but why the pain And I think that is a central question that we can if we just look outside in this world we can see that that question is not being asked when it comes to thinking about either traditional quote-unquote addictions for those listening and putting that

in quotes because there's so much more of a Broadband of addictions but even all the other things that we don't see as traditional addictions that truly are well exactly and you know this is called The broken brain podcast well then you get depressed because you've been pushing down your feelings or you compensate for your pain by getting addicted to to heroin or you compensate for your lack of value by becoming a workaholic or you compensate for your sense of not being monitored by becoming a habitual sexaholic you know And then they tell you there's something

wrong with your brain there's a brain disease going on no these are all compensations and yes they affect the brain but it's not an illness that started in the brain it's how your brain responded to life circumstances to the pain of life and the brain is actually shaped by life experience so really it's people's experience we Have to look at by the pain and that's the question not only in addiction although it certainly applies there but in so many human conditions even physical conditions you know we've had so many different experts in integrative and functional

medicine and leading researchers in cancer and now the new view on cancer is that cancer is not this thing that attacks the body but it actually is a survival mechanism our healthy cells that are trying to survive A diseased a dis- eased environment that they're being placed in so really the idea that so much of we think of what is wrong with us physical ailments personality traits compensations addictions are as you said survival mechanisms it's action reaction when we understand that we're left with the truth of now we can actually move forward well let's see

what would I say about cancer so lots of studies I'm just writing new books I Just reviewed the vast literature on this so um women who've got symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer children who have used in general have a higher risk of inflammatory diseases autoimmune diseases and and cancer and I could go on and on and on and on um the Cancer I wouldn't say directly is a survival mechanism but it's a product of the body's response to to lifelong stress and Trauma and and for example we talk

about people pleasing and a lot of people who develop cancer have got this tendency to suppress their feelings That's suppression of feelings also suppresses the immune system because because the immune system is not separated from your emotional system it's all one system so then you get cancer because your immunity has been diminished now what does the cancer do well Lucas threatens your life it really does I mean physically it Threatens your life and of course often it takes your life which is true but what's also true is that for a lot of people that I've

talked with the cancer functions as a wake-up call and says boy you have not been paying attention have you you've not been paying attention to your own needs you're not going to pay attention to who you really are So in that certain sense no I don't recommend this way of learning I don't recommend cancer to anybody but once it shows up I've known so many people who view who to whom it's been a teaching experience in a really in a real sense it was a cause of Rebirth of their true selves and this has been

studied I'm not just talking every phrase stuff here you know And this has been studied and and if you look at there's a couple of books I could mention in fact you might want to have these people on your podcast one of them is called cured by Dr Jeffrey rediger who's a physician and psychiatrist at Harvard and cured is his book where they looked at people with so-called spontaneous remissions people who despite the failure of medical treatment or or despite the fact that they refuse medical treatment and They're supposed to die instead their cancer goes

away and and medical doesn't Medical Science doesn't study these things very much like it's interesting I talk with these people who've survived like that and the doctors never know never know what they did but what they did is in every case transform their relationship to themselves they became much more authentic to themselves and that made a difference to their malignancy now I'm not talking about panaceas or cures I'm just saying that when the healing happens it has to do with a deep connection to yourself that was cut off when you were small the cancer woke

you up and you reconnected to yourself and I've seen this in autoimmune disease and multiple sclerosis even even in ALS which is set to the university terminal but actually people who survived it and Who've even recovered from it you know and in every case it has to do with the transformation of the relationship to themselves and radical is not the only one to have studied this other people have as well and they publish the same kind of findings and in my own personal research how people authentically people are able to be themselves instead of identifying

with all those mechanisms that you identified In yourself the people pleasing and all that are just going to be themselves that is a huge impact on their health and illness again not that I recommend it very often comes along and says friend wake up wake up the life you'll be living is not your life for you you didn't have an illness I Don't I don't think so from the work that I've read about you but you had these addictions and this pain that was there you've been very vocal about you know shopping workaholism some challenges

that were there in the relationship how your kids really felt that maybe they couldn't approach you because anger or like you know rage feelings inside what do you think at that time in your life and you feel free to give context for our listeners who Don't know your story what do you think that you were suppressing that was allowing these manifestations to express themselves also knock on wood um I have not had significant physical illness so that I've had back surgery that's that's always interesting but but I've not had significant illness I've had a few

close calls kidney stones which had a high stress time of my life and so on But after that significant depression and of course I've been living with ADHD um and as you mentioned I've had a very addictive relationship to work and also at some point to shopping where it's ignore work spend thousands of dollars a day for things they didn't need 10 Things I didn't even enjoy I mean I mean not I didn't enjoy I I was shopping for classical music I enjoy the classical music but I didn't have time to enjoy it because I

was too busy working and too busy shopping for more music to actually sit down and appreciate what I already had so it's pure addiction and I lied and I cheated and I ignored worked and ignored family to pursue the addictive drawing so I've had all that um I recently read a family history written by a deceased cousin of mine he was 11 years older than I was I'm not going to go into the whole story now but she and her family looked after me for a month when I was a year old and my mother

had to give me up because she couldn't guarantee that she would live another day let alone that I would So she gave me the stranger in the street and said please take this kid one year old this is a wart I'm hungry so these relatives who are in hiding let them look after him and so this cousin of mine and her family looked after me under terrible conditions and she said I just read this five days ago I had never read her interestingly enough I never read this before But she said that my big black

eyes you stuck with me were sealed with fear and the only thing she could see on my face was fear this is a one-year-old not quite two years ago I went to the Amazon Amazon jungle to take part in a ceremony with a native traditional Healers and those people they know those people knew nothing about me They didn't know the history of the Jewish infant under the Nazis and they knew nothing they didn't know they know I've written books they didn't know an international speaker none of them they just knew that I came to lead

a retreat for other doctors and healers and they did one ceremony and they said you can't lead anybody you could heal yourself and they said when you were very small you had a big scare and you still Haven't got over it wow no they spoke no English they just read me in ceremony so I've been carrying a big scare about my life and everything else that goes on with it I would love to ask you a question about that which is you know how do you see The Duality of their message you know them saying

in the best way that it was translated To you because you guys didn't speak you know the same language you can't lead anybody and here you are uh wounded Soul like all of us who is still leading as best as they can through the vulnerability so how did you receive the duality of their their message well first of all it's contextual uh I just come I just arrived in the jungle from a very fatiguing speaking trip and I've taken on a lot of stress of a lot of other people they saw that in me As

well they said you can take it on the stress so a lot of other people and you haven't cleared it out of yourself but that's the thing in the west we can split our minds from our bodies in a certain sense and I can be on stage and I can be very effective and very articulate and I think very insightful and people find my work inspiring and helpful um Informative but this is a healing retreat and they said for us to work with you you need to be much clearer than you are so it's not

that I can't do this stuff I can do this stuff but in that context where full healing is required and working with the sacred plant they need to meet they needed me to be really clear and they said you're not So yeah and uh speaking of Eckhart Tolle by the way he said somewhere it might be in the new Earth or it might be in the power of no I forgot where some people can manifest being their Essence when they're working but not elsewhere you know so that they can be displayed because I can Channel

somebody to stop when I'm on and present but but I'm not always like that And they phoned me in a moment when I wasn't like that if I'm in a moment when I was stressed and uh and um they I quickly identified the Deep sources of them so yeah I can do the work I've been able to do it um but at the same time be confused and scared myself on deep levels And to me that feels like one of the most beautiful reminders for everyone because we all have our micro versions or our macro

versions of that everybody here listening to this podcast today is doing the best they can you know we still I'm in California I live in Los Angeles I don't have kids but many of my friends do there are days where you are so loving to your kids that you know my friends tell me and I can imagine I have nephews And nieces and there's days where you've just been around your kids 24 7 they're not in schools they're stressed you're stressed and you have a moment as a parent and that still allows an opportunity to

repair you know everybody's working through and is doing the work and as long as we are still living there's still that opportunity to continue to do the work and to step back into the present moment and Parenting of course is the most powerful course of teaching you'll ever get [Music] I mean you you when you're a parent you really find out who you are and and who you need to be and you have the motivation to do the work as well and for me a lot of the motivation to do the self work that I've

taken on has been the difficulties of my kids Whose sources originated in my own traumas that I transmitted to them you know when a lot of people are first introduced to your work because so much of the connection of addiction and pain is related to Early Childhood experiences those formative years where we are still developing our sense of who we are so it's natural that we develop it by attaching to the form of the people that are around us so if our parents are in pain as they're in stress As you've shared with your story

your mother not even knowing if she was going to survive having to give you two family members and you even talking about her calling the doctor and saying you know my son just keeps on crying keeps on crying like we need to do something and he's like all my Jewish baby patients are crying they're all crying right now yeah this is right after the Nazis occupied hungry and all the Jewish babies were crying and And you can generalize this you know um in any situation where the parents are stressed or under struggling and Afraid the

energy is picked up by the kids and not only is it affected by the kids the kids thinks it's about themselves so sometimes their fault so some people grow up with with a kind of guilt that don't even realize what the source of it is and the sources of guilt is that they Didn't make their parents happy they couldn't have made them happy it wasn't their job but as children we take this on automatically and so that a huge source of Shame and guilt in this world people say it's addicted people of course I'm ashamed

no you're ashamed before you're addicted one preceded the other the shame preceded the addiction and uh by the way this is true not only Um for addiction but all kinds of conditions and all kinds of illnesses as I've written in my other books so that our self-concept uh develops in interaction with our parents and children are narcissistic and that I don't mean there's a negative statement I mean in the genuine meaning of the word they think it's all about them So taking that hand the spiritual teacher who I'm sure you know of he said that

the Buddhist teacher he said that the biggest gift parents can give their kids is their own happiness and the reason for that is Chill known as a stick if my parents are happy oh I must be a great guy I must be a good person I must really be lovable hey aren't I just wonderful but if my parents are stressed and Unhappy guess whose fault it is if they get divorced guess whose fault it is on the unconscious level it's about me it's my fault my mother was unhappy it was my fault not that it

really was but that's what the child perceives it and so that sense of Shame and failure and guilt it precedes everything and it's got nothing to do with who you are and what you've done or haven't done and I think that sometimes when people Hear that because we all go through this it's sort of the universal experience of humanity and they're introduced to your work there's almost this feeling of like so now you're saying that everything is my parents fault and you have a great explanation around this that I'd love you to expand upon because

it's like these Early Childhood experiences impact us we're devoid of of feeling or or have something missing in our life then there's adaptations that come from that That if they're not met over a period of time can turn into these versions of addictions that are there so is it all our parents fault well I never use the word fault it's not a concept that exists in my understanding of things because the logic thing is well why were my parents like that did my parents did my mother create the Second World War Did she invite the

Nazis into Budapest um if your father was an alcoholic where did that start in his childhood okay great let's blame his parents but wait a minute why were his parents like that over less than their parents by that logic we end up going back blaming Adam and Eve or some poor ape ancestor sitting in a tree eating a banana you know like in other words there's no end to the blame game It and and there's a book a title which I like very much is by our family assistance therapist called uh Mark Woolen and the

book is called it didn't begin with you it didn't begin with any of us it's not personal and and and like Eckhart says the ego is not personal it's just what um happens to people so no parent deliberately screws up their kids it's not a fault look Where my kids are small I would lose my temper I was a workaholic I was there for my patients what a wonderful doctor who's always available guess what that leaves his kids the the shoemaker's son yeah shoemaker's kids with no shoes exactly that was the same story and so

why was I doing that because as an infant I got the sense that the world didn't want me so if the world doesn't Mommy you know what you do if you know what You do if the world doesn't want you go to medical school then they're going to want you all the time they're going to want you when they're born when they die and every at every moment in between they have any problem they're going to want you now you can keep proving to yourself how important you are every second but when my kids experience

a father who's always Working was always on the beeper's cell phone delivering babies at night not available on weekends what message do they get but they don't want it I'm passing on the same message did I do it deliberately did I wake up one morning and said I'm going to screw up my kids was it my fault I Didn't Know Myself And as Eckhart says without Consciousness there's no responsibility There's no without awareness so there's no point talking about fault it's a question of just being compassionate towards every generation towards everybody this idea that there

are the traumatized which is usually our version of like the other right so there's a group of people that have been traumatized there's different versions of trauma the Big T and you know the little T trauma but when we think of that there's other People that have gone through trauma and that we are quote unquote normal we're missing the understanding that everyone has experienced some degree of this and that can often lead to these behaviors in our life that are uh either filled with addiction fear uh um obsessions over over things so it's it's when

we understand that because we don't live in a trauma-conscious society we don't see where our own trauma could have lived out We miss the boat on really understanding who we truly are and not to not to figure out who's to blame as we've talked about before but to actually get a better sense of Letting Go what's not useful so that we can move forward and focus on all the things that we were brought on Earth to be able to do yes so um it's a question of how you understand trauma and uh most people naturally

when they think of trauma they think of catastrophic events like a war No question that children in the Ukraine right now are being traumatized no question that children in Gaza are traumatized whenever they get bombed by the Israeli Air Force no question that student living in poverty under condition of racism or being traumatized on a regular basis um but to think of Toronto only as catastrophe is [Music] Um well it's understandable it's it's inaccurate so the word trauma itself comes from a Greek word for wound so trauma is a wound and people can be wounded

in many many ways and to different degrees but the point is that the degree to which we wounded those wounds are going to be affecting how we live how we think how we handle ourselves how we relate to others how relate to the world So the charter traumas and in our society they're very common now this is the catastrophic kind like physical or sexual or emotional abuse or severe neglect the death of a parent violence in a family those are significantly traumatic events but you can also hurt kids wound kids just by not meeting their

needs for being held for being seen for being understood For being accepted for being celebrated for who they are these are needs of the child we can hurt children by forbidding their expression of emotion a lot of friends are told if your kid is angry give them a time out which means angular is not if you're angry you're not acceptable to me now you're forcing a child to make a decision do I stay a relationship with my parent Or do I express what I feel because if I express what I feel I'm gonna be banished

do I guess what decision most kids will make not that it's a conscious decision but what I'm saying is that we can traumatize or hurt or wound children in many many many many ways I've already talked about some of the ways that we heard children in our society and those traumas will show up later on in life And we'll say well I was never traumatized because I was never beaten or sexually abused thank God you weren't but that doesn't mean you weren't wounded and it doesn't mean that your wounds aren't showing up and it doesn't

mean that if you understood those wounds and you dealt with them and you healed them you couldn't have a more satisfying and meaningful and more connected life and just to be clear Every parent will wound their child and every child that grows up to be a parent one day if that's part of their path will wound their own children so part of this is that there is a degree of Just The Human Experience it's not just a human experience and it's The Human Experience in certain conditions because again we were not meant to be parented

in isolated nuclear families with stressed parents who are Absent most of the day and who are having to worry about making a living and whose relations may be in shambles that's not how we evolved have you evolved for millions of years was in small communities with the nurturing environment holding each child that's how we evolved so it's not necessarily part of the human condition to be traumatized it's the it's been part of the human Condition for many many thousands of years that's true and this Society didn't invent trauma but then no Society has known as

much disconnection as the society knows so in some ways we've sophisticated our traumatization of children but you're right in this Society there are very few children who don't get wounded and it's and you also write it's not a question of blaming parents parents do their best They love their kids I love my kids did I pass my trauma on to them yes I did in fact I wrote this book with one of my sons and thank God because I would not be able to do this one on my own and even writing the book we

had to work through our stuff you know so we had a much better relationship by the end of the book than we did at the beginning um so yeah we passed on our traumas Um unwittingly without meaning to do so sometimes in minor ways sometimes in major ways and the thing is to understand that not to blame ourselves and not to blame others either but okay now that we get it what do we do about it it's not a question of feeling sorry for ourselves or making ourselves victims let's just say that in this Society

at least this is The Human Condition And how do we address it now it would help tremendously if the institutions in this Society such as the educational system such as the daycare system such as the medical system such as the legal system understood these traumatic imprints but they don't garbage teacher doctor lawyer daycare worker never gets a single bit of introduction into understanding children's wounding And so many of the practices that are followed in daycares that are followed in schools not to mention the legal system might as well be designed to traumatize kids or adults

because they do you know off that topic you know the idea inside the book is like as the individual goes is as Society goes so goes the individual and one of the things that you have talked about in the past is that you say ask Not what is wrong with an addiction but what is right about it what benefit is the person deriving from their habit what does it do for them what are they getting that they otherwise can't access so if we apply that thinking and those questions to our culture what is our culture

getting from continuing to play out these addictive behaviors that keep the cycle of trauma alive well whole Industries are based on manufacturing and conveying Goods that Don't do anybody any good but they make for good profits so for example junk food no in this case the vast majority of obesity is rising around the world the sugar the food sugar and and and [Music] Bob drinks Industries know full well they conspire actually this is not conspiracy theory this is conspiracy reality that's been documented How do we get the right combination of sugar salt and fat that'll

most make people most addictive now junk foods are very addictive because they actually soothe stress in the short term they like that you know eating junk food is like getting a hit of opium as far as the brain circuitry is concerned now they have scientists figuring out how to Maximize The Addictive hit of junk Foods and this has been documented and published in papers and books and so on well in this case it's a very simple reason why they do it it's profit or take another example um specifically addictive you know the opiate so you

know the whole Scandal about the Sackler family and is it uh Pfizer you know Pharmaceuticals who Manufacture the Oxycontin and they sold it to doctors as non-addictive opiates when they knew better and we have had tens and hundreds of thousands of people dying of overdoses and big court cases and all this the daycare no it's profit when companies um deliberately hire phony scientists provide articles about the non-existence of climate change As they did for decades and they Lobby politicians even now to inhibit for Saul climate protective legislation they do that in full knowledge of the

science so that's why I have a book a chapter in a book called sociopathy a strategy what do you call entities that are willing to see millions of people die immensely people are people who are Dying because of um drugs because of obesity because of junk Foods because of climate change well because of cigarettes why would people do that is because profit is more important so the system works beautifully like on the one hand the way of this culture goes it stresses people to the max people are just very very stressed this is recognized by

everybody the more stressed people are the more They want soothing so they went soothing with you know by diverting their attention to sports the average person can tell you a lot more about the quarterbacking strategy of the New England Patriots then they could tell you about the war in Afghanistan where hundreds of thousands of people died including thousands of Americans so there's all these there's all this culture to divert us from paying Attention to what's important there's all these products that prey on our stressed lives to give us temporary stress relief so consumer goods and

and Foods entertainment becomes addictive because precisely they're diverting us from our stress so the system works with Elegance number one to create the stresses and then to profit off those stresses that the system creates Now there are some conspiracy involved as I've mentioned you know like on climate change yeah they're conspired cigarette companies they conspired that's not controversial that I'm just stating a fact junk food companies they conspired pharmaceutical companies yeah they conspired but it's not the conspiracy that runs the world the conspiracies simply take advantage Of the word the way of the way this

culture works so there's a beautiful Elegance to it as I said on the one hand we live in a society that by its very nature stresses people from Inuit or onwards and then creates industries that are based on trying to take advantage of those stresses so it's it's a self-generating system is what I'm saying and then of course these same companies will hire politicians that will enact policies that'll protect their interests now that's not disputable it's just demonstrated fact so the system works on every level to maintain itself like any system does so we're not

looking for villains here not that there aren't any but we're not Looking for them what we're looking to understand is the nature of the system itself and I think it's so good to talk about the nature of that system because as goes Society also there's those parallels that happen in the individual as well and when we find and we see a system that's out of whack it's easy to see the dysfunction of that it's harder for individuals to see the dysfunction themselves but both are super key right both are super key Because they're both part

of the solution I would love to return back to you talking about your son and you and him working on this book together um how did some of those early experiences that you had were you were talking about your mom and the circumstances that she was trying to raise you in and the trauma that that created what adaptions did those create in your life and would you feel comfortable Sharing about how maybe some of those one or two adapt adaptions that you were bringing in impacted your relationship with your son sure well actually my son

Daniel Every time I wrote this book um the next book we're going to write together co-write it is going to be called hello again a fresh start for adult children and their parents and that's that's just your Workshop that we do together including we'll be doing it in at Omega in New York and at the end Of October so we've had a lot of stuff to work through and he's 46 now so for one thing because I was hurt so early one of the adaptations you make emotionally when you're being hurt is you shut down

your heart so you won't be so hurt when you shut down your heart it means that when you see somebody else Suffer you're not as open to them as you might be so I was capable of being very harsh with my son with all my children not because I didn't love them but because my heart wasn't as open as it needed to have been and that shutdown of the heart was a protective device on my part as a small child not that I knew that That's one maid showed up the other way you show up

of course is that when we get married or reform a relationship a significant relationship we always do so with somebody else at the same level of trauma that we're at mine might not have taken the same form but it's at the same level that means that I'm almost 25 and my wife was 21. and we've been married 53 and a half Years now we're two young people at the same level of trauma and it took a lot of growing up to work through those traumas and our children grew up in a war zone you might

say and my son Daniel talks in this book about how the floor was not the floor like he never knew when things would just collapse emotionally speaking so it was a volatile environment plus the message that I got from the World is that the world didn't mummy because my mother gave me away didn't she well the rule doesn't want you then you have to compensate for it so if you want to compensate for not being wanted make yourself needed now if you want to make yourself needed go to medical school now they're gonna need you

all the time when they're being born when they're dying and at every moment in between Very addictive because you don't love yourself you have to keep proving to yourself that you're lovable and you're being wanted which means that it's never enough so I was a workaholic doctor which means I was very comfortable being on call on the weekends day and night delivering babies looking after dying people the people are going all the time going to the emergency Ward What message do my kids get that that is not available I love my kids I didn't know

about these Dynamics but what message did I give them same one that I got so my son and I and my children and I have had a lot to work through you know even as in a adult and a leading figure in the space with this level of awareness that you have is it not fair to say that even with the Best intentions and even with the best awareness that there will still be times that you contribute to the wounds of other people and how does repair play a role in that process I'd love to

get your thoughts on that well um yeah that can still happen and um for example in my marriage um I'm much quicker to recognize it now I'm much quicker to acknowledge it and to own it Um also I've done a lot of healing I'm not the same person I was 10 20 30 years ago thank God I'm not even the same person I was a year ago in some ways um I have a regular practice if I meditate do my yoga if I pay attention to myself I'm much less likely to sink back into Old

patterns but for most of us it's ongoing work and It's a lifetime's work and that's okay that's what it means to be a human being but I've done a lot of healing over the years in all kinds of ways and I worked with many others it helped their healing so and we're aware of these Dynamics but is it ever perfect well I don't think anybody demands Perfection we just require I think a willingness to be To reflect on ourselves to examine ourselves to keep looking at Harbors showing up in the world but you know when

you think about it it's basically the moral inventory that they teach in the 12 steps just look at yourself how are you behaving are you showing up what is the impact of how you speak and how you act on other people what is the impact on yourself what is driving that behavior What are those patterns where did they come from what can you do to change them I think these are key questions that people who want to heal and be kind to themselves and to others need to ask themselves yeah the reason that I ask

is that uh even many of us who do the work and as you mentioned the work is ongoing and uh we you have a beautiful story inside of Your book where you talk about how you had just landed back in Vancouver and I think you were waiting for your wife to pick you up at the airport and she had texted you you know I haven't left yet and there was agitation that developed inside of you and you were kind of running a story you're running a story in your head and playing out a pattern that

led to silent treatment if I can remember correct that's correct yeah that's what you're talking about that Opens the very first chapter of the book and uh sorry right back from him from speaking trip and she is supposed to pick me up at the airport and when I land I get a text thing I haven't left home yet do you still want me to come and I go into a rage and I take a taxi home and I'm barely even looking at her I'm just withdrawn well for God's sakes at age 72 you think I

could handle my Wife forgetting to leave home on time so what took me 15 minutes to get home by taxi but it's an imprint of being abandoned by my mother they showed up so that that imprint of the woman on whom I'm relying is not being there for me and all the pain and anger and with defensive withdrawal that it triggered that's what showed up And that's what I mean that until we deal with it these early imprints can run our lives or at least show up in our lives with uncountable frequency and one of

the things that when why I brought up that story one of the things that I took away from that story is then you go on to talk about how your wife wasn't having any of it and kind of like checked you a little bit and was like look get over your stuff it's time to move on or whatever right there was a Little bit of that and part of the messaging that I got from that is the beauty of again we're gonna mess up things are going to happen even with level of awareness even sometimes

if we teach these things and I'm pointing at myself because I interview experts on this I write about these different topics that are there and what we can do in our own lives in our own world is we can begin to implement a trauma Trauma conscious society which is where the book talks about at the end you know yes we can talk about and say how we want to implement it for the greater world and yes we do want to do that we want to work towards that in our respective fields to do that and

the way that we get started is actually doing it with our own household as as a part of that is that if you have a partner you have a kid you have somebody around you how what are some tips that you have of Creating a trauma-conscious society within your own little household what does that look like well so just as you say my wife said to me knock it off already after 24 hours of Silence treatment and uh but you know she won't say that anymore she expects not to be that way in the first

place she expects me to take a responsibility when I find that arising in me not to go there You know and uh I don't want to be that do I don't keep showing I'm in my 70s do you want to do my late 70s actually do I want to keep showing up as a little baby for the rest for the rest of my life I don't it's not a great place to be in by the way what I do point on in one of the chapters is that the women the reason women have so much

more anxiety and depression And autoimmune disease 80 of autoimmune disease happens to women I think because they take on the stresses of their men and they play their mothers to their big babies at the risk of suppressing themselves and my wife doesn't want to do that anymore bless her soul so uh what are some of the tips um well the first thing is just to recognize it to recognize that when I'm In an intense emotional state it's never about the present virtually never about the present some traumatic imprint showing up and um one of the

meditation teachers that I respect Torah Brock talks about her program called rain recognize allow investigate and nurture so she says when you notice these states in yourself recognize that you're in a state so when I came back from the airport um alienated from my wife I was in the trance I wasn't present as an adult I was in the trans so when you're in that intense state recognize it that's a huge step forward rather than saying it's all your fault that I'm this way ah I'm in the state recognize it okay let me experience it

let me allow that let me just accept that it is that's how it is for me right now but then let's investigate it what is it Really all about and then nurture that part of yourself that felt so hurt I can do that you can do it most people can do it with proper training and support so it's a recognition that's so important then the book um I think I have eight or nine chapters on the healing in each of which I point to different aspects of healing of the essentials of seeking to be authentic

With ourselves to experience our genuine emotions to recognize when our body is sending us signals because our body sending those signals all the time and um when we don't listen it's going to keep us sending us stronger signals and one of the song of signals that people get is disease this is a chapter called diseases teacher we actually talk about people Who have its significant illnesses sometimes life-threatening but who took this disease not just as an unfortunate calamity but as a wake-up call how have I been abandoning myself why have I been stressing myself what's

been my life pattern how can I how can I be different so the disease can actually you can actually learn from our misfortunes that way We can learn that when the depression or anxiety or an addiction or chronic physical health condition maybe there's a message there that we pay attention to not that I would wish that on anybody I wouldn't the chapter is called the Dreadful gift diseases teacher but do I've talked to so many people who are grateful for their illnesses for what they learned from them even at Great cost to themselves Um There

Are Spiritual practices of course there are meditational practices there are ways of working with some of our worst enemies the self-loathing and the guilt and the self-rejection the shame there are positive ways of working with all that and I talk about them in various chapters so there's many many ways of working the First and the primary condition is that we recognize that we have an issue recognize them and that shows up and rather than just acting it out and indulging in it finding creative ways of working with it I think there's also a beauty to

do this work with the people that are in your household of course it always has to start with you because that's the only person that we can ever you know control to some degree is we Have our own actions but as we start to get into it we can explore this with our partner our wife our husband whoever it may be your your and and create an open dialogue where everybody understands that that largely we all have different things that shape we've all had experiences that shape who we are today and and there's times where

we're gonna forget there's times where we're going To forget that it's the story it's the it's the it's the pattern the old pattern that's running our Behavior but as you mentioned it's it's never about really what's going on right now it's always that old old wound that is controlling the story and the better that we get a handle on that the more that really we get a chance to step into Freedom which is really what everybody's looking absolutely I propose what you've been Talking about and just reading this book called us by the therapist Terry

reel the subtitle is getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship that's a subtitle just being published I think in a month or two and this is what Terry talks about is that in all these relational issues it's always the past showing up and it's all about getting into the present Which is what I teach as well and there's a book called getting the love you want by Harwell Hendrix bestseller has been on Oprah many times it's about how we marry somebody who actually mirrors to us some of the best but also

some of the worst aspects of our childhood and how to use the relationship to grow from as a template for Mutual growth so in that from my perspective from their wheels Perspective from horrible Henderson's perspective it's no longer a question of how do we try and get the other person to change but how do we learn together to be in the present rather than coming from the past and that's beautiful work so that relationships they can be hell but they can also be the pathway out of hell if there's sufficient willingness and mutual support to

do so Yeah it seems like that framework is the framework that allows us to step into this phrase that you have in the book and you say your personality is not you you are not your personality why is that recognition so key when it comes to unwinding also for example I point out both excuse me base the Boston both on my own excuse me um perceptions and observations and clinical experience but also a lot of um Studies as well that people with chronic autoimmune conditions tend to be people who are people Pleasers they suppress their

anger so they're very very nice all the time they take responsibility for the people's emotions rather than their own emotional needs they're afraid to disappoint anybody now these traits create a lot of stress and that stress creates a lot of illness so that's their personality But that's not who they are these personality traits are simply coping mechanisms suppressing their anger pleasing others being more worried about others than their own emotional needs no infant is born like that people develop those traits when a family environment demands it in one way or another and those traits that

become their personality But that's not who they are who they are is somebody who in your words wants freedom and freedom means not being programmed in any particular way but the response spontaneously with the full awareness of your own needs to the needs of others and the situation not to be programmed to be self-limited and self-suppressing those are personal traits that you adapted in order to survive your Childhood then you believe you're your personality you think I'm just this way no you're not that way and very well very often it's illness that comes along and

makes people outside and say you know you can if you stay like that you're gonna get very sick and people do get very sick when they stay like that so we shouldn't take ourselves to be our Personalities for example if you if you weren't liked for who you were like children need to be liked for who they are unconditionally if they're not they'll try to be very nice if they weren't made to feel important they will try to be a helper so now they can be important if they weren't loved they might become very Charming

as a personality trait but these are just adaptations these Personality traits are significantly adaptations to Childhood environment and they're limiting so we're not our personalities we think we are but the personality is sort of a imposter pretending to be us until we get the difference so that begs the question and again you talk about this inside the book if we're not our personality then who are we well That's a good question for everybody to ask I mean rather than me answering it how about everybody has asked themselves if I'm not my personality who am I

if I'm not this nice person if I'm not this angry person if I'm not this or that then who am I I think that's a really useful necessary question as a matter of fact there was a great Hindu spiritual teacher Romana maharshi he only asked one question he just said To people tell me who you are he didn't say tell me what profession you have what characteristics you have tell me who you are that's a profound question and rather than me answering it people need to ask themselves that who are you it's a very uh

is disconcerting to ask it but Illuminating so if I'm not this Doctor Author and speaker then who the Heck am I it's a scary question because really get we get attached only to our roles and to other people see us and then to kind of forget um that stuff is fun but it's not who we are as we uh start to wind down there's a few more topics that I'd love to give your thoughts on you mentioned your experience with psychedelics that you had and that area Is increasingly garnering more and more attention both to

research as well as just general interest from lay people who are hearing stories about it being um a very strong pathway potentially to to Healing um if there's somebody here that is thinking about embarking down that road what are some important things for them to be considering in the Context of the work you have and that you've dedicated your career to talking about um how addiction can take us over when we don't understand really the source of the pain that's there how much how much sort of introspection how much self-work Etc should we think about

having gone through before we pursue that path if Any well so in the book as you know I have a chapter on psychedelic healing now I have I think eight or nine chapters on healing eighth I think one of them is no secretary killing so by no means am I a secular evangelist I don't think psychedelics are going to save the world but I think they can be very useful for a lot of people and not just in addictions I mean I have tell stories in the book of people healing from significant medical illness with

the Help of psychedelics by getting to know themselves by transforming their relationship to themselves that changes their physiology that allows them to overcome their illness in some cases in one case very dramatically and nearly terminal illness so but psychedelics can do that they can penetrate below the surface level and they can really get out of unconscious stuff where our trauma is And also where some of our best qualities are some people don't realize how courageous they are they don't realize how beautiful they are they don't don't realize their what Clarity they have but they can

recognize it under the influence of psychedelics they also don't know how hurt they are how much pain they carry how much fear they have that can all show up in a psychic experience So um I would say that they can be useful in almost any chronic condition and I give some examples of that in the book again they're no Panacea there are books exclusively devoted to psychedelics such as micropolan's how to change your mind when I interviewed Michael for the book from my book Um a lot of research has been done on it has been

increasing clinical experience with them they're an openness here they're not for everybody and practically speaking they will not be available for most people in any kind of affordable way in a reasonable future they just won't be but that doesn't mean that there aren't some lessons to be learned that they couldn't be powerful allies in healing For a lot of people and I wish they were much more readily available not to buy in the stores not for people to use them indiscriminately on their own but in the proper setting with the proper support with the devil

guidance they could literally be transformative for so many people uh part of the problem is that again our culture is so suspicious Of anything that goes beyond its limited perspective it's going to be a while before that's going to happen in a big way but I've already seen enough and experienced enough personally to know how powerful they can be I thought this only comes into it if I consciously know something I'm totally aware of it and I quite deliberately for selfish reasons Go against what I know to be true that's very rare that's actually very

rare now unless there's also a difference between fault and responsibility yes it's my responsibility how I lived my life I did it I mean I did it at a certain patternings it wasn't my fault but who's going to respond to all that if I'm not me who's who's response able if It's not me so taking responsibility means that once I realized something I do what I can to clean it up that's they take responsibility but that's not that's got nothing to do with fault there's no there's nothing to do with not that I haven't blamed

myself believe me I have and I mean that's you have to really learn not to blame yourself but But responsibility and blame are two different things and I I just for me playing just doesn't work in fact um you know Hafiz uh Sufi poem poet wrote uh was it 800 years ago now how blame is such a sad game it is because we're left being a victim in the truest sense of it there's nothing we can do about the situation Connect for me here while we still have a little bit of time connect for me

here what you perceive to be you know the experiences that you went through as a child and and how that mapped out to these addictive patterns like what actually is taking place in the brain and in the body to create a connection between those two okay so if you look at the addicted brain there's a number of circuits that just don't work very well One of them is the Endorphin circuitry endorphins are on internal opiates we have our internal opiates we have receptors for opiates that's why the heroin works just because we're receptors but why

do we have receptors because we have our own substances internal to ourselves that look very similar to you know to heroin so we have endorphin receptors so we have an endorphin system in our brain what do the endorphins do They provide pain relief physical and emotional pain relief which is necessary for life they give us a sense of pleasure and reward Joy elation and they connect us to other people so that endure from someone the attachment chemicals along with the oxytocin that that keeps us connected to people that we used to have to stay close

to why to survive So incidents have to attach and connect with their parents and the parents have to connect and adapt to the infants otherwise there's no infant survival given the helplessness of the human infant so we have these brain chemicals that help to modulate our attachments so we have to have brain circuitry that circuitry doesn't function well in addicted people so heroin Boy all of a sudden they have love and connection and Pain Relief and pleasure which are totally normal human aspirations as a sex trade worker with HIV said to me once the first

time I did hairline she said it felt like a warm soft hug so the opiates are really all about love then is the dopamine circuitry dopamine is our incentive motivation circuitry we have receptors for dopamine we have brain centers and nuclei that work on Dopamine without dopamine we're lifeless we're in Earth black Vigor incentive no motivation to do anything dopamine flows when you're seeking food or a sexual partner you can see how important that is people who are prone to diction the dopamine circuits don't function very well and that's where the addictions take root So

when you're addicted to work it's not the work that you're addicted to it's a dopamine that that's released in your brain to that activity that's what you're addicted to so even a non-substance addicts or substance addicts except they get those substances released internally triggered by whatever their target Behavior so the sex addict gets the dopamine from sexual shaking the gambling The Gambler from Gambling the cocaine addict from cocaine but they're all after the same hit of dopamine other circuits that don't work so well are stress regulation circuits in the brain whose job is to calm

our stress so our body doesn't go into overdrive and impulse regulation so that I may feel like doing something but something says no Gabor not a good idea don't do it addicts don't have that they keep doing what they know is bad for them These circuits in the brain develop in childhood in interaction with the environment so this is what we have to get about the brain the brain is a dynamic social organ it's circuitry it's systems development the availability of receptors for the neurochemicals like serotonin and oxytocin and vasopressin and Gaba and and and

and and and the endorphins and and dopamine They all develop in interaction with our environment in a more stressed environment is the Lefty circles develop properly and the more prone you are to be addicted later on so you can see um for example even already in utero like if you stress mothers that'll affect their children's dopamine receptors and their stress regulation Those kids will be more prone to be addicted later on because of what happened in utero so yes it is about the brain but the brain is not the primary source the brain itself is

under the effect of life history and life experience which also means that if we change our life experience in our relationship to ourselves it's not easy to ask we're gonna have to Change our brains so that's the beauty of it and the first step is awareness would you say well well without that there's no other steps so but when you say awareness what do you mean by that the recognition of that space that we talked about just at least a glimpse not that it's going to be there with us always But that we are not

our wrong patterns we are not our addictions we are not these things that are we are not Our Father who was an alcoholic we are not these things they're we are not our life events they've happened to us I think that that's partly what I mean through awareness fair enough and so even in the 12 steps when somebody says uh my name is so-and-so and I'm a an addict there's some there's value in that and That the person is recognizing and owning their behavior but at the same time it's a double-edged sword because nobody is

an addict that's not who they are detection was a pattern of behavior which came along as we pointed out before to suit some kind of pain so be more accurate to stand up and say hello my name is Gabor or my name is Drew and um I've had pain in my life which have sued through this particular Behavior but that's not who I am that's just my behavior that's just my coping mechanism that'd be more accurate and yeah that's where awareness comes in so once awareness the next component which a big part of awareness is

getting connected to there was pain first and that pain created the void to go with lack of Awareness or on with unconsciousness to go find things to put into that that void so is the next component to begin to unravel the pain well you know the pain you know there's no one-size-fits all um but for me if we don't go there if we simply focus on the behaviors you know you're drinking you want to stop drinking well that's good but very often that hasn't dealt with The fundamental addiction process in your brain you just stopped

a certain behavior and very often people that stop one Behavior they go into another people who stop smoking very often will put on weight why because that emptiness is still there so for me while it's good to work on behaviors obviously ultimately healing has to do with working through that pain and working through the trauma And and and and and and and finding your deeper to yourself underneath all that which by the way if you look at the word recovery I mean I say this all the time it's almost a cliche but recovery what does

it mean to recover something it means to find it you've lost contact with something you've lost touch with it and you've found it so you recovered it So I'm going to say I recovered what have people recovered and if you talk to people who've been through addictions and they asked them what did you recover what did you find oh I found myself so that's what ultimately recovery is but to do that you have to work through the pain for sure it's one of my favorite messages from Eckhart Tolle and a new Earth is that it's

in the nature of humanity and largely Consciousness to Have something lose it find it again but find it at a deeper level with true meaning that it cannot be lost so we had these things we lose them and then we step back into them I often I think of that in the context of of recovery yes um let me read you a quote from Karl Marx If I could please and he says um the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to become conscious in order to approach to possess it

in reality the world has been lying for something for which of which it only has to become conscious in order to really have it in other words it's here we just have to become conscious of it again your Consciousness is it so for me All the work that I do whether it's on physical illness or mental and it's not as any separation addiction whatever child development parenting it's all about how do we become conscious of what's already in here but we've lost sight of it yes both on the individual level and on the society level

and a good part of your your work you know while we have a Few more minutes here I would love to talk about the society aspect of it you've mentioned before in different interviews like you go and speak at different medical you know universities and even your own medical training you rarely ever or never hear the word trauma right like that was just not something that was being brought into the understanding I think there's a little bit of a shift happening especially more in the last three four Five years especially your work other people a

new generation of medical doctors who are starting to become more aware of these items which society being in this place that it is of a version of sickness right it's a version of sickness that's there what do you see zooming out as the pathways to that recovery on a societal level is it hap is it going to happen to the medical system is it Through individual I would love to just get your perspective on it yeah um well I'm just writing a new book um just rewriting it it'll be published in 2022 the title is

the myth of normal illness and health in an insane culture like once it comes out I'd love to come back and talk to you about it I would love to have you on yeah but it's all about but it's all about um how Illness in this Society physical and mental do not have normalities they're normal responses to an abnormal culture this this culture is abnormal when it comes to uh real human needs and it's in the nature of the system to be abnormal because if we had a society geared to meet human needs will we

be destroying the Earth through climate change Would we be um putting extra burden on certain minority people would we be selling people a lot of goods that they don't need in fact are harmful for them would there be Mass Industries based on manufacturing designing and the mass marketing toxic food to people So that we do all that for the sake of profit that's insanity it's not Insanity from the point of view of profit but it's Insanity from point of view of human need and so in so many ways this culture denies and even runs against

counter to human needs when you mentioned trauma that's given how important trauma is in human life and what an impact it has Why have we ignored it for so long because that's denial of reality is built into this system it keeps the system alive it keeps that's the whole point so it's not a mistake it's a design issue almost not that anybody consciously designed it but that's just how the system survives now the average medical student to this day I say the average there are exceptions and as you mentioned thank God there's an increasing number

of exceptions but the average medical student still doesn't get a single lecture on trauma in four years of medical school now they should have a whole course on it because I can tell you that term is related to addiction all kinds of mental illnesses and most physical health conditions as well but they never hear and there's a whole lot of science behind that but they Don't study that science now that reflects this society's denial of trauma the medical system simply reflects the needs of the larger society I should say the dominant needs of this larger

society how to create change on a social level that's a whole other discussion but I think whatever I can do with whatever platform that I've been able to Gain for myself whatever platform you have whatever sphere of influence any of us have you we helped to create consciousness we want people to be aware of how things are take something like the George Floyd murder Last Summer and all of a sudden in the wake of that murder which became public knowledge only because there was a 17 year old with a cell phone Who videoed it that's

the only reason we know about it but all of a sudden people started to respect black lives matter black lives matter well why did it take that horror to wake us up it's been going on for 400 years it's still going on so that waking people up waking ourselves up consciousness no For some people that'll take the form of activism political activity and it has to because it can't just happen on an individual level but I can't hear I can't sit here and prescribe people for what they should do all I can say is whatever

degree of Consciousness you have manifested on whatever level you can through activism in your personal life through the work that you do Um in your social relationships that's what we can do through all of our own individual awareness asking the universe how can I show up and contribute to this world in the best way you could be a chef at a restaurant and you're choosing to change your ingredients because you want to feed people healthier food you could be a mother who's doing her best to instill in new values in a different Pattern for a

family tree that would continue on you can host a podcast oh sorry go ahead apparently pessimistic no I don't need to be pessimistic I'm going to be realistic the problem is the chef is a boss the boss wants to make a profit getting those healthy foods might be more expensive and against the profit motive the mother may want to do her best or she might be on welfare or she might have to have a job where she Commutes to ours each way and leaves her care and some poor leaves your kids in some poor daycare

so the problem is I know both you and I are talking about an individual level and we have to but I'm saying it's also systemic and at some point we have to look at these larger systemic issues and those are political and uh social questions absolutely which is why if you have the awareness to even recognize as a problem And you have some of the means to be able to do it first starting with ourselves just like the quote that you shared earlier uh which is the greatest gift you can give to the world or

your children is your own happiness is very hard to help the world heal when you haven't begun your healing Journey which is a journey very much so as we talked about earlier and then within that the awareness of what way in any way that I can can I Make a contribution absolutely uh you may have heard this quote before again it's become one of these aren't repeated mantras but it was set by a Jewish rabbi about 100 years before Jesus and he said the task is not yours to finish but neither are you free not

to take part in it um and he's talking about the task of Bringing light to the world I love that quote I I've heard that before but yeah it's been a long time and it's a beautiful reminder I want to be very uh mindful of your time and I want to thank you for coming on the podcast and getting a chance to talk about some things that you know I'm gonna link to a few other episodes that are there because I feel like in some of those episodes you very concretely lay out the foundation of

Your work but I feel like a lot of our audience is familiar with you so I wanted to ask you some things that maybe I haven't heard it or had an opportunity to you know hear in different interviews that we've had a chance to talk about and um I want to conclude on one more one more aspect which is as a sensitive person is it fair to say that you've identified yourself as somebody who's sensitive I don't know if they have I know people Much from sensitive than I am okay okay got it um yeah

so as I know there's a book that has been a big impact in your in your life and it's uh the book by um uh I'm blanking on the name I'm getting it here Alice Miller the drama of the gifted child yeah and in inside of there she talks about the the sensitive child the gifted child right yeah so so really the the title the drama of the gifted child Should really be translated at the drama of the sensitive child but but um and she was a Polish Jewish person who then went to Switzerland and

lived there and um psychotherapist and the German title of the original title of the book was Prisoners of childhood it was translated into English as the drama of the gifted child it should have been the Drone with a sensitive child But I'm not you know what I haven't heard the question yet so I should stop answering it what's the question well we'll see if the question actually makes any sense so I will preface that before I put it out there I was connecting the component of uh in your life right now how do you think

about both what the external needs of the world are like people like me reaching out to you saying hey we I would love to have you on my podcast or other components and Bridging the Gap between The Addictive patterns that you've had previously where it's like the feeling of wanting to be wanted by people but making sure like how do you catch yourself on the are there tools that you have on the path of awareness to say okay I'm playing back into this pattern let me pull back a little bit from the world and make

sure that I'm fulfilling my own needs yeah so that's been an issue for me Um so a number of things one is I've been married 51 years 50 years 51 years now to um a wonderful woman his name is Ray in the middle of a Spate of workaholism and my part not that long ago raised that to me listen buddy you've written a book called when the body says no no you better write them one called When the wife said no because I ain't putting up with this anymore so it's good to have relationships that

speak the truth to you yeah and it's good to listen when they speak the truth number one number two these days I've re begun by yoga practice so I do yoga for the last month I've been doing it 45 minutes twice a day That's essential for me This interview would have been very different a month ago I don't know it's for you and your and your listeners to gauge what authenticity or energy or whatever there's there but internally to me um I I feel less driven and more at peace than when I don't do the

yoga and it's not like I've got it now I can Forget about it no it's ongoing practice so even last night like yesterday I was busy working on my new book and I had another interview and so on and meant for a swim that's another thing physical activity is very important for me almost every day I I I I I I I bicycle I get on my elliptical machine I go swimming but something but but even last night because I didn't get to do my yoga during the day so last night 10 o'clock I did

two 45 minute sessions that's just the commitment and that's saying wrote a part of myself because it's not something I would have done always but I'm telling you if I don't look after myself that way if I don't you'll find me a different person I might have all the same ideas but I have no peace around them what is normal in our society will be become Used to and in your two is actually abnormal from a point of view of human needs and human um aspirations so that what is Norm in this culture from the

point of view what human beings actually require for a healthy existence is totally abnormal and so we've become used to believing that we're competitive selfish aggressive creatures each of Our Stars for us each of us art for ourselves We become used to being manipulated being sold and in fact induced to desire products and foods and ways of being that actually undermine our health we become used to being a passive in the face of dire threats or existence like for example climate change we've become used to rein children in ways that were encounter to the needs

of children there was an article in New Yorker Justice last week about the mysterious rise of childhood suicides there's nothing mysterious about it it's only mysterious because we think that hobby lit is normal and then we don't understand when things go wrong but if we realize that the environment in which children are being raised today and how they're being raised and the parenting advice that parents get and the conditions the stress conditions I'm doing which families must live Then there's nothing mysterious about the rising tide of childhood mental health conditions including the rising tides of

suicides so in other words what I'm saying in short is that we become used to ways of being that or inimical to our well-being and I think it's an introduction that I quote the great late writer David Foster Wallace who talks about this metaphor of these two young fish swimming along and his older fish comes Along and says to them hey boys how's the water and the the the two fish swim on a bit longer and one of them says did one what's water in other words when we're surrounded by something and we're in edit

all the time we don't even recognize that it's there and we don't recognize the many ways in this culture undermines human health well-being mental and physical health and relationships Now one of the core themes building on top of that is this idea that so much of the suffering we see in the world you alluded to the recent article about increased suicide amongst young adults and teens and like that we have an explosion of chronic disease we have so many ailments that people are going through everything is basically On The Rise Alzheimer's autoimmune conditions cancers etc

etc and a core part of what you're sharing here with the audience Today is that this isn't a bug this isn't a glitch no this is a part of how the system whether it was designed on purpose or not this is part of the exports of a toxic system can you talk about that yes so the analogy I give is if in the laboratory you're going microorganisms in a broth we call that a culture a laboratory culture now if that broth is healthy nutritious Then those microorganisms will multiply and they'll thrive but if many of

them got sick or we're not doing well or we're actually dying we would think this is a toxic culture broth well that's as you point out is what's happening today so you have the United States which is the richest culture in the history of the world and 70 percent of adults are on one Medication or another 50 are on two medications a lot of the children are being medicated well we can say this to some mysterious accident it's a glitch or we can say there's something about this culture that's toxic and I'm saying that girl

like laboratory microorganisms living in a toxic culture birth so that the illnesses that we see when you probably understand them and their sources they're not Um Mysteries they're not glitches they're actually an outcomes of of the culture that we live in and and sorry we can understand their sources and we can actually do something about it both personally and socially so that's the good news you know one of your favorite books is the dhamapada yeah and inside of there and the Buddha is known for saying our life is shaped by our mind we become what

we think now You've expanded on that quote and shared that yes that's part one but actually a prequel to that is understanding that before our mind even develops into what we have an understanding of our mind Society is actually shaping our mind can you talk about that yes so as um a great American physician and psychiatrist Dr George Engel said in 1977 I think that human beings are bio-cycle social creatures Biopsychosocial which means that our biology is inseparable from our psychology our emotions and our thinking and from our social relationships now that begins before birth

so already the emotional states of the mother during pregnancy are affecting the physiology and brain development of the fetus so when mothers are stressed fetuses are stressed and when fetuses and are stressed even Decades later you can see the impacts of that stress and how they respond to stress as adults so this process becomes very very early and even in the womb and this has been documented meticulously then there's the birth experience now what I'm saying which itself can be either supportive or traumatizing because we've medicalized birth and to give modern obstetrics is due yes

It's very important it saves lives and the lives of children lives of mothers but we it's become so interfering and [Music] um disrespectful of natural processes that a lot of children born in ways that actually are traumatic for them High rate of cesarean section instrumentation noises interference when that's necessary it can be life-saving When it's not necessary we should often it isn't as a physician I've seen that often it becomes life-blating it hurts life and then hobby Raves children let me give you an example a lot of parents these days are taught to Sleep Train

their children mostly training a child an infant means not to pick them up when they're crying no as we evolved as human beings over Millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years that was never the practice hunter-gatherer groups when a kid cries they pick them up in fact you know what they never even put them down they carry the kids everywhere they go another cat a mother orangutan will never ignore a baby that's crying what we are told by Sleep Experts not to pick up the baby the baby's crying because they need to Be

held that's a physiological need of the child the baby's brain needs to be held the baby's emotional system and nervous system needs that holding when we ignore that were actually hurting the child and that's just the beginning so a lot of parents get pending advice that tries to make their parents life a bit easier in this modern crazy world where parents Are not getting proper support so there's a natural desire for the kid to sleep through the night so the parent can sleep through the night but from the child's needs point of view those needs

are being trampled on that affects the child's brain development that gives the child the message that his emotions her emotions their Emotions Don't Matter but they don't matter and that's just the beginning And so in Aboriginal societies when you study them you see that babies are breastfed till about three or four years of age not exclusively but the weaning weaning happens around the average age of winning is about four years none in the United States 25 25 of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth which from the physiological evolutionary

point of view amounts to an Abandonment of the child the mother is not doing this deliberately she's doing this because she's economically forced to do so and there's not enough support to allow her to be with her infant but what does the infant experience and so infants in this Society experience abandonment by parents who are actually doing their best and who love them but where the culture doesn't support the parenting And I could go on and on and on and I've only talked about pregnancy so far in the first months of life and then this

kind of culture that ignores the child's needs then continue and then what we do then we have companies that figure out how do people's how to appeal to Young children's addictive circuits by getting them hooked on machines So we're getting our infants and our young children addicted to technology which displaces human relationships and those human relationships are essential for healthy brain development and psychological development and then and that affects the brain we know this from studies that the more children spend all these devices the less their brain circuits work So then we wonder why there

are so many problems so you know and you know so far dude I've only scratched the surface well we'll continue to go deeper as you have in your book and I think one place for us to open that up and I'm jumping ahead a little bit but a Core theme that I've picked up inside of the book and your writings is this idea of the crisis of Separation that we're living in and can you talk about that Crisis and how it's been a key part of what has created this toxic culture that we're living in

today yes so again we have to understand human beings are very adaptable we can adapt to more environments than any other mammal we can live near the North Pole we can live near the equator we're very adaptable we're also adaptable emotionally that we Can survive in many environments but that doesn't mean that we'll do our best in all the environments so if you look at how did human beings evolved we evolved in small band hunter-gatherer groups so if our species Homo sapiens sapiens has been around for say 150 200 000 years and if if that

can be represented in one hour then until five minutes ago we lived in Small band hunter-gatherer groups which means we had a close-knit community connected to other people where people knew each other supported each other they all parented the kids together so children had many adults parenting them where everybody knew their cousins and aunts and uncles were where there was a social Unity until very recently so now we have a society under globalized capitalism Where they extended family to a larger stand has been eroded for a lot of people where communities are no longer communities

but people live in isolated homes they commute long distances to work they don't see the children the whole day there's an epidemic of loneliness so between I think it was the 1990s to the 2010s or something like that I have to look up the statistic but The number of Americans who said they were lonely doubled from 20 to 40 percent in Britain they have appointed the minister of loneliness not so bad the problem is now because we're biopsychosocial creatures and we need other good people to connect with for a physiological and emotional well-being loneliness itself

is as much of a risk factor for ill health than smoking 15 Cigarettes a day people are lonely they get sick faster and they die quicker of their diseases so there's a huge problem with longinus these days and this has been documented for decades now by the book um bullying alone for example um and and Vivek murthy's recent book unknowning as the he's the American Surgeon General But that loneliness has got major mental and physical health implications and this Society because it Fosters this individualistic competitive aggressive everybody against everybody else kind of ethic and because

it makes people so insecure in so many ways it Fosters isolation and loneliness and that has significant Health implications when you walk to your layout in the book of what a toxic Culture is and how we've gotten so used to it and we even think that it's normal yeah um their there are going to be individuals that are only listening to the first part of this conversation that have not had a chance to go deeper or yet read the book that are asking themselves well aren't we living in the safest most Progressive time people are

living longer there's Less extreme poverty less people have you know more people have access to clean water compared to like a decade ago so these advances that we are noticing inside of society how are they layered on top of the the central landscape that you paint out inside of the book yeah well it's a question of whether willing to look at the whole picture and the actual lived lives of human beings or the evolution of the external Statistics and hold them up as kind of the the Counterpoint now um first of all we have to

put this into a global context so no country lives on its own and on a worldwide scale there's immense poverty the real question is why is it that amongst such wealth there's still such poverty why is there a single poor person in the United States or Canada why me of all This wealth I mean that's the real question and that economic insecurity is actually increasing for people people are less and less economically secure people are are less and less sure that their children are going to be okay um as far as violence I mean do

I really have to talk to you about violence in the world either on the international Scale or on the individual scale particularly in the country like the United States we may be living longer for because we have more food and uh better medical services and better hygiene that's true but why I'm going to be more people getting sick and why more people were living longer with chronic illness I mean why is it that 70 of American Adults earn one medication or another so um to me this argument about how things are better than ever it's

pure Pie in the Sky and the real question is why given all the resources all the science all the medical Wonders that we were capable of all the wealth why are we living so badly that's the real question is and only people that want to justify the Status quo would point to statistics that look different because I would say to them okay even if you're right how do you explain all the misery that people are experiencing how do you explain the fact that the United States the wealthiest country in the world had the highest rates

of covet deaths I mean something was driving that and I'm not being anti-American here I'm Just stating a statistical fact so to me that argument doesn't cut much water and surely the task of intellectuals and there's certain intellectuals I could name them have made a career out of out of the right best-selling books and how everything is just fine and things have never been better well that's not the job of an intellectual the job and intellectual is the question What the heck is going on and and and and and to try to understand the sources

of our difficulties not to keep telling ourselves that we're doing better so what if we're doing better than people 10 000 years ago by the way I'm not sure that we are but so far if we're doing better than people hundred years ago so what the real question is given all that's available to us all that we know and all our resources Why are we doing this so poorly and why are there more illnesses than ever used to be and by the way this is only true amongst all people it's also true amongst young people

you know when a patient comes into a doctor's office the first hope really and obviously we live in a little bit of a crazy situation when it comes to how we treat Health we're going to get into that a Little bit is that before the physician can decide what to do there really must be a deep understanding of the problem and the first section of your book is exactly that it's taking people through this deep understanding because we've gotten so normalized we don't even know where the fish that don't realize that we're in the water

and we don't even know what water is what are some of the top things that you Think that Society is not understanding that our deep contributors to the problem that we're in today so we talked about separation yeah there's many many separation something occurred to me so one of the things that Western medicine does it separates mind from the body so my books have been my previous books have been published in 30 languages now And so I travel all over the world give a lot of talks and I asked people a simple question have you

in the last five years been to a respirologist a rheumatologist a gastroenterologist a rheumatoid a neurologist cardiologist a lot of people put their hands up and then I'll say did anybody ask you about childhood Toronto for your multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or colitis or Crohn's disease or fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or whatever you got chronic asthma the reality trauma did they ask you about stress in your life did they ask you about how you feel about yourself as a human being did they ask you about your relationship with friends or significant others did they

ask you about stress at work at this point the vast majority of People put their hands down and yet I say to people those questions had everything to do while you got sick in the first place most chronic illnesses not all but most chronic illnesses brother of Mind so-called mental illness is actually so-called for a good reason which we can talk about so-called mental illnesses or physical illnesses are connected to chronic stress and in many cases to child to trauma Properly understood now the average medical student doesn't get a single lecture on trauma so how

would they understand these relationships now let me tell you uh fascinating vignette in 1938 it was it was a very famous physician at Harvard his name was Dr Soma Weiss he was so famous and so revered that at Harvard every year they still have a day In his honor a research day in his honor he was that revered and he gave a talk in 1930 I think it was to his medical school class which was printed in a journal of the American Medical Association and some of I said in 1938 that emotional and psychological factors

have as much to do as physical factors in the onset of most disease he said and they have to be at Least as an important a part of the treatment he he knew this this is decades before there was all the research proving our right rules in 1977 there was an American physician again very famous in his time not So Much Anymore called George Engel who said that human beings are biopsychosocial creatures in other words we can't separate the emotions from the physiology from The social relationships in other words these insights have been arrived at

Time and Time Again by clinicians and Physicians there's been tens of thousands of research papers in those decades showing the mind-body unity how emotions and social conditions and relationships affect our physiology and the average physician never hears a single lecture about any of this So the Western a lot of doctors begin to figure it out after they go into practice but they kind of have to do it on their own like I had to and then I discovered oh my God there's all these other people saying the same thing and they've even researched it and

is all the proof so when you mentioned separation what occurred to me was that the Western medicine medical ideology separates mind from the body And it separates the individual from the environment so that's why you not get these questions asked he might say so what well the so what is that if you ask these questions and people start understanding their own mind body Unity it means they become much more empowered to heal from their conditions and to deal and to live with them and to deal with them in a powerful way so these aren't just

theorical questions They're practical ones but they never asked hardly ever asked so people are left bereft of some Essentials of healing because of the medical separation of mind and body and separation of the individual from the social and cultural environment now let me give you a quick example um So telomeres are structures on our chromosomes they're like the aglets and our shoelaces like glue that keeps the strands from unraveling so our chromosomes have these structures called telomeres that keep the chromosomes from unraveling and when we're born there have a certain length and is stress and

aging happens they get shorter and shorter Until they unravel and enemy unravel as well and our life is over so telomeres are kind of a way to look at biological aging now if you measure the telomeres of black Americans their years shorter than Caucasian Americans not for any genetic reasons but because of the social stress of racism produces stress stress on their chromosomes that they age faster now that's an example of what I mean by Bio psychosocial so are we going to look at all that or we're just going to ignore it and believe that

diseases are simply physiological isolated events I'm saying if you're going to deal with them both personally and on a social level we have to look at the whole social cultural picture that we're a part of and I'd love you to contrast this with the idea that a lot of people still are Living with today we've done many episodes in this podcast about is that so much of these things are driven by genetics tell us how we know that genetics are not the full picture when it comes to this idea of what's creating disease today I'm

going to be more radical than that but not only are they not the full picture they're not even half the picture so Um there are very few diseases there are some that are purely genetically driven one of them is runs in my family muscular dystrophy if you have the gene you're going to have the disease and it's in my family my mother had it my aunt had it but those diseases are very rare now most diseases have very little genetic component this is contrary to everything you read I'm just talking about what the research Shows

so take something like breast cancer yeah there are breast cancer genes there are such genes but out of 100 women with breast cancer only seven have the gene 93 don't and over 100 women with a gene not all of them the risk is increased for sure but not all of them will have the the disease either for the reason that genes are turned on and off by the environment And there's a whole new science of epigenetics epigenetics that studies our genes are turned on and off by the environment and so that even if there's a

genetic predisposition which in most cases does nothing or very little of it still depends on the environment to turn those genes on or off so genes explain very little about diseases For the most part diseases represent a person's life not a person's genetic background a genes can in some cases increase the risk for some conditions but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination you can have two people with exactly the same genes put them in or two animals put them in different environments they'll have very different outcomes because the genes are Turned on

and off by the environment in by multiple mechanisms so for the most part the idea that mental health conditions or physical health conditions are generally determined is completely false the might in some cases to be some some degree be genetically influenced but that doesn't cover even half the picture in most cases so I'm saying besides here's the thing Drew like even if a disease was 20 genetically determined which most diseases not even Close to that much but let's say 20 was and 80 wasn't there's nothing I can do about that 20 percent it's there but

that 80 percent the environmental stuff that I can work with I can give children a better environment supports Healthy Growth we can provide adults with healthy environments that support healthy physiology Regardless of their genes what I'm saying is so even if it was as high as 20 you know what I would say even if it was 99 genetic and one percent environmental I don't want to know what that one percent was and how to work with it but in most cases it's nothing like that even not even close so what I'm saying is that the

most important determinant Of people's health is actually the lives that they lived that's and is that when you mentioned the Buddha um yes the Buddha says that with our minds we create the world that how we see the world how we see ourselves determines how we will behave and treat ourselves and other people but it took modern psychology to point out that before with our minds we create The world the world creates our minds so when my mom when I was two weeks of age writes in her diary I was two weeks of age and

she writes in her diary my poor little Gabor my heart is breaking for you because you've been crying to be fed for the last hour and a half but I promise to the doctor I would only feed you on schedule what message am I getting your message that you're getting is that you know you're on your own I'm on my Own my needs don't matter four years later five years later I have a severe earache it's four in the morning and I have a really bad ear infection I'm not crying I'm whimpering to myself I'm

not calling my parents that's unnatural the natural thing is for me to scream with my Eric to get help that's self-suppression happens to so many people in this Society So that if if my needs are ignored then then the world I'm living in is a real damage I might I must fight or either ignore my needs or fight for them like crazy well that's a world view that was shaped by my early experience and my poor mom her heart was breaking but she had to suppress her own parenting instincts to comply with the doctor's advice

And then I get the message okay you're on your own and that has affected my whole life by the way it has affected my marriage relationship and how I relate to my work and I that I've had to do a lot of healing to overcome that early messaging and just to add to that you know we talked about this a little bit in depth when you were on the podcast last time but there's multiple journal entries That you share so beautifully of your mom inside of the book and one of the journal entries your mom

is writing now begin the most Dreadful five or six weeks of my life when I couldn't see you so just to add that too it wasn't you know just that you weren't in that moment not being breastfed there was a very sort of crazy circumstances if you could just chat about those for a moment here well for those that are not familiar so There's a chapter in this book on psychedelic healing and um I went to the Amazon jungle to work with some shamans I'm not going to tell you the whole story here it's in

the book but um this Shaman said to me that when you were very they didn't know anything about me by the way or my personal history or who I was they just I was just guy from the north you know they said to me after one ceremony you Had a big scare when you were very small and you haven't got over it yet now when I was a year old as you mentioned being a Jewish infant on the Nazi occupation in Budapest Hungary Second World War my mother was living under circumstances where she couldn't ensure

my survival so she gave me to a strange Christian woman in the street and said please take this baby to this address well they'll look after Him because I can't feed him I can't assure that he'll Live Another Day so I didn't see my mom for five or six weeks a pediatrician came to see me during that week that time of separation and the pediatrician said that she's never seen such Terror in the eyes of a human being if she saw in my eyes as a one-year-old these shamans 76 years 76 years later Picked up

on that fear that's how deep it went and that of course again has affected how I've been in work and my relationship and my parent and my children and my mental health of course so um these early experiences do shape how we see the world but we're not conscious of them then we live out of these early Experiences and by doing so we create more stress for ourselves and that stress then acts on our physiology and then we go to a doctor with an illness they'll deal with the physical aspects of it but the net

deal with the historical and human aspects of it hey YouTube If you enjoyed what you just saw keep watching for more great content on How to improve your brain and your life craving and desire is the foundation of stress and fear and people think well that how could that possibly be well stress and fear comes from adrenaline