Pod Insights The School of Greatness How To End the Cycle of Generational Trauma w/ Dr. Gabor Mate EP 1319 About this episode A renowned speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including 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: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It. Be sure to check out Gabor's new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, that goes on sale 9/13/22! In this episode you will learn,The difference between primary and secondary trauma. The five things every parent needs to do for their children. Why suppressing your anger is doing more harm than good. The parts of yourself you need to integrate to feel whole. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1319Check out Part 1 of Gabor’s Interview here! https://link.chtbl.com/1303-podCan You Make Money and Also Be Spiritual? w/ Jay Shetty: https://link.chtbl.com/1298-podWhy Emotional Agility Is The Most Important Skill You Need To Know w/ Susan David: https://link.chtbl.com/1297-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Transcript 13,677 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Gabor Maté? Now, most people I know who engage in a path of self-exploration and truth, they didn't do it because all of a sudden they just made a decision. They just suffered so much. So the suffering can actually wake you up. And I think to answer your question, this society has got to the point where the suffering is so intense and so widespread that...
0:17 Lewis Howes? Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.
0:41 Lewis Howes? In this episode, we discuss topics that include sexual abuse and trauma that might be triggering to some audiences. Please be advised.
0:53 Lewis Howes? So when we start to ask ourselves this question that you're asking is what happened to you? Or when, you know, when did you feel not powerful or not lovable or not wanted?
1:03 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04 Lewis Howes? And let's say we're able to, someone watching or listening is able to assess themselves and actually be present, really reflect on the painful moments of the past, which a lot of people aren't even willing to talk about it to themselves, right?
1:19 Gabor Maté? That's right.
1:20 Lewis Howes? For 25 years, I had a memory of being sexually abused and thought about it almost every day, like for a moment, you know, it'd come, you know, at least weekly, maybe not every day, but it was like a memory. Yeah, that's there, you know, but I never told anyone for 25 years because it was so shameful and I didn't want to be, you know, made fun of or all these things. And so if someone's able to self-assess and say, okay, I had this pain, this trauma, I felt not powerful or whatever it might be, what's the next step for them once they start to journal about it and be aware of it? And they're like, I really want to heal, you know? What would be that next step in the process?
2:00 Gabor Maté? Well, I mean, it's not that I can prescribe a butcher. But if she be for everybody and there's many different ways of working. But one of the things I would address first of all is the shame.
2:10 Gabor Maté? Like, one of the impacts of trauma is shame. Because children are narcissists by nature. When I say narcissist, I don't mean in a pathological negative sense. I mean, they think it's all about them.
2:22 Lewis Howes? The world revolves around me.
2:24 Gabor Maté? Exactly. So if bad things are happening to me, it must be a bad person. You know, number one. Number two, I didn't fight back.
2:37 Lewis Howes? I couldn't defend myself.
2:39 Gabor Maté? And so that makes me weak and, you know, so I'm ashamed of that. Now, actually, when you look at it, the not fighting back is nature's coping mechanism. Part of your nervous system just freezes, because if you fought back, what would happen?
2:58 Lewis Howes? Just depends what age you are.
3:00 Gabor Maté? No, but as a young child.
3:03 Lewis Howes? If you fight back on...
3:05 Gabor Maté? Against the sexual abuser.
3:06 Lewis Howes? Oh, right.
3:07 Gabor Maté? What would happen to you?
3:08 Lewis Howes? Who knows? I mean, it could have been even worse.
3:10 Gabor Maté? And were you in a position to run?
3:12 Lewis Howes? No.
3:13 Gabor Maté? No?
3:13 Lewis Howes? I was trapped in a bathroom.
3:14 Gabor Maté? So, the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated.
3:22 Lewis Howes? It's protecting yourself.
3:23 Gabor Maté? You're protecting yourself. And the part of the nervous system that freezes you, just be still, and you get through this.
3:30 Lewis Howes? Wait till it passes.
3:31 Gabor Maté? Yeah, that takes over. So it's actually what you're ashamed about is actually the brilliance of your nervous system that protected you.
3:40 Lewis Howes? But you're beating yourself up in retrospect, saying, "I should have ran, I should have fought back, I should have done this."
3:47 Gabor Maté? That's the first point.
3:48 Lewis Howes? Man.
3:49 Gabor Maté? The second point is, if I can ask you, how old were you when this happened to you?
3:54 Lewis Howes? Five.
3:55 Gabor Maté? And how long did it go on for?
3:57 Lewis Howes? It's probably 10, 15 minutes, yeah.
4:00 Gabor Maté? No, but it was only one time?
4:01 Lewis Howes? One time.
4:02 Gabor Maté? Okay. Who did you speak to about it?
4:04 Lewis Howes? No one.
4:04 Gabor Maté? Okay, now, you don't have kids yet.
4:07 Lewis Howes? No.
4:07 Gabor Maté? But if you did have a child, five years old, and this happened to you, who would you want them to speak to?
4:14 Lewis Howes? Me.
4:15 Gabor Maté? Yeah. Now, if you found out that this happened to your child, and your child never told you, how would you explain that?
4:23 Lewis Howes? How would I explain it to?
4:24 Gabor Maté? How would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened?
4:30 Lewis Howes? I would explain it by saying it's something I'm not doing. I'm not creating a safe environment to allow this child to speak up.
4:37 Gabor Maté? And that was your primary trauma?
4:39 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
4:39 Gabor Maté? So the sexual abuse is a secondary trauma. As a matter of fact, the abuser, like you were bullied in school, you said? And the bullies can always sense the vulnerability. The bullies have like a laser.
4:50 Lewis Howes? The weakness in you.
4:51 Gabor Maté? They have a laser like.
4:53 Lewis Howes? Because you're an insecure, weak person, yeah.
4:56 Gabor Maté? Which, by the way, speaks to their own trauma.
4:58 Lewis Howes? Right.
4:58 Gabor Maté? But, but, but, but they have a laser like, like the physicians who abuse their, their, their patients, the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers.
5:10 Lewis Howes? They see a weakness.
5:11 Gabor Maté? They, they laser like they sense it. And that's who they pick on. And the bullies do the same thing. Now, that weakness, as we call it, comes from not having the solid support and protection and confidence and security in your family of origin. So that's the primary trauma. That's, that's, that's the first thing that happened.
5:30 Lewis Howes? Yeah, I mean, that's the case for sure.
5:32 Gabor Maté? So to answer your question, then, if somebody comes to me with those issues, um, now, first of all, if somebody realizes those things, I'd say,
5:43 Gabor Maté? don't try to do this on your own.
5:45 Lewis Howes? It's so hard.
5:46 Gabor Maté? Talk to somebody.
5:47 Lewis Howes? It's so hard.
5:48 Gabor Maté? Yeah. Well, look, um, people with addictions, at least they have the 12 step groups where they can actually talk about it and people ideally will not judge them.
5:59 Lewis Howes? It's a safe space to.
6:00 Gabor Maté? Safe space. Or you might have friends, or you might reach out to a professional, or you might have an intimate partner that relationship is close enough where you can actually share this, you know, but. You have to bring it out of you. By the way,
6:19 Gabor Maté? that just reminds me, this is one of the ancient gospels, written around the same time as the other gospels, is the Gospel of Thomas. Image Jesus says that what you shall bring out of you will save you.
6:33 Gabor Maté? And what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you. He says something like that.
6:36 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
6:37 Gabor Maté? He was a supreme psychologist.
6:38 Lewis Howes? Wow.
6:39 Gabor Maté? And so you gotta bring it out.
6:42 Lewis Howes? Yeah, what you suppress becomes more depressed, right? It's like...
6:45 Gabor Maté? Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's gotta start with that somewhere.
6:49 Lewis Howes? You've gotta bring it out. And if someone has a...
6:53 Lewis Howes? What if they say, "Well, it wasn't that big of a deal. This thing that happened back in the day, I was a kid and it only happened a few times." Whether it's sexual abuse or someone screaming at you, or you were neglected, or put in the corner, you know.
7:06 Gabor Maté? I hear that all the time.
7:07 Lewis Howes? "It wasn't that big of a deal."
7:08 Gabor Maté? I hear that all the time.
7:09 Lewis Howes? You know, "Gabbard, come on." I shouldn't be that concerned about that. It was five, who cares, you know, it was like, what do we...
7:16 Gabor Maté? Okay, then that's a very simple way to answer that.
7:19 Lewis Howes? But why are we selling that stuff right now?
7:21 Gabor Maté? No, no, no, not at all. If a five-year-old kid came to you and you were the uncle,
7:29 Gabor Maté? Uncle Louis,
7:31 Gabor Maté? this guy did such and such to me, and I'm really scared and hurt, would you say to them, "Oh, no big deal."
7:42 Lewis Howes? No.
7:42 Gabor Maté? Think of all the other kids that worse things have happened to. Would you say that? Why wouldn't you say that?
7:49 Lewis Howes? Because I'd wanna be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen and loved.
7:53 Gabor Maté? And what would be the impact if you did say that?
7:57 Lewis Howes? I feel like it'd probably affect him for a long time, if that was a pattern of... That was the response that he got.
8:05 Gabor Maté? But you see, that's what you're saying to yourself.
8:07 Lewis Howes? Right.
8:07 Gabor Maté? When you say that it's no big deal, you're saying to the five-year-old that was hurt, "It doesn't matter." In other words, there's no self-compassion there.
8:16 Lewis Howes? Right.
8:16 Gabor Maté? What you would never say to anybody else, you're saying to yourself. And one of the impacts of trauma is lack of self-compassion. And again, I...
8:27 Gabor Maté? If I may mention my book, The Myth of Normal. I talk about that, about how this idea of self-compassion. And I see it all the time. And so when somebody says to me, no big deal, you know? I say, okay, take any other child in your position, plug them into that situation and tell them it's no big deal. And of course, I wouldn't.
8:49 Lewis Howes? But people do. They do say these things to their kids or to their, right, their nephews or nieces. They're saying like, ah, you'll be all right, you know? And I think it's because they don't have the emotional courage to, to handle the wide range of emotions because they probably suppress the emotions themselves.
9:06 Gabor Maté? I mean, that's the whole point.
9:08 Lewis Howes? Right.
9:08 Gabor Maté? Is that they're, they're not, they're not comfortable with the child's pain.
9:13 Lewis Howes? Somebody crying, they're like, I can't handle it.
9:14 Gabor Maté? They can't handle it, yeah.
9:16 Lewis Howes? You know, my daddy should be like, stop crying, you know, just stop. There was no like hugging and like, he had a lot of love and affection in other ways, but he couldn't handle the crying and the screaming, yeah, the emotions.
9:28 Gabor Maté? Well, one of the, in the book, I talk about the essential needs of children. And one of them is that they're given the freedom to feel all their emotions, particularly sadness and grief and pain, also joy and everything else. But I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this, but what do you know about your dad's childhood?
9:48 Lewis Howes? Oh, man, yeah, it was messed up too.
9:50 Gabor Maté? Yeah. So this goes on from generation to generation.
9:53 Lewis Howes? Yeah, yeah. So, and I feel like a lot of people listening or watching this can relate and say, you know, I don't think anyone's like, I had the perfect parents, right? There's some that maybe said, man, I had a great childhood and my parents did amazing. But I would say probably a majority of people had something where they didn't feel emotionally seen or accepted by their parents or some type of challenge. And they probably would all say, well, yeah, their parents, you know, had struggle from the war, from this, or from the depression, and their parents suffered, and it was all about survival. It wasn't about thriving.
10:29 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
10:30 Lewis Howes? So how do we break, I guess, the generational trauma?
10:35 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
10:35 Lewis Howes? And not let it pass down to our children?
10:38 Gabor Maté? So not being seen is a major source of trauma?
10:41 Lewis Howes? Just not being seen in general?
10:42 Gabor Maté? Just not being seen for who you are.
10:44 Lewis Howes? Not being accepted for your identity self?
10:46 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Expected to be different than who you actually are, you know? It's a major trauma for people in the society, and it's very common.
10:56 Lewis Howes? Let me, can I ask you a question before you go on to the next thing there about that? This might be a controversial question, but I feel like I want to talk about this because, you know, when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, I was born in the eighty-three. So growing up in the eighties and nineties in the Midwest, you weren't really, people were still afraid to come out as, you know, gay, right? It wasn't fully accepted.
11:23 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
11:23 Lewis Howes? Parents didn't accept their kids when they said, you know, "I'm different, I'm gay, or I'm not this, you know, I'm not like you, and I'm, you know, afraid to talk about it because I don't think you're gonna love me and accept me," right? And now more and more people are coming out, that's more, I would say it's more acceptable, right, in most of America?
11:45 Gabor Maté? In some communities.
11:46 Lewis Howes? In America, in some communities, and it's more talked about, and you see it in TV and movies a lot.
11:52 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
11:52 Lewis Howes? And, but now it's like, okay, what about people changing genders, and people transitioning and all these different things? Their sexual orientation, their identity, and things like that? And I think people are confused, you know, parents are like, well, that's not acceptable, right? Can we touch, talk about that for a little bit to see, you know?
12:15 Gabor Maté? Sure.
12:15 Lewis Howes? Can parent, you know, how can parents accept their kids? And if kids want to start doing surgeries, you know, at a younger age, and changing their gender?
12:26 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
12:27 Lewis Howes? Is that a, is that a symptom of something, of a depression? Is it natural? What is all of this that we can talk about?
12:37 Gabor Maté? So human beings are very complex creatures, and...
12:46 Gabor Maté? But there was a spectrum of orientations in every sense. And so much of it has to do with, not genetics so much, but how life acts on those genes. So, some people may be male gendered, but maybe hormonally, they had different influences acting on the womb or throughout life or whatever, you know? So they don't identify with those genitalia.
13:21 Lewis Howes? Is that a personality or identity? Or is that a temperament? Or is that an actual like biological identity?
13:30 Gabor Maté? I can tell you of one young relative that I have, very close relative, we knew that it was easy to see as soon as they reached adolescence, they just weren't comfortable with the gender, the female gender that they were assigned. They hated feminine clothing. They just walked unhunched to hide the breasts. It was not a surprise to any of us that a year or two ago, they said, "I'm a male." And they chose surgery. Now they walk with their shoulders back and proud of themselves.
14:14 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
14:15 Gabor Maté? And now...
14:16 Lewis Howes? Now, is that, and I'm curious, from I guess your point of view or your practice, is that a, were they suppressed emotionally more as children? Do they have the flourishing environment to be fully seen and express their wide range of emotions? Or is that a...
14:35 Gabor Maté? Well, no family is perfect. And I don't want to talk in detail about this family. But they had a very loving parents, really loving grandparents. I witnessed it. A lot of the qualities that we need for a good life, you know? And like in any family, there are issues.
14:54 Lewis Howes? Of course.
14:54 Gabor Maté? No issues in the family would possibly explain this gender issue.
14:59 Lewis Howes? Gotcha.
15:00 Gabor Maté? This is much deeper in them. They weren't, you know, no, this is very hard on the parents, of course, when it first became manifest and hard on the grandparents, but everybody came to terms with it. But it was really real and we could see it from adolescence on. It wasn't the culture, it wasn't anybody giving her propaganda, it was just how they were.
15:20 Lewis Howes? It wasn't bullies, it wasn't...
15:21 Gabor Maté? No, no. They had good friends.
15:24 Lewis Howes? Yes.
15:25 Gabor Maté? You know, there was no issues like that.
15:28 Lewis Howes? So it wasn't trauma?
15:29 Gabor Maté? No.
15:29 Lewis Howes? Gotcha.
15:30 Gabor Maté? It wasn't trauma. Trauma doesn't cause anybody to change their genders.
15:32 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
15:33 Gabor Maté? Okay, what is traumatic is that you're not accepted for who you perceive yourself to be. Now that can be traumatic.
15:39 Lewis Howes? Right.
15:40 Gabor Maté? But that's a different story. And in a lot of families, like I, with a lot of gay men that I've known, um, they may not even have, even if they've realized their gayness, they suppressed it because of fear.
15:53 Lewis Howes? They didn't feel like they'd be accepted or...
15:55 Gabor Maté? Yeah, you know, and that's, that's, no, let me tell you a story. Um, I was on a recent tour of Europe, I was telling you, and in Berlin, there were showings of this film that features my work, which is entitled, uh, The Wisdom of Trauma, which is available, folks, online. You don't have to pay any money to see it. Um, you can, but you don't need to. Um, so they were showing it in this theater in Berlin. Five hundred people, two, two showings. There's a guy that I'd met online at a webinar who, whose name is Ben. I can talk about this because he's public.
16:33 Lewis Howes? Mm-hmm.
16:34 Gabor Maté? And Ben was a guy in his twenties who, um, was a very athletic young man and then he had a accident a year ago this August. So just about a year ago, as we're speaking now, and broke his spine and became paraplegic.
16:50 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
16:50 Gabor Maté? And I first met him, he wanted to talk to me from his hospital bed, from Berlin on this webinar, in front of a thousand people.
16:58 Lewis Howes? He was in the hospital?
16:59 Gabor Maté? He was in the hospital when he talked to me on this webinar. And I just found him to be a spiritually amazing person. Now, Ben, this is Berlin, so he comes to the showing of the film.
17:11 Lewis Howes? Hmm, this year?
17:12 Gabor Maté? This year, just a month or so ago, in his wheelchair, and he's paraplegic. And I asked him to talk to the group about resilience, so he did. He was eloquent and beautiful, and then he stayed for the second showing.
17:29 Gabor Maté? I didn't know why he wanted to stay for the second showing, he's already seen the film. But he stays for the second showing, and after the Q and A, he says, "I wanna say something." So we're giving the mic, and he says, "I wanna tell all these people here, 500 people, that I'm not attracted to members of the opposite sex. I'm more drawn to people of my own sex, and I've never told anybody this," he says. Wow. And he says, and this is the best compliment I've ever got. He says, "And the reason I'm saying this to you now is because with Gabor in the room, I can't be inauthentic." Wow. I'm telling you, my heart leapt. Everybody applauded, of course. And then I asked the people in the group, 500 in the audience,
18:15 Gabor Maté? "Anybody here, anybody else here who suppressed important aspects of themselves?" Oh my gosh. For fearing of not being accepted. 500 people put their hands up. Oh my gosh. So this gay issue is one aspect of that, it's one manifestation of that. The people that are really upset about it are people who got parts of themselves that they suppressed. And they can't, they're afraid. That's what I say. Now, let me take it more historically, since you asked. In one of the, in a lot of the Greek plays, there's this famous prophet called Tyresius, he's got the wet breast of a woman.
18:53 Gabor Maté? A lot of the ancients recognized that there's wisdom in marrying masculinity with femininity in the same person. Because it gives you a more full understanding of the world. So Tyresius was this wise man and prophet. A lot of indigenous cultures, there have been bi-gendered people. And they were seen as, I forget, there's actually a word for it that some indigenous people had, but it was like a sign of respect. But these people have something to teach us. So what's happening here is not, so this has been going on forever. Now we have surgery and all that, that didn't used to exist, but
19:31 Lewis Howes? Right.
19:31 Gabor Maté? Uh, but, but the phenomena of being transgendered and so on, that's been going on forever. As long as, as long as human beings are around.
19:40 Lewis Howes? Right.
19:41 Gabor Maté? The fact that we have such a problem with it, that has to do with this culture.
19:45 Lewis Howes? Why is there such a problem with it, you think?
19:48 Gabor Maté? Well, partly, look at um, your own work on, on, on toxic masculinity. The last thing you wanna admit, that there's anything feminine about you.
19:59 Lewis Howes? Hmm, then you're not a real man, you're not, you're not man enough, or?
20:02 Gabor Maté? Yeah, but actually, these, these categories masculine and feminine are totally arbitrary. There's nothing in itself feminine about being vulnerable, there's nothing masculine about not being vulnerable. But in this society, with these strict gender roles, we assign these things to one gender or the other. In fact, what we wanna be is complete people, not
20:21 Lewis Howes? Whole.
20:22 Gabor Maté? Whole, yeah, which means that we recognize both aspects.
20:24 Lewis Howes? The yin and the yang inside of us, right?
20:27 Gabor Maté? Well, yeah, and you know, I um,
20:31 Gabor Maté? like, people tell me that if they watch me present for the last twenty years, that I really, my presentations have really changed, that I've softened somehow, you know, and um
20:43 Lewis Howes? You used to be more hard or aggressive?
20:44 Gabor Maté? I used to be hard and aggressive and
20:46 Lewis Howes? Intense?
20:46 Gabor Maté? Intense and egotistical.
20:48 Lewis Howes? Egotistical, you said?
20:49 Gabor Maté? Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah, cause
20:51 Lewis Howes? Know-it-all and this?
20:52 Gabor Maté? No, no, it wasn't just about the truth that I was speaking.
20:56 Lewis Howes? Yeah, I know the truth.
20:57 Gabor Maté? But it's about the truth that I was speaking.
20:59 Lewis Howes? That I discovered.
21:00 Gabor Maté? Yeah, exactly, you know, well, that's sort of that toxic masculine side, you know? Um, I'm much more apesna, just like you, you say much more apesna, I have much more apesna than I used to be. Um, so I think this gender issue is largely a cultural one, and it's
21:20 Gabor Maté? Again, it represents a lot of repression. So the people that are really upset by it are people who are really repressed and traumatized. And I could name some very public spokesperson from that point of view. I will not let them be discovered. They already have been. Let them speak to those who will listen. But they're coming from repression.
21:42 Lewis Howes? And you said not being seen for who you are
21:45 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
21:46 Lewis Howes? is, you know, one of the main traumas, right?
21:50 Gabor Maté? This is exactly right. It's one of the main sources of trauma.
21:52 Lewis Howes? Not being seen or accepted.
21:54 Gabor Maté? Yeah, because when you're not seen for who you are, like for example, in order for them to learn to see themselves, they need to be mirrored. And then they're mirrored when the parent is attuned, when the child, when the parent recognizes and accepts and mirrors back the child's feeling in a context of safety. Then the child says to themselves unconsciously, oh, I can be sad and I can be safe at the same time. I don't have to reject sadness. I can be vulnerable and I can be safe at the same time. I don't have to reject vulnerability. When that mirroring is not there, the child loses the connection with themselves. And that loss of connection to ourselves is the biggest trauma there is. That's not my own formulation. That's a formulation of a wonderful mentor of mine,
22:39 Gabor Maté? Peter Levine, who's done extensive work on trauma. The biggest loss is the connection to ourselves.
22:44 Lewis Howes? It all makes sense because if we're not able to express a certain emotion because parents weren't present to it or they said, don't do that, or give you a timeout, or whatever it was.
22:54 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
22:55 Lewis Howes? Then you say to yourself and your nervous system, okay, it's not safe to express myself this way. Therefore, in order to stay alive and have, say, and not get punished or beaten or slapped or yelled at.
23:06 Gabor Maté? Or hurt.
23:07 Lewis Howes? Or hurt. I need to not do this, this or this thing.
23:11 Gabor Maté? Or I need to not be this or that.
23:12 Lewis Howes? Yeah, not to be that, to be accepted or loved.
23:14 Gabor Maté? So I can't be myself. And in this society, I interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis once and just not long ago. And she's in the book as well. And she used this very dramatic phrase. She said that in this culture, there's a genocide of authenticity.
23:34 Lewis Howes? Everyone's inauthentic.
23:36 Gabor Maté? Everybody's programmed to be inauthentic. And that, as we've been talking about, that carries its impact on the mind, on the body, on our relationships, on our life satisfaction and everything else. And so that's really the task is to become authentic.
23:56 Lewis Howes? What would you say for every parent or soon to be parent that they should really focus on in creating for their children? What would be the three things that would set them up for more greater success emotionally, financially, spiritually, relationship wise, if they could do these three things for their children?
24:18 Gabor Maté? Can I say five things?
24:19 Lewis Howes? Give me five things, please.
24:23 Lewis Howes? Every parent should do.
24:24 Gabor Maté? Yeah, so the first thing is, I mentioned the work of Dan Siegel, Daniel Siegel, psychiatrist here in L.A. He's written a book called Parenting from the Inside Out. And it's about how parenting brings out your own stuff. So that, so that, deal with your own stuff first. And continue to deal with it as you have children, because I guarantee you, your kids are gonna trigger you, you know? And I didn't realize that as a parent. So I visited my own traumas unto my kids. Because I wasn't working on myself at that time, you know? So do your own work.
25:05 Lewis Howes? Yes.
25:05 Gabor Maté? That's the first thing.
25:06 Lewis Howes? Do your own work, that's...
25:08 Gabor Maté? When you're pregnant or when your partner's pregnant, do your work already. Because already the stresses of the husband during the pregnancy will affect that infant in the womb.
25:19 Lewis Howes? The husband's stresses will also affect the...
25:21 Gabor Maté? Yeah, because the mom takes on the stresses of the partner.
25:25 Lewis Howes? Right, so if you're stressing the mother, you're stressing the child.
25:28 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
25:28 Lewis Howes? Wow, okay.
25:29 Gabor Maté? So work on yourself, that's the first thing, okay? Then there are, what a great psychologist, friend of mine, Gordon Neufeld, and there's a chapter in this in the book, describes as the irreducible needs of children.
25:47 Lewis Howes? The irreducible...
25:48 Gabor Maté? That if you take them away, the child's gonna be hurt.
25:50 Lewis Howes? What are those needs?
25:51 Gabor Maté? Okay, first of all... A secure attachment relationship with the parents. Where the child feels that he's just welcome, she's welcome, they're just welcome to be in the world, in the presence of the parents.
26:09 Gabor Maté? Not because they're pretty smart. Just because they are.
26:13 Lewis Howes? Just because they're alive.
26:14 Gabor Maté? Yeah, this is their life, yeah. That's the first one. The second irreducible need is what Gordon calls rest. Which means that as a child, I don't have to make the relationship work. I don't have to be nice.
26:29 Lewis Howes? Prove this.
26:30 Gabor Maté? I don't have to absorb the stress of my parents. I don't have to take care of the needs of my alcoholic father.
26:37 Lewis Howes? I don't need to create peace for my parents.
26:39 Gabor Maté? I don't have to create peace for my parents. I can rest from the work of making a relationship work. That's the second irreducible need. The third one we've already talked about. That's the freedom to experience all the emotions. Joy, grief, sadness, pain, anger. And by the way, if you look at the brain, we have circuits for all this. We have circuits for anger. We have circuits for caring. We have circuits for grief and so on. And we're wired for them. And we have to be allowed that wiring to express itself when the situation calls for it.
27:20 Gabor Maté? So that the capacity to experience all your emotions, all your emotions,
27:27 Gabor Maté? is a third irreducible need. The fourth one is free, unprogrammed play in nature with multiple playmates of different ages. Not play with a gadget. Not play with a computer. Not giving us a one-year-old a cellphone to occupy them as you're changing their diapers.
27:51 Gabor Maté? But actually free creative play. And play has no agenda. It doesn't matter who wins or who loses, it's not about winning. Now, play is wired into our brains. We have a play circuit. How do we know that? All animals have it, all mammals have it. You have two cats.
28:06 Lewis Howes? Yeah, they play.
28:07 Gabor Maté? They play. Dogs play. Bear cubs play, you know.
28:12 Gabor Maté? But play is essential for you, for healthy brain development. Play is much more important for healthy brain development than intellectual learning.
28:21 Gabor Maté? If a child plays, they'll be able to learn intellectually later. So free, creative, spontaneous play. Kids have, now if you look at those four needs, our society denies them all. No wonder we have so many kids in trouble, you know? And by the way, there's another psychologist I spoke to
28:42 Gabor Maté? called Darcia Narvez, and she taught at Notre Dame University. And she's researched indigenous societies, Aboriginal societies, small band hunter-gatherer groups. Guess what she found? They provided their kids all those. All those things, lots of time to play. That's out there in nature, you know? With other kids, yeah. Yeah, all that. Full range of emotions. All that stuff, all that stuff. That's interesting. So we've lost, you know, this kind of, we've lost the, um, we've lost the ball somewhere, you know, in this culture. I know this culture has many achievements to its credit. Innovations, achievements, successes. Science and all that.
29:25 Gabor Maté? But boy, have we lost it when it comes to what human needs are. And, and, and you can hurt people in two ways. Hurt or hurt? Hurt. Hurt. Well, you can hurt them in many ways. Hurt them in two ways. You can traumatize people in two ways. One is to actually do bad things to them that you shouldn't have done. But there is to deprive them of their needs.
29:47 Gabor Maté? And this society does it both ways. By doing bad things to them? By doing bad things. A lot of kids have bad things done to them in schools, in homes, and so on. A lot of other kids, it's not so much that bad things are done to them, but that the good things that they need, they're deprived of. And those are the needs I just talked about. Was there a fifth one too, or no? Well, the fifth one was the parents working on themselves. That was the first one, gotcha. Okay, these are the five, got it.
30:13 Lewis Howes? So the five, if you're a parent or about to be a parent, they do these five things. If you, if you are, if you have kids right now and you ask yourself, am I doing these five things? Start adding them if you've been neglecting. But the first one is to do the work on yourself first. And I think this is Dr. Shafali, I'm not sure if you know her, but she's got a conscious parenting.
30:34 Gabor Maté? Shafali, it's a very, I know her very well.
30:37 Lewis Howes? And I think it's this, you know, she talks about doing the work yourself as a, you know, a conscious way to heal so that you can parent in a conscious way as well.
30:47 Gabor Maté? Exactly. You know, we talk the same language.
30:49 Lewis Howes? Yes.
30:50 Gabor Maté? I really like her work.
30:51 Lewis Howes? So doing that first for yourself.
30:52 Gabor Maté? And then, and, and ongoingly.
30:56 Lewis Howes? So it's not a one day and you're done?
30:58 Gabor Maté? I wish I could, yeah, it was one day. Just they want, they spend the day working on yourself. You'll be fine.
31:03 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
31:03 Gabor Maté? No, it's ongoing. It goes on till you have kids.
31:06 Lewis Howes? Yeah. So do the, do the work yourself first. Number two, create the needs for your kids, which is a secure attachment first off. So people feel secure.
31:17 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
31:17 Lewis Howes? The child feels secure that they just exist, not to prove that they're pretty enough or talented enough or smart enough or more advanced than other kids to get love, but just because they exist.
31:29 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah.
31:30 Lewis Howes? Uh, free to, uh, the second one would be rest.
31:34 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
31:34 Lewis Howes? So rest meaning.
31:36 Gabor Maté? Uh, when you're, when you're resting, you're not having to work.
31:39 Lewis Howes? Right.
31:40 Gabor Maté? So not having to work to make their relationship work.
31:42 Lewis Howes? With the parent. Yeah. Right, yeah, gotcha.
31:44 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
31:44 Lewis Howes? Um, the third one is the freedom to express all emotions, your four inch emotions in a safe environment.
31:52 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
31:52 Lewis Howes? And then the last one would be, uh, adding play in nature with multiple playmates without electronics.
32:01 Gabor Maté? Yeah, spontaneous, spontaneous, creative play, yeah. Creative play.
32:06 Lewis Howes? So ask yourself if you're doing these things.
32:08 Gabor Maté? Yeah. Now, um, this book, The Myth of Normal, I wrote it with my eldest son, Daniel, um, who's now forty, about to be forty seven. He talks in the book about.
32:22 Lewis Howes? Did he have those things?
32:25 Gabor Maté? Sorry?
32:25 Lewis Howes? Did he have those things with you?
32:26 Gabor Maté? No, none of my kids had them.
32:28 Lewis Howes? Wow.
32:29 Gabor Maté? None of my children have, had them, you know, uh.
32:33 Gabor Maté? I've made every mistake in the book, literally. I've made every mistake in every book I've written, you know?
32:38 Lewis Howes? Right, right, right. About what not to do.
32:40 Gabor Maté? About what not to do, yeah. So, Daniel talks about, he used to have this recurring nightmare. As a child.
32:47 Lewis Howes? Mm-hmm.
32:48 Gabor Maté? Well, the floor just disappearing. The floor not being the floor. Which meant that he never knew when my wife and I would get into one of our really hostile tents exchanges. And he had to sort of absorb and endure all that. Well, when the parents are in that state, the child doesn't feel secure. Now, if we lived in a large community, like we used to, where there's uncles and aunts and grandparents around.
33:16 Lewis Howes? Go next door, you're hanging out with your...
33:17 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah.
33:18 Lewis Howes? You have safety somewhere.
33:19 Gabor Maté? Go to the next cave, or go to the next tent, or something, you know? But we don't.
33:26 Lewis Howes? So you're trapped in your room to...
33:28 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah. So, so, so Daniel writes about when the floor was not the floor. And, um, no, thank God, we've done a lot to heal our relationship. And even writing the book together was a, a healing exercise.
33:42 Lewis Howes? Sure.
33:42 Gabor Maté? Let me tell you. But, but you know, going back to his childhood. Yeah, so when I point these things out, I'm not pointing fingers at anybody. I, I, it's hard. And I, I certainly had to learn a lot from the many ways in which I showed up that weren't helpful.
33:59 Lewis Howes? Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I couldn't sleep at night for many, probably until, I don't even know. Till I was like in my late teens or late twenties, probably. I would stay up for hour, hour and a half, kind of just unable to sleep. Like, I would try to go to bed early, I would go to bed late, and I would just kind of like anxiousness, or worry, or just
34:21 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
34:21 Lewis Howes? an inability to fully rest.
34:23 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
34:24 Lewis Howes? Kind of always on this like edge.
34:26 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
34:27 Lewis Howes? And I think, you know... And I never felt that stability with my parents, right? It was like there was always some type of tension.
34:35 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
34:35 Lewis Howes? And and it was like every other week, there was an explosion of like the slamming of doors and the screaming in the kitchen and we're in the living room like.
34:42 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
34:43 Lewis Howes? When is the, you know, when's the explosion gonna happen next with our parents?
34:47 Gabor Maté? Was there anybody in your life that you could talk to that that that was any kind of a safe haven for you?
34:52 Lewis Howes? No, I was the youngest of four. So they're my brother was eleven years older. My sisters were four years older than eight years older. So I was. I kind of always felt like I just gotta, you know, figure it out. And and I left home at thirteen.
35:06 Gabor Maté? Wow.
35:06 Lewis Howes? So I begged my parents to send me away, where most kids get sent away for being bad.
35:11 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
35:12 Lewis Howes? I was I went to a private boarding school.
35:14 Gabor Maté? Okay.
35:15 Lewis Howes? Because I went to a a Christian camp one summer.
35:18 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
35:18 Lewis Howes? And I met a bunch of kids that went to the school and I was like, these kids are accepting. These kids are kind. These kids are nice. These kids have joy. They're loving.
35:25 Gabor Maté? Wow.
35:26 Lewis Howes? I was like, I want to be around these kids. It feels safe.
35:29 Gabor Maté? Yes.
35:30 Lewis Howes? Whereas I didn't feel like the the school I was at before and kind of the environment at home felt safe.
35:35 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
35:36 Lewis Howes? I was like, I begged them when I got back from this campus, said, please send me here to the school. And they're like, we're not gonna send you away. And I was like, every day I was just like, please. And convince them to send me away. I think that was probably like the beginning of feeling like, okay, I'm more safe now.
35:52 Gabor Maté? Wow.
35:53 Lewis Howes? Yeah, even though I was in a strict dorm environment with, you know.
35:56 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
35:57 Lewis Howes? Wake up and dress code and rules, but it was like.
36:00 Gabor Maté? Probably something.
36:01 Lewis Howes? Structure.
36:01 Gabor Maté? Probably something you welcome to structure.
36:03 Lewis Howes? I was like, I thrived.
36:04 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
36:05 Lewis Howes? I mean, some things I was resistant to, but I was also like, I felt more safe with the order and the structure and I was able to develop my mental and emotional skills and.
36:15 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
36:16 Lewis Howes? That discipline gave me a skill set too.
36:18 Gabor Maté? Well, you know, absolutely. And going back to our discussion about that anger issue, I'm not saying that parents need to be permissive. Permissiveness is a kind of neglect.
36:28 Lewis Howes? What do you mean permissive?
36:30 Gabor Maté? Permissive where the child is able to do whatever they want and and in a rage or whatever, you know, it's not a question of that. It's a question of um. There has to be structure, there has to be rules, and the parents have to set boundaries for their children. And that's what you probably appreciated in that boarding school.
36:45 Lewis Howes? Because the rules and the boundaries were scary at home. It was like discipline, you know? It was like anger rules.
36:51 Gabor Maté? Exactly, rather than loving rules.
36:54 Lewis Howes? Yeah, healthy rules and healthy boundaries, where it's like, hey, you know, put me in line if I need to be, but
36:59 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
37:00 Lewis Howes? Not screaming at me for my life, you know, type of thing.
37:02 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
37:03 Lewis Howes? That's interesting. Yeah, and so when, when, when parents, when there's tension within parents and there's kids around, and it's a pa- pattern, whether there's
37:13 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
37:14 Lewis Howes? A lack of affection, physical affection, a disrespect, whether it's loud or it's just a, a low level sense of arguments. What happens then to children if there's that type of bickering, arguing, anger?
37:33 Gabor Maté? Well, first of all, a number of things can happen. Once the child disconnects, tunes out.
37:40 Lewis Howes? It's a coping mechanism.
37:41 Gabor Maté? It's a coping mechanism. Then their brain gets wired to tune out.
37:44 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
37:45 Gabor Maté? The child pushes down their emotions, as we talked about.
37:47 Lewis Howes? Wow.
37:48 Gabor Maté? Older child takes on the role of trying to fix things, being the peacemaker.
37:52 Lewis Howes? Peacemaker, yeah.
37:53 Gabor Maté? Which is immediately a source of shame, because they can never succeed. So they're, right, right off the bat, they're a failure.
37:59 Lewis Howes? They're a failure because my parents are still.
38:01 Gabor Maté? Yeah, exactly.
38:02 Lewis Howes? I didn't fix it.
38:03 Gabor Maté? It's my fault.
38:04 Lewis Howes? Oh, my gosh. So much weight on the kids.
38:06 Gabor Maté? Lots of impacts. This shows up in so many areas. Let, let, let, let me tell you a story. If, if I told you about a four-year-old girl who was bullied by neighborhood kids, and she runs into the family home to seek protection from the mother, and the mother says, "There are no room for courage in this house. Now you get out there and deal with those kids." How would you view that interaction with the mom?
38:31 Lewis Howes? There are no room for what?
38:32 Gabor Maté? No room for courage in this house.
38:34 Lewis Howes? Cowards.
38:35 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
38:35 Lewis Howes? Cowards.
38:36 Gabor Maté? The kid comes in the home.
38:37 Lewis Howes? Yeah, go be a coward, go defend yourself.
38:38 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
38:39 Lewis Howes? As a four-year-old?
38:40 Gabor Maté? Four-year-old little girl.
38:41 Lewis Howes? I would say, uh, how would I view that situation or that home?
38:45 Gabor Maté? How would you view that interaction with the mother?
38:50 Lewis Howes? I would view it as that's how that mother was raised. And she's not creating a safe environment for the child.
38:57 Gabor Maté? What's the impact on the child?
39:00 Lewis Howes? Suffering, pain, challenges.
39:02 Gabor Maté? Let me tell you an amazing thing. This story was told on public television in front of millions of people. And nobody thought there was anything wrong with it. This is Hillary Clinton. At the Democratic Convention where she was nominated for presidency. And there was a document about her life narrated by the voice of God, Morgan Freeman. And this is described in an example of good parenting. Oh, this is how my mother helped me become resilient. No, it didn't. This is how the mother taught her to suck it up and to become hard. You know, and sixty years later, she gets pneumonia during the election campaign. Remember what she did with that?
39:47 Gabor Maté? She collapsed in public. She had fever, she was dehydrated, she didn't tell anybody. She sucked it up.
39:53 Lewis Howes? She said, I'm gonna be strong, I'm gonna be tough.
39:55 Gabor Maté? You know, there's no room for courage in this house. What amazes me is that, and we see this in our politicians all the time. And what amazes me is that this is a story told in front of millions. And nobody says, oh, my God, that poor little girl. Everybody says, oh, this is a great example of parenting. That's how the nature becomes a culture.
40:25 Lewis Howes? Yes.
40:25 Gabor Maté? Because a foiled girl who goes to mom for protection is not a coward. She's a foiled girl. What would that little cat do?
40:32 Lewis Howes? Run back for protection.
40:34 Gabor Maté? Run back to mom, you know, run with a little bear.
40:35 Lewis Howes? Yeah, yeah.
40:37 Gabor Maté? You know.
40:37 Lewis Howes? Save me.
40:38 Gabor Maté? Save me, exactly.
40:39 Lewis Howes? Help me.
40:39 Gabor Maté? That seeking help from the adults is the most natural urge of the child. So, but in this culture, we're so glorified sucking it up. That a presidential candidate can discuss this in public. And nobody even bats an eyelash.
40:58 Lewis Howes? So how do we, how do we teach our kids to have?
41:05 Lewis Howes? The full range of emotions and come to us for safety and support, but also
41:12 Lewis Howes? have the courage to
41:15 Lewis Howes? manage challenging times in our life.
41:17 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
41:17 Lewis Howes? So that we're not always reliant on our parent when we're thirty, but we're also, okay, we can take on challenges.
41:25 Gabor Maté? See, here's the thing, nature has an agenda.
41:29 Gabor Maté? I've been talked about the oak tree before. Nature's agenda is that you develop will and self-respect. Given the right environment. And anybody with will and self-respect will stand up for themselves. You don't have to teach them.
41:47 Gabor Maté? You have to just uh, respect them and support them. They will develop that way. If you respect them,
41:57 Gabor Maté? they will learn to respect themselves. Nobody who respects themselves will put up with
42:03 Lewis Howes? Yeah, bullies or being picked on.
42:05 Gabor Maté? Or, you know, or disrespect or anything, you know? They won't. They will say, no, you don't, you don't do that to me. To me, you don't do that.
42:13 Lewis Howes? How do you, how do you show that to children? To, how do you respect kids so they feel that and see it?
42:18 Gabor Maté? Well, about all the things, all the ways that we, we talked about and, you know, and, and anger, we have a circuitry in our brain for anger, as I said. There's such a thing as healthy anger. Now, um, which is very different from uncontrolled rage.
42:37 Gabor Maté? Healthy anger simply says, no.
42:42 Gabor Maté? I mean, you're in my space, get out.
42:45 Lewis Howes? Right.
42:45 Gabor Maté? Now, animals have that.
42:47 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
42:48 Gabor Maté? You know, it's like
42:48 Lewis Howes? The gorilla is just like
42:50 Gabor Maté? You're in my space, you know? And the cats, you know? That's healthy anger, you know, uh, you know? Look at a cat with a Ambitious looking dog coming near them. Don't even think about it. Forget about it, you know?
43:06 Lewis Howes? Right.
43:07 Gabor Maté? Um, that's healthy anger.
43:08 Lewis Howes? What's?
43:09 Gabor Maté? We don't have, we don't have to teach it. It's there. We just allow it.
43:13 Lewis Howes? What's uncontrollable rage? What's the difference?
43:15 Gabor Maté? Uncontrollable is different. And, and so here's the thing. The suppression of healthy anger promotes autoimmune disease and neurological disease.
43:25 Lewis Howes? The suppression of the health, yep.
43:26 Gabor Maté? Yeah, because anger is a boundary defense. Um, healthy anger is a boundary defense. Suppressing healthy anger suppresses the immune system. Because of the mind-body unity, again, this has been demonstrated. So the mind-body unity says, you suppress healthy anger, you're suppressing your immune system. Your immune system may even turn against you.
43:46 Lewis Howes? Right.
43:46 Gabor Maté? Just like your anger can turn against you. Now, so that's not healthy. Then there's uncontrolled rage, which is also not healthy. And, and people who rage a lot, they more want to have heart disease and strokes and high blood pressure.
44:00 Gabor Maté? Because all the adrenaline and, you know, all that.
44:04 Gabor Maté? Unhealthy rage is usually because you have suppressed emotions and all of a sudden the pressure cooker just boils over and then it.
44:13 Lewis Howes? Explodes.
44:14 Gabor Maté? Spews out, spills out, yeah. And I don't know if you've ever experienced rage, I have.
44:19 Lewis Howes? Of course.
44:20 Gabor Maté? But you know what? Healthy anger is, you're in my space, get out, no. Once it's done its job, it's over.
44:27 Lewis Howes? You're creating a, a barrier, a boundary.
44:29 Gabor Maté? Yeah, and it's done its job.
44:31 Lewis Howes? And you move on.
44:31 Gabor Maté? Exactly. And the more I raged, the more circuits in my brain got recruited to be even more rageful. So that's the, so the healthy anger is in the present moment, boundary defense. Unhealthy rage is usually based on the past.
44:46 Lewis Howes? Yes.
44:47 Gabor Maté? So when I would rage with my kids, it had nothing to do with my kids. It had to do with being triggered.
44:52 Lewis Howes? That you unresolved trauma.
44:54 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
44:55 Lewis Howes? And until you resolve the trauma, you're gonna keep having the symptoms.
44:58 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
44:58 Lewis Howes? Which for you was rage.
45:00 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
45:00 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
45:01 Gabor Maté? And when you speak of that word, trigger, when people talk about being triggered, have you triggered me? It's an interesting word. Because, um, if you look at the weapon, how big a part of the weapon is the trigger?
45:12 Lewis Howes? Small.
45:13 Gabor Maté? Small. What was there is, there's explosive material, explosive charges, ammunition. There's a mechanism to do a lot.
45:20 Lewis Howes? So wires connected to it.
45:21 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I get triggered, I could blame you and then just rage at you for triggering me.
45:29 Gabor Maté? Or I could say, hmm, what was the explosive charge inside myself? What's the ammunition here? What is that all about? And it's got never to do with the present.
45:39 Lewis Howes? It always has to do with the past.
45:41 Gabor Maté? It always has to do with the past.
45:42 Lewis Howes? Healing the memories of the past, healing the stories.
45:45 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
45:46 Lewis Howes? And is, you know, sometimes we have a something, a memory of the past. And we could either downgrade the memory or we could elaborate the memory, right? So how do we address the memory?
46:00 Gabor Maté? By allowing the feeling that's associated with it to be present. In other words, by not being caught up with the story. Either suppressing the story and diminishing it. Or enhancing it and dwelling on it. But by what happens to me, what's in my body? When that story comes up for me.
46:21 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
46:22 Gabor Maté? And just being with the emotions and accepting the emotions. Which is really what should have happened to you as a child.
46:27 Lewis Howes? Mm hmm.
46:28 Gabor Maté? You know, so it's not about the story. It's about
46:33 Gabor Maté? what you're experiencing when you're
46:37 Gabor Maté? under the influence of that story.
46:38 Lewis Howes? Yes.
46:40 Gabor Maté? That's what I would say.
46:41 Lewis Howes? What's the, what's the biggest?
46:45 Lewis Howes? What's the challenge you feel like you're still healing? Or the, maybe the trauma or the stress that is most present for you that you're still healing?
46:55 Gabor Maté? It shows up in my relationship mostly. It shows up, it shows up in two ways. One of them, not so much anymore. Let's say somebody critiques my view of addiction, okay? Now, I'm totally open to being critiqued. I'm, I got no problem.
47:11 Gabor Maté? If they understood what I was saying.
47:12 Lewis Howes? Right.
47:14 Gabor Maté? But if they critique something I don't even understand. I just can't stand not being understood. So, so.
47:20 Lewis Howes? Right, that's a.
47:21 Gabor Maté? So that can be a trigger.
47:21 Lewis Howes? That's a trigger for you.
47:22 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
47:23 Lewis Howes? Not being understood.
47:23 Gabor Maté? Not so much anymore because I really see that it's about them. Here's what I'm saying, it's very, I'm a reasonably good communicator.
47:29 Lewis Howes? Yes.
47:30 Gabor Maté? If, if you read what I say and if you don't get the get it and then you have critically critique me for that, well, you got a problem here, you know, of perception.
47:38 Lewis Howes? Sure.
47:39 Gabor Maté? So that's one. But the big one shows up in my relationship with my wife is, is if.
47:47 Gabor Maté? But I'm really letting it go and I've let go of it majorly. Is there any sense of not being wanted? From your wife? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any sense of not being wanted, you know, whether it's physically or emotionally, you know. But you know what?
48:02 Gabor Maté? Maybe you're finding this, I know you're in a new relationship and I've been in mine now for... Fifty-three years, you say? Well, married fifty-three years. Wow! In a relationship for fifty-five years now. It's been my biggest teacher. I'm sure. And it's my biggest ground of spiritual and personal growth. So if you take away all the therapy I've done, the psychedelic work I've done,
48:24 Gabor Maté? this still has been, none of which I would want to do without, but this relationship and both of us wanting to find out the truth of things. I mean, we were, as dysfunctional as that relationship was, ultimately, we were both committed to the truth. And not, and not holding on to our little stories. What is the truth? You know who said that?
48:51 Gabor Maté? Pontius Pilate said it to Jesus Christ. When, when Jesus was taken in front of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius, you know, Pilate, he said, he says, well, who are you? He says, Jesus says, "I'm here to speak the truth." By the way, I'm not comparing myself to Jesus. No, you do, Pontius Pilate, okay? But, but he said, Jesus said, "I'm here to speak the truth." And Pontius said, "What is the truth?" You know what Jesus did with that answer, question? What? Didn't answer him. The reason he didn't answer him is because the question comes from the intellect. And intellect cannot grasp the truth. The intellect can grasp the facts, but not the truth. And for us to grasp the truth,
49:38 Gabor Maté? ever read the, um, The Little Prince by Antoine? Okay. Remember what the fox says to the little prince? He says, "The eyes can't, you cannot see with the eyes, only with the heart." So, so truth for me goes way beyond the intellect. It has to do with... Therefore, there's no intellectual answer. That's satisfying. But the truth actually, again, as I write about, we have three brains. We think we have one brain, we have at least three. There's the one up here. Then there's the heart, which is our nervous system of its own, the intelligence of its own.
50:18 Lewis Howes? The gut.
50:19 Gabor Maté? Then we have the gut. When the three are aligned, then we're in a position to apprehend or appreciate the truth. When they're not, we're not.
50:31 Lewis Howes? Right.
50:31 Gabor Maté? And so,
50:34 Gabor Maté? there's no simple intellectual answer to what is truth. Truth is not a fact, it's an experience. You know, and I know that sounds mystical. And I'm not at all a mystical being. I've never had deep mystical experiences. I'm not, you know.
50:49 Lewis Howes? Yeah, you're a doctor.
50:50 Gabor Maté? I'm a doctor.
50:53 Gabor Maté? You know, although, again, as I do write about this, with certain psychedelic experiences, I've kind of glimpsed it, you know? But I know people who've had experiences of truth without psychedelics, just for some spiritual opening happened. Sometimes at a time of deep suffering. Actually, Jodhwan said to me that she surrendered to a god she didn't even believe in, at a moment of deep suffering. So, the truth can show up in all kinds of ways, but it's not an intellectual experience. That's why I can't answer the question.
51:25 Lewis Howes? How much do you think you suffer on a regular basis?
51:28 Gabor Maté? These days? It's very momentary, and when I revisit circuits of my brain that have long outlived their usefulness, but I don't...
51:40 Gabor Maté? But I really, I would have told you, most of my life, I've suffered.
51:43 Lewis Howes? Really?
51:43 Gabor Maté? Yeah. And I'm not saying that as a victim. I mean, I just felt bad and perceived it as hopeless and and myself as somehow irretrievably hurt. You know, that was my self-image, even as I was helping other people.
52:02 Gabor Maté? I suffered writing this book.
52:04 Lewis Howes? Really?
52:04 Gabor Maté? Yeah, because of what we were talking about earlier, identification. So, I took on this big project. This book, ten years of research. I collected 25,000 scientific articles and reports, hundreds of books, hundreds of people interviewed. And then I started writing it.
52:25 Gabor Maté? And the first chapter was like the worst piece of junk I've ever produced.
52:31 Gabor Maté? And I said, oh my God, I've taken on something way bigger than I can possibly deliver. Now, why did I suffer? That's not suffering. If I take on something that I can't deliver, I just say, okay, I can't do this. That's not suffering. The suffering is, I should do this. The world expects me to do this. If I don't do this, I'm a failure because I identified with it.
52:57 Lewis Howes? The judgment you have on yourself.
52:59 Gabor Maté? That's what the suffering was from. And I identified with it. So, you know, I've written four books now, published in thirty languages. This is the fifth one.
53:10 Gabor Maté? It doesn't matter how successful the others are. If this one fails, I'm a failure. And I really exposed my incompetence to the world. In other words, my mind was identifying myself with the book. And it took me some time to realize, you know, I'm not the book. Let's say I write this book. It doesn't work for whatever reason. I mean, I think it will, but if it doesn't, it doesn't say a thing about me. It's not me. I'm still alive. Earth is still here, the sun is, you know. So it's that identification that created the suffering for me. And that identification had to do with the childhood sense that I had to prove the value of my existence. You know? So that's.
53:53 Lewis Howes? So all suffering stems from what specifically do you think for us?
53:59 Gabor Maté? Some false belief that we developed about ourselves as a result of what happened to us.
54:05 Lewis Howes? And the fastest way to end the suffering within ourselves?
54:10 Gabor Maté? Well, it's to recognize that we're suffering, which means.
54:15 Gabor Maté? What in us recognizes that we're suffering? Something that
54:20 Lewis Howes? Some awareness or consciousness, yeah.
54:22 Gabor Maté? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So then to follow that awareness. You know, and, and, but the Buddha.
54:32 Gabor Maté? You know, his Four Noble Truths. Life is suffering. Suffering.
54:38 Gabor Maté? Secondly, there is a reason for that suffering. Which actually is the attachment, the identification. Thirdly, there's a way out of the suffering.
54:49 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
54:49 Gabor Maté? And fourthly, here's the path. You disidentify.
54:53 Lewis Howes? You disidentify with the things that society is
54:56 Gabor Maté? Yeah, and that you've attached to and everything, and a society is laid on you. So, you know, that's the Buddhist way. It makes a lot of sense to me.
55:03 Lewis Howes? Let go of the identity.
55:05 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, let go of the identity, exactly. And when he had his enlightenment experience, that's exactly what he found. That he was not his identity. That he wasn't his prince, that he wasn't his ascetic, you know, this hermit. He wasn't any of that. Now, I have not had that experience. But you know what? The funny thing is, is I talk to you about it, and I sense your understanding of it. I can only say, yeah, absolutely, that's the truth, isn't it?
55:36 Lewis Howes? Yeah. I think for, I was telling you before we started that last year, over last year, I've had so much peace in my heart and in my body, and I just
55:49 Lewis Howes? doesn't mean there's not stressful moments and, you know, challenges of business and things that maybe I'm disappointed in or frustrated with.
55:55 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
55:55 Lewis Howes? But I, it doesn't stick with me like it used to.
55:59 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
55:59 Lewis Howes? And I'm so grateful for the continual healing journey that I'm committed to creating and cultivating within myself.
56:08 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
56:09 Lewis Howes? Because I want everyone to feel this peace. I want everyone to feel this inner peace. And again, my mission and intention is to continue to cultivate that and stay with me.
56:22 Lewis Howes? And I'm sure every parent will say, wait till you have kids and see if you have the peace inside you still. But it'll be the ultimate test, I guess.
56:27 Gabor Maté? Or as Ram does, if you think you're entitled, go spend a week with your family.
56:32 Lewis Howes? Exactly, exactly.
56:34 Gabor Maté? Yeah, but listen, let me say something.
56:36 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
56:38 Gabor Maté? Are you experiencing gratitude?
56:39 Lewis Howes? All the time.
56:40 Gabor Maté? Did you used to experience gratitude?
56:42 Lewis Howes? I did, yes, but I would judge myself still for not doing enough.
56:48 Gabor Maté? Yeah, okay.
56:49 Lewis Howes? Now I'm like, I'm doing enough.
56:51 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
56:51 Lewis Howes? I'm not judging myself or comparing myself that I should be doing, I should. I used to use should a lot. Uh, this is good, but I should have done it better.
57:00 Gabor Maté? So I mentioned the psychologist Peter Levine, who's a mentor and a friend. And him and I were just working together in Switzerland. And Peter and I were talking a year ago and he said, he's eighty years old now. And he says, um, uh, he asked himself this question, am I doing enough? And he says, these days he can say, yes, have I done enough? He says, yes, I've done enough. But then he says, there's another question, even deeper, he says, am I enough? And recently, when I'm working together and, and sir, I said, so Peter, that's second question. How are you answering that one? He says, I'm still working on it.
57:36 Lewis Howes? Wow.
57:37 Gabor Maté? Or am I enough, you know?
57:38 Lewis Howes? How do we
57:41 Lewis Howes? fully, uh, believe that we are enough?
57:46 Gabor Maté? I don't think there's a how, I think it comes. When you've done the work, it comes, you know? And the other thing he said is that your, your passion
58:01 Gabor Maté? for helping others feel, uh, heal and find peace in their lives is you have funded. I'm telling you, I used to work in Vancouver's downtown east side, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more people there in a few square block radius using all kinds of drugs. These people are all terribly traumatized. All the women down there were sexually abused, there's the children. Many of them are indigenous Canadians, which is a very traumatized segment of the Canadian population.
58:29 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
58:30 Gabor Maté? As it is here in the States.
58:33 Gabor Maté? But they all, so many of them said to me, Doc, if I ever get over this, if I ever beat this addiction, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life making sure that other people don't have to suffer as I've suffered.
58:45 Lewis Howes? Right.
58:46 Gabor Maté? Now, that's what you just said, is that as you've dealt with your own suffering, you're so committed now that others won't suffer, that others can deal from suffering. What does that say about the true nature of human beings?
58:58 Lewis Howes? We care about others.
58:59 Gabor Maté? And we're here for each other.
59:00 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
59:00 Gabor Maté? We're not selfish, competitive, aggressive creatures.
59:03 Lewis Howes? Right.
59:03 Gabor Maté? That's, that's not our true nature.
59:05 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
59:05 Gabor Maté? This is.
59:06 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
59:07 Gabor Maté? Now, we may do a good job at it, we may sometimes do it well, sometimes not so well, but our nature wants to express itself.
59:15 Lewis Howes? I have a few final questions for, I feel like I could talk to you for hours, I love this stuff. Um, but when does someone know that they're, they are on a healing journey? What, what is, what is healing and when do they know they're on it?
59:29 Gabor Maté? Talking about chapters of my new book.
59:30 Lewis Howes? That's perfect.
59:31 Gabor Maté? So, healing comes in the word wholeness.
59:34 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
59:35 Gabor Maté? The Anglo-Saxon origin of the word is whole. So, healing is not a matter of curing anything. You can be cured without being healed, and you can heal without being cured. Um, healing is becoming whole, in other words, integrating all the parts and, and, and, recognizing all these aspects of yourself that you've loathed and hated and rejected, that you've tried to run away from. So, it's becoming whole. It's, it's, it's coming back to your authentic self, which has never went away, but you lost contact with it. If trauma is the loss of connection to self, then healing is the reconnection to self.
1:00:15 Gabor Maté? Um, when do you know you're on your healing path? When you're asking yourself some of these questions, that's already a sign of healing.
1:00:25 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
1:00:25 Gabor Maté? Cause the people that are not healing, they don't ask themselves these questions. When you find that things that used to trigger you don't get you so upset anymore.
1:00:35 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:00:36 Gabor Maté? Or when you do get upset, you get over it much quicker. Because you realize, oh, you know, so really, it's when the past starts to loosen its hold over your present.
1:00:46 Lewis Howes? Hmm, that's so powerful.
1:00:48 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:00:49 Lewis Howes? You know, it's, I used to get, I guess, we're using the word triggered. I used to get triggered a lot to reacting to.
1:00:55 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:00:55 Lewis Howes? My big thing was feeling taken advantage of, feeling used, abused, taken advantage of.
1:01:00 Gabor Maté? Exactly what happened to you.
1:01:01 Lewis Howes? What happened.
1:01:02 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:01:02 Lewis Howes? And so when little things would happen in the world, like someone cut me off in a car.
1:01:07 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah.
1:01:08 Lewis Howes? Or flip me off or something, I would like want to go and beat this person up.
1:01:12 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
1:01:13 Lewis Howes? It was like I, it would come over me of like, I need to chase this person down. And I remember being like, man, why is this, you know, I was addicted to that reaction.
1:01:23 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:01:24 Lewis Howes? That anger feeling of like, you're gonna abuse me, I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen, right? Rage, whatever I'd be, right, that.
1:01:31 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:01:31 Lewis Howes? And that addiction of that trigger, from what I'm hearing you say is an enslavement.
1:01:38 Gabor Maté? Exactly, yeah.
1:01:39 Lewis Howes? To that traumatic experience.
1:01:43 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
1:01:44 Lewis Howes? You're, the past has power over you.
1:01:46 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
1:01:47 Lewis Howes? You don't have control, you are reacting.
1:01:49 Gabor Maté? Yeah. But I'm gonna ask you a personal question.
1:01:52 Lewis Howes? Yes.
1:01:52 Gabor Maté? This is a curiosity.
1:01:54 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:01:54 Gabor Maté? So you're a big guy.
1:01:55 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
1:01:56 Gabor Maté? I mean, if you decide to beat somebody up, ninety-five percent of the time, you're gonna succeed. Now, I'm five-seven and, you know, um, and probably, you know, one hundred and thirty-four pounds.
1:02:07 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:02:08 Gabor Maté? I can get that kind of rage too, but I'm in no position to actually.
1:02:11 Lewis Howes? You might get beat up, yeah.
1:02:12 Gabor Maté? Which is probably a good thing.
1:02:13 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:02:14 Gabor Maté? But what was it like for you? Did you use your size that way or not?
1:02:17 Lewis Howes? Oh, my gosh. Um, I did, and this was a big awakening. I, I remember there's two, two experiences. I've talked about this before.
1:02:25 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:27 Lewis Howes? One time I was driving nearby, it's probably ten years ago.
1:02:31 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:32 Lewis Howes? And I, I stopped at a stop sign, then I kind of rolled to like take a turn, right? And there was a runner coming and he, he had to like stop because I was rolling. So I, I went in the crosswalk area slowly, like one mile an hour.
1:02:47 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:48 Lewis Howes? He had to stop and go around the car as opposed to just going through the crosswalk.
1:02:52 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:53 Lewis Howes? And he punched my car and went around and said something to me and then went around, right?
1:02:58 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:59 Lewis Howes? I literally chased the guy down in my car and like chased him around the block, got out of my car and ran him down until I was like, finally my senses came to me, I go, what am I doing?
1:03:11 Gabor Maté? Well, you keep it to yourself.
1:03:12 Lewis Howes? Thankfully.
1:03:13 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:03:13 Lewis Howes? But uh, maybe like six months after that, I, I got in a fight on a basketball game. I've talked about this in my books and on my podcast where I got in a physical, like a fistfight, a pretty bad one. And um, the guy was bigger than me, but I'd played football my whole life and you know.
1:03:30 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:03:31 Lewis Howes? It was almost like when I had this triggering addictive rage moments.
1:03:36 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:03:37 Lewis Howes? I didn't feel any pain, right? It was like, there was so much adrenaline.
1:03:40 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:03:41 Lewis Howes? There was so much fight in me.
1:03:43 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:03:44 Lewis Howes? That it was like, this is life or death feeling. And so I got in a pretty bad fistfight, um, and afterwards I remember being like, like I saw the guy's face and I go, oh my gosh, I can't believe I just did this. Even though he hit me first and so it gave me the.
1:04:01 Gabor Maté? The reason.
1:04:02 Lewis Howes? The reason, right? I was like, I would never start it physically.
1:04:06 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04:07 Lewis Howes? But I would make sure I'd always finish it if I needed to. And I remember at that point, I was like, my, my, my best friend Matt, who's in the other room, who I've known for a long time. He was there with me and he goes, you know, what are you doing? Like later he was like, Lewis, something's wrong with you.
1:04:21 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04:21 Lewis Howes? Like we're playing a basketball game, we're having fun here.
1:04:24 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04:24 Lewis Howes? Why are you getting in this fight, this altercation? And that was a big wake up call for me, like when my best friend like called me out, he's like, I don't know if I want to hang out with you. Like I'm never playing basketball with you again. And you gotta figure out why you're reacting to someone talking trash.
1:04:38 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04:38 Lewis Howes? We're supposed to have fun here.
1:04:39 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04:40 Lewis Howes? What are you so triggered by?
1:04:42 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:04:42 Lewis Howes? And that was a big wake up call. This is when I started the healing journey. This is when I started going to therapy and emotional intelligence workshops and for the first time opened up about the sexual abuse. Which was kind of the first opening of healing. And it's been a 10 year journey of what you said, integrating all the parts. There was one part that I started integrate and it started to heal certain things, triggers. But there were other parts and relationships that I hadn't integrated yet. From parents, from other things. So, yeah, thankfully that was 10 years ago and I haven't gotten.
1:05:19 Gabor Maté? Well, that story brings up for me is you had this fit of rage.
1:05:25 Lewis Howes? But I was a loving, fun guy unless I felt like I was being taken advantage of, yeah.
1:05:30 Gabor Maté? Which is what happened to you as a child. But what else do we talk about having fits? We talk about epileptic fits. In epileptic fits, the brain is in a different state of physiological organization. When you're in that fit of rage, it's almost like an epileptic fit. You're not even there.
1:05:47 Lewis Howes? You're not conscious.
1:05:48 Gabor Maté? You're not conscious.
1:05:49 Lewis Howes? You're like, you're like a tiger or like a hunting or something. Yeah, you're like.
1:05:52 Gabor Maté? Which by the way.
1:05:54 Lewis Howes? You have one focus. You don't see anything else.
1:05:57 Gabor Maté? Which also speaks to a lot of how the criminal justice system doesn't understand people. We don't, we don't understand how often the people do the worst things. I'm not saying this to excuse any bad behavior or not to protect society, but however you approach it is these are really traumatized people. And they're not actually, often the worst things they do, they're not even there.
1:06:21 Lewis Howes? They're not even aware. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm grateful that I started to, I was aware of it, started to, you know, heal and yeah, and now I see things. It's funny because like, it's like a completely different person 10 years ago, right? And then from teenage years and twenties. When I'm like, I'll see something and I'll just notice it and smile, you know? Kind of, okay, that's just about them. And I'll just. And I'm so connected to it. The vision of my future and my present, but my vision, my values, my intention. My appreciation for life that I'm just like, okay, I'm safe. I can protect the five year old who was abused.
1:07:06 Lewis Howes? I'm the adult in the room. I don't need to react because I'm here for that. Part of myself that didn't feel whole.
1:07:12 Gabor Maté? At a certain point, you get to realize that life has created me. But now I get to create my life. You know, within limits, I'm not going to live forever. You know, but, but I get to create how I live my life. As long as I'm alive, you know, and that's actually when you're healed, you get to create your life.
1:07:30 Lewis Howes? You have the creative freedom to dream, to imagine the life you want to create, right? As opposed to living in survival and stress mode.
1:07:39 Gabor Maté? By the way, what I don't want to get is to, when I say that, when I hear myself say that. I don't want to get too new agey about it. Because there's a lot of people under difficult economic. Or racial or political circumstances where. Not that they're totally helpless, but there's a lot of pressures on them externally. So it's not like. All you've got to do is take it on. We also have to look at the larger political, economic, social. Racial, cultural issues that keep a lot of people.
1:08:18 Lewis Howes? Suppressed.
1:08:19 Gabor Maté? Suppressed, yeah.
1:08:20 Lewis Howes? There's a lot of political trauma. And how does someone who maybe is living in. A stressed environment, whether it be their home or their city or their culture. Political, you know, whatever it might be, they're, they're more suppressed than others. How can they support themselves to getting out of a stressed environment? So that they can be more of a baseline to have the ability to thrive and flourish emotionally?
1:08:47 Gabor Maté? You know, something as a privileged. Caucasian identified male with.
1:08:57 Gabor Maté? Economic freedom and I'm not in a position to say to somebody, these are larger political questions, these people, society has to change and people have to work to change society. It's a question of, at some point, it becomes a question of advocacy and activism and, and, and joining with others, you know. I, I don't want to preach to somebody else.
1:09:23 Lewis Howes? Sure.
1:09:23 Gabor Maté? About, about that, you know, it's my job is to, to extent, is to support and help, but not to provide some kind of.
1:09:32 Lewis Howes? But if society, let's say, society won't change for a period of time for these individuals, for certain individuals who are feeling overstressed. What can they do as an individual? Whether they get support externally or not, what could they start to do? Anything else besides, I mean, we covered a lot that they can start to do and they get your, they can get your book, that's for sure.
1:09:52 Gabor Maté? Well, again, you know, um, I'm not sure I can fully answer that, but I can, I can give examples. So, The New Yorker a couple of years ago, within the last two or three years, had an article about a, an American black man who was jailed for decades and kept in solitary confinement, for decades.
1:10:18 Lewis Howes? Was it Shaka Senghor?
1:10:19 Gabor Maté? I don't know, I don't know if I remember the name, it could be.
1:10:21 Lewis Howes? I interviewed this guy who was in solitary confinement for decades, but.
1:10:25 Gabor Maté? Yeah, well, maybe the same man.
1:10:28 Lewis Howes? Wrote a bestselling book and was on Oprah, it might have been the same guy, but go ahead.
1:10:32 Gabor Maté? All right, well, my point is that, fair enough, my point is that it didn't, that he wasn't destroyed by it.
1:10:39 Lewis Howes? Right, he started to heal in the prison.
1:10:41 Gabor Maté? He, he found the inner strength somehow, so that, it's not for me to tell, I, I don't know if I could stand it for one day, never mind for four decades or three decades.
1:10:49 Lewis Howes? I know, it's crazy.
1:10:50 Gabor Maté? But, but that just shows you that the strength, the capacity to heal and to hold on to oneself, to find oneself, is actually inherent in all of us. So even in that unimaginably horrific, inhumane, cruel and absolutely socially, from a social point of view, despicable way of treating a human being, that person still could hold on to themselves, they, they suffered.
1:11:18 Gabor Maté? But they could hold on to themselves and come out of it with dignity.
1:11:20 Lewis Howes? No.
1:11:21 Gabor Maté? You know, so that's available to all of us, I believe.
1:11:23 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
1:11:24 Gabor Maté? You know, but again, I'm not saying. Again, I don't even want to begin to imagine how I would handle that situation, but I'm just saying it's possible.
1:11:33 Lewis Howes? Sure, sure.
1:11:34 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:11:35 Lewis Howes? I've got a couple of final questions for you. Before I ask them, I want to make sure people get the book. Because I think this is going to help a lot of people, The Myth of Normal. They can get it where books are sold, or Amazon, or on your website.
1:11:48 Gabor Maté? They can't get it from me directly, but.
1:11:50 Lewis Howes? They can go, there's a link to it somewhere.
1:11:51 Gabor Maté? I don't sell books, but yeah, yeah.
1:11:53 Lewis Howes? But if they go to Dr. Yawar Mate.
1:11:56 Gabor Maté? Dot com, yeah.
1:11:57 Lewis Howes? Dot com, they can get all the information about where to get it. But this book's going to be extremely powerful, ten years of research, exploring all these things, bringing it together.
1:12:08 Gabor Maté? Ten years of research and seventy, eight years of living.
1:12:10 Lewis Howes? Exactly, yeah, personal research, yeah. The scientific research.
1:12:16 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:12:16 Lewis Howes? And I think this is the type of stuff people need the most is understanding how to understand their pain, their trauma, their suffering.
1:12:24 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:12:24 Lewis Howes? And find solutions.
1:12:26 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:12:27 Lewis Howes? And reclaim their wholeness.
1:12:29 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:12:30 Lewis Howes? So they can be in a state of peace, under stress in the world potentially, and find that peace. And I think it's, you know, something I feel like I want everyone to experience as I've been experiencing it more in the last year and a half, last ten years, some of it, but more in the last year and a half, internally, like consistent peace.
1:12:50 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:12:50 Lewis Howes? And it sounds like you've been experiencing for a long time, and I feel like I'm so inspired by your mission, and I've been watching your content for a while now, and I just think we need more of these.
1:13:04 Lewis Howes? I guess it's available information to us that we've just forgot, or we're not reclaiming, so.
1:13:10 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:13:11 Lewis Howes? But I'm so grateful for your doing this. So the Myth of Normal, I want everyone to get a few copies and give it to your friends.
1:13:17 Gabor Maté? And to subtitle, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
1:13:22 Lewis Howes? Exactly.
1:13:22 Gabor Maté? Which is what we've been talking about. You know.
1:13:24 Lewis Howes? We haven't even talked about social media consumption and iPads and iPhones.
1:13:28 Gabor Maté? All that stuff, yeah.
1:13:29 Lewis Howes? Just being on electronics all day, how that's probably affecting, traumatizing us in certain ways.
1:13:34 Gabor Maté? It's actually distorting the brain development of children.
1:13:37 Lewis Howes? By being on the iPhone or iPad all day.
1:13:39 Gabor Maté? It changes their brain circuits.
1:13:40 Lewis Howes? Really?
1:13:41 Gabor Maté? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's, I talk about that too. It's a huge problem. What I want to say about the question of recognizing trauma is that there's been a sea change in that. Like, the bestselling book in New York Times Bestseller list is consistently Bessel van der Kolk's.
1:14:00 Lewis Howes? The Body Keeps the Score.
1:14:01 Gabor Maté? The Body Keeps the Score.
1:14:02 Lewis Howes? Incredible.
1:14:02 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah. It's not an easy read.
1:14:05 Lewis Howes? No.
1:14:05 Gabor Maté? It's very, you know, it's eloquent, but it's also technical and scientific and so on.
1:14:10 Lewis Howes? It's been out for like 10 years, right, or something?
1:14:11 Gabor Maté? No, it came out in 2015, I think.
1:14:13 Lewis Howes? Okay.
1:14:14 Gabor Maté? 14, maybe 15, something like that.
1:14:18 Gabor Maté? And, or, and this year, another psychiatrist, Bruce Perry, wrote a book with Oprah called What Happened to You? The fact that these books are now.
1:14:29 Lewis Howes? So many of these books are in the top 10 bestseller list.
1:14:30 Gabor Maté? Yeah. People are waking up.
1:14:32 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:14:33 Gabor Maté? So I'm just glad to be able to contribute to that.
1:14:35 Lewis Howes? Of course, yeah. It's very powerful. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the three truths.
1:14:41 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:14:41 Lewis Howes? So it's a hypothetical question. Imagine you get to live as long as you want to live, and you get to live your life, creating what you want, experiencing life, and the relationships you want to be in, and making the impact you want to have. But it's the last day, eventually. Live as long as you want. For whatever reason, all of your content has to go with you. No one has access to your information, your books, hypotheticals.
1:15:09 Gabor Maté? So if I'm gone, it's all alone?
1:15:11 Lewis Howes? It all goes with you to the next place, to go somewhere else. But no, we don't have access to it.
1:15:15 Gabor Maté? Okay, good.
1:15:16 Lewis Howes? Hypothetical scenario.
1:15:17 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:15:18 Lewis Howes? But you got to leave behind three lessons to the world. Three things that you know to be true.
1:15:23 Gabor Maté? Okay.
1:15:23 Lewis Howes? That you would share with us. And this is all we have to remember your.
1:15:27 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:15:27 Lewis Howes? Your information.
1:15:28 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:15:29 Lewis Howes? What would you say are those three truths for you?
1:15:31 Gabor Maté? Seek the reality of everything. Don't, don't get seduced by appearances of anything. Second would be, um. Don't be afraid of your pain and don't run away from it.
1:15:48 Gabor Maté? Because that running away is what leads to addictions and illness and so on. Number three?
1:15:52 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:15:53 Gabor Maté? It's all worth it. It's worth going through all that suffering. Because this is what life is. It's just worth being alive.
1:16:03 Lewis Howes? Mm hmm.
1:16:04 Gabor Maté? A friend of mine in England recently lost a very close friend to suicide. She was just struck by, overwhelmed by grief. And she didn't know if she could handle it. And then she's got a favorite forest that she walks in. She told me this like two months ago or a month ago in England. She went to walk in this forest and she just felt this deep grief. Now grief is one of the brain circuits that we have. We have circuits for grief. We have to. She felt this deep grief and she felt the greatest joy at the same time. And I asked her, well, are the two even compatible?
1:16:45 Gabor Maté? She said, I felt the grief and I felt such joy at the privilege of being alive to feel the grief.
1:16:51 Lewis Howes? Wow.
1:16:53 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:16:54 Lewis Howes? It's all worth it.
1:16:55 Gabor Maté? It's all worth it, yeah.
1:16:57 Lewis Howes? Oh, man, I want to acknowledge you, uh, Gabor, for, I mean, your journey. I mean, the journey of your relationship and what you've experienced from coming together and staying together and all these different things. The journey from teaching from a place of suffering. Because it sounds like for many decades you weren't at peace.
1:17:16 Gabor Maté? No.
1:17:16 Lewis Howes? But you were trying to help others.
1:17:17 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:17:19 Lewis Howes? From you, I want to acknowledge you for you creating peace inside of yourself and facing the pain and the trauma fully yourself and being on that healing journey. And for your consistent dedication to creating your work so that people can consume it in a way that resonates with them. From your books, to your content, to the videos, to your posts. This is so needed right now. And I think it's going to be needed for a long time until society and culture starts to heal. So I really acknowledge you for the way you show up, your commitment and your consistency and dedication to this research.
1:17:58 Gabor Maté? Well, I can't thank you enough for, first of all, creating this platform, which by the way, it means having done all the work yourself and then having a vision to create this platform and then allowing me to speak from this platform.
1:18:09 Lewis Howes? Of course.
1:18:10 Gabor Maté? Such a privilege and such a joy. So thank you very much.
1:18:12 Lewis Howes? Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. Again, your book, I want people to get it, The Myth of Normal. Make sure you guys go get a few copies of that right now. Follow you, your website will have everything linked up as well. Final question for you, what's your definition of greatness?
1:18:26 Gabor Maté? You don't make it easy on a guy, do you?
1:18:29 Lewis Howes? I'm going to challenge you.
1:18:32 Gabor Maté? It's a willingness to find your best qualities and to express them in the world. That's what I see as greatness. And that doesn't have to do with achievement necessarily. It might lead to achievement, but it's actually the willingness and the capacity to find your own best qualities and to manifest them in the world. That's what greatness is.
1:18:53 Lewis Howes? Love it. Dr. Martin, thank you so much.
1:18:56 Gabor Maté? Thank you.
1:18:57 Lewis Howes? Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.
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