Dr. Gabor Maté: The Shocking Link Between ADHD, Addiction, Autoimmune Diseases, & Trauma

Order your copy of The Let Them Theory 👉 https://melrob.co/let-them-theory 👈 The #1 Best Selling Book of 2025 🔥 Discover how much power you truly have. It all begins with two simple words. Let Them. — Today, Mel’s dream guest joins her in the Boston studios: Dr. Gabor Maté, MD. Dr. Maté is a world-renowned trauma expert, and shares things today unlike he has ever shared before. This wide-ranging conversation covers ADHD, autoimmune diseases, anxiety, addiction, people pleasing, and trauma. Dr. Maté will take you on a deep dive into how your early life experiences can shape the way you feel and function today, both mentally and physically. This episode is about unlocking real healing and finding hope. Dr. Maté’s compassionate insights will show you how understanding your past can free you to make healthier choices right now. You’re about to discover powerful, science-backed ways to understand and care for yourself in ways you never have before. So, whether you’re on this journey for yourself or to help someone you love, this episode is for you. Get Dr. Maté’s book The Myth of Normal: https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/ For more resources related to today’s episode, click here for the podcast episode page: http://www.melrobbins.com/podcasts/episode-235 Follow The Mel Robbins Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themelrobbinspodcast I’m just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is NOT intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I’ll see you in the next episode. In this episode: 0:00 Introduction 2:24 What world-renowned trauma expert, Dr. Gabor Maté, says about your childhood 5:56 The shocking things that are impacting every child’s brain development 10:22 Do you feel constantly stressed? Well, it’s rewiring your brain 14:22 Do you have a “sensitive kid” in your life? 18:40 So what’s actually happening when your kids act out? 20:12 Mel’s ADHD revelation at 46 that changed her life 23:36 Everything you thought you knew about addiction is wrong, here’s why 26:02 Turns out the attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain 32:40 Healing requires help! You don’t have to do it alone 38:40 Maté shares his own struggles with addiction, and what you can do to break the cycle 43:48 The 4 shocking traits driving autoimmune disorders in women 48:50 When was the last time you felt truly connected to yourself? 53:07 The 6 questions to ask yourself if you have a hard time saying “no” 59:53 You can heal! The actionable steps you need to take for lasting change — Follow Mel: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melrobbins/ TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@melrobbins Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melrobbins LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melrobbins Website: http://melrobbins.com​ — Sign up for Mel’s newsletter: https://melrob.co/sign-up-newsletter A note from Mel to you, twice a week, sharing simple, practical ways to build the life you want. — Subscribe to Mel’s channel here: https://www.youtube.com/melrobbins​?sub_confirmation=1 — Listen to The Mel Robbins Podcast 🎧 New episodes drop every Monday & Thursday! https://melrob.co/spotify https://melrob.co/applepodcasts https://melrob.co/amazonmusic — Looking for Mel’s books on Amazon? Find them here: The Let Them Theory: https://amzn.to/3IQ21Oe The Let Them Theory Audiobook: https://amzn.to/413SObp The High 5 Habit: https://amzn.to/3fMvfPQ The 5 Second Rule: https://amzn.to/4l54fah

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mel Robbins?

  Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

• 0:08Mel Robbins?

  You know, when I started this podcast, I sat down and I made a list of dream guests. And I am so excited that you chose to listen to this episode because today, one of those dream guests is sitting here in our Boston studios. His name is Dr. Gabor Maté. Now, Dr. Maté is a five-time New York Times bestselling author. He is one of the world's most respected and prolific experts on childhood development, trauma, and the impact that it has on who you become as an adult. And his work has profoundly changed my life. Around the world, he is considered the people whisperer because when he talks about the connection between your childhood and the things you struggle with right now as an

• 0:52Mel Robbins?

  adult, you're going to feel so seen and so understood. And today, he's here to share a very provocative opinion. Dr. Maté believes that you are not born with conditions like ADHD, or addiction, or an autoimmune disorder, or the inability to say no, or being a people pleaser. Dr. Maté says, "These are conditions that are created by your childhood experience." Now, one of the things that I love about his work is that not only does he bring the science, he also removes the shame. None of what you experienced and how it impacted you is your fault.

• 1:35Mel Robbins?

  And when you understand the factors in your childhood that create people pleasing, ADHD, addiction, and health issues, and all the research and science that supports it, you are going to have a completely different roadmap to your own healing. In fact, you're going to leave this conversation with five questions that Dr. Maté will tell you, you need to ask yourself that are going to help you take the very first step.

• 2:07Mel Robbins?

  Hey, it's your friend Mel. I am so excited that you're here with me today. It is always an honor to be able to spend some time with you, to be together, to learn together. If you're brand new, I want to take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. Super excited that you're here. And because you chose to listen to this episode, I know something about you. You're the type of person who values your time. And you're also in learning about simple ways that you can improve your own life. And I absolutely love that. And you know what I also love? I love that you and I are going to get to spend time today, learning from the extraordinary Dr. Gabor Maté. He's a world renowned physician, and New York Times bestselling author, and a renowned

• 2:48Mel Robbins?

  addiction expert who dives deep into childhood development and the impact of physiological and psychological trauma, and how it shapes our mental and physical health over your lifetime. And today specifically, you and I are going to dive deep with Dr. Maté, into how ADHD, people pleasing, addiction, your inability to say no, and autoimmune disorders are not things that you're born with. They were created by your childhood. So please help me welcome Dr. Gabor Maté to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

• 3:19Gabor Maté?

  Thank you. It's so nice to be here.

• 3:21Mel Robbins?

  It is such an honor to sit down with you and spend some time together today.

• 3:25Gabor Maté?

  Thank you.

• 3:26Mel Robbins?

  I'm really excited about the topic today, and your work around how childhood conditions and experiences in your childhood are connected to ADHD, addiction, and autoimmune diseases and disorders. And I have so many questions I want to ask you. Why don't we start with just your definition of what you're talking about when you mean childhood conditions, so that as the person is listening to us today and spending time with us together, we're all using the same words and concepts, and we kind of start on the same page?

• 4:05Gabor Maté?

  So child conditions include the physical conditions, nutrition, housing, comfort, protection. But they also include the emotional conditions, which has to do with a child's sense of being accepted, or being loved, not just this love, but actually being seen, understood.

• 4:27Gabor Maté?

  And also on the parents' emotional states. Are the parents stressed? Are the parents struggling with economic difficulties? Are the parents carrying traumas that they hadn't worked through yet? Like I had when I was a young parent. Are the parents in a marriage that's relatively peaceful? Is there a lot of conflict? Is there a lot of instability? Is there unpredictability? What kind of community support there is? Is there an extended family that can spell off the parents and give them some kind of emotional support? Are they rather isolated? Are you a single parent, struggling to make a living and raise a child?

• 5:09Gabor Maté?

  So all these conditions affect the personality and the brain development of the child.

• 5:16Mel Robbins?

  I know you wrote the original book on childhood development and ADHD, Scattered Minds, 25 years ago. It is still on the bestseller list when it comes to ADHD topics.

• 5:28Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Mel Robbins?

  I don't know if I'm going to say this correctly, but is it fair to say that your opinion is that your childhood and the conditions and the experiences that you have directly create or cause ADHD addiction and autoimmune issues?

• 5:46Gabor Maté?

  Yes, along with certain genetic predispositions.

• 5:50Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 5:50Gabor Maté?

  But I can talk about genetics later, but what I want to say about them now is a predisposition is not as same as a predetermination.

• 5:58Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 5:59Gabor Maté?

  So you can have predispositions, but then depending on the environmental conditions, those predispositions can be expressed one way or another way. So you can have animals with the same genes or humans with the same genes that have very different outcomes depending on the kind of conditions under which their early years were spent under. So that's what I'm saying, yes. And the first recognition of that in my life came when I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 53 or 52 or something.

• 6:29Mel Robbins?

  So I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 46.

• 6:32Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 6:32Mel Robbins?

  When our son, Oakley, was going through the process of going through neuropsych evaluations for schools and IEPs. And as they were doing his evaluations, I started going, oh, wait a minute.

• 6:46Mel Robbins?

  That's a lot like me.

• 6:47Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Mel Robbins?

  And then I went through the formal process of being evaluated and diagnosed dyslexia, ADHD.

• 6:55Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Mel Robbins?

  And I had never, ever, ever heard anyone connect your childhood and adverse conditions, or conditions where you didn't get your needs met.

• 7:06Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Mel Robbins?

  Being a contributing factor or a cause of ADHD. How is that even possible?

• 7:12Gabor Maté?

  Well, it's possible because Western medicine separates the mind from the body.

• 7:17Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 7:18Gabor Maté?

  So they tend to look at things purely from a biological point of view. So ADHD is considered to be a genetic disease that you inherited. Here's the problem with that. Number one, if that's the case, why the number is going up? Genes don't change in a population over 10, 20, or 30 years. So something is going on in the environment that's affecting the child development. Number one. Number two, even if you look at the physiology of the child's brain, what's not understood by most physicians, because it's not taught in the medical schools, but it's firmly and completely unequivocally and uncontroversially established in brain science, is that the brain is a social product, that the brain development of the child depends on the emotional conditions on which the child lives from in utero onwards.

• 8:02Gabor Maté?

  And so that the very circuitry of the child's brain is programmed by the action of the environment on the genes. So different environments will like differently on the same genes. No, if you look at ADHD.

• 8:15Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 8:16Gabor Maté?

  What's the medication that we give? I took it for a while. Stimulants.

• 8:19Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Gabor Maté?

  What do stimulants do? They elevate the level of a chemical called dopamine in the brain. And dopamine is essential for motivation and therefore for focus. And that's what Redland and Dexedrine and Adderall and all these medications elevate. Now, the dopamine circuitry of the child's brain develops an interaction with the environment. And this is what most people who do ADHD just don't look at, even though it's just a pure scientific fact, you know, and. The summary from Harvard University pointed out that the child's brain develops in interaction with the environment, especially the emotional relationship with the nurturing adults. Now, dopamine is a brain chemical. We have receptors forming in our brain.

• 9:02Gabor Maté?

  Receptors are molecules where the dopamine can land and do its job. The number of dopamine receptors in a child is affected by stress on the mother already in pregnancy, let alone afterwards. If you take mice and you isolate them, the number of dopamine receptors will go down. If you bring back into companionship, the number of dopamine receptors will elevate. In other words, the brain is a social organ. It's interactive with the environment. All our lives and therefore environmental conditions affect the brain, especially during its phase of early development. It's just pure science. It's not even controversial.

• 9:43Gabor Maté?

  So, the problem here is the tendency of the medical profession, in which I was trained, is to separate the mind from the body and to look at brain biology in isolation from the life circumstances that shape that brain biology. So that's the one problem.

• 9:59Mel Robbins?

  So, I'm gonna try to distill what you just said. Because I've never heard it explained quite like that. And I believe you. What you're saying is that your brain is a social organ-

• 10:18Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 10:19Mel Robbins?

  -that is developed in partnership with your relationship to the adults around you-

• 10:25Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 10:26Mel Robbins?

  -when you're literally inside your mother's womb-

• 10:29Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Mel Robbins?

  -all the way until you are, you know, developing as a little kid.

• 10:34Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Mel Robbins?

  And if you are in a condition, whether it is the condition of being inside your mother's womb and your mother is depressed or experiencing racism or abuse or poverty or any of these things that create chronic stress on a human being, it impacts the development of your brain. And what you're also saying is that ADHD and the way that it is treated- Is typically through prescription drugs.

• 11:02Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 11:03Mel Robbins?

  That flood the brain with dopamine.

• 11:05Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Mel Robbins?

  And that is what helps your underdeveloped brain, or whatever we want to call it, or the brain that's been impacted by stressful conditions during your childhood or your development in womb. And that the stressful conditions are what has interfered with the brain development.

• 11:31Gabor Maté?

  And continues to now.

• 11:33Mel Robbins?

  Can I ask you a quick question?

• 11:34Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Mel Robbins?

  So I understand that when, as a human being, you're experiencing stress.

• 11:42Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Mel Robbins?

  Or you are experiencing a threat.

• 11:45Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Mel Robbins?

  Or you're feeling isolated and lonely and like you're invisible or nobody cares about you.

• 11:51Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Mel Robbins?

  That your body naturally switches from being present and in the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala taking over. And you're now in like fight or flight. When you're in fight or flight and you're kind of in that stress response state, does it interfere with dopamine?

• 12:07Gabor Maté?

  It interferes with dopamine, interferes with cortisol. It has an effect on the memory centers in the brain, like the hippocampus. It affects the amygdala, all those things. And if you look at children in poverty or who experience racialized circumstances, they're more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. The children of women with postpartum depression are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. The children of women who are stressed during pregnancy are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. And there's this myth about it being genetic because it tends to run in families. Like you were diagnosed, your kids were diagnosed. I was diagnosed, a couple of my kids were diagnosed. But it's not because the so-called disease, it's not even a disease.

• 12:52Gabor Maté?

  But it's not because the so-called disease was passed on, but because the conditions.

• 12:58Mel Robbins?

  That created your brain.

• 13:00Gabor Maté?

  They created your brain, also then repeated in your children's childhood as in mine. So something running in a family says nothing about genetic causation. And going back to the flight or fight thing, if a child is feeling stressed, and by the way, I think there's something genetic here, and with genetic here is sensitivity. And the more sensitive kids are, the more they feel what's going on around them. So if the family, if the parents are stressed, the child feels the stress. Can the child escape or fight back?

• 13:32Mel Robbins?

  No.

• 13:33Gabor Maté?

  What do they do? They tune out. But when did they tune out? They tune out when their brain is developing. So that gets wired into the brain. And now they're told you've got this genetic disease. No, you don't. It's an adaptation that began as an adaptation. And as with many of these sheltered adaptations, later on, they create problems. So they serve their purpose, but now they are wired in. And, you know, not to mention, if you look at the traits of ADHD, which is the absent mindedness, the tuning out. And then the other traits of ADHD are poor impulse regulation, which means that when you want to do something like, I might have an impulse to do something.

• 14:17Gabor Maté?

  There's nothing with, nothing wrong with the impulse. But there's something wrong with me acting out the impulse. But impulse regulation depends on certain circuitry in the brain. No baby has any impulse regulation. It has to develop. For anything that's developmental, the conditions have to be right. If a plant in your backyard wasn't growing the way you expected it, you'd look at what's missing here. Nutrition, sunlight, irrigation. It's the same with kids. When they've got these challenges, let's look at the conditions that shape their development. So impulse regulation is another brain circuitry that doesn't develop well in people with ADHD. And incidentally, in people who are addicted,

• 15:01Gabor Maté?

  which is why there's such a great link between addictions and ADHD. And then the third one is, which is sometimes they're not always, hyperactivity.

• 15:08Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Gabor Maté?

  More tends to be there, more in boys.

• 15:10Mel Robbins?

  Boys, not girls, yep.

• 15:11Gabor Maté?

  And the regulation of the body is a function of the midfrontal cortex. That has to develop. So under conditions of stress, given that the brain is a social organ and it's also a historical organ, do you know that, does the name Bruce Perry mean anything to you?

• 15:26Mel Robbins?

  Is he in Wisconsin?

• 15:28Gabor Maté?

  I don't know where he is, but he's a very well-known child trauma psychiatrist.

• 15:31Mel Robbins?

  Yes, I believe he's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I think, but don't quote me on that. Did he write the book with Oprah Winfrey?

• 15:37Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, he wrote the book.

• 15:38Mel Robbins?

  Yes, okay.

• 15:39Gabor Maté?

  What Happened to You? And he says the brain is a historical organ, so it stores the impacts of life experiences. So when we look at brain biology, let's not think that the biology is somehow distinct and separated from life experience. So there's no fault laying here, and sometimes I do get accused of blaming parents, it's the last thing I want to do.

• 15:59Mel Robbins?

  I don't hear you blaming parents. I hear you talking very factually.

• 16:03Gabor Maté?

  No, but there's a very well-known ADHD psychologist who goes on YouTube and says I blame parents, and I don't. Actually, I think parents do their best, they love their kids, but their best is limited by their own particular challenges and limitations. You know, there's no parent blaming here, but we have to recognize the importance and the impact of early experiences. So what I'm saying is that ADHD is a result of all that stress and its impact on the brains of especially genetically sensitive kids, that's what's inherited is the sensitivity. But if there was only the sensitivity and optimal conditions, they'd never have ADHD. So it's not the ADHD that's inherited, it's the sensitivity. Now, that's the good news.

• 16:47Gabor Maté?

  If you were a parent with a kid with ADHD, and if I was a doctor,

• 16:50Mel Robbins?

  Yep.

• 16:51Gabor Maté?

  And I said to you, "Madam, your kid's got this genetic condition, brain biology, nothing we can do about it, but here's some medication." Or if I said to you, "Mel, you know, your child's got this condition, your child's very sensitive, very responsive to the environment, and even now at age eight or age 16 or whenever, if we could create different conditions, the brain can still develop in different ways." Which message would you rather go with?

• 17:17Mel Robbins?

  The second.

• 17:18Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, of course. This is a much more optimistic and much more science-based attitude, but unfortunately, again, given the dominance of pharmaceutical companies and the biological mindedness, or what they call biological psychiatry, which is just fixating on the biology and fixing it rather than looking at the conditions that shape the biology, we're very much stuck in a state where... Hundreds of thousands and millions of kids are being medicated. And I'm not against medications. I prescribe them, I've taken them, but they're not the answer.

• 17:49Mel Robbins?

  What's fascinating is that when you really wrap your brain around it, it makes a lot of sense. I'm sure you're familiar with that metaphor. It's not the most elegant metaphor, that the genetics loads the gun.

• 18:02Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Mel Robbins?

  But the environment that pulls the trigger, which means you come into this world predisposed to certain things, but it's the environment that either deactivates or activates what you're predisposed to.

• 18:13Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 18:14Mel Robbins?

  So that makes perfect sense. And the other thing that makes perfect sense in terms of my lived experience.

• 18:19Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Mel Robbins?

  Is being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.

• 18:23Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Mel Robbins?

  And also having a son.

• 18:26Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Mel Robbins?

  And two daughters that have ADHD.

• 18:29Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Mel Robbins?

  We were in Boston in a very competitive public school system, in the go-go-go, both spouses working, running to the club sports, doing this, doing that, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.

• 18:41Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Mel Robbins?

  When we moved to Southern Vermont.

• 18:44Gabor Maté?

  Uh huh.

• 18:45Mel Robbins?

  Open space.

• 18:46Gabor Maté?

  Amazing. Things change.

• 18:49Mel Robbins?

  You change because the environment changes. And if you just think about being on vacation.

• 18:54Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Mel Robbins?

  You leave the go-go-go-go-go-of-your-day-to-day and your work and your social and all that stuff, and you step away to a space that typically has a little bit more open space.

• 19:05Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Mel Robbins?

  And a different pace to your life, you change.

• 19:09Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 19:09Mel Robbins?

  And so I feel, because I was about to ask you, well, why does this matter to know this? But I feel that it matters deeply because if environmental conditions can shape your brain as a child, and we know that the brain develops and grows and changes through neuroplasticity through your entire life.

• 19:28Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Mel Robbins?

  Then environmental changes, I suppose, also help you change and address these conditions.

• 19:36Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely. And so.

• 19:39Gabor Maté?

  When a family with ADHD child would come to me, once I had this recognition, I would say, well, we can consider medication in the short term if we need to, but it's not the first step. It's never should be the only step. Can we look at the family atmosphere? Can we look at the relationship between the parents? Can we look at the stresses in the family? Can you understand the child's behavior in a way that doesn't blame the child? Because these kids tend to be blamed a lot for how they behave. Now, we talk about this phrase, acting out. Kids are acting out, which usually means there being a strep, or is oppositional, defiant, or non-cooperative, or rude, or something.

• 20:19Mel Robbins?

  It means they're not doing what the parent wants them to do.

• 20:21Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, but let's look at the phrase, acting out. It's English meaning. We act something out when we don't have the language to say it in words. So in a game of charades, we're not allowed to speak. What do you have to do?

• 20:33Mel Robbins?

  Act it out.

• 20:34Gabor Maté?

  These kids' behaviors are simply acting out their emotional needs and dynamics. It's up to the parents to understand that, rather than just to respond or react to the behavior in a controlling or punitive way. Let's understand what is being acted out, which is one of the reasons I wrote that book, is I want parents to understand what is being acted out in the child's behavior. And if you change the relationship to the child, the child's behavior will change. So it's not behavior control. It's actually promoting different conditions that'll support the child's healthy development.

• 21:08Mel Robbins?

  You know, this reminds me of something that's always really just made me feel very heartbroken about the state of society in the world, particularly in the United States. And that is, when I was going through this experience where my husband and I were having our son go through the process of all the evaluations, the school kept saying, this is behavioral behavior. And we were like, I don't think so. I don't think so. And so we were in a position to be able to have him tested here in Boston at Mass General outside the school. And just three years prior, we would not have been able to afford to do that.

• 21:51Gabor Maté?

  I understand.

• 21:54Mel Robbins?

  That diagnosis and understanding that his brain and the way that he learned and the development of his brain was just different.

• 22:02Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 22:03Mel Robbins?

  And changed the trajectory of his life and my life. And before I did what I do now, my earlier in my career, I was a public defender in Manhattan.

• 22:15Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Mel Robbins?

  Doing criminal defense work.

• 22:17Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Mel Robbins?

  The statistics of people who are incarcerated.

• 22:24Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, with ADHD.

• 22:26Mel Robbins?

  Yes, with ADHD, with learning differences who were never diagnosed.

• 22:30Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 22:31Mel Robbins?

  Who, when you trace it back to what you're saying, childhood conditions, a parent who is absent, chronic racism, which is a form of trauma.

• 22:39Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Mel Robbins?

  It makes very depressing and sad and unfair sense.

• 22:46Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely.

• 22:47Mel Robbins?

  And I think a lot about the fact that it's simply because we were able to, at that moment in our lives, to be able to afford a test that sent him in one direction, when kids who don't have that are sent in a different one.

• 23:02Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, we're actually hurting people for having been hurt.

• 23:05Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 23:06Gabor Maté?

  And then they act out that hurt and then we blame them for it. We don't understand what that's all about. Let me say something else. The diagnosis doesn't explain anything.

• 23:15Mel Robbins?

  What do you mean the diagnosis doesn't mean anything?

• 23:17Gabor Maté?

  So male or gab or ADHD, how do we know? Well, they absent minded, they have poor impulse regulation and they're hyperactive. Why are they absent minded and have poor impulse regulation? And why do they have activity? Because they have ADHD. How do we know they have ADHD? Because they're hyperactive, they tune out and they have poor impulse control. Why do they? It's circular.

• 23:41Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 23:42Gabor Maté?

  It's not an explanation, it's a description. And we mistake, medical practice tends to mistake descriptions for explanations. They're not. If you want to know why they're active, they're hyperactive or lacking impulse regulation or tend to tune out, you got to look at their lives. And those lives acted on their genes. That's the explanation. The diagnosis describes something, but it doesn't explain anything.

• 24:10Mel Robbins?

  But understanding this helps you also understand the role that environment

• 24:15Gabor Maté?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:15Mel Robbins?

  And how this happened.

• 24:17Gabor Maté?

  I think descriptions are helpful. We just mustn't mistake them for explanations. That's all.

• 24:22Mel Robbins?

  That makes a lot of sense. Dr. Mate, let's take a quick pause. I would love our sponsors to have a chance to say a few words. And while you're listening to the sponsors, please share this episode with somebody that you care about. Absolutely every human being that you know and love deserves this information because once you kind of understand things, you are now empowered to make them better. And don't go anywhere because we're going to be waiting for you after a short break. Stay with us.

• 24:52Mel Robbins?

  Hey, it's Mel. I'm coming in here with my own ad. I am beyond excited to tell you that my new book, The Let Them Theory, is available for preorder. Holy smokes. I have never worked harder on anything in my entire life. I have never been more proud of something that I have done. I wrote every single word in this book. It's about the most powerful tool I've ever discovered, The Let Them Theory. And right now, go to letthem.com, preorder your own copy. And this book, it's going to change how you think about your entire life and finally stop you from getting in your own way. Letthem.com. You won't regret it.

• 25:33Mel Robbins?

  Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And today you and I are spending time with the extraordinary Gabor Maté. And we're learning all about how your childhood impacted who you became as an adult. So I have another question for you. You know, you mentioned addiction.

• 25:46Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Mel Robbins?

  And there is a lot of research that shows a direct link between ADHD and addiction.

• 25:55Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Mel Robbins?

  And what does your research and experience show about your childhood experience and conditions?

• 26:02Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Mel Robbins?

  And the connection to addiction?

• 26:05Gabor Maté?

  So for 12 years, I worked in Vancouver, British Columbia's downtown east side, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more drug users there in a few square block radius than anywhere in the States or anywhere else in Canada, in fact, anywhere in Europe.

• 26:20Mel Robbins?

  Wow.

• 26:21Gabor Maté?

  So I was there for 12 years and.

• 26:25Gabor Maté?

  A significant percentage of my patients clearly had ADHD that had not been diagnosed. Now, let's look at the commonalities. First of all, both addicts and people with ADHD lack impulse control. Like somebody said about addiction is that the problem in addiction is not lack of free will, but lack of a free won't.

• 26:44Mel Robbins?

  Lack of a free?

• 26:45Gabor Maté?

  Won't.

• 26:46Mel Robbins?

  Won't, oh.

• 26:47Gabor Maté?

  They have nothing to say no with because that circuitry didn't develop. Okay, number one. Number two, addictions all work on the dopamine system, which is what is affected in ADHD as well. So stimulant addicts, like crystal meth addicts, cocaine addicts, nicotine addicts, caffeine addicts, they're literally boosting their dopamine levels, which is precisely what's the issue in ADHD is as well. So if you look at the studies, something like a good thirty percent or more of stimulant addicts actually are diagnosable with ADHD. But again, this is, this is studied and reported, but not much is done with it in medical practice.

• 27:30Gabor Maté?

  Furthermore, all addictions, no matter what they are, they work on the dopamine circuitry. I will define addiction for you.

• 27:38Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 27:39Gabor Maté?

  As manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief for pleasure and therefore quaves, but then suffers negative consequences as a result of, and doesn't give up despite the harm. So craving pleasure relief in the short term, harm, inability to give it up. That's what an addiction is. Now, let me just go sideways a little bit.

• 28:01Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 28:02Gabor Maté?

  Let me ask you a question.

• 28:03Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Gabor Maté?

  And you've already answered it, but according to that, notice I didn't say anything about drugs. I said any behavior.

• 28:08Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Gabor Maté?

  Now, if I speak to a room of a thousand people and I give that definition, and I say, I'll go into that definition, which is not controversial. If you ever had an addictive pattern in your life, just raise your hand. Another one thousand nine hundred ninety nine.

• 28:22Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 28:23Gabor Maté?

  Well, raise their hands and this one liar who won't, you know, but basically it's almost everybody. Now, here's the second question. And I don't care what your addictive patterns were, whether they were to alcohol, which you mentioned, or to whatever else. Now, what was wrong with it? But what was right about it? What did it give you in the short term that you wanted? So what did it give you?

• 28:45Mel Robbins?

  Oh, well, with alcohol, it was like a sense of belonging and relief, and it was a way to turn my brain off.

• 28:52Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 28:52Mel Robbins?

  And to escape.

• 28:53Gabor Maté?

  Okay, when do people need to escape?

• 28:56Mel Robbins?

  When they're stressed.

• 28:56Gabor Maté?

  When they're suffering.

• 28:57Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so the addiction wasn't the disease that you had. It wasn't your primary problem. It was an attempt to solve the problem of emotional pain and isolation.

• 29:10Gabor Maté?

  So my mantra under addiction is don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And if you want to understand the pain, look at the person's life rather than just their genes. Okay, so both people are addicted, and people who did ADHD often share this genes for sensitivity, which means they suffer more when circumstances aren't right. And so they're most, obviously those conditions will go together. And furthermore, to go back to dopamine, the shopping addict, the gambling addict, the pornography addict.

• 29:44Mel Robbins?

  The social media addict.

• 29:45Gabor Maté?

  The social media, and I have had my behavior.

• 29:47Mel Robbins?

  The gaming addiction addict, the busyness.

• 29:50Gabor Maté?

  You know what they're after? They're after a hit of dopamine in the brain, which they get through seeking that behavior.

• 29:56Mel Robbins?

  And then you feel bad, though, that you did it.

• 29:58Gabor Maté?

  Well, yeah, and I had my behavior addictions, but what I'm saying is, it's all based partly on the dopamine circuitry.

• 30:05Mel Robbins?

  Which didn't develop.

• 30:06Gabor Maté?

  Which didn't evolve the way it should have.

• 30:08Mel Robbins?

  Because of your childhood.

• 30:09Gabor Maté?

  Exactly, so now you have to get your dopamine hit through pornography. And if you do brain scans on pornography addicts, they get multiple spikes of dopamine hits in their brain when they're

• 30:19Mel Robbins?

  Just like a drug addict.

• 30:20Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:21Mel Robbins?

  It makes absolutely perfect sense. How do you, what do you do if you're listening to this and you either you yourself are recognizing this is you, or you're like, you are describing my spouse, or my adult child, or my parent, or whomever in my life. Like, what do you do with this particular information of the connection between childhood conditions and development and ADHD and addiction?

• 30:47Gabor Maté?

  May I just say one more thing about the brain?

• 30:49Mel Robbins?

  Please.

• 30:49Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, opiates.

• 30:51Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 30:52Gabor Maté?

  So people get addicted to heroin, or Oxycontin, or Dilaudid, Hydromorphone, or codeine, or whatever, you know, fentanyl, unfortunately, which is a very dangerous one. These are opiates. They come from the opium plant in Afghanistan. Or they're human manufactured copies of the same molecule.

• 31:11Mel Robbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:12Gabor Maté?

  No. Why do opiates, why does a plant from Afghanistan work in the human brain here in the States?

• 31:20Mel Robbins?

  I don't know.

• 31:21Gabor Maté?

  Well, because the opiate molecule, we have receptors for it in our brains, which means we have our internal opiate system.

• 31:32Gabor Maté?

  This is just pure brain science. And the opiate system is called endorphins. Endorphin means endogenous, internal, morphine-like substance. So we have an opiate system in our bodies, which affects many functions in our body from the gut to the immune system. But what do they do in the brain? If we understand opiate addiction, we have to understand what do endorphins do in the human trajectory? First of all, they provide pain relief, both physical and emotional pain relief. Our internal endorphins do that. We have to have pain in life, because without pain, we don't survive, because we can hurt ourselves. But we also have pain relief. So endorphins relieve pain, but not just physical pain, also emotional pain.

• 32:15Gabor Maté?

  Because they're part of the brain where people experience physical pain, the suffering of physical pain, it's also where they experience the suffering of emotional pain. So the endorphins, the opiates, work there. That's their first role. The second role, along with dopamine, is to give you a sense of pleasure, elation, and joy.

• 32:35Mel Robbins?

  Uh huh.

• 32:36Gabor Maté?

  But that's rather important in human life, because human life is difficult. So we have to have some expectation of pleasure, joy, relief. That's what the opiates do. That's the second thing they do. But the third thing they do, they facilitate a little thing called love. Endorphins help to feel as connected to other people. And particularly, they help feel parents connected to their kids.

• 33:01Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 33:01Gabor Maté?

  Without which the child doesn't survive. And if you take little animals and you knock out their opiate receptors, they will not call for their mothers on separation. What would that do to them? It would kill them in the wild.

• 33:14Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 33:15Gabor Maté?

  So that's why important the opiates are. Now, who are these people that develop opiate addictions? People whose lives have undermined their opiate circuitry.

• 33:24Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 33:25Gabor Maté?

  And I had a sex trade worker in the downtown east of Vancouver. I asked her, what did the heroin do for you? She said, the first time I did heroin, it felt like a warm, soft hug. So just like the alcohol, which gave you a more sense of belonging, it gave her a sense of being loved, a sense of warmth.

• 33:42Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 33:43Gabor Maté?

  That's why people get addicted, is because they suffered that early pain that they're trying to escape from, and because their brain circuitry was affected by adverse conditions, so that this circus didn't develop optimally. Now they have to substitute. You know, so that's, that's, that's a shiny on addiction. It's not an inherited disease. It's a response to the environment, and it's not genetic, contrary to what 99% of physicians believe.

• 34:12Mel Robbins?

  The reason why this is so important is because there is so much shame and self-blame.

• 34:18Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Mel Robbins?

  When you have... An addiction.

• 34:22Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Mel Robbins?

  Or you have something that you're struggling with like ADHD. And when you understand the brain circuitry and the connection to brain development and human development and childhood conditions and experiences and how that has a direct impact.

• 34:37Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Mel Robbins?

  On the working and wiring of the functioning of your brain.

• 34:41Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Mel Robbins?

  You can separate yourself as a human being.

• 34:45Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 34:45Mel Robbins?

  From the thing that caused this.

• 34:47Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point.

• 34:48Mel Robbins?

  And then that allows you from that moment of separation and detachment and objectivity to go, oh, wait a minute.

• 34:55Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 34:55Mel Robbins?

  I'm not to blame for this.

• 34:57Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 34:58Mel Robbins?

  This is a circuitry and a conditioning problem.

• 35:01Gabor Maté?

  It's my responsibility.

• 35:02Mel Robbins?

  And now it's my responsibility.

• 35:04Gabor Maté?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 35:05Mel Robbins?

  To do what I need to do with this.

• 35:08Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Mel Robbins?

  To heal it and make it better.

• 35:10Gabor Maté?

  Exactly right. And, and to go back to your question about now, what do we do with this information? If you are parents of a child who's been diagnosed with, say, ADHD.

• 35:20Mel Robbins?

  Uh huh.

• 35:21Gabor Maté?

  Then make a considered decision about whether you want the kid medicated or not. Medications can sometimes help, sometimes they cause side effects. No child should be forced to be on medication.

• 35:31Mel Robbins?

  Uh huh.

• 35:31Gabor Maté?

  Cause no child at any age should be here, get the message that they're only acceptable to the adults when their brain is sedated. You don't want to give that message to any child. But they can help sometimes to mitigate symptoms.

• 35:44Mel Robbins?

  Uh huh.

• 35:45Gabor Maté?

  They do nothing for brain development in the long term. So then the question is, can we create in this family better conditions for that child's brain to develop in more optimal ways? And yes, we can. And that has a lot to do with the emotional atmosphere in the family and the degree of understanding and connection, not love, cause that's already there, but the actual understanding and connection between the parents and the child. And I mean, that book's been out 25 years and I've been told by so often that it totally changed the family just to read that book, you know, and it totally changed their children.

• 36:18Mel Robbins?

  Well, it's very empowering because I think if you're the person struggling with the addiction or ADHD.

• 36:23Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Mel Robbins?

  Or a condition like that, you feel deficient, you feel.

• 36:29Mel Robbins?

  That you've done something wrong and you can never heal while you're punishing yourself at the same time.

• 36:35Gabor Maté?

  And the world is punishing you.

• 36:37Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 36:37Gabor Maté?

  Teachers are punishing you.

• 36:38Mel Robbins?

  That's true.

• 36:39Gabor Maté?

  Your parents are exasperated with you.

• 36:42Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 36:43Gabor Maté?

  You know, when it comes to treating addiction, then it's very complex, but the person again needs to understand there's nothing wrong with them. They weren't born with any kind of disease. That addiction is a perfectly normal response to abnormal circumstances. I mean, look at all the veterans who are traumatized and they become alcoholics or opiate addicts.

• 37:03Mel Robbins?

  And then there's the opposite study about the veterans from Vietnam.

• 37:07Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Mel Robbins?

  Who were using opioids in Vietnam.

• 37:10Gabor Maté?

  Over there.

• 37:10Mel Robbins?

  But then came home to a supportive environment.

• 37:14Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 37:14Mel Robbins?

  And were not addicted.

• 37:16Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. I quote that study in my book on addiction because it's such a salient fact. In fact, it's been done with laboratory rats, you know, where they took laboratory rats and exposed them to different environmental conditions and they tried to get them addicted to opioids. Now, those rats that were stressed and isolated and under adverse conditions, they very easily became addicted to opioids. The rats with good conditions, you couldn't even make them addicted to opioids. Doesn't matter how much you gave them.

• 37:47Mel Robbins?

  But the main thing is, is that if the environment is actually creating the conditions in your brain and body.

• 37:54Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Mel Robbins?

  For addiction and ADHD, then the environment is a huge piece of you healing this and growing in new ways and figuring out new adaptations for how to heal.

• 38:06Gabor Maté?

  Well, and I think it's not an individual process. It should be foremost, but it should be you need the social help. That's what the 12 step groups are. I have my critiques of them, but the 12 steps themselves, I think are wonderful and the group process is wonderful, where people can share themselves and be heard compassionately and not be shamed. They can declare their so-called dysfunctions and be accepted, you know. So I think it's not just an individual process, but I think what's missing from the 12 step groups unfortunately is awareness of Trump, which is interesting because Bill W, the original founder was an abandoned child. Highly traumatized.

• 38:46Gabor Maté?

  And for some reason, trauma hasn't entered the conversation of the positive movement as much as I'd like to see it done. But again, healing should not be just seen as an individual process. It should be seen as a social process. And people that deal with addictions, they need to understand trauma.

• 39:04Mel Robbins?

  Gabor, I've never heard it explained like that. That makes so much sense. And this feels like a good time to take a quick pause so we can hear a word from our amazing sponsors. And while you're listening to our sponsors, take a moment and share this with somebody that you care about, because there's no doubt in my mind that this can help change somebody else's life. And don't go anywhere, because we have so much more to dig into with you, and we're going to be waiting for you after a short break. So stay with us. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins, and today you and I are with the extraordinary Dr. Gabor Maté. So, Dr. Maté, I have another question.

• 39:49Mel Robbins?

  What do you think is missing from the conversation that women need to know when it comes to diagnosing and supporting women who are largely getting late in life diagnoses of ADHD?

• 40:01Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. I love to think here. I think what happens is when we get older, they tend to get a bit less repressed. And the tendencies are in them that they try to kind of control in order to be acceptable and to fit in. It becomes intolerable for them, particularly perimenopausally. It becomes a real chore for women to continue to fit the stereotype in which they were molded. So I think whatever's in them is more likely to show up. And I would say to them, what I say to anybody, they get curious about what's being manifested in this condition.

• 40:42Mel Robbins?

  You know, in your book Hungry Ghosts, you mention your own struggles.

• 40:46Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Mel Robbins?

  With addictions to praise, even to classical music.

• 40:50Gabor Maté?

  Not to the music, sorry, to shopping for classical music.

• 40:53Mel Robbins?

  Oh.

• 40:54Gabor Maté?

  There's a distinction.

• 40:55Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 40:56Gabor Maté?

  I love the music, but that doesn't make me an addict. That just makes me a music lover. It's the shopping. I would drop three thousand dollars in a music store and go back two hours later. It's right because I had to get the next one. Typical addictive behavior. So it's the, it's the shopping that I was addicted to. It's the, not the having, but to the acquisition.

• 41:16Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 41:17Gabor Maté?

  And that's, and you know what? When I was in the classical music store, I know ADHD. I had high dopamine levels. I was focused. I can almost remember which record did I buy in which store? You know, which CD that, so, so just to make the distinction. It's not the music, it's the shopping I was addicted to.

• 41:34Mel Robbins?

  I love that distinction because I can relate to it.

• 41:36Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Mel Robbins?

  I think in the biggest moments of crisis in my life.

• 41:39Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Mel Robbins?

  Like facing bankruptcy.

• 41:42Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Mel Robbins?

  Literally about to lose it all. If I had a tiny bit of money.

• 41:46Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Mel Robbins?

  I would go to the mall.

• 41:48Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Mel Robbins?

  As an escape.

• 41:50Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Mel Robbins?

  And I would say, given that daily addiction.

• 41:54Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Mel Robbins?

  Whether it's the mom pouring a couple glasses of wine at night. Or it is just scrolling for three hours. Or it is mindlessly shopping or whatever it may be.

• 42:05Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Mel Robbins?

  What strategies have you found most effective in really either controlling or managing through these tendencies or patterns of behavior that, that so many of us have?

• 42:20Gabor Maté?

  Well, here's where we have to make a distinction. I mean, drug addictions and behavior addictions.

• 42:24Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 42:24Gabor Maté?

  Because drug addictions are, become a very.

• 42:27Mel Robbins?

  Chemical.

• 42:27Gabor Maté?

  Chemical problem and, and people go through withdrawal and that has to be managed and all that. Now, the behavior addicts, by the way, also go through withdrawal, but it's less noticeable. Like with my work addiction, my workaholism. When I was at home, I'd go through, I'd be irritable and depressed. That's withdrawal because the dopamine wasn't flowing.

• 42:44Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 42:45Gabor Maté?

  So, but obviously it's more easily manageable. So I say two things. One is let's look at the need that is serving in your life.

• 42:54Mel Robbins?

  What is the need it is serving in your life?

• 42:57Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Mel Robbins?

  Well, doom scrolling for me, the need is to tune out.

• 43:00Gabor Maté?

  No, that's not the need. What's the, what is the need for tuning out, serving your life?

• 43:05Mel Robbins?

  Oh, boy.

• 43:08Gabor Maté?

  Scrolling out is the-

• 43:08Mel Robbins?

  Oh, I have no joy play or relaxation.

• 43:13Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so you don't know how to, you're not comfortable with yourself. You need to, you can't just be.

• 43:20Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 43:20Gabor Maté?

  You have to be doing and your attention is to be external.

• 43:24Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Gabor Maté?

  Now, that goes back to your childhood. It means that you weren't comfortable and you developed that comfort with yourself. You developed that sense of your own goodness and validity. And so that when you're alone and you're not doing something, there's distress and your mind is going all over the place.

• 43:42Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Gabor Maté?

  You know, so that's the need that it's serving. So then you say, well, is meeting this need to escape from myself? How can I learn to be with myself? So what, what techniques, what, what could I do? And there's ways to do that. I mean, I, I have many suggestions in my books, but essentially it's recognizing the need that's meaning that not invalidating the need, validating the need, but recognizing that the behavior itself only temporarily soothes it, but it doesn't meet the need.

• 44:13Mel Robbins?

  Well, I feel like I've been fixing the wrong problem. Because I'm focused on, don't drink the drink, don't pick up the phone. And what you're saying is, no, no, no, you're like over here looking at this thing. There's a deeper issue.

• 44:25Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Mel Robbins?

  About just learning to be with yourself, about learning to be in the five to seven PM time zone.

• 44:32Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Mel Robbins?

  And, and be okay with all that comes up.

• 44:35Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Mel Robbins?

  And know that you can move through it without pouring a drink.

• 44:40Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point. And there's nothing wrong with saying, don't drink. I mean, all that. It's only that it doesn't deal with the fundamental need, need. So let's, let's recognize the need. Those needs are valid. You need for social contact or not being isolated, social isolation, which you interpreted as rejection. And your husband points out, you're not being rejected. They're just, you know, something else. But your childhood programming tells you that it's rejected.

• 45:04Mel Robbins?

  It's true.

• 45:04Gabor Maté?

  So.

• 45:05Mel Robbins?

  Does everything come back to our childhood?

• 45:07Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 45:09Gabor Maté?

  Pretty much. That's why we're shaped. Look, have you ever had a puppy dog?

• 45:12Mel Robbins?

  Yes, two.

• 45:14Gabor Maté?

  Okay, well, tell me about them. I mean, how you treat that puppy will not not define to a significant degree what kind of creature they're gonna be.

• 45:21Mel Robbins?

  It's true.

• 45:22Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, well, this human being is infinitely more complex than puppy dogs. And it's totally true. So what I'm saying is, recognize the need, validate the need, but then ask the question, okay, how can I meet that need in ways that are not harmful?

• 45:39Mel Robbins?

  One of the things that you're talking a lot about is the connection between childhood conditions and experiences.

• 45:45Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Mel Robbins?

  How they shape you and the significant rise in autoimmune disorders and diseases in women?

• 45:53Gabor Maté?

  You know, eighty percent of people, eighty percent of autoimmune disease, which are diseases where the immune system attacks the body that is supposed to protect.

• 46:00Mel Robbins?

  What are a few examples of an autoimmune disease?

• 46:03Gabor Maté?

  Multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, probably fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, forms of psoriasis, autoimmune eczema, scleroderma. I could go on and on. There's about a hundred or so of these, and eighty percent of them happen to women.

• 46:23Mel Robbins?

  Why?

• 46:24Gabor Maté?

  So in my medical practice, I began to notice, and here's my advantage over my specialist colleagues, is that they know a lot more about certain body parts and systems, as they should, but they don't know the patient. I knew people before they got sick. And I knew them in the context of their families of origin and the extended family very often. So I got to see who got sick and who didn't. And when I was in palliative care, again, I saw who ended up in palliative care and who didn't. And these people had four significant characteristics. One is, they tended to put other people's emotional needs ahead of their own, and they tend to ignore their own. Number one.

• 47:06Gabor Maté?

  Number two, they tended to identify with duty, role, and responsibility rather than the needs of the self. Number three, they tended to be very nice, which means they repressed healthy anger. The healthy anger is a boundary defense. And these people tend to be very nice. And number four, these people tended to believe that they're responsible for other people feel, which is a point that you address in your book, Let Them. And they had this belief that they would never disappoint anybody. Now, those beliefs lead you into not saying no to the demands of the world. And you're constantly taking on stuff and stress and other people's stress. You get stressed.

• 47:51Gabor Maté?

  That stress undermines the immune system, which then turns against you. Now, and I could explain the physiology of it. And by the way, people, because the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system and the emotional system are one system. They're not separate. They're wired together in a whole lot of chemical and neurological ways. I'm not making this up. This is science. Science is called psychoneuromatology. With psychology and neurology, immunology and endocrinology, the hormones, it's all one system. People that repress healthy anger, they're suppressing their immune system biologically.

• 48:32Gabor Maté?

  Now, if you understand that it's all one system and if you ask why, well, what is the role of healthy anger? It's a boundary defense. What is the role of the immune system? It's a boundary defense. It's meant to let in what is good and nurturing, keep out what is toxic and dangerous. When you're suppressing your emotions, you're also messing with your immune system because it's all one.

• 48:58Mel Robbins?

  It's almost like you're training your immune system not to protect you from the outside.

• 49:04Gabor Maté?

  That's what happens. And it'll turn against you. Like anger that you repress turns against you in a form of depression or self-loathing.

• 49:12Mel Robbins?

  The same way that your negative thoughts, where you think you're to blame for all of the stuff going on when you're a child that are not your responsibility, turns into the negative self-talk that's aimed against you.

• 49:23Gabor Maté?

  Same way the immune system turns against you.

• 49:25Mel Robbins?

  Wow.

• 49:26Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point.

• 49:26Mel Robbins?

  That makes so much sense.

• 49:27Gabor Maté?

  Well, physiologically, it's just a fact. No. Why is it women? Because who in this culture is programmed to always looking after everybody's emotional needs, taking everybody's stresses, identify with the duties and their role, be nice all the time, not be angry in a healthy way, and to take responsibility for other people's feelings? It's women. It's not a gender issue, it's a cultural issue.

• 49:51Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 49:52Gabor Maté?

  And of course, the more stress that a woman experiences, the greater the risk of autoimmune disease. So if you look at minority women, they have a higher percentage because they're women and they're minority.

• 50:03Mel Robbins?

  I was just about to ask you whether or not there were studies for minority women and people that are in first responder roles?

• 50:11Gabor Maté?

  Many studies, many studies. And in Canada.

• 50:15Mel Robbins?

  It makes sense.

• 50:16Gabor Maté?

  In Canada, an indigenous woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than somebody else, and this is in a population that never used to have rheumatoid arthritis. And by the way, again, are we blaming people here? No, we're not, because we have to look at what happened here. What happened here is the child is born with all these emotions wired into their brains, but the child has two big needs here. The need for attachment, for belonging, for being held, for being accepted, supported, and so on. That's a need that you have. It's not negotiable. Without it, as an infant, as a young child.

• 50:48Mel Robbins?

  You'd die.

• 50:49Gabor Maté?

  You'd die, yeah. So, there's one need, but you have another need as well, which I call authenticity, which means being connected to your emotions and your gut feelings. Now, in any audience, when I ask people, have you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something, ignoring it, and being sorry afterwards? Most people put their hands up. You probably would. Now, gut feelings were programmed into us by evolution. We evolved out in nature for millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years, we lived out in nature. How long does any creature in nature survive if they don't pay attention to their gut feelings?

• 51:26Mel Robbins?

  Not until the end of the day. You're a goner.

• 51:29Gabor Maté?

  At this point, so we have this two need, attachment and authenticity, being connected to ourselves. Now. If the child gets the message that they're being authentic with their emotions and so on, they're not acceptable to the environment, guess what's going to be in the contest between

• 51:46Mel Robbins?

  Oh, you get trained to not trust your instincts.

• 51:49Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, and you're trained to disconnect and you're trained to push down your feelings. So we give up our authenticity for the sake of attachment. Now, in your book, there's an example of this guy who's about to get married.

• 51:59Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 51:59Gabor Maté?

  And it's got all these misgivings.

• 52:01Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 52:01Gabor Maté?

  And there is a fear of what everybody else will think.

• 52:04Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 52:04Gabor Maté?

  And you're wishing he would say no to the wedding.

• 52:07Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 52:07Gabor Maté?

  You know, what's going on? He's stuck in this tension between attachment, which is needed to be acceptable, and authenticity being himself. Women are caught in that trap in this society. So are many men, of course. It's not just a gender issue, but overwhelmingly, it's women who have to choose the attachment of being acceptable over authenticity. That's why they have much more autoimmune disease.

• 52:32Mel Robbins?

  Wow, and often, I'd say for a lot of us, we choose attachment rather than staying connected to ourselves.

• 52:42Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point. As a child, you have no choice. The question is, as an adult, can we develop that choice? Do I have to keep choosing the attachment over the authenticity?

• 52:51Mel Robbins?

  Well, you also hear doctors say that all of these autoimmune disorders, diseases, whatever you want to call them, flare up in moments of stress.

• 52:58Gabor Maté?

  Of course.

• 52:59Mel Robbins?

  In moments of overwhelm. And the main thing that they're treated with is...

• 53:03Gabor Maté?

  Steroids.

• 53:04Mel Robbins?

  Yes, and take better care of yourself.

• 53:08Gabor Maté?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 53:08Mel Robbins?

  Breast.

• 53:09Gabor Maté?

  No, but here's what's interesting. Typically, for these conditions, we give cortisol.

• 53:14Mel Robbins?

  A stress hormone?

• 53:15Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. Yeah, like if you go into the dermatology with an inflamed skin, they're going to give you a steroid cream, cortisol. If you go to a gastroenterologist with an inflamed intestine... They'll at some point give you cortisol, stress hormone. If you go with an inflamed nervous system, multiple sclerosis, they're gonna give you a stress hormone, cortisol. I could go on. But we never ask ourselves, gosh, we're giving stress hormones to people. Is it possible that stress may have something to do with their condition? So doctors know that in cases of acute stress, that can flare up a disease. That's clear.

• 53:49Mel Robbins?

  Right.

• 53:49Gabor Maté?

  What they don't recognize is those emotional patterns that I'm talking about, which stress people chronically, but in less dramatic ways. Because what's it like to always having to repress your anger, to be pleasing other people?

• 54:02Mel Robbins?

  Exhausting.

• 54:02Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point. And that's what the stress that I think often instigates.

• 54:07Mel Robbins?

  You've abandoned yourself and now your body function is abandoning you.

• 54:11Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point.

• 54:12Mel Robbins?

  Is there good news here?

• 54:13Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, the good news is if you change these patterns, you can actually significantly affect the course of your illness. And I know lots of examples of that.

• 54:20Mel Robbins?

  How can someone find the root cause of the emotional pain? Or the, like, how do you begin the process of healing? And because you've now painted this landscape that helps us really understand the connection between childhood experiences and conditioning, how that shapes your body, your brain function, your physiology, your immune system, and how continued environmental stress and continued abandonment of self for the sake of being accepted to other, by other people?

• 54:55Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Mel Robbins?

  When you see all this, it's incredibly empowering. What is one step that you would want someone to take if they're having an awakening or they've been sent this episode by somebody who loves them and they're like, this is me?

• 55:11Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so let's take one example, very simple one. Prior to your awakening and transformational journey that you undertook sometime in your 40s, how easy did you find it to say no to other people's expectations?

• 55:28Mel Robbins?

  Oh, I couldn't.

• 55:29Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so you couldn't say no?

• 55:31Mel Robbins?

  No.

• 55:31Gabor Maté?

  All right. So I ask people this question, where in your life do you have difficulty saying no? It shows up in two areas, work and in personal life. Okay, so you couldn't say no. The second question I ask people then is, what was the impact on you or have you difficulty saying no?

• 55:48Mel Robbins?

  It's exhausting. I don't like my own behavior.

• 55:52Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so it's this shame.

• 55:54Mel Robbins?

  Lack of control.

• 55:55Gabor Maté?

  Lack and loss of control, loss of control, by the way.

• 55:57Mel Robbins?

  Anger, blaming other people and making it their fault that I can't say no.

• 56:01Gabor Maté?

  That's right. And loss of control is one of the most significant triggers for stress, by the way, according to the stress literature.

• 56:09Mel Robbins?

  Well, that makes sense because we have a biological hardwired need for safety.

• 56:14Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 56:15Mel Robbins?

  Which we try to achieve by controlling everything and everyone around us.

• 56:18Gabor Maté?

  Only because we learned in childhood that if we didn't, there'd be no safety. If we learned that there was safety, we would trust the world a lot more and we wouldn't have the control. So nobody's a control freak. Nobody's born a control freak. It's an adaptive trait is what that is. But here's what I'm saying, so that going through this exercise, so what's the impact? You identify some impacts, could also be frequent colds, illness and so on. The third question is, what's your belief that keeps you from saying no? So when you had trouble saying no, what's the story? What was the belief?

• 56:51Mel Robbins?

  That I would get fired from my job and then we wouldn't be able to pay our bills and then we would lose our house and then on and on and on and on and on. Or they wouldn't like me or my mother would be mad at me or, you know, this would happen or that would happen, like the weight of the world on my shoulders.

• 57:05Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. So then the fourth question is, how did you develop that story? That if I say no, I'll be rejected. How did, where did you learn that?

• 57:17Mel Robbins?

  I'm sure for me, even though I don't quite remember.

• 57:20Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Mel Robbins?

  It was that I had, it was my job to make sure everybody was okay in the house and that everybody was happy.

• 57:27Gabor Maté?

  In other words, you learned it.

• 57:28Mel Robbins?

  And that made me feel safe.

• 57:30Gabor Maté?

  In other words, you learned it when you're two or three or four years old or five.

• 57:33Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 57:33Gabor Maté?

  And now you're adult, as you're saying.

• 57:36Mel Robbins?

  My book, that's why this has been such a game changer because when I say let them, I separate someone else's emotions and their expectations from what's my responsibility.

• 57:47Gabor Maté?

  You're choosing authenticity over attachment is what you're doing.

• 57:50Mel Robbins?

  Oh, I love that. You're right. I'm staying connected to myself.

• 57:53Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole game. That's what I'm talking about here. So once you understand.

• 58:00Gabor Maté?

  That you learned the story when you were hypnotized into it as it's, by the way, three or four years are in hypnotic states. That's why they believe that when they're playing monsters, they're actually monsters. So those hypnotic influences are really powerful. They stay with us. So then the next question is, who would you be if you didn't believe that you couldn't, that you mustn't say no? Would you be then?

• 58:22Mel Robbins?

  Free.

• 58:23Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. Do that exercise once a week.

• 58:27Mel Robbins?

  Five questions to free.

• 58:29Gabor Maté?

  It's in the Metanormal, there's a chapter on it. There's a sixth question.

• 58:33Mel Robbins?

  What is the sixth question?

• 58:34Gabor Maté?

  Where you're not saying yes.

• 58:36Mel Robbins?

  Oh, my God, everywhere to free time, to play, to joy, to

• 58:42Gabor Maté?

  Creativity.

• 58:43Mel Robbins?

  Creativity, to, to rest.

• 58:46Gabor Maté?

  Well, that not saying yes is as harmful as the not saying no. So those two little words, just that little exercise, you do that once a week. It changes people's lives.

• 58:57Mel Robbins?

  You just, the, the, the sixth question.

• 59:00Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Mel Robbins?

  What are you not saying yes to? That one made my heart contract a little.

• 59:06Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 59:07Mel Robbins?

  Because that's where I really saw truly what, what I'm missing out on.

• 59:12Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Mel Robbins?

  Where are you not saying yes?

• 59:15Gabor Maté?

  To play.

• 59:18Gabor Maté?

  And the rest, I mean, I'm much better than I used to be. As a matter of fact, I've told this story many times, but five years ago, I was in London giving a talk on my book, When the Body Says No. And I was very articulate and adept on stage. But personally, I was irritated. I was working too hard. I was driving myself too hard. I was not kind to my wife. And she said to me, her name is Ray, and she said, buddy, you're in a book called, When the Body Says No, now you better write a book called, When the Wife Says No.

• 59:50Gabor Maté?

  And you know, so part of it has helped me draw up these patterns, and I'm still working on it. Is because I love this relationship, I want to be in it. And I don't, I don't want to be this person who's not saying yes. I'm an eighty, you know. Again, when you look at the top five regrets of dying people, you know, that book that I mentioned in another conversation, this was written by a palliative care nurse who worked with dying people. The top regret was that I didn't have the courage to be myself. And the third regret was I didn't have the courage to express my emotions. And the fifth regret was, and I neglected my friends. The fourth to get, and then the fifth one, I think was I, I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

• 1:00:32Gabor Maté?

  I wish I had played more. I wish I had given more scope for the creativity and playfulness and childlike self that I am, you know? So I'm still looking for that one, uh, to develop it more. Um, I'm a whole lot better than I used to be.

• 1:00:48Mel Robbins?

  Well, we're a whole lot better than we used to be.

• 1:00:50Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Mel Robbins?

  Because of what we're learning from you.

• 1:00:52Gabor Maté?

  Well, thank you.

• 1:00:53Mel Robbins?

  Gabor Mate. Wow. Any final things you wanna say?

• 1:01:00Gabor Maté?

  Everybody's got the capacity to heal, as long as it's consciousness, there's the capacity to heal. And, um, for some people it's tougher because they don't have the resources.

• 1:01:10Mel Robbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:10Gabor Maté?

  But you know, you can go on YouTube. Lots of my talks on YouTube, people have told me that's changed their lives to the better. Doesn't cost a penny. And not just my talks, by the way. Talks by other wonderful teachers, um, some of my colleagues, some spiritual teachers. Um, that doesn't cost any money to watch that. You can take books out of the library, that doesn't cost a penny, and they can be very helpful. You can, um, learn to meditate and be with yourself and observe your mind. That can be very helpful. There's free meditation instruction on, on, on the line or in many books. Um, those people that can afford therapy,

• 1:01:53Gabor Maté?

  if it's the right kind of therapy, they can address these issues. Um, they can connect with nature. Nature's got a huge healing capacity. As our indigenous people really know, we can learn a lot from them about connecting with nature. Those people that have the capacity to get out of the city and, or even go to a park and connect with the plants and the trees and the flowers. That sounds hokey, but it's hugely healing. Um, exercise, giving your body what it needs, eating the proper food, if you can afford it. And most people, many of people afford the best foods, but they could probably afford to eat better than they do if they paid attention to themselves. So all those things are not inaccessible.

• 1:02:38Gabor Maté?

  So in other words, healing is possible. It's available to all of us and it just takes the decision to embark on that path.

• 1:02:49Mel Robbins?

  Well, you've empowered us to make the decision today.

• 1:02:52Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Mel Robbins?

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:02:55Gabor Maté?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:02:56Mel Robbins?

  It's amazing to spend time with you.

• 1:02:58Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 1:02:59Mel Robbins?

  There are so many people that I want to share this episode with. I feel empowered and excited for you. And so I just want to thank you for listening all the way to the end and sharing this with people that you love. And I also wanted to be sure to tell you, in case no one else tells you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life. And listening to this today is certainly going to help you take the steps to create it. And I will be waiting for you in the very next episode. I'll see you there.

• 1:03:39Mel Robbins?

  So Dr. Oh, my God. Okay. Um, and then I look at the bottom and it's like, wow, wow, wow. Thank you. Wow. Fantastic. I'm the one that says fantastic, right? Okay, do you need me to do those? Okay, great, great. Okay, great, great, great. Can I wait a minute?

• 1:03:53Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Mel Robbins?

  Okay, hold on.

• 1:03:55Gabor Maté?

  Oh, sorry, there's a helicopter.

• 1:03:56Mel Robbins?

  That's okay. We're in it. But I was like, all of a sudden, I'm like, wait, wow. Fantastic.

• 1:04:00Gabor Maté?

  We did it.

• 1:04:01Mel Robbins?

  You got it done. You like that? Okay, great. All right. That's it. We're wrapped. Well done.

• 1:04:12Mel Robbins?

  Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.