Dr Gabor Maté | "Sensitive people used to be our Shamans - now they are shamed"

[Music] and i should say we'll try to get through there's lots of questions which is wonderful and so if you could try and keep them um succinct and and brief that would be marvelous so that we can get through as many as possible thank you um thank you hannah thank you dr mattie um i wondered and i'm not sure if you're prepared to answer this but i wondered what method you used to recover from your own self-confessed addiction if you used a 12-step program or if you care to share that yes um i attended uh

12 star group once or twice but um i didn't have the discipline to keep going um [Music] what method i don't know that there's one method you know but it was really now look by the way it was two years ago this june that i was in london speaking to a lot of people including to the hardware academy and my wife was with me and this work that i i the the shopping addiction i've got over years ago but to work addiction two years ago i was in london and i was given these talks and

i was being my usual um you know i like to think articulate and intuitive and communicative self on stage but back in the hotel room with my wife i was irritated because i was working too much i taken on too much and my wife said to me listen friend you've written a book called when the body says no now you better write one called when the wife says no i'm not putting up with this anymore i will not have my holidays ruined because you're a workaholism so partly it had to do with do i want

to honor my relationship in fact to stay in it so i had some incentive after 49 years at that point of marriage and um but really it's been a a process of deepening my awareness of myself of separating from my ego and that meant for me uh counseling deep reading self-reflection yoga taking care of my body physically and nutritionally all that each of my books that i've written have been from myself so the more i immerse myself in this material the clearer i became within myself there's no simple answer i can give you i can

also tell you that i've also done some um really helpful work with uh traditional healing methods including psychedelic substances and that's also helped i can't i can't point to one thing that has been the key it's all of that but fundamentally what it was is i've had a deep commitment i can acknowledge myself for that sometimes i had to drag myself kicking and screaming but i had a deep commitment to transformation and to self-awareness i i i could should jump in at that moment and say i think one of the experiences could have been with

the guest we have coming up on the on the how to academy program march the 24th the temple of life well yeah uh the temple of the way of light of life yeah that's in peru and it's it's an ayahuasca healing center with matthew waterston and good friend of mine and uh yes i had a deep experience there two years ago that i'll tell you about in some other context in fact i went to the temple of the way of light right from london in the under the second i just mentioned and when i got

there the shaman said buddy you can't lead anybody else you're too stressed yourself you better just work on you that's what happened these traditional healers read me like a book they didn't know a thing about me matthew is free to talk about that if he wants to hi uh thank you so much dr mattei um i am an md and uh your work has influenced my practice and i was working as a med school professor as well and would turn all my students onto um your videos and books um my question is personal um i

struggle with an immense amount of dissociation um and i think i have maybe become involuntarily addicted to the endogenous opioids in my brain um and i feel very disconnected from myself and i do use psychedelics also but i still find myself kind of struggling to connect with the self all the time because of this dissociation and i was wondering if you have any ideas on how to break it well yes um so the first question is why would anybody dissociate not that you do it by the way you don't dissociate your brain does it automatically

i mean do you decide miriam do you decide all of a sudden i'm going to dissociate now not at all um that's one of the most frustrating things is that it just happens so automatically okay now what no don't think about yourself or why would any human being why would any human organism do that yeah um i guess it's just overwhelm it's a response to just not being able to cope with with whatever's in front of you exactly and its origins are always in childhood when the brain is developing so that like for example my

adhd my tuning out which is a milder form of dissociation was a response to circumstances that as an infant i couldn't handle so that the brain tunes out as a way of defending itself from the overwhelming stress and it's doing so when the brain is developing and all the circuits are being laid down so the tuning out the dissociation actually becomes wired in and later on it takes very little to trigger it so what i would invite you to do is to send me an email and i'm giving how to academy permission to share my

personal email with you this is professional courtesy here and if you want to write to me i'll get back to you i won't take the time no no no do we have it for me to delve into this question with you but in recompense for you recommending my books to your students i'll see what i can do to get back to you is that fair enough that's an absolute honor thank you so much i really appreciate it you're welcome thank you without sounding rude again if i could emphasize if you could keep a question brief

so that i'm so that i can get through as many as possible thank you so much uh i just wanted to ask uh i've come to recognize my deep sensitivity as well as in my family through my healing of trauma and coming into authenticity so i was curious what you recommend to help prevent trauma when deeply sensitive well um you know it's a bit like asking how do you prevent trauma when deeply black in a racist society because this society does not honor vulnerability fact it kind of shuns it you're being weak how many times

have you been told don't be so sensitive hundreds you might as we've been told now what colors are you a brunette or you're blonde i okay well you might people might as well tell you don't be so green-eyed it's just your nature no nobody ever told you not to be green-eyed but they told you not to be sensitive which is as much part of your nature as their green eyes are so in this society sensitive people are hurt how do you prevent it is if if the parents had the wherewithal and the awareness and the

teachers to recognize sensitivity and to actually honor it and to cherish it because in traditional societies the sensitive people were the shamans there were the healers in our society don't be so weak don't miss your name be pambi don't be so sensitive so how do you prevent it you can't as an individual as a fetus as an infant as a small child you can't you can heal from the traumas but you can't you could hardly have prevented it thank you okay i'm gonna ask a question that somebody would rather remain anonymous i think it's important

um they said that their mother um was an alcoholic for years and was ostracized for the from the family she's been sober for years but it's still a taboo subject she's still ostracized and it fits in with so much of of what you talk about and what you advise that she wonders you know your ideas and thoughts on how to overcome that taboo well i'd have to know much more about the situation she may or may not be able to overcome it because it may be a deeply held prejudice that the family is not willing

to give up precisely because her own journey was so painful for them because it reminded them too much of what they don't really want to know which is their own dysfunctions her addiction her alcoholism was not her individual manifestation she was the canary in the mind manifesting the dysfunction the multi-generational non-culpable dysfunction of the entire family so the family may or may not be ready to confront that in themselves having said that assuming that the family is somewhere else open she could actually go to the family without blame if she's ready to do that if

she can do this authentically and say you know what i really got that my behavior was so painful for you all that you all loved me so much you couldn't handle it and you couldn't handle the behaviors that i generated as a result of my addiction and i get it but i'm hoping we can reconnect because i miss you all now if she's in a position to say that that'd be one approach whether or not she's received or not does not depend on her yes hi um i was gonna ask um a relatively simple question

which is how would we uh address the tension between your findings of addiction but also the fact that the optimal business model seems to be an addiction model from tech pharma media religion that is the optimal business model that can't be changed so if they're and they've got a lot of research to addict people it's effectively combating what you're or using your findings what do you think the best way to is stay inoculated against all these new forms of um addiction well um you're quite right and i mean in the business world workaholics are rewarded

aren't they and cell phone companies and food companies do research on how to access the addiction from parts of the brain including the child's brain so they're they're gearing their profits on people being addicted that's all true so prevention of that or dealing with it is on different levels if you're a parent you better make sure that your child doesn't experience that inner emptiness that would have them turn to all that stuff and other books of mine talk about that as adults i go back to what i said earlier is that all we can do

not all we can do but personally the best we can do for ourselves is to become aware as possible is there some emptiness in me like is there some emptiness in me that drives me to the internet to watch the same stuff on youtube over and over and over again or compulsively it has me do that then i have to deal with that emptiness inside of myself so rather than worrying about the behavior let me really take on that emptiness that's inside the that void inside of myself what is the source of it how do

i experience it how do i relate to it in a conscious fashion so it's maybe a pat answer nail but um consciousness awareness and that is daily work when i don't do my yoga twice a day i become less conscious that's my particular i'm not telling you you should do yoga i'm just telling you for me it's daily work to stay conscious thank you so much i think we've got time for just maybe a couple more i wanted to ask you actually two things but you can you can answer them in whatever one order you

want so because you talked about the the sort of distant history of humanity and um how much healthier the environment was so at what point do you think in human civilization do you think that we lost uh that environment um and a sort of short follow on on the topic of this sort of misattributed quote of saying that uh you know you should be the change you want to see in the world what can we do to create um you know without wanting to take on the burdens of the world what can we do as

individuals to create a better environment for ourselves what's interesting is that your questions in both cases contain their own answers um when you said at what point in civilization did we lose it that was the point when civilization came up when we went from hunter-gatherers small band to um agricultural and civilization started to rise that's when we began to lose that stuff and it's been gradual but steady and relentless ever since so there are higher um stages of technology in the economic organization we reached the more separated we became from our original selves so that

was the answer write a new question civilization the question now is can we re-embrace those values without giving up the benefits of science and technology and intellectual awareness and so on i say that we can but it'll take a lot of awareness a lot of work um as to what you can do again you answer your own question be the change that you want and um where you play that out depends on what your inclinations are and what your platform is so in whatever platform you have whether it's in the context of your family community

extended family political grouping larger society profession manifest your awareness and teach it to those that are ready to listen at whatever level and don't be attached to the outcome if i was attached to the outcome that my colleague medical colleagues should all also embrace what i'm talking about and believe me at times i thought all i have to do is say the obvious and never going to say oh yeah he's right no they're not so i've let go a long time ago of that kind of attachment then and everybody should it's not about the end

result it's about the process um i'm just trying to go through as many of the screens as possible there's so many of you out there and i want to be able to kind of ask as many get your questions in before i got time for one more thank you very much um yeah this has been great thanks both um i just wondered uh i'm in america uh where the disease model of addiction is uh primary and i've been in a recovery myself drug and alcohol addiction i have other addictions as well i just wondered what

your view is on abstinence um and moderation when it comes to addiction i know it's a big question but uh out here you know abscess and abstinence is is really seen as as the ultimate goal so um yeah your view will be great thank you okay so again a deep question very quickly um abstinence is a goal but it's not legal it's a legitimate goal but it's not legal the goal is sobriety and you can be abstinent without being sober abstinent means simply you're not doing something that's that's good it's good but it's not sobriety

sobriety is actually full awareness and being in touch with yourself that's the ultimate goal number one number two while abstinence is a legitimate goal it can't be the immediate goal for everybody in a downtown east side in vancouver be pioneered for example via the north america's first supervised injection site and i worked there as a physician where people bring their drugs even though they're illegal and they get to inject under supervision they're giving clean needles store water to inject with um and and they're resuscitated if they overdose this has been done in england it's been

done in europe but this is not abstinence because these people are not ready for abstinence it's harm reduction it reduces the harm because it means they're not using puddle water from the back alley to inject with as some people did and they're not passing hiv onto one another is that a good thing or a bad thing that's a good thing so abstinence is a legitimate goal but we don't define what the goal should be for individuals we meet them wherever they're at that's the whole point and let me say one final thing here you mentioned

recovery well that's a great word what does it mean to recover something it means to find it again and it means that whatever you found again was never destroyed you just lost sight of it and if i asked you and if i asked anybody what did you recover when you recovered they'll say i recovered myself so that self is always there for you to recover and everybody can be helped to do that but it takes a lot of patience understanding and compassion including for ourselves i think that that is a very sort of much more

a positive sort of optimistic place to draw to a close but it really is it's wonderful to have so many of you with us to see so many of you it's a it's a rare thing and and gabriel thank you so much indeed for your wisdom and insight we could go on a lot longer but hopefully you'll come back and join us and perhaps that will be when we can all be together in the same room thank you very very much indeed thank you very much bye-bye you