Today, I talk to Dr. Gabor Maté. A celebrated speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, such as addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction; When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress; and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. He is also the co-author of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in more than thirty languages.

Dr. Maté generously shares his deep understanding of childhood trauma, vulnerability, grief, and emotional distress. He explains what real trauma is and how time doesn’t necessarily lead to healing, how vulnerability is ingrained in us since we are young and the importance of these formative years to mold our emotional health, and the societal expectations we always try to meet but have never truly given us real fulfillment. We also exchange thoughts on dealing with grief, how we struggle to identify with the people we look up to, and how childhood experience varies for every child even when they are raised in a similar environment.

Trauma is a wound that has not fully healed which can be triggered at any point in our life so it matters that we are able to find a common ground and stay firm in what can give us healing, emotional stability, and happiness.

What We Discuss:
00:00:00 Intro
00:03:12 How do you define trauma?
00:06:32 How is healing defined?
00:08:45 Time itself does not heal emotional wounds
00:11:38 We are all born vulnerable
00:13:55 The inherent expectations we all have
00:20:00 The societal standards we try to live up to 
00:25:15 It’s not possible to love kids too much
00:29:35 Grief is essential for life
00:32:19 When the past dominates the present reactions
00:35:16 There is no healthy identification
00:42:11 Why are we set on things staying the same
00:44:38 No two children have the same childhood
00:50:19 The difference between loneliness and being alone
00:53:54 How do you see human nature?
01:02:24 Suffering has to be acknowledged
01:06:27 Getting closure and start moving on
01:10:04 Spirituality becomes commoditized
01:15:56 Dr. Maté on Final Five

A tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it?

It grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable.

So vulnerability is absolutely essential for growth.

And for vulnerability, you got to let go of those defenses such as

the number 1 health and wellness podcast,

Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number 1 health podcast in the world.

Thanks to each and every 1 of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow.

Now I know that if you're listening right now, you're here because you want to improve your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.

I know that you're trying to heal from trauma, from stress, from pressure.

You're trying to heal challenges you experienced early in childhood or ones that you're going through today.

And it's my job and it's my duty and it's my honor and joy to introduce you to incredible people that I believe have answers, have insights, have helpful approaches to navigating the challenges we all experience.

And today's guest is someone I have been so excited to speak to for a long time on On Purpose.

I hope this is not just his only time on the show.

I hope this starts to become a regular guest on the show.

Gabor Matei, who's a celebrated speaker and bestselling author.

He's highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics such as addiction, stress, and childhood development.

Matei has written several bestselling books, including the award winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress, and Scattered Minds, The Origins and Healing of attention deficit disorder.

Now, today we're talking about his new book called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and we have the link to this in the notes.

I want you to go and order this book right now.

The insights of this individual about what we're going through as a culture and a society are going to be really powerful.

So the book is called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

I love sitting down with people who are deeply immersed and obsessed with ideas and observing human behavior.

I admire obsession deeply and admiration deeply, and I admire the ability to sit with something for a long enough time, but I want to start off broad and I want to move in deeper.

And I think this is a question that me and my friends often talk about.

I think we hear the word trauma more often these days.

It's thrown around sometimes, sometimes it's used effectively, sometimes it's used in conversation around things that some people would perceive as small and insignificant.

Sometimes it's used to describe life-defining things.

In your words, how would you describe trauma and why is it so misunderstood even though it's so widespread?

It's a deep question because on the 1 hand, trauma is sometimes used somewhat loosely and promiscuously to refer to things that are not traumatic.

So people will have a difficult experience and say I was traumatized.

No they weren't, they just had a difficult experience.

And as 1 of my colleagues points out, all trauma is stressful but not every stress is traumatic.

So sometimes people use the word to refer to difficult experiences which is not the same as being traumatized.

And on the other hand, where it really matters, which is in the area of health that you and I are both concerned in, whether it's physical or mental health, trauma is not understood nearly enough or used nearly enough.

So that, to my mind, a lot of conditions of mind and body are actually very much trauma related without the healing profession, particularly the medical profession, actually recognizing it.

So trauma then is, it comes from the Greek word for wounding.

It's a psychic wound that leaves a scar, it leaves an imprint in your nervous system, in your body, in your psyche, and then shows up in multiple ways that are not helpful to you later on.

So in its basic sense, trauma is a psychic wound.

And if you look at the nature of a wound, on the 1 hand, if it's raw and open, it really hurts.

So when somebody touches that wound that you sustained a long time ago, but that hasn't healed yet, you'll react like you're just being tormented all over again.

This happens in relationships all the time.

On the other hand, wounds scar over, and the scar tissue has certain features.

It's very hard, it's rigid, so it's not flexible, so people tend to be rigid when they're traumatized, it also doesn't grow.

So trauma very often stops emotional growth and development.

So on the 1 hand it's very raw and painful, on the other hand it's even lacks sensation because scar tissue doesn't have nerve endings in it.

The trauma then, just to finish, is not what happened to you.

So trauma is not the difficult incidents, like trauma is not the war.

It's not the, in my case, the second world war when I was born or what happened to me.

Trauma is not the abuse that people experience.

Trauma is the wound that they sustained as a result.

So the trauma wasn't, for example, the sexual abuse.

Trauma was the wound that the person sustained as a result of having been abused.

That's the good news Jay because if trauma is the wound that we sustained it can be healed at any time.

If trauma is what happened to me 75 years ago or 78 years ago it happened.

You know, the partition of India wounded a lot of people, but it never would, it'll never not have happened.

But if the wound is what happened to people inside as a result, that can be healed.

That's probably the best differentiator that I've heard.

And you're right, it is good news, because it means we can heal it.

What do you think are the biggest, going the opposite way, we're talking about a wound, and I want to come back to that, but going the opposite way, how would you then define healing?

Because that's another word like trauma that is also just everywhere now, right?

Self-healing, healing from this, healing from that.

I think healing is such an interesting concept in and of itself, which again is rarely defined or made clear to us.

And from your studies, I would love to hear your thoughts in the same way as you did for trauma.

Sure, so you mentioned to me that you spent some time in my homeland of Hungary, where I was born.

And the Hungarian word for health actually begins with the word for wholeness.

And the English word for healing and health also come from an Anglo-Saxon origin meaning wholeness.

So for some reason, languages internationally have intuited the sense of healing which is a sense of completion and wholeness.

Now, What trauma does is it disconnects us.

It splits us off from our true self and disconnects us from emotions, even from our bodies.

So that if that disconnection is the essence of trauma, then the healing is that coming together of the self to become whole again.

And healing is often used synonymously with cure, fair enough, but strange enough, in my view, and not just in my view, people can be cured from an illness without becoming whole, without healing.

People sometimes also become healed without being cured.

So in essence healing is not the absence of a physical illness, but it's the integrity of a person who is no longer split off from themselves.

I think what we find is that trauma is so, as you said, a wound that is long lasting.

But healing is a process that we want to happen now or today or tomorrow.

I'm intrigued by how does time, we've always had time will heal, right?

So, so let's go back to the wound and talk about, Is there any relationship between time and wounds or unhealed wounds?

How is that wound being formed internally?

As you said, trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside of you.

That which is happening inside of you, what is happening with that wound over time when it's left?

What happens is that it may lie dormant for a long time and then something occurs that touches it.

It's when we talk about people being triggered, for example, something touches an unhealed wound inside you, and you react, you've just been wounded for the first time.

And certainly I can tell you that's been the case for me.

For example, in my marriage relationship, is that the unhealed wounds, you may think you've gone past them, but then something will happen that touches that wound and you react like you're being tormented all over again for the first time.

Time maybe scars it over, time maybe makes it less available to immediate memory, but should something happen to evoke it, it's gonna show up in its full painful impact until you do some work to heal.

Time by itself does not heal, not spontaneously, not automatically.

Because I feel that, and maybe this is something to address, it's that, at least what I find is that a lot of our beliefs that we have about ourselves and about others are wired to try and make us feel safe to some degree.

So I believe, and I'm hypothetically saying this, I believe that I am right in my opinion, because that makes me feel safe and secure.

But often to unearth a wound, we have to be okay with the vulnerability of saying, well, maybe I'm not right.

Maybe this response is coming from some wound that I gained in the past.

So, for example, when you speak about your marriage, you sparked something for me.

I found that a lot of the love I received when I was younger was then followed by guilt.

So when I received love when I was younger, the idea was if I couldn't reciprocate with that level of love, I'd be made to feel guilty that I didn't love someone enough.

And I found that I would repeat that in my own relationship with my wife, where I would over love, And if she didn't match that level of love, I would then make her feel guilty.

And it took me years to really discover that pattern.

And whether that's trauma or a difficult experience is a different conversation.

But the idea that spotting that pattern only came from me saying, well, maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe me wanting to make someone feel guilty is not the right thing.

How do we gain the vulnerability in safety to create that future stability?

Well, it makes absolute sense because vulnerability itself is absolutely essential for growth.

So vulnerability, the word itself comes from the Latin word, vulnerare, to wound.

So vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded.

Now the reality is that as human beings, we're all vulnerable from conception until death.

But when we're hurt in childhood and the vulnerability is too painful to bear, we will try and shut down our vulnerability and for example, by being right.

Because if I'm right, then I'm powerful and I can't be assailed anymore, you know?

Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable.

So a crustacean animal like a crab inside a hard shell, it can't grow.

It has to molt and make itself very vulnerable to be able to grow.

So vulnerability is absolutely essential for growth and for vulnerability, you gotta let go of those defenses, such as being right, that you developed as a child in order to protect yourself from the pain.

So that's why we talk about growing pains, because vulnerability is necessary for growth.

Without vulnerability, there's no growth.

Wow, what You just said, that is so beautiful, you just said, vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded.

Yeah, that's an incredible definition of the word.

I think we hear so many definitions of vulnerability, but that vulnerability, I'm just gonna say that again, Everyone write that down.

Vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded.

So if we go to childhood, what are the things happening currently that you perceive?

And I know you talk about this in your new book, The Myth of Normal.

By the way, everything we're talking about is in this incredible book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

If you don't have it, please go and order it now.

What is happening in our childhood in society?

I guess when you say things are not happening to us, there are still environmental impacts that are imprinting the potential for this wound to grow.

What are some of those things that are distorting our development in unhealthy ways in childhood?

1 is obvious, like when the children are mistreated, maltreated, abused, sexually, physically, emotionally, when there's violence in the family, or a parent is caught up in addiction, or where there's a rancorous divorce, and a lot of conflict in the home, children are just wounded, period.

But it's more insidious and more ubiquitous than that, because children have certain basic needs.

Now if we understand human, if you wanna understand a zebra or a whale, where would you study those creatures?

In a zoo or an aquarium or out there in nature?

So you have to actually look at what are the evolutionary determined needs of human beings as inculcated or instilled in us through our evolutionary history.

There used to be this belief that children are what are called a tabula rasa, you know, an empty slate.

You can just write whatever you want on it, program the child in any way you want.

Children are born with not only certain needs, but certain inherent expectations.

So to give an example, your lungs are an inherent expectation for oxygen because they've developed in response to oxygen.

If there'd be no oxygen in the environment we'd have no lungs.

In the same way with the human child, it has certain inherent expectations and you can wound kids not just by maltreating them but by not meeting those expectations.

When I say expectation, I don't mean a conscious expectation, I mean an expectation inherent in the organism.

So children need unconditional loving acceptance by multiple adult caregivers, which is how we evolved in hunter-gatherer groups and lived that way for millions and hundreds, thousands of years.

Children have a need not to have to work to make the relationship with the parents work.

So a child, children need rest from having to struggle to make the relationship functional.

They don't have to be pretty or cute or compliant or clever or successful or any of that stuff.

They just need to be and they don't have to work at getting the parents to accept them.

When I say essential, I mean if it's not met, that'll distort child development.

The third need is really crucial and in our society it's hardly ever met, which is the child needs the freedom to experience all the emotions that nature has endowed her or him a day with.

So we have certain brain circuits for anger, for love, for play, for lust, for seeking curiosity.

All these circuits are there for a reason.

We share them with bear cubs and puppies and little whales, you know, elephant.

They need to develop because they're there for a reason.

In our society, parents are often advised and taught to suppress certain emotional experiences on the part of the child.

That's a wound to the child, which distorts their development and has significant implications for health later on.

The fourth need, fourth essential need, is free play out in nature.

Free play, spontaneous, creative, imaginative play.

That's essential for healthy brain development.

Baby elephants play, bear cubs play, puppies play, lion cubs play.

Crucial for brain development, we know that now.

In our society, we put cognitive development way ahead of play, and we deprive our children of play by giving them gadgets, which deprives them of imagination.

So we're actually undermining their brain development and their healthy unfolding as human beings.

So children can be wounded, not just by bad things happening to them, but by their needs not being met.

And in our society, when you ask about the environmental conditions that undermine health and child development, these environmental conditions in our society are inimical to healthy human unfoldment.

No wonder we have so many children in trouble with anxiety and ADHD and depression and the rate of childhood suicide is going up and the number of kids being medicated with heavy duty medications, multiplicity of medications is going up.

Because the conditions for healthy development are less and less available to them.

Not because parents don't love their kids, not because they're not trying to do their best, but because of the conditions under which parenting takes place in this society.

Yeah, just to share some of those stats that are in the book that Dr.

We have in 2019 more than 50 million Americans, over 20% of the U.S.

Adults suffered an episode of mental illness.

Rates of obesity along with the multiple health risks it possesses are going up in many countries, including Canada, Australia, and notably the United States, where over 30% of the adult population reached the criteria.

And then this part, millions of North American children and youths are being medicated with stimulants, antidepressants, and even antipsychotic drugs, whose long-term effects on the developing brain are yet to be established.

So, you know, you share all these insights and research and work.

What I'm interested by is, let's say a child today is raised in that way.

I find it fascinating that if you then migrate that child into the real world, and for everyone who's listening, I'm doing my quotation marks, like real world, they walk into this conditioned world that we currently have.

If we almost raised a village of children in a, I don't know what the right word is, but I guess in a more natural way, but then they evolved and had to get a job and work in the world, how would they function?

What would be your take on how they would do?

Or what would be your thoughts about how they would deal with the then capitalist society that is drilled around results and performance and being beautiful or smart or cute?

That question has actually been studied to some degree and they would not automatically buy into the values.

So they may need to get a job, but they wouldn't identify themselves with the job and they wouldn't judge themselves based on the external values of success.

They would also enter the world with a sense of purpose.

And I know you, purpose is very important to you.

So a sense of purpose can only arise from us if we're in touch with our real selves.

So they would be in the world, but they wouldn't be of the world in a sense.

They wouldn't identify themselves with the values that society would push on them.

So I think they would struggle, but they would do reasonably well and they'd hold on to themselves in the process.

They wouldn't live a life that's based on what do other people think about me?

Have I collected enough goods and objects to make me feel okay about myself, they wouldn't buy into all that.

And to the extent that this has been studied, and it has been, those people that can be in this society without buying into its values tend to be healthier and more grounded emotionally.

The reason why I love hearing that is because it's the first time I've connected these ideas together that, when I was born and raised in London, I was born and raised with all the usual pursuits, i.e.

Of a good education, a good home, a good financial situation, et cetera.

Those were the ways I was raised and success was a big part of my culture.

And I chased the validation of my family and the external surroundings and my community and what my aunts and uncles thought of me.

And when that validation was dissatisfying or didn't feel like it was actually coming my way, and when I was finally introduced to the monks at 18, I then seeked the validation of the monks.

Only for them to teach me that the issue wasn't who you seek validation from, the issue was seeking validation in the first place.

And so what you've just said to me is in 3 years, I got a crash course in what you're saying where We spent more time in nature.

We were trained in unlearning the behaviors and habits that I'd developed for, well, 21 years at the time.

And then when I came back into the world, the way you just described that is exactly how I felt.

Like I almost felt like a new person coming back into the same world that I left with a completely different approach and a different map of how to navigate it, and you're spot on.

It's not that it's perfect and it's easy, and It's not that I've got it right.

It's just that when I am challenged, I have a toolkit or I have some ideas, as you said, with purpose, that help me think about the problem differently.

So when I went into the world of work, and I just want to give people a practical example of what Dr.

When I went into the world of work, we were all told that we had to be good at a list of like 10 things in order to succeed.

And I looked at that list of 10 and I was like, I can do 1 of those things really well, And I'm only going to focus on that 1, because these other 9 are not my nature.

And it's so strange because that 1 thing made me extremely successful at the company I worked at and then has become how I've built my career.

And it's so true that had I had gone in and done what 90% of people did, I would have become what 90% of people are doing.

What is the difference though with, and I can't wait to read some of that research on that.

When you have a culture where I think most people who read this book today, The Myth of Normal, will say that they can relate to having trauma, illness, and trying to be on the path of healing, especially our community here.

See all Jay Shetty Podcast transcripts on Youtube

The ROOT CAUSE Of Trauma & Why You FEEL LOST In Life | Dr. Gabor Maté & Jay Shetty