Dr. Gabor Maté ON: Understanding Your Trauma & How to Heal Emotional Wounds to Start Moving On From the Past Today

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. 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: Episode Resources Gabor Maté | Website Gabor Maté | Instagram Gabor Maté | Twitter Gabor Maté | Books The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture Do you want to meditate daily with me? Go to go.calm.com/onpurpose to get 40% off a Calm Premium Membership. Experience the Daily Jay. Only on Calm Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:27Jay Shetty?

  and has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick+ Awards than any other car brand as of July 2026. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine. Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective. And with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct.

• 2:10Jay Shetty?

  Enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges, three times the points on dining, and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank. N A Member, FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one 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 wellbeing. I know that you're trying to heal from trauma, from stress, from pressure.

• 2:54Jay Shetty?

  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 honour 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. I'm talking about none other than Dr. Gabor Maté, 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.

• 3:39Jay Shetty?

  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". 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. It is going to blow your mind. 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".

• 4:24Jay Shetty?

  Please welcome to the show Dr. Gabor Maté. Thank you so much for being here.

• 4:29Gabor Maté?

  Well, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

• 4:30Jay Shetty?

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

• 4:55Jay Shetty?

  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.

• 5:03Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 5:03Jay Shetty?

  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?

• 5:30Gabor Maté?

  It's a deep question because on the one 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 one 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

• 6:14Gabor Maté?

  without the healing profession, particularly the medical profession, actually recognizing it. So trauma then is, it comes from the Greek word for wounding. Trauma is a wound. 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 one hand, if it's raw and open, it really hurts. So when somebody touches that wound that you sustained a long time ago. But it hasn't healed yet. You'll react like you're just being tormented all over again. This happens in relationships all the time.

• 7:00Gabor Maté?

  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. The trauma very often stops emotional growth and development. So on the one 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. So trauma then, just to finish, is not what happened to you. So trauma is not a difficult incident, 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 not the pain that they felt.

• 7:45Gabor Maté?

  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 him being 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. It never not will have 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.

• 8:23Jay Shetty?

  Hmm, that's probably the best differentiator that I've heard.

• 8:29Gabor Maté?

  Hmm.

• 8:29Jay Shetty?

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

• 8:33Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 8:34Jay Shetty?

  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. What is, what is healing?

• 9:07Gabor Maté?

  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. So. Health literally means 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 intuitive 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,

• 9:52Gabor Maté?

  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's no longer split up from themselves.

• 10:25Jay Shetty?

  I think what we find is that trauma is so, as you said, a wound that is long-lasting. It can often be that way.

• 10:33Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Jay Shetty?

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

• 10:37Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Jay Shetty?

  Or today.

• 10:39Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Jay Shetty?

  Or tomorrow.

• 10:40Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 10:41Jay Shetty?

  I'm intrigued by how does time, we've always heard time will heal, right? Like that's a whole cliche.

• 10:49Gabor Maté?

  It won't.

• 10:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, right, right. So let's go back to the wound and talk about, is there any relationship between time and wounds? Or unhealed wounds? And what is that relationship? 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?

• 11:15Gabor Maté?

  What happens is that it may be 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. And time does not automatically heal. Time maybe scars it over, time maybe makes it less available to immediate memory.

• 11:57Gabor Maté?

  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.

• 12:12Jay Shetty?

  How do we uncover those? 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 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.

• 12:57Jay Shetty?

  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 that's just one tiny pattern. And whether that's trauma or a difficult experience is a different conversation.

• 13:38Jay Shetty?

  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 assess that? How do we gain the vulnerability in safety to create that future stability? Does that make sense?

• 13:55Gabor Maté?

  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? But when we do that, we stop growing. Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable. So a crustacean animal like a crab inside a hard shell, it can't grow.

• 14:38Gabor Maté?

  It has to molt and make itself very vulnerable to be able to grow. A tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable. 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 is no growth.

• 15:08Jay Shetty?

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

• 15:15Gabor Maté?

  That's what it means, literally.

• 15:16Jay Shetty?

  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. How do we develop our capacity? So actually, let's go back to childhood, we'll come back to that. So if we go to childhood,

• 15:35Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Jay Shetty?

  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?

• 16:11Gabor Maté?

  There are two things. One is obvious, like when 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 we want to understand a zebra or a whale, where would you study those creatures? In a zoo or an aquarium or out there in nature? Same with human beings. So you have to actually look at what are the evolutionary determined needs of human beings as inculcated or instilled in us

• 16:55Gabor Maté?

  through our evolutionary history? And so we evolve with certain needs. 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 any way you want. That used to be the prevailing belief. It's not true. Children are born with not only just certain needs, but certain inherent expectations. So, to give an example, your lungs are an inherent expectation for oxygen. Because they've evolved in response to oxygen. If there'd be no oxygen in the environment, we'd have no lungs. In a same way with the human child. It has certain inherent expectations.

• 17:38Gabor Maté?

  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 why 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,

• 18:20Gabor Maté?

  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. That's an essential need of the child. When I say essential, I mean if it's not met, that'll distort child development.

• 18:37Gabor Maté?

  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 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 other animals. 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. Evolution gave it to us. In our society, parents are often advised and taught to suppress certain emotional experiences on the part of the child.

• 19:20Gabor Maté?

  That's a wound to the child, which distorts their development and has significant implications for health later on. The fourth need, the fourth essential need, is free play out in nature. Free play, spontaneous, creative, imaginative play. But that's essential for healthy brain development. We share that with other animals. Baby elephants play, bear cubs play, puppies play, lion cubs play. Crucial for play, 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.

• 20:05Gabor Maté?

  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. 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. Why? 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,

• 20:49Gabor Maté?

  but because of the conditions under which parenting takes place in this society.

• 20:53Jay Shetty?

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

• 21:00Jay Shetty?

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

• 21:42Jay Shetty?

  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? I mean, is there any research on that? 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? How would they react to that?

• 22:27Gabor Maté?

  That question, as you actually has 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.

• 23:09Gabor Maté?

  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? Am I pretty enough? Do they find me attractive? 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.

• 23:39Jay Shetty?

  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 I was born and raised with all the usual pursuits, i.e. have a good education, a a good home, a good financial situation, etc. Those were the ways I was raised and success was a big part of my culture.

• 24:01Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Jay Shetty?

  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 eighteen, I then seeked the validation of the monks.

• 24:24Gabor Maté?

  Hmm.

• 24:25Jay Shetty?

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

• 24:31Gabor Maté?

  In the first place.

• 24:31Jay Shetty?

  In the first place. And so what what you've just said to me is in three years, I got a crash course in what you're saying, where we spent more time in nature.

• 24:40Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Jay Shetty?

  We were trained in unlearning the behaviors and habits that I developed for eighty, well, twenty one years at the time.

• 24:46Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Jay Shetty?

  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 still hard. 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. You're not governed by the same thing. So when I went into the world of work, and I just want to give people a practical example of what Dr. Mateo is saying is spot on. When I went into the world of work, we were all told

• 25:30Jay Shetty?

  that we had to be good at a list of like ten things in order to succeed.

• 25:35Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Jay Shetty?

  And I looked at that list of ten and I was like, I can do one of those things really well. And I'm only gonna focus on that one. Because these other nine are not, not my nature, they're not my purpose. And it's so strange because that one thing made me extremely successful at the company I worked with, worked at. And then has become how I built my career. And, and it's so true that had I had gone in and done what ninety percent of people did. I would have become what ninety percent of people are doing. That really deeply resonates. What is the difference though with? And I, I can't wait to read some of that research on, on that. I think that's fascinating. When you have a culture where I think most people who read this book today. The Myth of Normal.

• 26:19Jay Shetty?

  Will say that they can relate to having trauma. Illness and trying to be on the path of healing, especially our community here. They, they are absolutely gonna love this book. This is exactly why we have this show. But I find that we would all agree, I think if I asked everyone to put up their hands and say, how many people feel they experienced a traumatic environment at home? I think most people would raise their hands. If I asked how many people felt when they were children that they had unhealthy relationships with their parents to some degree, I think most people will put their hand up.

• 26:53Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Jay Shetty?

  The challenge I find is that I, I really feel with what you're saying with the book, there's a difference between what you're saying. And then the other extreme, which is mollycoddling. So there's neglect. And then there's mollycoddling. And I find that as humans, our brains are wired for extremes. So if we've seen that being mistreated or neglected is really bad for us. We go the opposite way and we go, okay, now I'm gonna make sure that this kid has like twenty four cushions around it.

• 27:23Gabor Maté?

  I'd be curious to know. I like to answer that question. This is a very important one. But I, I just wanna know exactly what you mean by mollycoddling.

• 27:30Jay Shetty?

  What I see, and I'm talking about people that I know and people that will speak to me, is that anyone who had a tough childhood. Are then trying to create a scenario for their child where that child experiences no pain.

• 27:42Gabor Maté?

  They no longer respond to their child needs. They're coming from their own anxieties.

• 27:47Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 27:47Gabor Maté?

  So mollycoddling has got nothing to do with the child. It has to do with the anxieties of the parents. That kid is gonna download the anxieties of their parents. So mollycoddled kids become very anxious and very scared and very ungrounded in themselves. On the other hand, it's not possible to love kids too much. In fact, there's a very interesting study where they looked at a large number of mothers and their infants very in the early few months. And most mothers in this study were seen as really good mothers. And some were a bit distant and for their own because of their own traumas, not as available. And a small group were seen as like super loving in how they doted over their infants.

• 28:32Gabor Maté?

  Okay. Thirty years later, they looked at these infants now as adults, the ones that were most emotionally grounded and healthy.

• 28:40Jay Shetty?

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• 29:25Jay Shetty?

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• 30:28Gabor Maté?

  Were the ones who received the super loving. So there's a difference. You can't love a child too much. What you can, so the molly calling that you describe is not a child being loved too much. It's a child who has to endure the anxieties of the parents. And you know, there's a very famous example in world history of someone whose parents wanted to protect him from suffering was the Buddha. He never saw death, he never saw illness, he never saw old age until he goes out and sees a dying person, sees a very poor person, a very ill person, a very old person, he realizes there's suffering in the world. So all the molly calling he received could not ultimately protect him from the awareness of pain and vulnerability.

• 31:11Gabor Maté?

  Although, if I talk about the Buddha, I also have to say that his own trauma is often not talked about because his mother died when he was a week old or right after birth, didn't he? Didn't she? So even they tried to protect for him, they couldn't. You know, but so anyway, molly calling has got nothing to do with the needs of the child.

• 31:31Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's a great differentiator.

• 31:32Gabor Maté?

  It has to do with the unmet needs of the parents. And as soon as parents project their needs onto the child, they no longer see the child as they exist. They see their own anxieties, their own fears and their own fantasies. Naturally, that's going to hurt the child.

• 31:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's such a great differentiator. That's. Again, it's a trauma response.

• 31:53Gabor Maté?

  It's a trauma response.

• 31:53Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's a trauma response. How and when should children, young adults, be exposed to pain in order to develop their vulnerability? Like, as you said, the capacity to experience a wound. Like, how and when do we allow ourselves? How should we? What environment is required to allow ourselves to experience pain in a healthy way? Or is it just gonna come anyway?

• 32:16Gabor Maté?

  It's the nature of life. There's no reason to deliberately expose children to pain because they're gonna experience it. The question is, how do we support them? And they do. You know why? Because their puppy's gonna die. Because grandfather's gonna die. Because some neighborhood friend won't wanna play with them. Because they're not gonna get the toy they wanted. Because some disappointment will happen. You know? So, pain is inevitable. But it doesn't have to become traumatic. If the child is supported in experiencing the pain and moving past it. So, we don't have to impose or bring pain into kids' life to train them. Life's gonna do that.

• 33:00Gabor Maté?

  The question is, how are we to interact with them while they're enduring the pain?

• 33:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and what would you say? There's, obviously, there's the love part which you spoke about. But when a child is going through something like that, let's talk about loss, because I think that's a big one, right? Like, whether it's losing a parent or losing a puppy, as you said. Or even if it's not losing a parent to death, it's losing a parent to a divorce. It's, you know.

• 33:25Gabor Maté?

  For example, yeah.

• 33:26Jay Shetty?

  Correct, yeah. So, grief and loss doesn't have to mean end of life. It can be everything.

• 33:30Gabor Maté?

  Definitely.

• 33:30Jay Shetty?

  Or a loss of a country. What are the steps that someone should take in order to help guide through anyone through loss, not just a child?

• 33:38Gabor Maté?

  Well, interestingly enough, when I talk about these brain circuits that we share with other animals. For play and for loving and seeking, we also have a brain circuit for panic and grief. Why do we have that? Because life brings loss. And so grief is essential for life because grief is coming to terms with the fact that something is gone and is not going to come back. You know, so um, I mean, a child experiences grief. And you know, I said that the need of the child is to be able to experience all the emotions. They need to be able to experience their grief as well. And it doesn't matter whether from adult eyes, we see that loss as major or minor. It's a question of how is the child experiencing it?

• 34:20Gabor Maté?

  And for a small child, even what looks like small losses can be very painful. Well, then we don't make the child wrong for it. We don't say, get over it. There's nothing wrong. Think of all the other children who are suffering, all that kind of relativistic shaming stuff. You say, oh, it really hurts, doesn't it? You really wish grandpa would be here with you. You really wish mom and dad weren't leaving each other. It hurts. In other words, you just validate their emotions. By doing so, you help them accept the loss and you help them move through. And you help them learn that they can endure difficult emotions without having to become falling to pieces.

• 35:05Gabor Maté?

  So we have a circuitry for grief in our brain, for grief in our brains. It needs to be allowed to do its work.

• 35:13Jay Shetty?

  I find that a lot of us today are reflecting on that inner child, right? Like that language is again more widespread today or is growing. The idea of like, oh, we have this inner child who has this wound or this trauma. What, what do you find is the difference between analyzing and overanalyzing? Or thinking and overthinking these experiences? And how would you define the difference? Because I, I, and I'm being very honest and vulnerable because it's the only way to have this conversation, really. Like, I often think about events in my life that happened that would be considered generally as either difficult experiences or as traumatic, right? They could be seen as either or.

• 35:57Jay Shetty?

  There are some of them that I've worked through myself or with with people that I trust or with guides and and and obviously through my monk life. There were things that I looked at and worked on. There are certain things that I don't feel a need. Like I don't feel a desire to dive into. The question I'm asking is, should I dive into them? Or is that considered over analyzing and overthinking? And I ask that for everyone else who's listening to this going, gosh, if I thought about everything that happened to me, I could be there for a while. Uh, yeah, what's your take on that?

• 36:30Gabor Maté?

  Well, first of all, in my world, there's no shoulds. Okay.

• 36:33Jay Shetty?

  There's no?

• 36:33Gabor Maté?

  There are no shoulds.

• 36:34Jay Shetty?

  There's no should, yeah.

• 36:35Gabor Maté?

  So, um, I would never say anybody, you should, you know, because, um, that itself is intrusive. So the question is whether it's helpful or not to delve into the past. It depends on what's happening with that individual. And if some of the effects of trauma, as we said earlier, is that the the wounds of the past keep showing up in the present. So from my point of view, it's not so much about delving into the past and dwelling on the past, but on dealing with how the past is showing up in the present. What a psychologist friend of mine, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past, where the past dominates my present reactions. It doesn't matter how many times I go back and

• 37:18Gabor Maté?

  think about my childhood story, that's not gonna help me. What I have to deal with is what's happening in me right now at this very second, which is a shadow of the past. So thinking about it is not gonna be of much help. What's gonna help is to deal with the emotions that are arising now as a result of what happened and how those emotions affect my life in the present moment. So it's not about the past, it's about the present.

• 37:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, so it's it's really about the choices we have now.

• 37:48Gabor Maté?

  Exactly, what's available to us now.

• 37:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, what's available to us now, because I feel like we didn't have a choice in the past because we were either too young or

• 37:55Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 37:56Jay Shetty?

  too incapable of of making a choice.

• 37:58Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 37:59Jay Shetty?

  But the choices that happen right now, uh, can can transform everything.

• 38:03Gabor Maté?

  It is possible. Some people do make themselves into victims. They kind of identify with the victim role. All this stuff happened to me and therefore I cannot do such and such or I'm keep or I'm hurt and I'll never get over it. It's possible to identify with the victim role. It's even possible to identify with the survival. I'm a survivor. Well, no, that's not who you are. You survive, but who you are is much greater than that particular experience. And who you are is always much greater than than your suffering. You know, and so it is possible for some people to identify with the suffering in the past to such a degree that they stop moving forward.

• 38:46Jay Shetty?

  Yes, I think you've just raised a really important component of all of this. On a deeper level is that what we identify with, right? Even earlier, you were talking about people who would be raised in this hypothetical village we were talking about, but even through research, they won't identify with the values of a capitalist society.

• 39:06Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Jay Shetty?

  Identification, you just said people could identify as a victim. They could identify as a survivor. What is a healthy identification?

• 39:18Gabor Maté?

  There isn't, there isn't one.

• 39:19Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 39:20Gabor Maté?

  Because I, if you look at, again, the meaning of words, and I just find words fascinating.

• 39:25Jay Shetty?

  Same, yeah, yeah.

• 39:26Gabor Maté?

  Identification comes from a Latin word, edem, which means the same, and facere, to make. As soon as I make myself the same as something, like if I identify with my role as a doctor, I immediately limit myself. If you identify with your experience as a monk, and I don't mean not to learn from it or to grow from it, but if I identify with it, that's what I am. You've now narrowed yourself. So there's no healthy identification. If I identify myself with a state or a nation, I could be loyal to that state or nation. I could love that state or nation or any group.

• 40:06Gabor Maté?

  But if you identify with it, such as you have no independent existence, you've limited yourself already. So when you say, is there healthy identification? Not really.

• 40:17Jay Shetty?

  Isn't the challenge, though, that we're, I think all of us are pursuing some sort of identification? Like, that seems to be a massive human need, like, I support this football club, or I'm a fan of this band, or I'm a member of the, this car club, or I go to this shopping grocery store. Like, I feel like we're all wanting to be members. Like, that seems to be like a human need of wanting to be a member of a community, wanting to identify with something.

• 40:42Gabor Maté?

  It is a human need to belong, but can we belong without identifying? To the point that we have no independent perspective, you know? In other words, can we be authentic? And I talk a lot about this tension between authenticity, being ourselves, and attachment, which is belonging. Ideally, we can both be authentic and belong.

• 41:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Gabor Maté?

  But that kind of identification often leads to suffering. I mean, that's what the Buddhists call attachment, isn't it? And, well, I mean, I'll give you an example. So you mentioned sports team. So in the nineteen, you wouldn't know this, but in the nineteen fifty's, the Hungarian soccer team was the best in the world. We never lost.

• 41:20Jay Shetty?

  That's, I did not, I love soccer and I did not know.

• 41:22Gabor Maté?

  No, no, we went to Britain and we beat Britain six to three in Wembley Stadium. The first, the first time that it was a.

• 41:29Jay Shetty?

  Sorry, Brit fans.

• 41:30Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, sorry about that, but, you know, and it was a huge national holiday in Hungary. And a small country goes to mighty Britain and beats them at their own game, you know? And the next year, the whole country was joyful and it's still one of the great memories of my childhood. The next year, when the world championships and we're the heavy favorites, because we haven't lost for years. And we meet the Germans in the final and we lose three to two.

• 41:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Gabor Maté?

  National tragedy.

• 41:58Gabor Maté?

  I'm telling you, it still hurts. You know, it's just a football game played on the pitch by twenty-two guys in nineteen fifty-four. So what, you know? But when you, when this is over identification.

• 42:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Gabor Maté?

  Then that itself brings suffering. Now, you know, yes, you can support your team. In Vancouver, British Columbia where I live, it's a very peaceful place. But the Vancouver Canucks, which is the local hockey team, made it to the Stanley Cup Finals and they lost. There were riots in the streets. Why? Because people had over identified. You can enjoy the team and be a a sports fan, but the identification, that your joy or satisfaction depends on whether your team loses or wins. Well, why? It doesn't matter.

• 42:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. I I love that answer for many reasons because I've had to go through the grief of letting go of past selves, adopting new selves, and then having to realize that none of those were me as my identification. So as you rightly said, when I took off the garbs of a monk, when I took off my robes, it was really tough because there was a part of my identity, especially at a young age, that was attached even to the outer covering. And I had to realize that I had to extract the inner beliefs and leave the outer covering behind and the outer name and the what that meant. And even in my career today, like I've I've had to let go and and even now I don't even know

• 43:34Jay Shetty?

  how to identify in one sense. Whenever, I'm sure you I'm sure you feel this to some degree in your work as well. It's like whenever they say like, oh, when you're on TV and they want to put like your your title and they'll be like, Jay, what's your title? I'm like, I I'm more defined by my purpose than my profession. Like, you know, what I what I do for people and the service I want to offer in the world is far more important to me than author or podcaster or former monk or like those things don't really define me.

• 44:05Gabor Maté?

  Well, I get that totally. I I am. What I'm thinking about is you telling me when you left those monks robes. We talked about the crab, didn't we? With the hard shell. To grow, you have to let go of the shell at some point. So each of those moltings represent the point of growth. But at the time, it's difficult. So when I left family practice to go and work with the highly addicted population in Vancouver. And it was a loss of identity for a while. I was a bit disoriented for a few days because all these people, these families that had relied on me to be the kind of the linchpin of their, linchpin of their health and all these people that had come to me and trust me and who I would see in the office. And all of a sudden, I left that. Now, who am I all of a sudden? So I totally understand that.

• 44:49Gabor Maté?

  No, the reality is that I'm so grateful that I did. But then I got to experience in the next realm of work, help to further define my purpose in life and taught me so much about myself and human beings. And but at the time, it was difficult. Letting go of that identification was difficult. And there was really that sense of, well, if I'm not that, then what am I? This is what happens when we identify with roles.

• 45:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, if anyone's listening and wants to go at figuring out what your subconscious answer is, ask one of your friends, ask them and then get them to ask you, who are you?

• 45:21Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Jay Shetty?

  And your answer to that question, 99% of the time when you ask someone, who are you? They'll say, I'm a lawyer, I'm an accountant, I'm a, I'm a Brit, I'm an American. And I'm, you know, always the answer is on such a material level.

• 45:34Gabor Maté?

  Well, as one spiritual teacher said, I think, unless I'm making this up, but I think he said, they said that the problem is not not knowing who we are. The problem is thinking that you know who we are.

• 45:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. It's incredible, isn't it, that the things that are true safety feel unsafe to the mind?

• 45:52Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Jay Shetty?

  And I'm intrigued by that because you've studied the mind, you've studied addiction, you've studied healing, you've studied trauma. Why is it that we seek certainty and stability? When you earlier also said that the only time we experience growth is the opposite, when we're vulnerable? Why is it that we're so addicted to things staying the same? Or things not changing? Like, that seems to be a core human addiction.

• 46:18Gabor Maté?

  Well, a therapist once said to me that it has to do with the nature of the mind that you're referring to. A therapist once said to me that if your parents didn't know how to hold you, you develop the mind you hold yourself with. So you find safety in this mind that you created. And so the human mind, the ordinary egoic human mind is basically a defensive structure. It's, in significant ways, it's a response to pain. That's not all it is, but in significant ways, it's a response to pain. It's afraid of pain and it's designed to keep you from experiencing pain. So it's worried and it's anxious and it's defensive. So when it comes to change and vulnerability, the mind wants to defend against it. And so it comes out of fear,

• 47:03Gabor Maté?

  which comes out of childhood experience, where the pain that you had wasn't held. And therefore, you develop these mind structures to keep you from experiencing it. And I mean, one of them clearly is addiction. And you know, Keith Richards, the world's most famous former heroin addict, the Rolling Stone guitarist, said about addiction, for example, his heroin use, that the contortions you go through just not to be yourself for a few hours. Now, why would somebody not want to be themselves? Because it hurts so much at some point to be yourself. And then a mind comes in and tries to protect you from that pain of being yourself,

• 47:47Gabor Maté?

  with its ideas and its beliefs and its certainties and its endless desires and its artificial needs. And it's afraid to let go. Because if I let go, I'll be a helpless child again. Well, the mind largely is a defensive structure. And then often, we'll react that way.

• 48:09Jay Shetty?

  That defensive structure, obviously, sets us up for so much. What is happening inside that makes two people react completely differently to the same thing?

• 48:21Gabor Maté?

  Hmm.

• 48:22Jay Shetty?

  Right? You could have a parent that's a drug addict, and one of the children goes, "I'm never gonna have drugs ever again, because I saw what it did to my parents." And the other person actually imitates the behavior and goes down the same path. What have you found or seen that, at a young age, creates that different journey?

• 48:40Gabor Maté?

  Well, the first thing to say is that no two children have the same two parents. And no two children have the same childhoods, even though they grew up in the same biological family. Because first of all, one of them came along at a different time. So they had a different set of experiences. There's a birth order. That affects how children experience the parents. Then there's degrees of sensitivities. So some people are born more sensitive than others. Sensitive, again, comes from the Latin word "sensier" to feel. The more sensitive we are, the more we feel, given the right environment, nourishing, supportive.

• 49:18Gabor Maté?

  Grounded environment, that sensitive child just becomes an intuitive, a creator, an artist, an actor, a leader. But in an environment with his pain, that sensitive child suffers more pain than the less sensitive one. So he'll have more reason to escape from the pain. It's not so much that he imitates the behavior of the adult, it's that he takes the same escape route. Addictions are always, in my view at least, an escape route from pain. So it has to do with birth order, with family circumstances, degrees of sensitivity. Having said that, the other child who doesn't become an addict hasn't necessarily escaped.

• 50:01Gabor Maté?

  They just may have developed different coping mechanisms. They might have become one of these people that are gonna make a big success in the world out of themselves, and they're gonna, never gonna fail, and they have to be the best, and they're gonna suffer too. They just might suffer in a different way.

• 50:14Jay Shetty?

  That sensitivity you're talking about is probably one of the biggest questions I get asked right now, and I want to ask it to you because I feel your experience could offer some real light on it. I feel people are experiencing so much sensitivity and empathy that they just can't stand the world we live in today.

• 50:34Gabor Maté?

  There are people like that.

• 50:35Jay Shetty?

  And, and I hear this again and again, where it's like, whether it's the political climate, or the economic climate, or their family have addictions, or friends, like everything that you talk about in the book. And people feel, this can't be my home. Like, I, this, this is not the place I want to live in. And so just as you were saying earlier, that someone may have the thought, I don't want to be myself, or feel like myself for a few hours. People say, well, this doesn't feel like the world I want to live in. I'm sure you've met many people who've felt that way, seen that way, or maybe even talked that way.

• 51:12Gabor Maté?

  I haven't met people, let me tell you something.

• 51:14Jay Shetty?

  Or worked with people.

• 51:15Gabor Maté?

  I had an experience with ketamine a few years ago. This is ketamine training for healers and I was injected with ketamine. It was taking me where it was taking me and all of a sudden I found myself screaming, "I hate the world." That was good that it came out of me. So I totally know what you're talking, I'm just saying that personally.

• 51:32Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:33Gabor Maté?

  I personally know what you're talking about. Okay, so here's the thing. I think a lot of that has to do with, first of all, the world is getting more stressed, it's getting more split. Everybody sees that. Getting more hostile in a lot of ways, getting more, less welcoming and more dangerous, more alienating. On the one hand, on the other hand, we're more and more alone with it. Isolation and loneliness are rising. So if people experience pain and change and stress or even danger communally, it's bearable. But when we're alone with it, it becomes less and less bearable. And so one of the major factors driving, I think, the sensitivity that you're describing

• 52:18Gabor Maté?

  is just how alone people feel. Which is not how we're meant to be. So that the capitalist values of aggressive, individualistic, ruthless greed and competition against everybody else, that doesn't reflect human needs or even human nature, not as we evolved. But the world, the more the world gets that way and the more isolated we become, the more vulnerable we are to be hurt by the world that we live in. And I think that's what people are talking about.

• 52:48Jay Shetty?

  Hmm. Yeah, I think one of the biggest things for me, I was really fortunate that the clients I coach and the people that I work with, I got to experience a lot of individuals who were vulnerable with me, but they experienced being lonely and successful. And lonely success.

• 53:11Jay Shetty?

  Didn't bring happiness. And I know that one thing that me and my wife are always talking about, especially because we're in a country where we don't have any family. We had to start from scratch in our friendship work and everything was.

• 53:24Gabor Maté?

  I heard you say in a podcast of how important family is to your wife, for example.

• 53:27Jay Shetty?

  For my wife, it's huge. Like, her personal family is like everything to her. Like, that's her greatest value. But here, we had to build our family.

• 53:36Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Jay Shetty?

  And I think one of the things we constantly do is we try and make a concerted effort in order to cultivate and curate our community in L A.

• 53:45Gabor Maté?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:45Jay Shetty?

  And it's fascinating to me because, again, perception comes in where most people say to me, well, L A is a very shallow place, like, L A is a very fake place. And I'll say, well, I found some of my best friends here and incredible human beings. How much does that perception of a place or a space or a person actually also make us more lonely? Because I find sometimes that loneliness is created by perception. Like, if we're scared of being vulnerable with someone, it's hard that someone will be vulnerable with us, right? So what do we need to do in order to build deeper relationships for healing and in this path that you're suggesting?

• 54:21Gabor Maté?

  Well, first of all, it occurs to me that loneliness is obvious perception. There's a difference between being alone and being lonely. Alone is just a fact and that we can embrace and make decisions about. Loneliness has got an emotional charge to it. And that's very much a matter of perception. You can be alone and not be lonely.

• 54:49Gabor Maté?

  And you can be surrounded by all kinds of people and be completely lonely. So that comes, how open am I? How vulnerable am I really, really willing to be? What defenses have I erected around myself to protect myself that keeps me from really contacting other people? I think we unwittingly generate loneliness. There's also something else that happens, and you referred to this earlier. You talked about elders. In our society, we don't talk about elders. We talk about the elderly. It's not the same. In our society that defines people so much in terms of their economic value, we tend to discard people that are not perceived as having economic value, either as producers or consumers.

• 55:33Gabor Maté?

  So this society generates a lot of loneliness just because it's materialistic values. And in other functioning cultures, elders are...

• 55:44Jay Shetty?

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• 56:27Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

• 57:10Jay Shetty?

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• 57:42Gabor Maté?

  Or not only they're respected, but they're also they have a purpose. They have the wisdom, they have the experience, they have the vision. They have let go of a lot of the attachments that youth invariably engages with. So they have a lot to offer. So loneliness is also created in a society that is a very rigid and limited set of values.

• 58:07Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I love the change in the language again of the elders and the elderly and it's I always go back to that time in my life because it gave me so much, but growing up around people that were the same age, younger, older and elder gave you so many different visions of life. And when I look back at my childhood or my young adulthood, I was constantly surrounded by people that were older than me, younger than me, much older than me and wiser than me. And being able to have everyone's vantage point created a beautiful 360 degree picture of life. But most of today, we're only seeing one degree. If you spend time with only people your age,

• 58:52Jay Shetty?

  you're getting a very limited viewpoint of life versus if you're spending time with a much wider age range.

• 58:57Gabor Maté?

  And you tend to get a much less mature and rounded view of life. One of the books I helped to write called what is called Hold On To Your Kids, Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers? The point made in that book is precisely what you just articulated, which is that for so many people, their world begins and ends with their own age group, which is a developmental disaster. Because again, we evolved as creatures in touch with multiple people of multiple ages. And we've spent our time around people with multiple ages. When you isolate people by age, as this culture largely does, I mean, there's subgroups within subgroups, within subcultures, within subcultures in a society,

• 59:39Gabor Maté?

  all based on very shallow identification with age. It just limits our development and limits our possibilities.

• 59:49Jay Shetty?

  And with that development, how do you see human nature? Do you see human nature as muddied, trying to become pure? Or beginning it pure and then getting muddied and then trying to go back to purely? How do you see that?

• 1:00:01Gabor Maté?

  Well, we do happen to have a chapter on human nature in this book. And pondering that same question that you just raised, I more or less come to the conclusion it's not that there's a definable human nature, not that you can say... Because I mean, look, Buddha was a human being, Hitler was a human being. One is full of compassion and love and giving. The other is full of greed and aggression and hatred. They're both human beings. So how can you talk about a defined human nature? However, what I think we can say confidently, that there's a certain human potential based on human needs. If those needs are met, development would be healthy and this potential will be realized. If those needs are frustrated,

• 1:00:44Gabor Maté?

  which they severely were in the case of, say, a Hitler, terribly abused child, then what you get is the hatred and the rage and the murderous venom that characterized that personality. Now, when you couple that with political power, you see what happens. But that's not human nature. It's just human nature thwarted because the needs of that child were not met in a society that was completely incapable of meeting people's needs. In fact, totally abused them. So, human nature to me is not a given. What we have is a human potential. Based on human needs, if these needs are satisfied, we can be reasonably confident that people will be connected and generous.

• 1:01:29Gabor Maté?

  Most people want to be kind. I mean, it's interesting in this society, when somebody does something selfish or greedy, we say that's just human nature. Do we say that when somebody is kind or generous?

• 1:01:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, never.

• 1:01:44Gabor Maté?

  The educator Alfie Cohen points that out. And if you ask most people, when does your body feel more at ease? When do you experience more peace? When you're being kind and generous and giving authentically, not for a sense of duty, but because that was just the impulse? Or when you're grasping and greedy? When is there more tension and more discomfort inside? So, that should tell us something about our nature, that our nature wants to be aligned with connection and generosity and giving, because our bodies will tell us that.

• 1:02:16Jay Shetty?

  That is so true. That is so true. I mean, there is no time in life when you're bitter at someone or angry at someone that makes you feel good inside. Like it does, yeah, gut wise too. I'm not just meaning in the heart space, but in all areas of your body, the tension, the stress, the holding, the tightening. But like we were talking about earlier, society is set up in a way for false identification and divisive identification, whether it be two sets of soccer fans who now hate each other or rioting, or whether it be, you know, political parties, or whether it be businesses at war with each other, right? Like, everything's set up in a way to get you to identify with something in order for you to be against something. Like, that's what naturally ends up happening.

• 1:02:59Jay Shetty?

  Even schools, like, I went to this school, you went to that school, we competed. Competition seems to be something that has been carefully crafted by capitalist society. And then when you see the rise of, and by the way, I love competition. So I, I help competitions, great. So I'm not talking bad about competition, but it's interesting to see how again, it's so hard to compete without identifying as that being your worth.

• 1:03:26Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Jay Shetty?

  And that requires so much mental, spiritual strength, in my opinion, to be able to differentiate between identification and attachment.

• 1:03:35Gabor Maté?

  Well, it's really interesting because let's take the example of sports that you just mentioned. What do we call the people who participate in the sports? We call them players. What do we call the process that they're engaging? We call it a game.

• 1:03:52Gabor Maté?

  But we don't treat it like players. We don't treat it like a game because real games and real play has no agenda. There's competition in the process and you want to do your best. But in the end, it doesn't matter. It was just, it's for the process and for the joy of it. That's genuine play. Well, when you think about these multi-billion dollar sports industries and the strategy and the hype that goes into, these are not players anymore. These are warriors, almost as if they're engaged in some kind of a battle. And winning and losing becomes everything, like the famous Vince Lombardi. Winning is not the only thing, is the only thing. Well, that's not true, people.

• 1:04:34Gabor Maté?

  That's true for the purposes of playing, as long as you recognize that you're only playing. As long as you don't confuse the game with life itself. But once it becomes a business and becomes cutthroat, that confusion is really prevalent. And people take it so seriously. So when you think, let's think about it, like you have these terrible conflicts in the world, like the war in the Ukraine right now. The average person, how much time are they induced to spend thinking about those large issues? Or say about climate change, that only the blindest of the blind or the wickedest of the wickedest can at this point deny as a reality. But how much of our life do we spend?

• 1:05:17Gabor Maté?

  Actually pondering and engaging with these larger issues compared with analyzing which quarterback should have played in which quarter of which particular NFL game, you know, so that these so-called games and these so-called players have assumed that far larger importance in their life, in our lives, whereas the real things we tend to ignore.

• 1:05:38Jay Shetty?

  You've just sparked something for me that I was blown away by this experience. I recently went to Rwanda and I went there with Ellen DeGeneres in collaboration with the Diane Fossey Fund has opened up a gorilla sanctuary and a conservation center.

• 1:05:56Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 1:05:57Jay Shetty?

  And we went there to trek with the gorillas, learn about gorillas, learn about Rwanda. And I had never been to Rwanda before. I didn't know if I would have visited if it wasn't for her. And the biggest thing I took away, obviously trekking with gorillas and being in nature with a form of life that has no interest in us, but we're totally fascinated by them was an incredible experience and I'll talk about that separately. But the reason I brought it up here is I also took time to go to the genocide memorial museum.

• 1:06:26Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 1:06:28Jay Shetty?

  And it was fascinating for me to learn that it's been around 20 years, from what I remember, a tenth of the population of the country, so like a million people of like 10 million people died in the genocide, were killed in the genocide.

• 1:06:41Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Jay Shetty?

  And most of the people who live there today, it was their parents, it was their ancestors that did this, just 20 years ago, which is not a long time at all. And I met some of the survivors, I sat with them in the museum, I talked to them, we talked to the locals, we talked to people that were helping us with our travel and arrangements and the hotels we stayed at. And it fascinated me that the people were so healed.

• 1:07:09Jay Shetty?

  Like there was such a genuine sincere conversation that they've now let go of this two-tribe culture, they've let go of the names, the identification, that they're living by a principle they call Ubuntu. I am because you are, I believe, or you are because I am, like, that's, I'll get that right, but Ubuntu is the word that they use. And it was so special. I was, I was totally.

• 1:07:35Gabor Maté?

  I'm curious to ask, did you delve into what allowed them to do that?

• 1:07:40Jay Shetty?

  They, they said a lot of it came through the leadership. Like they said that that was how they were being, it's what you're saying. Like when you said, like, they were asked to, you're saying, we don't make time to focus on these huge issues because we're too busy wondering which player played in which position.

• 1:07:54Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Jay Shetty?

  That's, they didn't say it in that way, but that's what they were saying, that our leadership encouraged us to think in this way. And I couldn't believe that in 20 years, when your parents have probably killed their parents, that you were standing next to each other, not worrying about the lineage that this, this culture was set up. And it was the Europeans who, who set up part of that anyway. But I just wanted to understand from you, like, what does it take to get to that level of healing? Because that's, you know, people would say, okay, well, it's a 10 million population. To me, that's still a humongous win for the world.

• 1:08:30Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Jay Shetty?

  Um, I was wondering if you've seen cultures, or if you've seen even smaller groups, or even living through the war, where you've seen that kind of healing before?

• 1:08:38Gabor Maté?

  I don't know how the healing happened in Rwanda. I'm really, really encouraged to hear what you describe here. I think at the very least of it, the suffering had to be acknowledged and, and had to be heard, um, and fully acknowledged. And then the healing can take place.

• 1:08:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Gabor Maté?

  Um, without that, it can't.

• 1:08:57Jay Shetty?

  Of course, absolutely.

• 1:08:58Gabor Maté?

  Which is why it's so important to understand trauma. The suffering has to be acknowledged. Now, in my country, Canada, like when you talked about Rwanda, of course, that tribal hatred didn't just arise out from nowhere, nor is it necessarily in the nature of those people to be like that. A lot of it was the legacy of colonialism that quite deliberately and. You would know something about British colonialism. It quite deliberately set one group against another. The legacy of which was often tremendous struggle and hatred and violence. In Canada, as in the United States, the legacy of colonialism falls, fell more particularly on our indigenous peoples.

• 1:09:41Gabor Maté?

  So that, to this day, they suffer so much. The addiction rate is much higher amongst them. Fifty percent of the women in jail in my country are indigenous people.

• 1:09:51Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:09:52Gabor Maté?

  They make up five percent of the population.

• 1:09:54Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:09:54Gabor Maté?

  An indigenous woman takes six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis. They never used to have rheumatoid arthritis prior to colonization. There's been some apologies in Canadian history, but there's been not sufficient acknowledgement of what actually happened and what continues to happen. And I'm saying that an essential condition for that healing would have to be acknowledgement. So the Pope came to Canada, just maybe six weeks ago, because the Church cooperated with the state to abduct children from their homes, indigenous children from their homes, for over a hundred years, into the 1990s, into these residential schools where our native

• 1:10:36Gabor Maté?

  children were not allowed to see their parents, where their culture was extirpated. They had pins stuck in their tongue if they spoke their tribal language. They were sexually abused, often they died. They were physically abused, they were starved. And the Pope came and apologized. And you know what the apology was? "I'm so sorry for what some Christians did to your people."

• 1:11:00Gabor Maté?

  Well, that's, he means well as a person, but that was an apology uttered by an institution, because it wasn't, or should have been uttered by the institution, but they said, "What some Christians..." It wasn't some Christians, it was the state and it was the Church. And what I'm saying is, that was a good first step. But until there's full acknowledgement and you're fully willing to hear the suffering of the people that we hurt, and that's why in the 12 steps, what do they do? They do this moral inventory. How did we hurt somebody and how can we, without imposing on them? How can we acknowledge if that's appropriate?

• 1:11:44Gabor Maté?

  So I think for healing, whether for myself or people that I've hurt... There has to be acknowledgement

• 1:11:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Gabor Maté?

  of the suffering itself. I think that's the first essential step.

• 1:11:55Jay Shetty?

  The challenge we have though, right, in society is that I fully agree with you, but for most people, we will never get the apology we deserve. Because, again, we live in an unhealed environment where people are not coming out of the woodwork and saying, "I'm so sorry for what happened." And even if they do, it's a bad apology, or an incomplete apology, or a 10% apology. So, how do we function in a world where often the closure doesn't come from the person who hurt us, or the person who created the wound, or that we received the wound through, and it really comes down to us, like I

• 1:12:37Gabor Maté?

  Well, that's true.

• 1:12:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Gabor Maté?

  So, I work a lot with indigenous groups in Canada, when they ask me to. And, first of all, I often say, "Who the hell am I to offer you advice?" Because in your traditions, there's so much healing wisdom. The best advice I can give you is to follow your own traditions. But, I often say to them as well, "Don't wait for the acknowledgement from the government or from society, because it's gonna take a long time coming." But you need to acknowledge your own suffering.

• 1:13:09Gabor Maté?

  You need to acknowledge your own pain.

• 1:13:13Gabor Maté?

  And then, there's so many rituals, there's so many traditions. The dance, and the chanting, and the drumming, and the sweat lodges, and the the sun dancing, and the going back to the land, and the wisdom circles, and the, and there is sort of justice. There's so much wisdom. So what I'm saying to people is, acknowledge your own suffering, but to look to the wisdom within, to want to healing, and it's there. That wisdom to heal is inside cultures, inside society, peoples, and inside individuals as well. We both have to acknowledge the suffering, and not get stuck on it.

• 1:13:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Gabor Maté?

  But then to look for the healing capacity within.

• 1:13:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Gabor Maté?

  And you certainly can't wait for the world to It's nice, but you can't wait for it. Otherwise, you're dependent on somebody else for your healing.

• 1:14:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I feel like when you're healing, most apologies are dissatisfying. Like, when you're healed, or, and we'll talk about that, what that means, but I feel like when you're more along the process of healing, you can receive an apology, you can receive a a vulnerable piece of information from someone who may have hurt you, or, but when you're, when you're in the thick of the healing process, I find that validation and apologies rarely really feel that good. Like, you know, and I'm saying that for myself. I know that when I've worked, when I've been in the thick of like, working really hard in my life, or trying to make something happen, and someone says, "Yeah, you're doing great." It doesn't feel like anything, because you almost feel miss, you don't feel fully understood.

• 1:14:46Gabor Maté?

  I got that.

• 1:14:47Jay Shetty?

  It doesn't make sense, yeah, and even when healing's sad.

• 1:14:49Gabor Maté?

  They're not quite seeing you.

• 1:14:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and you don't feel seen.

• 1:14:51Gabor Maté?

  No, I don't feel seen. They're seeing some aspect of you.

• 1:14:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Gabor Maté?

  But we need to be seen. That's, that's a human need. There's a psychotherapist here in California called Edith Egger, E E G R.

• 1:15:02Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, yeah, I know Edith.

• 1:15:03Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. So I, Edith was on the same train, probably, or quite likely, on the same train to Auschwitz that my grandparents were, along with her family. She's in her nineties now. She describes, uh, because they came from the same town in southern Slovakia, northern Hungary. Her parents were killed in Auschwitz, that's where my grandparents. Edith describes in one of her books that she goes back to the Berghof, which is in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler lived, to forgive Hitler.

• 1:15:37Gabor Maté?

  Which is not to say to make it okay what he did,

• 1:15:42Gabor Maté?

  but to release him from the cage that she kept inside her own heart, because that limited her. So the forgiveness wasn't, "It's okay what you did." The forgiveness was, "I wasn't gonna hold this hatred and this resentment in me anymore, because it's limiting me." You know, so the work really is internal.

• 1:15:59Jay Shetty?

  Where do you see the connections between, you talked about the, you know, the practices and the healing of the indigenous people, et cetera. How much do you see a connection between spirituality and healing? And where has it gone right and where does it sometimes go wrong?

• 1:16:12Gabor Maté?

  So first of all, spirituality is one of these words that

• 1:16:15Jay Shetty?

  Again, gets thrown around, yeah.

• 1:16:16Gabor Maté?

  Gets thrown around, who knows what somebody means when they talk about it.

• 1:16:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Gabor Maté?

  So we can only talk about it in terms of what you mean by it and what I mean by it.

• 1:16:25Jay Shetty?

  So yeah, I liked what you said, that there are ancient traditions

• 1:16:29Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Jay Shetty?

  that focus heavily on inner healing.

• 1:16:32Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Jay Shetty?

  And that I'll explain my challenge. The challenge I see is that often even these ancient timeless traditions have now become externalized and institutionalized, so they've lost their

• 1:16:43Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Jay Shetty?

  purity of the inner healing that's required.

• 1:16:46Gabor Maté?

  And they become commodified.

• 1:16:47Jay Shetty?

  Correct, right.

• 1:16:48Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, which is what will happen in a material society.

• 1:16:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Gabor Maté?

  I spent time with some indigenous people earlier this year in a ceremony. What I was struck by is a deep, deep, deep connection with nature. In fact, even the connection is inadequate a word. I'm talking about unity. Like, they just felt so alive, every blade of grass and every tree and the mountain that overlooked our ceremony and the bison that were in the field. So for me, spirituality, if it means anything at all, it means a sense of connection to something larger, which is difficult to define and may be different for every person or for every group. But it's something beyond the limited confines of both body and the egoic mind.

• 1:17:37Gabor Maté?

  Now, I think that's our nature as human beings. I can't prove it, but that's my sense. And I think, and certainly when you talk about indigenous traditions, they talk about the medicine wheel, which is the quadrants involve the our emotions and our physical bodies and our social relationships and our spiritual selves. And we have to be sort of grounded in all four of those quadrants to be fully whole. I think there's something in that spirituality that is really essential to us. What that is, I think each person has to discover for themselves. If they don't have a tradition, that already grounds them in it.

• 1:18:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you're reminding me of my time that I spent with some groups in Hawaii and they had a song for the sun and the sea and they had a beautiful ritual where when a child is born, the umbilical cord is placed on the earth and then they carve almost like a a pattern there to remind the child that this is your connection to the earth. But I always thought that was such a beautiful ritual. I was wondering whether you've seen or whether you've looked at at all any aspects of reincarnation or past lives or trauma cross lives or seen any connections or study in that space.

• 1:18:49Gabor Maté?

  I've had people talk to me about their experiences and there's a rabbi I met once who told me that in ancient times, he was a priest in Egypt.

• 1:18:59Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:18:59Gabor Maté?

  He was in no way a lunatic, you know, or psychotic. He was a very grounded, lovely man. You know, he was convinced, my mind doesn't go there. Uh, I've read something about these traditions, you know, the Tibetan tradition of the bardot and you probably know a lot more, but I do, but I've not personally experienced it. And my mind, as I've experienced my mind so far, hasn't found a space for knowing what that really means. I understand it intellectually.

• 1:19:29Jay Shetty?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:29Gabor Maté?

  But I, there's nothing in me resonates with it as far as I can recognize.

• 1:19:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Gabor Maté?

  Now, maybe at some point I'll have some huge awakening. Uh, or maybe after I die, there'll be a huge joke on me, you know, saying, you didn't believe, buddy, well, here it is. But frankly, right now, if you ask me, I'd say nothing in me goes there or even wants to. That's my, that's my truth.

• 1:19:50Jay Shetty?

  No, I appreciate that. Yeah, no, no, I always find it fascinating for people who study trauma, especially when we, when you, as you said, that, you know, no, no child starts at a blank slate. They start with a makeup to some degree. And so that's why I was intrigued. But Dr. Mate, it's been, it's been so beautiful talking to you because I feel like I get to ask you questions that.

• 1:20:16Jay Shetty?

  I wouldn't often receive the answers and the quality of answers, the depth of answers that you can provide. I see you as a true elder, as a wise person in our society, and I respect you a lot for that.

• 1:20:27Gabor Maté?

  Well, thanks so much. I can tell you quite honestly that this is not an interview like I've ever had before. Thank you so much.

• 1:20:32Jay Shetty?

  No, well, thank you, and I hope this is the first of many. And I want to make sure that everyone who's been listening and watching, I would love for you to order a copy right now of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. We touched on subject matter from within the book. We touched on ideas from within the book. But as you can see, these are my favorite books. You know, it's a real deep, study book. Please go grab a copy. I could not recommend this more. I will be posting from the book as I read more deeply through it as well on my Instagram. So if you want to see my notes or takeaways, then they'll be there as well. And please, please, please follow Dr. Mate on Instagram as well. We will put the links in the show notes. Follow him, share all the insights that you got from this.

• 1:21:17Jay Shetty?

  If there was something that stood out, I mean, there were so many beautiful descriptions of words, definitions, clarity between ideas that I think have just words that we use every day and we don't know what they mean. So if something stood out to you, tag me and Dr. Mate on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok. Let us know what you've learned and what you've taken away. And I promise you that this will be a great investment this year. Dr. Mate, is there anything that I haven't asked you before we ask you the final five, which are our fast five questions? Is there anything you'd like to share that I have given you an opportunity?

• 1:21:48Gabor Maté?

  Honest to God, I can't think of anything that you've given us.

• 1:21:51Jay Shetty?

  I love it. Okay, well, these are five questions that have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. So you have like a very tight, like almost think of like Twitter. These are your final five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever received on healing or trauma?

• 1:22:07Gabor Maté?

  Authenticity.

• 1:22:09Jay Shetty?

  Expand, I'm going to ask you to expand because I want to hear now.

• 1:22:11Gabor Maté?

  Be yourself, you know? When I was a very confused young man and I was acting out all over the place, I had an aunt who herself was a very traumatized person. She was an Auschwitz survivor and she came back weighing 80 pounds.

• 1:22:28Gabor Maté?

  She was an ophthalmologist. And she saw me being inauthentic. And she quoted, she sent me this passage from Hamlet, that famous phrase, unto yourself be true. And it follows this night to day that thou canst be false to any man. So be true to yourself. Without going into the details, that poor ant of mine couldn't be true to herself because of the nature of this culture. But that advice has always stayed with me.

• 1:22:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Gabor Maté?

  Authenticity has been a major theme in my life.

• 1:22:56Jay Shetty?

  It's amazing. I love that. That's a great answer. Okay. Question number two. What's the worst advice you've ever heard or received around trauma and healing?

• 1:23:04Gabor Maté?

  Is it okay if nothing comes up for me?

• 1:23:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, if you've never heard any bad advice, that's good. What is something that you once valued that you no longer value?

• 1:23:12Gabor Maté?

  This is almost true. What other people think of me?

• 1:23:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Gabor Maté?

  I'd be lying if I said, but at the same time, I can do without it. So it's still there, but I'm not attached to it. Yeah.

• 1:23:27Jay Shetty?

  Question number four. How would you define your current purpose in life?

• 1:23:31Gabor Maté?

  My purpose is that people are free. Free from limitations of culture and also the limitations of their own past and of their own minds. And also free politically. So my purpose is that people are free.

• 1:23:45Jay Shetty?

  It's beautiful. And fifth and final question. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:23:52Gabor Maté?

  One rule?

• 1:23:53Jay Shetty?

  One rule, one law, one principle that everyone in the world had to follow.

• 1:23:57Gabor Maté?

  If I was coercing and creating the impression that one had to do anything, that already would defeat its own purpose. Because as soon as somebody has to, it's almost like, just lean forward for a minute, would you? And put out your hand.

• 1:24:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:12Gabor Maté?

  What are you doing as soon as they push on your hand?

• 1:24:13Jay Shetty?

  Resistance.

• 1:24:14Gabor Maté?

  You resist. So as soon as people sense that there's a had to, there's going to be resistance. I'm going to decline answering that question.

• 1:24:20Jay Shetty?

  That's a great answer. We've never had that on the show. I love that answer. That's a brilliant answer. That's fantastic. I love, I love the way you think. The Myth of Normal is out right now. Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Gabor Maté. It's been an honor. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun and we'll do it again.

• 1:24:38Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely. Thank you.

• 1:24:39Jay Shetty?

  Thank you. Thank you.

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