Gabor Maté Explains How Trauma and Addiction Are Linked - And Why Modern Life Is Making Us Sick

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Gabor [00:00:01] The people who are most realised, or self-realised, or comfortable with themselves, are people who don't live a life that's designed to please others. But, you know, they may be part of a culture, but they don't necessarily conform to it. But they rather insist on being themselves. 

Pandora [00:00:22] Hello wonderful listeners and welcome to season 6 of Hurt to Healing. I'm your host Pandora Morris and I couldn't be more thrilled to be back with you after taking some time away to make this podcast better than ever. The podcast continues to be a source of light in healing for me and I hope it is for you too. Together we've built an incredible Hurt To Healing community, a safe and compassionate space where we can unpack the complexities of mental health and support one another. My hope is that with every new season, our community grows stronger and even more impactful. If you're affected by any of the issues discussed today, know that help is available. You can reach out to Shout, a free anonymous and confidential text service for mental health support 24-7. Just text Shout to 85258 or visit giveusashout.org for more resources. Shout is always here for you, free of charge and won't appear on your phone bill. Whether you're here for a dose of inspiration, some connection, or just to feel a little bit less alone, you're in the right place. Welcome to the first episode of the brand new series of the Hurt to Healing podcast. Today I'm honoured to be joined by the brilliant Dr. Gabor Mate, internationally acclaimed physician, speaker and author of the groundbreaking book The Myth of Normal. In this conversation we explore the deep connections between trauma, addiction and the journey to reclaiming our selves. Dr. Matei sheds light on the concept of a toxic culture. the roots of addiction in childhood experiences, and the importance of not labelling individuals by their struggles. He shares his wisdom on the healing power of connection, emotional awareness, and the groundbreaking role of neuroplasticity. Whether you're grappling with your own challenges or seeking a better understanding of how trauma shapes our lives, this episode is a must listen. So let's dive in. Gabor, your most recent book, The Myth of Normal, is just the most phenomenal work and has really opened my eyes to so much and just makes so much sense that I want everyone to read it. Can you start by telling us what toxic culture is and how you define it in your work? 

Gabor [00:02:56] We can think of it very simply if we imagine a laboratory where a biologist is growing organisms in a petri dish, and we call that a culture. So we culture these microorganisms. And if the organisms were thriving and reproducing, we'd say it's a healthy culture medium. If they were dying or not reproducing well or develop pathologies, we would say it toxic culture. Now, if you look at Western globalised society, from the point of view of how the inhabitants, the microorganisms such as us human beings are doing in our culture, we see that it's not very well. The rate of mental illness is rising all the time, anxiety, depression are becoming epidemic or endemic, childhood problems like anxiety, attention problems, self-cutting, BULLY IN depression, statistically arising here in Britain, in North America, and pretty much through the Western world, is the rise in the number of people with autoimmune disease, in non-smoking-related malignancies. If we understand that human beings, just like other organisms, live in a context, and the sources of the illness can't just be found inside the individual organism, but has to be sought and looked for. in the context in which those lives are lived, then we say this is a toxic culture. 

Pandora [00:04:34] Why do you disagree with labelling ourselves as our addictions? So to say I am an anorexic, I am a drug addict, I am an alcoholic, why is that mistaken in your opinion? 

Gabor [00:04:48] It may be true that a person has alcoholic tendencies and behaviours, and their lives are very much dominated by it, but is that who they are? Is that how they were born? Is that their true nature? Or is that just some behaviour that developed for certain reasons to do with their lives? So if you look at alcoholism, for example, alcoholism is very much related to a childhood trauma, childhood experience. It's also very much related to social circumstances, such as loss of meaning or purpose, loss of employment, sense of insecurity. In countries where there is severe national historical trauma, like Ireland for example, alcoholism is a huge problem. To say that somebody struggles with alcoholism or has an issue with it is not to say that that's who they are. Nobody is that. and it's very toxic. to identify people with their dysfunctions. That's not who they are. As much of a challenge as those behaviours may pose for them, it doesn't define them. If it did define them, nor would it ever get better. But the fact is that people heal, which means this is not who are. And what's interesting, when you talk about addiction specifically, or alcoholism, for example, when people get better, what phrase do we use? We say they've recovered. No, that's a good English word. What does it mean to recover something? I'm asking you. 

Pandora [00:06:20] you reverse a bad situation. 

Gabor [00:06:22] Well, that's one way to put it, but the other way to put it is more simple, you find something. You lost something and you found it. What is it that people find when they recover from addiction? You ask them, what did you find? They say, I found myself. So then underneath the addiction, there was a self that was lost but never damaged. So how can we say that they are their addiction? They're not their addiction. They're just not who they are. 

Pandora [00:06:50] That strikes a chord with me because I struggle with an eating disorder. Do you think you can ever fully recover from a process addiction like an eating disorder or say something like OCD? I mean, I sometimes say send it into remission so that it's something that always has to be managed, but it will still exist. 

Gabor [00:07:07] Well, first of all, the word remission implies a disease. And I don't perceive eating disorders as a disease, in fact, I don' perceive a lot of things as a disease that you do, you know, remission and so on. Let me ask you this question. What does it do for you in the short term? 

Pandora [00:07:25] control and it gives me a sense of safety in a very walked way. But the further along in my recovery I get, the more I realise that actually it creates an illusion of safety and it's not reality. 

Gabor [00:07:36] Well, of course. But in the beginning, so the eating disorder wasn't who you were and it wasn't your primary problem. Your primary problem was lack of safety and lack of agency in your life. So what happened to you? To deprive you of safety because the eating disorder is just your desperate attempt to attain something that you should have in the first place. Safety is an essential need of human beings. It's an essential need of the human infant. not having made it before and this is the first time we speak but I can tell you something happened in your life that deprived you of a sense of safety and that something that happened probably occurred very early in your Life and then to answer your question can you fully recover absolutely but not by focusing on the behaviour but by looking at the dynamic that the behaviour I was trying to resolve somehow. So, yeah, if you could find that sense of safety within yourself, and that would take some work, perhaps therapeutic work and other kinds of work, if you find that a sense of safe, there'd be no eating disorder. The eating disorder does not exist as kind of a dynamic of its own. It's simply a response. It's one particular response, amongst many possible ones, to that lack of safety that for some reason you developed at some point in your life. 

Pandora [00:09:08] And it's so interesting and I know you talk about psychedelics quite a lot and you've had first-hand experience with psychedelics and I myself went and had an experience and it was the first time in my life that alone when I was lying there, I actually felt a sense of safety in myself, like I actually experienced this, I'm safe in my body, I'm okay. Whereas up until that point, my entire life was spent like running away from this horrible feeling of, I don't want to be in my buddy, ooh, I want to run away for me a lot of My way of running away was literally to run and just to run, and run and run. 

Gabor [00:09:42] That's what people do. 

Pandora [00:09:44] And it's finding that just sense of peace and inner calm. And so when someone says to me, oh, I always have to be doing something, I was, to me that person, there's something that's not quite right. And there's some things slightly unhinged that they need to search within themselves. And I think in this English culture, we suppress and we bury a lot. 

Gabor [00:10:03] Well, let's not call it unhinged. It's a perfectly normal response to abnormal circumstances. The sense of safety that you found is your true self. What the psychedelics do in the right circumstances, they get you very deep in yourself. And sometimes people find terror and pain and rage under the psychedelic experience. Those are emotions that they've been bearing all their lives and they have to be dealt with. so it's a good thing that they experience them. but sometimes they get to that place that you got to, which is a fundamental safe of internal, essential goodness, that is your birthright as a human being. We evolved that way. And so I just recently read a book called The Continuum Concept, and it's written in the 80s, and it is American model, and the writer ends up in six weeks away from civilisation and the depths of the Venezuelan Amazon jungle, living with these Stone Age people. And how they bring up their children is, children get this essential sense of goodness and safety. Because they're carried everywhere, they're held by the adults, they are not chastised, they are loved, they allow to be individuals, and they don't have a lack of safety. Even though they're living in a circumstances that many of us would find disorienting and frightening. But that sense of good and safety comes from their sense of relationships with their environment and with one another. That's your intrinsic nature, actually. woohoo as that may sound, but that is your intrinsic nature. And that's who you really are, not your eating disorders. 

Pandora [00:11:42] in this English culture a lot of people get sent to boarding schools very young and that was my experience and I never felt that sense of maternal attachment and that's something that your work really illuminated. If you don't have that feeling that you're unconditionally loved but particularly by your mother, I think it's deep rooted and again what the myth of normal made me realise is that I've had a brother who has done no work on himself and who seemingly was line. However, I'm convinced that actually a lot of his trauma came out in asthma and eczema and physical illness, whereas mine came out and mental illness. 

Gabor [00:12:20] Yeah, well, asthma is a typical example where it's kind of a telling example because how do we treat asthma? As a physician, I can tell you, basically, we treat the asthma by giving people two hormones. One is adrenaline, the other is cortisol. The adrenaline opens up the airways, the cortisol settles down the inflammation. What are adrenaline and cortisol? They're stress hormones manufactured by the adrenal gland. What happened to your brother is that there's so much stress. that his stress mechanism became disabled and now his lungs get inflamed. Lots of studies showing the relationship between parental stress and childhood asthma. In fact, the more stressed the parents, the more medication the child needs for their asthma. And in the United States, for example, certain racial groups, the more episodes of racism they have to endure, the higher their risk for asthma. That's one aspect of it. Other aspect of it is your brother is probably one of these very sensitive people. And so the environment affects him all the more, which means that not just the physical environment, but the emotional environment also affects him. And so, the asthma is a typical stress-related condition. The problem being is that most physicians don't know what the heck I'm talking about. And it's not because the science doesn't exist, because the sciences has been there for decades, relating asthma and stress. It's not even vaguely controversial. with most people, if they go to their physician for asthma, all they get is a prescription, which is necessary, but not sufficient. I don't know if that answers your question, but in this society, there's so much stress on people, so there's an increasing rate of asthma. Now, there are other contributors to asthma, pollutants in the air and so on, but the emotional factors are ignored. 

Pandora [00:14:14] It was very true and as you've tried to do, and I know with like wrong and chattergy is educating a lot of medical practitioners about the Socratic model and saying that actually, the mental, the physical, you call it the biopsychosocial model, don't you? To me, it makes complete sense and yet we're living in a healthcare system where doctors still aren't really that up to speed with the mental side of things. 

Gabor [00:14:41] It's almost bizarre, because you mentioned Socrates, he said 2400 years ago, Plato quotes Socrates as saying that the problem with the doctors of today is they separate the mind from the body. He said this 2400 year ago, they're still doing it. And the difference is that in the last 100 years or more we've had so much scientific research showing the in extricable unity of mind and body, that when people are stressed, they get inflammation in their bodies. When people are stress, they suffer in all their organs. It can lead to disease of all kinds from autoimmune disease to malignancy to gastrointestinal problems. The evidence is overwhelming and it's virtually completely ignored in medical education. 

Pandora [00:15:35] And do you think it is changing? I mean, do you have hope that we will get to a stage and say 10 years time where doctors will be more able to diagnose people with psychological issues? Because I know that when I was first on my journey and my mom went to our local GP and said, I think I've got a child who's suffering with OCD. The GP turned around and said what's OCD? 

Gabor [00:15:57] That's extraordinary. 

Pandora [00:15:59] It was 22 years ago, but still. 

Gabor [00:16:01] Well, I mean, come on, I was trained 50 years ago, no, I imagine, I knew then what OCD was. I don't know what lecture you heard G.P. missed where he didn't know about OCD or she didn't know about the OCD. More of the problem is that even physicians who recognise the diagnosis as such see it only as sort of a physiological brain problem rather than as, again, a response their life experience, you know, because again, if you look at your OCD. However it manifests, maybe you have a need to wash your hand 99 times before you leave the house or check the key 55 times to make sure the door is locked. I don't know how it manifested, but it did something for you. And what do you suppose it did for you? 

Pandora [00:16:46] Well, again, I think it's the control and the safety and the certainty. Cause I, I do remember as a child having these existential thoughts of what is the world? The world is this huge bleak place. Who am I? I'm this voice in this body and what is Pandora and all those questions. And, and I think when you are a child, as an anxious child, who's an over-thinker, you try and make sense of the world, don't you? So you try and create something that feels solid and. 

Gabor [00:17:12] Well, that's not the first thing you try to do. That's the second thing you're trying to do 

Pandora [00:17:16] What's the first thing you try to do? 

Gabor [00:17:18] something that wasn't available to you. Which is to go to your parents and say, I have this fear, I have anxiety, I've these questions. But that's not available to your, then you're sunken in on yourself trying to figure all these things out. And then the OCD becomes a way of having a sensor control over some small area of your life, which gives you a sense of pseudo control and pseudo safety. Again, it's a perfectly normal response to an abnormal toxic situation. 

Pandora [00:17:48] Do you believe that when something like OCD, which I think is widely misunderstood, because I think a lot of people's reaction to something like that OCD is, oh, just stop it, just snap out of it. Whereas as you identify, you've actually got to go to the root and to regain that sense of inner safety and that I'm okay, and I don't need all these rituals and behaviours. But I think the typical person takes nine years to seek help for OCD by which time. It's almost metastasized so much that it becomes functionally autonomous in the brain. And so the rewiring process of all those neural circuits is, I mean, a task that I'm still having to go through. 

Gabor [00:18:26] I would recommend a book by an American psychiatrist called Jeffrey Schwartz, are you familiar with his book? Yeah. And he actually talks about rewiring the brain. It's true. When the brain gets miswired, if you like, or wired in the wrong ways early, it's much more difficult later on to rewire it. But it's possible. And that's called neuroplasticity, which is the capacity of the brain to develop new circuits in response to new experiences. So it can be done. It is more work later on. It's true. 

Pandora [00:18:56] And that's why you believe that recovery is possible for everyone because of this concept of neuroplasticity and the brain's ability to change. 

Gabor [00:19:02] It's one of the reasons I believe recovery is possible. That's one other dynamics, but it's not the only one. I think inside every human being, there is a deep capacity for healing. I mean, inside every living organism, there's a deep opacity for healing, and the human beings are no exception. It's more complex in our cage than in the case of a plant, but is still there. So it's a question of what conditions will promote that even capacity to assert itself. and what conditions were inhibited. When you're going to a doctor who doesn't understand you and throws their hands up in despair, that's not conducive to healing. And unfortunately, physicians, well-meaning and highly well-trained as they are, are very limited in their perspective because of the medical culture. 

Pandora [00:19:51] We've spoken about Geoffrey Schwartz and you talk about the four R's, don't you, about relabeling and reattributing. Will you elaborate on this? Cause I think that's something that's very interesting in creating that distance between, you know, ourselves and what we're going through. 

Gabor [00:20:06] Yes, I stole that from Jeffy Schwartz with his permission. 

Pandora [00:20:10] No 

Gabor [00:20:11] Because when I was writing my book on addiction, I had read his book on OCD. I know I quote him in The Myth of Normal, but I don't remember the title of his book now. But anyway, he develops this four-step programme, what is called relabel. So let's say you want to wash your hands a hundred times, because you need to. So Jeffrey will say, you relabel it. I don' need to wash my hands a lot of times. I have a belief that I need to watch my hands. But that creates a distance, that removes it from an ineluctable necessity to the realm of thought, which is what it really is, because it's true, you don't have to wash your hand another time, you just believe that you do. Reliable or re-attribute, you say, this belief that I have to do such and such comes from some old brain circuit in my brain. It's not reality, it's just an old brain-circuit with which I'm programmed, and so on. So it's a way of just re-visioning. This compulsion, whether it's to an addictive behaviour or to a compulsive behaviour, you see it for what it is. Shor's teaches that you do this with mindfulness, with mindful awareness, so you write this stuff down mindfully. So what really changes the brain here is not just repeating these steps, but the mindfulness that accompanies your performance of those steps. 

Pandora [00:21:34] What do you think of writing and journaling? Do you think it is essential in being able to externalise our thoughts and putting them on paper? 

Gabor [00:21:41] What is important is self-expression, whatever form it takes. And for a lot of people, journaling, I mean, how many people do you know? Or are there people in your life to whom you can, with no hesitation whatsoever? No shyness, no holding back, no shame whatsoever. Just spill the contents of your mind. And most people don't have too many people like that in their lives. And sometimes even with our most intimate partners, there's stuff that we're still withholding and so on. If you keep a journal and you don't censor yourself, then just expressing it and then actually seeing it now puts you in a position of an observer of your mind. You're not just totally identified with the contents, nor are you observing the contents. Now who are you? You're the observer here now. So yeah, I think journaling is a great thing to do. I wish I had the discipline. 

Pandora [00:22:33] and MET. 

Gabor [00:22:34] Bye. 

Pandora [00:22:35] I start and then I'm just full of good intention and then I'm like, oh god, I'll just think the thoughts. 

Gabor [00:22:41] Well, you know what, so I don't even try anymore, but in my 40s, I have this, I'm going to journal. So I start a nice fresh new booklet and I journal for three or four days and then I put it aside. And a half a year later, then I buy a new booklet. So I have six or seven booklets with each of them with five pages in it. 

Pandora [00:23:01] I'm exactly the same. It's like the nice concept of a nice new fresh notebook. Everyone loves buying a nice notebook with all these intentions and oh my god, yeah, exactly the same. I think as well it's really interesting about the attachment because what again, you've made me really think about boarding schools and nurseries and things like au pairs and nannies and do you think that a child needs that attachment to their mother or do you think they can have, you know, almost like a surrogate mother who can step in and fulfil that role. 

Gabor [00:23:32] Well, so I mentioned this book, The Continuum Concept about this aboriginal tribe. There's this concept of alo-mothering, alo means other. Nobody's mother done their own. There were always other women around and other adults around to help with the parenting task. It's called allomothering. So the birth mother was still there in its primary, but there was all these others. If the birth mother can't be there, but there's another parenting figure of any gender who can provide what the birth mom needs to provide, which is very difficult, by the way, because the child is used to the body of the mother for nine months inside the uterus. But yeah, that child can be perfectly okay, as long as they get those needs met. It doesn't have to be the birth moth, or ideal it is, ideal it's the birth parents, but it doesn't to be. in the boarding schools. Many children. they necessarily experience it as an abandonment. They don't want to be at home. And somebody very rightly said that the British Empire was built on the playing fields of Eden. It's true, cause all the cruelty, all the racism, exertion of force, all of the lack of heart, all the desire to dominate. necessary to build an empire at the cost of murdering hundreds of thousands of people abroad and stealing their lands and stealing their goods and subjugating them. The psychological mechanism that were built in the British public schools, so-called, where the boys in this case were mercilessly beaten, and often sexually exploited. And yeah, that's what builds that kind of character. You know, and there's movements here in Britain, I know that, of boarding school survivors. Maybe for women as well, I'm not so familiar with that, but I know men. had to go through all kinds of remedial work and enjoying support groups just to help overcome the impacts of the boarding schools on. this whole idea of the stiff upper lip, what is that all about? Have you ever met an infant with a stiff upper-lip? No. I mean, infants cry. Because crying is a communication. In fact, it's the only communication that they have. When they have needs that are not being met, they will cry. And essentially, when you impose the stiff-upper-lips ethic on a child, what you're saying to them is, your vulnerability doesn't matter to me. I just want the facade from you. and compliance, but I don't want you. How toxic can you get? 

Pandora [00:26:21] And it's actually that notion of when a child cries, it's hearing them and not saying, oh, please stop crying, because that's the default reaction of a lot of parents. 

Gabor [00:26:29] Well, if you look at the aboriginal tribes, they don't even let their kids cry. When I say let them, it's not that they forbid them. They don't create situations where the kid has to cry. I mean, a kid might cry because they stubbed their toe or something, but not crying because loss of attachment, not crying cause they're not being picked up, not crying, because they're left to sleep on their own, not crying cuz they're abandoned. This whole idea of the crying child is itself. They're called civilisation. And by the way... There was a study years ago where it showed that in Britain there's a higher incidence of crying kids than in many other countries. 

Pandora [00:27:06] The average, I mean, I think it's something like 25% of American women went back to work after two weeks of giving birth. 

Gabor [00:27:13] In the United States, because of economic and racial conditions, 25% of women go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. Now, physiologically speaking, the child needs to be with the mother for at least nine months. Human beings are born much less mature than other mammals. For example, a horse can run on the first day of life. And that's because human beings have larger heads. The female palace of the human is narrower. So we can't wait for full development to be born. We have to be borne prematurely. And so the British-American anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, talks about extra gestation. Extra gestation being gestation outside the womb. as opposed to introagustation in the womb. And it takes about nine long for the enzymes and the organs and body systems to develop in the human that in other mammals are present at birth. And that demands the body of the mother, close physical contact and breastfeeding with the body and the mother. That's called extraagustiation. Now, in fact, if you look at hunter-gatherer groups that are still following the evolutionary pathway, the average age of weaning is between three and five. usually around four. That doesn't mean the child doesn't need anything else, but that the mother breast is still available to them. So that's a need of the child. So when you send women back because of poverty to work within two weeks, it means a massive abandonment of the infant with huge implications for child development, brain development, personnel development, and it's harbinger of all kinds of future problems. Even the 25% that don't go back to work get so much bad advice about let your baby cry it out and all this kind of stuff. So basically in Western culture, there's a massive unwitting, unwilled, and with the best of goodwill on the part of loving parents, abandonment of the child's needs. And they're not blaming parents here. They do their best, but do their best in a culture that doesn't support. them providing for their child's needs the way the child was prepared for by evolution. 

Pandora [00:29:34] I think it's also that concept of trauma that a lot of people misunderstand. And I think there's a term that, you know, as you so rightly outline in your book, you know, there's capital T trauma, which is what most people focus on, but this little T trauma. 

Gabor [00:29:47] So, yeah, trauma is literally what it means. It's the Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is the wound that you sustain. It can be sustained by a whole number of incidents, some of which are what we call the Big T traumatic incidents, like physical, sexual, emotional abuse, poverty, racism, parent dying, parent being gaoled, a parent being addicted, a parent mentally ill, a rancorous divorce. violence in the family, a parent beating another parent. These are traumatic events that leave deep wounds in the child. Those are the Big T traumatic events. But as we've been talking, there's another way to wound children, which is not to impose these traumatic events on them, but not to meet their needs. So children can be wounded, not because bad things happened to them that shouldn't have, but because of the good things that should have happened not happening. So being seen, being responded to when you cry, being held, being understood, having emotions validated, feeling safe in a relationship, feeling unconditionally accepted and loved and just appreciated for who you are. Not for what you show or provide or how you please others, but just because you exist. These are genuine needs of the human child, determined by evolution. We can live without them, and we do, but we do so in a way that's lesser than our as human beings and often leads to all kinds of pathologies. 

Pandora [00:31:31] Yeah, and I think, you know, again, this dichotomy between attachment and authenticity, we get so removed from our authentic selves, and then life becomes this journey in search of who we are authentically. 

Gabor [00:31:45] It's interesting, Dante's Inferno, which is one of my favourite books, begins with midway through life I lost my way, all of a sudden he says, who am I? And what am I doing here? How did I get here? And he can't find the way back. So what does he have to do? He has to descend into hell. What's hell? All his unresolved, deep, traumatised emotions, greed, envy, hatred, rage, all this kind of stuff. needs to go through all that stuff to find himself again. at some point he lost himself. Now, we lose ourselves because our guides couldn't guide us in the right direction. And our guides were the adults in our lives, our parents, our teachers, our leaders. If they don't guide in the direction, we get lost. And then we have to take on the job of finding ourselves, which itself could be a very rewarding journey. It's also very difficult for a lot of people. 

Pandora [00:32:45] I think especially when we are a world that seems to be addicted to dopamine, and Anandam Ke's book, which I've heard you talk about, The Dopamine Nation, in which we're seeking those false highs and they're, to me, just getting us further and further away from our authentic selves. And so we're surrounded by all this stimuli that's actually just completely negating that sense of self. 

Gabor [00:33:13] Well, there's a technological company in the States, literally, it's called the Dopamine Lab. And it's all about how to get cell phones and technology to ignite our dopamine circuits, to give a sense of vitality and aliveness and purpose and meaning through external means, which means you never get enough. So the more you get, the more need to get. It's typical addictive stuff, it is actually called the dopamine lab. They target the circuits in the brain that are most prone to get addicted. The whole society is like that, like the pornography addict or the cell phone addict. It's not the cell phones addicted to as such. What they're addicted to is the hit of dopamine they get, this chemical that's necessary for a sense of vitality and curiosity and seeking and aliveness. That's why. It's interesting, this last summer, for the second time, I did a two-week digital sabbatical, no cell phone, no email. internet. And I'm telling you, it was interesting to watch myself because even though my cell phone was on aeroplane mode so that nothing was going to come through, several times a day I still reached for it. It's like there's a body memory that I've got to grab this thing. Why? There's nothing on it. But if it was on, I'd look at it and why? Because Who's gonna write me? Did someone sort of write me back? what's happening here, or who's winning this or who is losing that, you know, all of which is pretty irrelevant to the present moment, but I just need that hit. And this society is adept at giving us those dopamine hits without in any way helping us to find that inner vitality, which would mean that we wouldn't have to keep looking for it from the outside. 

Pandora [00:35:10] And I think it's just, it's getting worse, isn't it? That's the trouble. 

Gabor [00:35:13] Well, especially if you have kids in the younger generation, they're deeply in trouble. If you look at their brain circuits on brain scans, those brain circuits that have to do with insight and rational decision making, emotional connection, they are impaired. And kids who've been on too much social media, you can see it on brain scan. It's actually a culturally imposed impairment of the brain. 

Pandora [00:35:38] So would your advice be for parents now to really limit any kind of media device, social media? 

Gabor [00:35:46] No, I wouldn't limit it. I would totally limit it, yeah. If I had small kids these days, I wouldn' let them go near a machine. Not for years. I'd make them play outside with a puddle and a stick. And they would be very happy doing that, by the way. And then they'd learn how to entertain themselves and be comfortable with themselves. And I'd give them lots of contact so they don't have to look for sensor connection on the internet, because they're getting it from real people. For young kids going into advanced childhood, that I wouldn't even let them near it. And you know what, then they're going to lose out, no they're not. When the time comes, they'll pick it up in a day. 

Pandora [00:36:22] It is scary when you see parents just handing a two or three year old a telephone or an iPad and they know what to do with it immediately. It's just, like you said, their brains are being rewired. 

Gabor [00:36:32] Well, and you can understand the parents because they're so stressed and that device offers the parents like a surrogate babysitter. But you know, there's a friend of mine or acquaintance of mine who studies the impact of iPhones and technology on kids and she sees mothers, the changing of baby's diaper can be a fussy kind of thing. You have a kid, one of these little machines, you can do anything to them. So the mother gives the child this iPhone, The kid is happy and mother can easily change the diaper. What's lost is the interaction. What's last is that interconnection which triggers in the child's brain a release of love chemicals like oxytocin and endorphin. The kid is really missing out but the mother's job has become easier and mothers being so isolated and so stressed in this culture, who can blame them? It's not a matter of mom blaming, it's a question of pointing out that this whole system just doesn't support parenting the way nature would have intended it. 

Pandora [00:37:33] I'm curious, Gabor, as we're speaking, at what point in your life do you think that you really found your authentic self? Well, have you indeed found your authentic self or is it a constant journey? 

Gabor [00:37:43] It's a process, but there was always something in me, and I think there's something in everybody. But I've been kind of aware of it, that I just had the need to be myself, which meant that when I wasn't being myself, I noticed it, and I suffered because of it. And it takes many forms. I always had this urge to write, and I talk about this in my book, that sometimes I would sit there, there'd be like a weird sensation at the pit of my belly. and I didn't know what that was about. And then a voice would come into my head, say, writing, because I wasn't writing. Now, for me, writing is important. For somebody else, it's something else. But I listened to that voice. I wasn' the doctor to start with. I was a high school teacher, although I grew up wanting to be a physician. Some morning I just woke up and I said, no, I've got to do this medical school thing. And I did. So I tended to listen to these internal voices when they came along. And right now, without going into too many details. There's some terrible tragedies happening in the world. Children are dying every day. And to speak out about it is to invite a lot of criticism. I'm Jewish and I get a lot of criticism from fellow Jews, a lot appreciation from some, a lot criticism and even venom from others for being a traitor, for speaking up on behalf of freedom for Palestinians. But I made a decision a long time ago, that to me, the authenticity, I'm not saying this makes me right, but if I see a truth as I perceive it, I have a need to speak it. And if the consequences that some people won't like me, I'll live with that. I don't like it, but I live with it. So for me, this drive for authenticity has just been very strong in my life, and it just really would have allowed me to do a lot of my work, Because so much of what I do is controversial. I'm getting a prize in a couple of months. Simon Fraser University in Vancouver has got this annual prize for controversy and this year I'm going to get it. My point is, though, that what's controversial is totally contextual. If in the year 1100 I asserted that the earth was round and it revolved around the sun, that would have been controversial. So the controversial nature of something doesn't say anything about the truth or lack of it. It speaks to the context in which that particular statement is made. And so for me, just saying. what I understood to be the case, whether in medicine or politics or wherever, just for some reason became more important than how it's received and how the people might see it. And I think the people, when you look at the studies, the people who are most realised or self-realised or comfortable with themselves are people who don't live a life that's designed to please others. But you know, they may be part of a culture, but they don't necessarily conform to it. But they rather insist on being themselves. 

Pandora [00:41:05] You do a lot of work with parents and children. I mean, at whatever stage. You've done a few retreats, I think, haven't you, with adults, whether, I mean whether they're both adults but people can say come and you deliver courses with adults and their children or. 

Gabor [00:41:22] Well, so my son Daniel, who helped me write Myth of Normal, our next book project is called Hello Again, a Fresh Start for adult children and their parents. And you can just Google us on YouTube, Daniel Gabum at a fresh start or adult children. You can see us doing this process. And we've developed a course around it that's available through an American organisation called The Commune. You can, I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm just saying it's available. but also it's going to be a book. And what's interesting is when you watch those videos over the years, I think we filmed the first one probably six years ago now. Even as we're leading this workshop, him and I are at each other's throats. My son and I. So we've had to do a lot of work. Not that we're totally at each others throates, but we trigger each other and we get tense with each other and defensive. So it's an ongoing process, but yeah, I think this work between the adult children and the parents for a lot of people I think is very helpful. 

Pandora [00:42:25] Well, because when I read about it and when I saw about Hello Again and the fact that you guys are delivering these seminars effectively, I said to my mom, I really think we could benefit from doing one. And of course, her reaction was, yeah, there's nothing wrong with me. The problem all lies with you. And that's always been the problem. But for me, the most transformative healing would happen alongside her, I know. 

Gabor [00:42:49] Ideally, yes, but although you also can't, let's say the tragic scenario that your mother dies this evening, does that mean he is healing no longer as possible for you? No. So, you don't depend on her? No. And to the extent that you try to depend on here, you're defeating yourself. Now, ideally though, it's very helpful if you both engage in the process. So you could check out this course called Fresh Start from the Commune. You can find it on YouTube or, you know, you actually watch The First Star for free. We do tell people that it works better if both partners are there, but even one person can do it. Because you can change their relationship even without the other person moving a muscle. 

Pandora [00:43:36] How was the process of writing The Myth of Normal with Daniel? 

Gabor [00:43:39] Well, first of all, I couldn't have done it without him. This is my fifth book. I collected 20,000 articles, newspaper reports, scientific articles, filed them. It's been a 10-year labour getting ready for this book. I started to write it, and I decided it's too much, can't do it, and I gave the money back to the publisher. And then, a year and a half later, all of a sudden it just sprung back into my mind with a new title, and they said, I'm gonna do this. and he just demanded it to be done. And that's where Daniel came on. It was such a big subject and so many topics are covered in it. I needed somebody to rein me in, to give me feedback, to mirror me, to make sure I wasn't being too abstruse for people, to make I wasn' being too over-inclusive of all kinds of research, to prove my points, to make it reader-friendly, in other words. And Daniel's a brilliant writer. So literally it was core written. It's not like he wrote it for me or... he just edited my work, it's actually a mutual process. In that process, of course, we went through our stuff because at times I get tense. At a certain point in writing the book, I began to experience a certain degree of anxiety and even panic, thinking, maybe a bit enough more than I can chew. And when I get tensed, I trigger all his own childhood trauma because I was a very tense father. When I get ten, that affects his nervous system. All this stuff came up and we had to talk it through. In the end, it was a beautiful, collaborative, mutually respectful process, but we had our stuff to work through as he was helping me write the book. Hell again will be different yet, because myth-o-normal is largely my work, not the writing, but the theoretical work and the science and the experience and the concepts that came from my experience. as a person, as a physician, as the reader of the research, this book will be completely 50-50. So he'll write as much as I will write and we'll go each other's stuff, but it'll be not Gabor Matey with Daniel, it'll Daniel and Gabor writing this book. 

Pandora [00:45:59] And finally, Gabor, what advice would you like to leave someone who is on their journey but they've reached a block and they just think, I can't move forward, I've got to live with this sense of mediocrity in my life and it's like you're teetering on the brink of change, but you just can't take the plunge and you've got yourself into a state where you're feeling okay, but not well. 

Gabor [00:46:24] I will quote myself, because I was in my 40s or so, you know, these intermittent journals that we talked about, I can find one of my journals, my name is in my late 40s, when I wrote, I feel depressed, I felt frustrated, I fell blocked, I have some creative capacities that I haven't nearly touched yet, and I feel despondent about it. So, I think... If somebody gets to the point where they think they haven't reached their potential, I congratulate them. It means they haven' t. It means that there's something in them that's waiting to be expressed. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said something about detours and blind alleys. He said sometimes you have to go down blind alleies just to find out that this is not the right road. So if you're blocked, it only means that the direction you're trying to go in is not right one for you. But it doesn't mean that you can't get to your destination. You just haven't found a way yet. I always say to people, if you have that sense of frustration and block, good, it means there's something in you that knows that more is available for you. And then you need to get some help. But that sense of limitation and frustration is a sign that there's more in you, is there. It's just waiting for you to find it. And it's just going to take some time. I was 55 when I wrote my first book. 

Pandora [00:47:52] And you know what, when I heard that, it was so inspiring. Cause I thought, you know, life hasn't begun yet. It's all okay. 

Gabor [00:47:57] Yeah, yeah. 

Pandora [00:47:58] It's been such a pleasure, thank you so much for taking the time to come. 

Gabor [00:48:01] My great pleasure. Thank you. 

Pandora [00:48:07] Thank you for tuning in to Hurt to Healing. Remember, if anything we discussed today resonated or brought up difficult emotions, support is always available. You can contact Shout, a free, anonymous and confidential 24-7 tech service. Every day they have over 2,000 life-changing conversations with people in need, but they need support too. Just 10 pounds can fund a potentially life-saving conversation. Donate today at giveusashout.org and help make a difference.