Pod Insights The School of Greatness The Real Reason You Can't Stop Your Addiction | Dr. Gabor Maté About this episode Dr. Gabor Maté reveals a truth most people never hear: the abuse itself isn't always your deepest wound. He challenges everything you've been told about healing, explaining how the real trauma often comes from the people who should have protected you but couldn't. Through deeply personal stories including Lewis's own journey with sexual abuse, Gabor shows why shame keeps us trapped and how our nervous system's freeze response was actually protecting us all along. This isn't about blame or staying stuck in victimhood. You'll walk away understanding that healing means reconnecting with the parts of yourself you've been taught to hide, and that the suffering you've endured can actually become your greatest teacher. Gabor’s books:Scattered MindsWhen the Body Says NoHold On to Your KidsIn the Realm of Hungry GhostsThe Myth of NormalIn this episode you will:Discover why sexual abuse or bullying is often a secondary trauma and the real wound comes from not having emotional safety in your familyTransform your relationship with shame by understanding that freezing during trauma was your nervous system's brilliant survival mechanismBreak through the cultural genocide of authenticity by learning which childhood needs must be met for healthy developmentUncover why triggers aren't about the present moment and how to stop letting the past control your reactionsLearn what true healing actually means and recognize the signs that you're reconnecting with your authentic selfFor more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1849For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Jerry Wise – greatness.lnk.to/1747SCLewis Howes [SOLO] – greatness.lnk.to/1819SCSadhguru – greatness.lnk.to/1800SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript 11,678 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Gabor Maté? The things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs. The addictions that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation.
0:11 Speaker 01 Dr. Mate is a world-renowned physician, bestselling author, whose work dives deep into childhood development and the impact of trauma. Dr. Gabor Mate.
0:21 Gabor Maté? You were the average neurologist with symptoms of MS. Nobody's gonna ask you about your trauma. There's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine.
0:30 Lewis Howes? Why do you think in our modern society, with all the medical and scientific advances, that there's so much suffering when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before?
0:40 Gabor Maté? Well...
0:44 Lewis Howes? What I read about your stuff, what I see about your content, is a lot of people are lost based on trauma. And past traumas cause certain addictions or certain behaviors
0:55 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
0:56 Lewis Howes? and routines that maybe are some healthy addictions or unhealthy addictions, but it seems to be like a lot of unhealthy addictions.
1:03 Gabor Maté? Well, can I interrupt right there?
1:04 Lewis Howes? Yes, please.
1:05 Gabor Maté? No such thing as a healthy addiction.
1:06 Lewis Howes? No such thing.
1:07 Gabor Maté? If it's healthy, it's not an addiction. If it's an addiction, it's not healthy. There are passions.
1:12 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
1:12 Gabor Maté? There are habits that are healthy, but they're not addictions. I define...
1:16 Lewis Howes? Like working out?
1:17 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, well, that can be an addiction, or it can be healthy. Like eating can be healthy, but it could be an addiction.
1:26 Gabor Maté? The... I define addiction as any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences and cannot give it up. So if you're suffering negative consequences, so it's craving, relief, pleasure in the short term, harm in the long term, inability to give it up, that's what addiction is. Now, if you have a behavior... That's ongoing, but it has no negative consequences. It's not an addiction. It's a passion. It's a pleasure. It's a habit.
1:58 Lewis Howes? It's a healthy habit.
1:59 Gabor Maté? It's a healthy habit. So for me, it's not an addiction. And also, a healthy habit, a person, if it no longer works for them, they can give it up. So for me, there's no healthy addiction.
2:11 Lewis Howes? There's no healthy addiction.
2:12 Gabor Maté? In fact, the word addiction comes from a word for slavery. So there's no, there's no healthy slavery.
2:18 Lewis Howes? Interesting. So addiction, what is the root of addiction?
2:21 Gabor Maté? The word?
2:22 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
2:23 Gabor Maté? So in Roman times, an addictus was somebody who was assigned to another person to serve them because they owed them money and they couldn't pay it back.
2:33 Lewis Howes? An addictus?
2:34 Gabor Maté? Yeah, addictus was like an indentured slave who had to work off the debt. So that's where the word actually comes from, is slavery, is a form of slavery.
2:45 Lewis Howes? So if you're addicted to something, you are a slave to that craving.
2:49 Gabor Maté? Absolutely, absolutely. You have no choice. A slave has no choice.
2:54 Lewis Howes? Wow. They have no free will, essentially.
2:57 Gabor Maté? Yeah. And I've had my own addictive behaviors and nothing like the patients that I worked with, but insofar as I had them, literally, even though I was a well-paid, middle-class, successful doctor, I was not exercising any free choice.
3:14 Lewis Howes? Really?
3:14 Gabor Maté? Or my behaviors, no.
3:16 Lewis Howes? When did you, what was the main addiction that you were tied to? And when did you learn how to break free of that?
3:26 Gabor Maté? Well, so in my life, the main addictions have been to work.
3:34 Lewis Howes? To work?
3:34 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
3:35 Lewis Howes? Work hard, achieve, succeed.
3:37 Gabor Maté? More and more patients, more and more success, more and more. More and more is the essence of addiction. It's always more and more. And there's a reason why I developed that addiction. And that was the hardest, that's the hardest one to give up. Then I was addicted for a long time to shopping for classical compact discs. And when I say addicted, I mean I would spend thousands of dollars a day.
4:01 Lewis Howes? On CDs?
4:02 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
4:03 Lewis Howes? Really?
4:03 Gabor Maté? Yeah, really. And I would lie to my wife about it, and I would neglect my patients. And as soon as I left the store... Thinking now I'm complete. My collection is full. Half an hour later, I had to run back. And as I described in my book, An Addiction in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, I once left a woman in labor in hospital to go get a symphony. So that's an addiction.
4:26 Lewis Howes? Really?
4:27 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, and it's like, it's like that. Now, the interesting thing about addiction is, is that I wasn't using substances.
4:35 Lewis Howes? You weren't smoking or drinking or things like that, drugs?
4:38 Gabor Maté? But, but, but I was looking for a chemical hit.
4:41 Lewis Howes? Dopamine.
4:41 Gabor Maté? Dopamine, yeah. So I was a dopamine fiend, you might say. And I get it through those particular behaviors. And so that's what my addiction was. How did I give it up? Well, the, it took a long time.
4:56 Lewis Howes? Really?
4:56 Gabor Maté? Yeah, a lot of struggle, a lot of, you know, and finally, I just realized that the cost was greater than the, in fact, you know, in fact, if I started listening now to all the CDs that I have at home and did nothing but listen for those in my life.
5:11 Lewis Howes? You wouldn't finish.
5:11 Gabor Maté? I probably wouldn't finish.
5:13 Lewis Howes? Wow. So, so how long would you say? When did you realize, okay, this is an addiction? This is an unhealthy?
5:20 Gabor Maté? I realized it long before I gave it up.
5:23 Lewis Howes? Like years, ten years, decades?
5:26 Gabor Maté? Years.
5:27 Lewis Howes? Years?
5:28 Gabor Maté? Yeah, years.
5:29 Lewis Howes? How long does it normally take for someone when they realize this is unhealthy? This thing I'm doing, this addiction is not good for me? Until they actually give it up? Is there any data on that?
5:40 Gabor Maté? I couldn't answer that one. I, I think it's a highly variable and individual issue. It has to do with what resources they have to heal. It has to do with what support they have. It has to do with what cost their, this habit is exacting on their lives. It has to do also with some belief that there's a part of us that's actually healthy and we can get in touch with it. You know, there has to be a whole combination of factors. And it's very, very individual. Also, it also depends, of course, the degree of trauma a person suffered. And, and addictions are always about, like, you've heard my definition of addiction, and I'm sure if I asked you,
6:24 Gabor Maté? like, if I asked, if I'm talking to a thousand people, put your hands up if according to my definition, you've got an addiction. Virtually everybody in the room. We'll put their hands up, maybe there'll be two liars who
6:34 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
6:35 Gabor Maté? But nine out of nine, and then I asked them, not what was wrong with the addiction, but what was right about it? What did you get from it? So if I asked you that, so you had your behaviors, if I asked you, I don't care what it was to, but if I asked you, what did you get from it?
6:47 Lewis Howes? You get some type of relief, you get some type of pleasure, you get some type of, yeah.
6:51 Gabor Maté? Specifically.
6:53 Lewis Howes? What do you get from it?
6:54 Gabor Maté? What did you get from it? What did it give you temporarily, whatever it was, I don't even care what it was.
6:59 Lewis Howes? You know, you get to escape.
7:01 Gabor Maté? Okay, escape, right.
7:02 Lewis Howes? Yeah, you're not thinking about the pain or the shame or the insecurity.
7:07 Gabor Maté? So who needs to escape?
7:10 Lewis Howes? Me.
7:11 Gabor Maté? No, but I mean, what kind of person needs to escape?
7:13 Lewis Howes? Oh, a scared person.
7:15 Gabor Maté? Scared person is somebody who's imprisoned, isn't it? Somebody who's not free.
7:18 Lewis Howes? Trapped.
7:19 Gabor Maté? Yeah, somebody's trapped, exactly. And I know in your book on toxic vice community, you talk about being trapped. Trapped is the very word you use.
7:27 Lewis Howes? Yes.
7:28 Gabor Maté? And
7:28 Lewis Howes? I felt trapped most of my childhood.
7:30 Gabor Maté? That's the whole point. So what I'm saying is that addiction is never a choice, and it's not some kind of genetic disease, which that is total nonsense. What it actually is, is an attempt to solve a problem in your life. In your case, you were trying to solve the problem of being trapped, which was based on your childhood trauma, which you publicly talk about. In my case, the workaholism was about trying to prove to myself that I was, that I had the right to exist. That was important.
8:02 Lewis Howes? You're worthy of love.
8:03 Gabor Maté? That is worthy of love, exactly, acceptance and all that. No, that also came from my childhood experience. So addiction is never like either a disease as such. You can behave like a disease, but it isn't a disease as such. It's also not a choice anybody makes. It's actually an attempt to solve a deep life problem that was imposed on that person by trauma in every case.
8:24 Lewis Howes? Wow. Is it, is it possible for someone to heal a deep wound on their own? A trauma from decades past that they've had an addiction to trying to escape from? Is it possible to do it on your own? Or is it really take support? Someone, someone's, a team? What's your thoughts on that?
8:45 Gabor Maté? Well, I think very rarely it is possible for an individual, maybe they have some Deep spiritual experience. Maybe they're out there in nature and all of a sudden they're at one with the universe.
8:55 Lewis Howes? They feel a presence, they feel connected, yeah.
8:58 Gabor Maté? Exactly. So that can happen, it does happen to some people.
9:02 Lewis Howes? And they just to choose, I'm gonna decide not to do this anymore.
9:05 Gabor Maté? They realize they don't need to.
9:08 Gabor Maté? Because they're free.
9:09 Lewis Howes? They feel free, interesting.
9:10 Gabor Maté? Yeah. Very rare. For most of us, people, beings that walk this earth, it takes a lot of self-awareness, it takes a lot of support, connection, guidance. So I'd say, if you're listening and you've got one of these issues where you're addicted to something in the way that Lewis and I are just talking about, don't wait for that miraculous moment. Get the help because you have a much better chance that way.
9:42 Lewis Howes? Yeah. So what would you say is the root cause of all addiction then? Is it feeling a wound? Is it feeling trapped by something that's happened in the past?
9:51 Gabor Maté? The being trapped itself is a sign of a wound. So the, in fact, the word trauma means wound. The Greek origin of the word trauma is a wound. So children who are hurt, but they're not supported, seen, accepted and helped, they get trapped in a wound. And being trapped in a wound and being trapped in the behaviors to escape from a wound, that's how the trauma shows up in our lives.
10:20 Lewis Howes? Interesting. And in our culture and our society. You know, I talk about this in my book as well, about how as a, you know, young boy growing up in the Midwest, in Ohio, I didn't see examples of older men or athletes that I aspired to be like, talking about their emotions, or talking about healing, or talking about, you know, I had a trauma, talking about how to, you know, navigate the full range of emotions. It was more, you just get made fun of if you cried.
10:52 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
10:52 Lewis Howes? You get picked on and called, you know, things you don't want to be called. You're kicked out of the tribe, you're not accepted in the tribe, and you're, you know, boys group growing up.
11:00 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
11:01 Lewis Howes? And so I feel like culturally, there's a lot of pain with men and women, obviously, but that it seems to be is causing a lot of the stress in the world right now. It's just this cultural pain.
11:16 Gabor Maté? Well, if I may be self-serving, my new book is called The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. So just as you say, the trauma that people are experiencing massively isn't just personal to them. It's also a sign of a culture that's completely out of whack. And when I say out of whack, the things we consider, the reason I called the book The Myth of Normal is what I'm saying is that the things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs.
11:50 Lewis Howes? It's not healthy.
11:51 Gabor Maté? It's totally unhealthy. So that the addictions and the diseases and the mental illnesses that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation. So that whatever addiction you had, or even this mask of rigid masculinity that you tried to adopt for a while until it cracked for you.
12:16 Lewis Howes? Right, needing to win, needing to be the best.
12:18 Gabor Maté? But that was a normal response.
12:20 Lewis Howes? To survive.
12:22 Gabor Maté? To survive, exactly. So that the abnormality wasn't in you, it was in the situation that you're in. That's what I mean by a toxic culture.
12:28 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
12:29 Gabor Maté? And I know, again, in your book, you talk about these public figures that all of a sudden you realize we're talking about their emotions.
12:38 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
12:39 Gabor Maté? But that's fairly new.
12:40 Lewis Howes? Very, in the last like five, 10 years.
12:43 Gabor Maté? Yeah, so these days, athletes will talk about their sexual abuse.
12:46 Lewis Howes? This didn't happen until 10 years ago, really, and really more three to five years ago, right?
12:51 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:52 Lewis Howes? And so now there's, why, why do you feel like people are now starting to open up who are more public figures? Why do you think that's happening?
12:57 Gabor Maté? Well, I think what's happened, that the toxicity of the culture, one of my subtitles is toxic culture, and it's got so bad. There's a Greek playwright that I quote in my book, he's Aeschylus. And he, one of his plays, he said that the way the gods created us, human beings, that we have to suffer, suffer into truth. And I think that the degree of suffering, 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, 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
13:40 Gabor Maté? and so widespread that something had to crack open.
13:43 Lewis Howes? Right.
13:44 Gabor Maté? So I think that's why, you know, it's got so bad that it couldn't be hidden anymore.
13:49 Lewis Howes? Why do you think in, you know, in our modern society, with all the medical and scientific advances and all the, the knowledge out there, that there's so much chronic pain though, so much suffering, when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before?
14:05 Gabor Maté? Actually, we don't, we are blessed. What we have is a lot more physiological, physical science, which is great. You know, I mean, if I needed a heart transplant, I'd be very grateful for modern medicine and, or, you know, if a broken bone or anything. But we've forgotten something that human beings have always known. And for example, I, I write about this friend of mine, his name is Louis Mel Madrona, and he's an American physician. He's Lakota background.
14:36 Lewis Howes? Okay.
14:37 Gabor Maté? And he told me that in his, and he's, and he's just like me, he's full of respect for Western medicine, I'm just trained in it, he was trained in it. We also see what's missing. And he said that in his tradition, when somebody gets sick, the whole community gathers and thanks the person and says, you're carrying some dysfunction in our whole culture. So your healing is our healing.
15:01 Lewis Howes? Wow.
15:02 Gabor Maté? So, so they get that the individual represents the culture and the environment and the family and the community. Now, Western medicine totally forgets that. We, we separate the mind from the body. So we, often when I speak to groups, I ask people if, if in the last five years, you've been to a neurologist or oncologist or a cardiologist or gastroenterologist or a rheumatologist.
15:30 Gabor Maté? Any kind of anologist, put your hand up, so people put their hands up. If you keep your hands up, if they ask you about stress in your life, trauma in your childhood. Relationships. Relationships, exactly. How you feel about your work? How do you feel about yourself as a human being? Very few hands stay up. And those questions, which have to do with, number one, the unity of mind and body, which is only a scientific fact, and the inseparableness of one human being from another, Western medicine completely ignores, which is contrary to science. It's not only contrary to ancient wisdom, it's also contrary to modern science. Because we have tens of thousands of studies
16:14 Gabor Maté? to show that you can't separate the mind from the body. Tens of thousands of studies showing how emotions significantly influence the onset of illness. How relationships do, you know? There's a wonderful psychiatrist here in L.A. You may know of him or him, Daniel Siegel. And Dan Siegel talks about what he calls interpersonal neurobiology, which means that our brains are not separate. Something in you will sense the tension in me, and will pick up on that. The intuition, the... Yeah, that'll change your brain. And I take it a step further. I talk about interpersonal biology. So that what happens to people physiologically is very affected.
16:59 Gabor Maté? Now, give me two examples. Yes. But affected by their culture and their family. So we've known for decades that children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma. The parent's stresses affect the physiology of the child. The breathing. The breathing, that they narrow the air tubes, they cause inflammation. By the way, how do we treat asthma with stress hormones? Adrenaline and cortisol, you know. We know American black women, the more experience of racism that you have to endure, the greater the risk for asthma. Really? We know that men who were sexually abused in childhood, their risk of heart disease triples. I could go on.
17:44 Gabor Maté? Women who suffer symptoms of PTSD severely, their risk of ovarian cancer doubles. Why? Because you can't separate the emotions from the body. It's one unit, scientifically speaking. Not just from the point of view of indigenous wisdom, but on modern science. So when I talk, when you say, despite all this knowledge, I'm saying what's missing from the knowledge. Is wisdom. Is the wisdom. And not just the wisdom, even the science. Right. That's what's so ironic. So I'm a physician, and as doctors, we always talk about evidence-based practice. And I say, my God, I only wish we had evidence-based practice. Let's look at the evidence. Right. You know, what's the evidence for separating the mind from the body? But multiple sclerosis, this mysterious illness.
18:29 Gabor Maté? The guy who first described multiple sclerosis was a French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, in the 19th century. He said that it was a disease caused by grief and long-term worry. Since then, there's been multiple studies showing the relationship of stress, trauma, and multiple sclerosis. You were the average neurologist with symptoms of MS, nobody's gonna ask you about your trauma. Hmm. And nobody's gonna ask you about your stress. And why is that significant? Because if you deal with the trauma and the stress, your multiple sclerosis can actually improve significantly. Wow. So there's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine.
19:12 Gabor Maté? And what we call scientific evidence-based practice is miraculous. It's amazing, but it's way too narrow.
19:25 Lewis Howes? What about something like arthritis? What is that? What would you say that's connected to?
19:29 Gabor Maté? Okay, that's been studied as well. So there was a great Canadian physician who actually was one of the founding physicians at Johns Hopkins Medical School. His name is William Mosler. He said in 1880 that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by long-term worry and stress.
19:47 Lewis Howes? Long-term worry and stress?
19:48 Gabor Maté? Yeah. Now, since then.
19:50 Lewis Howes? In 1890?
19:51 Gabor Maté? 1880 or 90.
19:52 Lewis Howes? Wow.
19:53 Gabor Maté? Yeah. He said this then. Since then, multiple dozens of studies showing a relationship between trauma, stress, and rheumatoid arthritis. Do you think the average rheumatologist knows anything about that?
20:06 Lewis Howes? Wow.
20:06 Gabor Maté? So that people go to... I know people in my book, The Myth or Normal. I talk about people with MS or arthritis who, once they start recognizing that the flare-ups of the disease actually manifest stresses in their lives, if they learn how to deal with those stresses. One woman told me that I have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis. She says it was my best teacher. Because every time it shows up, I know that I'm out of alignment with myself.
20:33 Lewis Howes? Yes. You're out of... Somewhere, you need to have a conversation with yourself or get back in alignment. It's interesting. I was telling you this before off-camera, that in a previous relationship that I was in, I was feeling a lot of chest pain and kind of tightness in my throat.
20:47 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
20:48 Lewis Howes? And at one point, like I was starting to get like this, I don't know if it was a rash or some type of flare-up, like below my belly button.
20:55 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
20:56 Lewis Howes? And I was like, what is this? Like, I've never had some type of like eczema or a skin condition or something. It was like this kind of bright red flare-up. And I was like, do I have a disease? Like, what is this? You know? And it's fascinating because I was telling you, like, the moment after many, many months of therapy and...
21:15 Lewis Howes? And starting to integrate the lessons of healing and really feel it internally, I started to feel this sense of peace inside of me for the first time. I didn't feel trapped for the first time
21:28 Lewis Howes? in myself, in my heart and in my body. And almost overnight, like this flare up was there for months. And I was like, oh, maybe I'm having, I had like allergy tests and I was like, maybe it's peanuts. I don't know, all these different like foods that I'm eating. And I was like, eliminating the foods and it's still there. It was almost overnight when I felt the peace inside of me. The flare ups went away and they haven't come back. And I was like,
21:52 Gabor Maté? So if you had come to me with that rash, I would have asked you.
21:57 Lewis Howes? Not what are you eating?
21:58 Gabor Maté? No, I wouldn't. Well, that might have. And those are good questions. But I also would have asked you, what is your body saying no to?
22:05 Lewis Howes? It's rejecting.
22:06 Gabor Maté? That you're not saying no to.
22:07 Lewis Howes? Oh my gosh.
22:09 Gabor Maté? You know, um, now a flare up. If you take that word flare up, which is what you use.
22:15 Lewis Howes? Yeah, it's inflammation, right? Something's inflamed.
22:17 Gabor Maté? Okay, right. But where else to use, what else flares up? You know what flares up is rage, anger. But you had anger that you weren't expressing.
22:28 Lewis Howes? Right.
22:29 Gabor Maté? That hence your body flares up.
22:31 Lewis Howes? Yes.
22:31 Gabor Maté? We know that suppressed emotions cause inflammation. So had you come to me, not had you come to me when I was out of medical school, because I wouldn't know anything about this. Nobody teaches you this stuff. But if you had come to me more recently, I would have asked you, well, Lewis, what is your body saying no to that you're not saying no to?
22:52 Gabor Maté? And, and that happens in two major areas, relationships and, and, and, and work, you know?
23:00 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
23:00 Gabor Maté? And so the, the body sends those signals and we can learn from it. And now the problem is that you go to the average physician.
23:10 Lewis Howes? They're not gonna ask those things.
23:12 Gabor Maté? They, they, they're just gonna try and collude with you to try and get rid of the symptom.
23:17 Lewis Howes? Not, you know, Not find the root.
23:18 Gabor Maté? Which is, that's okay. I mean, you, you don't want to sit there with a rash. It's fine. But also let's look at the source of it.
23:24 Lewis Howes? Yes.
23:25 Gabor Maté? And, and, and the source is always assumed to be something physical.
23:31 Gabor Maté? Maybe they'll think of food. Maybe they'll think of some toxin. They will not think of your emotions.
23:35 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
23:36 Gabor Maté? Even though the mind and body are inseparable.
23:38 Lewis Howes? How much stronger do you think the emotional weight or trauma is than physical toxins? You know, in terms of affecting the body?
23:53 Gabor Maté? I can't make that assessment because I don't know what study would even compare the two.
23:58 Lewis Howes? Sure.
23:58 Gabor Maté? I don't, I don't want to speak.
24:00 Lewis Howes? Right.
24:00 Gabor Maté? Off the cuff, but what I can tell you is that the emotions are really primary in most chronic conditions. And if you deal with them, now in this society where there's all these toxins in the environment and junk in the food and all this, who knows?
24:16 Lewis Howes? Process everything.
24:17 Gabor Maté? But, but what I know is that the emotions play a huge role and that that can have an impact on their illness. And the other thing I've, I don't know about you when you write books, but I write books as much for myself as for anybody else.
24:34 Lewis Howes? Hundred percent.
24:35 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
24:35 Lewis Howes? This show is for me.
24:36 Gabor Maté? Yeah, exactly. So I get to learn a lot when I'm writing. So one of the things I, I learned when I was writing, writing the Myth of Normal was even how we think about disease. Like you, people say, I have eczema or I have depression or I have rheumatoid arthritis or I have ADD. Now, there's an assumption there, isn't there? The assumption is first of all, is that there's this thing called ADD. There's this thing called eczema. There's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis. Or there's this thing called depression. Then there's an I. And the I has that thing. But that thing has got its own separate, independent nature.
25:19 Gabor Maté? But to say that I have this disease makes the assumption that this disease got a separate life and nature of its own. It doesn't. What if we saw a disease of all kinds, mental or physical or addiction? Not as the things in themselves that have their own nature, but as processes that manifest our lives.
25:41 Gabor Maté? And if I live my life differently, then I can have an impact on that process. So that process will change. That's exactly actually how it is. So for shorthand language, I understand it's helpful to say I have depression. Right. But. How important is the words we choose? But it's, but it's, but it's, but if we, if we buy into that language, we're actually missing the point because you don't have it. There's no it that's separate from you. And that means that if you change yourself, in fact, there have been, there's a friend of mine now, a recent friend, Dr. Jeff Rediger, who's a psychiatrist at Harvard. And last year he wrote a book called Cured: The Science of Spontaneous Healing.
26:25 Gabor Maté? That was the subtitle. Now, he studied people who were terminally ill, documented to be so. They had no prognosis whatsoever, and then they get better. So they were terminally ill, they were not supposed to survive? They're not supposed to survive. Supposed to die in a few years or something? Or months or weeks. I, I, I've, I've talked to such people myself. And they've cured their disease? There's a woman called a psychologist called Kelly Turner, who studied the same thing, sure, a book called Radical Remission. So all three of us have looked at these people. They've done, they did it in a research kind of way. I just did it impressionistically, you know? But I do check out the histories of people's doctors.
27:09 Gabor Maté? We all know people who've got, supposed to have two months to live or six months to live. Either medical treatments has failed or they refuse medical treatment. Then also the disease goes away.
27:22 Gabor Maté? I think all three of us have found that what makes the biggest difference is that the person changes their relationship to themselves. Wow. And there's always trauma in the background. Now. Jeff and Kelly have documented people, they go on diets, they take supplements, they start meditating.
27:39 Lewis Howes? They go into nature, they're, yeah.
27:40 Gabor Maté? They go into nature, the whole thing.
27:42 Lewis Howes? All those things are great.
27:43 Gabor Maté? Yeah, a- and I think the, but I think Jeff and I agree, and I think Kelly would probably agree as well, that the biggest shift is in one's relationship with oneself. In other words, the life changes, the process changes. Now, I'm not promising everybody who's listening, you can cure yourself, I mean, you know, it's no, this is not snake oil. I'm just talking about the importance of recognizing the impact of emotions and one's relationship to oneself on one's physiology. That's all I'm talking about.
28:10 Lewis Howes? There's an external environment, and then there's an internal environment, you know, our emotional environment.
28:15 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
28:16 Lewis Howes? That is connected to our, I'm assuming, our nervous system, our heart, our brain, the whole body and everything. And if our emotional environment is sick, then we're probably going to be physically sick as well.
28:30 Gabor Maté? Well, that's what you, that's, that's what your story actually.
28:32 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
28:34 Gabor Maté? Illustrates, isn't it? As soon as you create a, an internal environment, your physical issues abate, you know? But I was speaking of, I just noticed I'm getting too excited here. This is, I'm, this is my passion, I mean, I, I just could go on about this forever, but I'm also noticing, probably I'm getting a bit too heated here and, uh.
28:53 Lewis Howes? You're getting warm.
28:54 Gabor Maté? Yeah, I just, no, and I don't physically so much, I just noticed I need to calm down a bit. I don't wanna, I don't wanna talk too fast.
29:00 Lewis Howes? No, I like it. You get, this is, this is exciting for me.
29:03 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
29:04 Lewis Howes? Well, I just feel like this is the, what you were just saying.
29:06 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
29:07 Lewis Howes? Emotional repression is a major cause of physical illness. It may not be the only cause, there's other factors, but what we, uh, you know, suppress usually comes to the surface in some way, is that correct?
29:20 Gabor Maté? That's the whole point.
29:21 Lewis Howes? And most of us, I'll speak for myself, I wasn't taught, and I think most of us are not taught on how to express the emotional traumas, the emotional pains, fears, insecurities, shames, guilt. We're, we're not taught the skills. It's one of the reasons why I started the School of Greatness, cause I was like, I wish I would have learned these skills in school.
29:43 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
29:43 Lewis Howes? You know, most of, most people's parents are messed up in some way or have some issues and they aren't taught this. And so we're, you know, I grew up in a household that was very stressful and chaotic and there wasn't stability.
29:55 Gabor Maté? So did my kids, by the way.
29:56 Lewis Howes? Right. And you're like the guy, right?
29:58 Gabor Maté? But I wasn't the guy then.
30:00 Lewis Howes? You weren't the guy then.
30:01 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
30:02 Lewis Howes? So your kids had to, had some traumas that they had to face because of you and their parents.
30:08 Gabor Maté? It's not even a matter of skills learning. It's deeper than that. Because you don't have to teach any one day old baby how to express their emotions, do you?
30:17 Lewis Howes? No.
30:17 Gabor Maté? If they're sad, lonely, do you hear about it? If they're hungry or uncomfortable, do you hear about it?
30:22 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
30:23 Gabor Maté? Of course you do. There's nothing to teach. You have to allow it. And you have to, um, give space for it. And you have to hear it and respond to it. The, the, the problem with most parents is not that they don't teach their kids these skills. It's that how they really live their lives because of their own traumas and because of the stresses in the society. They actually discourage kids.
30:45 Lewis Howes? Don't cry, stop crying.
30:47 Gabor Maté? Yeah, from, from what's natural.
30:48 Lewis Howes? Suck it up.
30:49 Gabor Maté? Well, look.
30:49 Lewis Howes? Don't do this, don't do that, right?
30:51 Gabor Maté? Well, well, I, you know, there's a very famous Canadian psychologist, I don't know if he's been on your program, but he, um, he says that an angry child should be made to sit by himself.
31:03 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
31:04 Gabor Maté? Until they come back to normal.
31:06 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
31:06 Gabor Maté? In other words, anger in a two-year-old is not normal.
31:09 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
31:10 Gabor Maté? And we have to socialize it out of them. No.
31:13 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
31:14 Gabor Maté? The, no, there's nothing more natural than an angry two-year-old.
31:19 Lewis Howes? There's nothing more natural than that.
31:20 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They get frustrated, you know? They want a cookie, they get a cookie before.
31:24 Lewis Howes? They don't get what they want.
31:25 Gabor Maté? Yeah, they want a cookie, you know, they want a cookie before dinner and if you're a good parent, you're not gonna give them a cookie before dinner.
31:31 Lewis Howes? Right.
31:31 Gabor Maté? So.
31:32 Lewis Howes? When do you teach, or when does someone learn how to not express anger every 10 minutes though?
31:37 Gabor Maté? Well, here's the point. If that two-year-old then starts screaming or throwing a tantrum, getting angry.
31:46 Gabor Maté? If you say time out and you're not gonna be with them.
31:51 Gabor Maté? Now you're presenting a child with a tragic dilemma. I can have my authentic emotion. Or I can have my relationship with my parent on whom my life depends.
32:03 Gabor Maté? So I can be authentic, or I can be attached in a relationship, but I can't have both.
32:08 Lewis Howes? Interesting, because if I'm not authentic, or if I'm authentic, then I'm gonna be alone.
32:14 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
32:14 Lewis Howes? I'm gonna be on time out or whatever.
32:16 Gabor Maté? And to the child, a time out is life threatening.
32:20 Lewis Howes? Because you might be alone forever, right?
32:22 Gabor Maté? Yeah, the child doesn't know that, you see.
32:23 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
32:24 Gabor Maté? So basically, you're threatening the child with depriving them of their greatest need, which is the connection with you.
32:30 Lewis Howes? Your love.
32:31 Gabor Maté? Yeah, the love, yeah. No.
32:33 Lewis Howes? But isn't there a point, though, if you're a 21-year-old man now and you're, you know, screaming every 10 minutes because you don't get the cookie?
32:39 Gabor Maté? But that's not the answer.
32:40 Lewis Howes? Right.
32:41 Gabor Maté? The answer is, the answer is when they're screaming, to pick them up. You're angry at daddy, aren't you? You really wish you had that cookie. Yeah, oh, I get it. You know, and then the child relaxes and the anger moves through them. And you know what they learn? That anger is just something that moves through you, you can let go of it. If you don't see the child, don't accept the child's emotion, they're gonna have to repress it.
33:09 Lewis Howes? Have to stuff it.
33:10 Gabor Maté? What's another word for stuffing? It's pushing down.
33:12 Lewis Howes? Trap it, yeah.
33:13 Gabor Maté? Well, pushing down.
33:14 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
33:15 Gabor Maté? What's another word for pushing down? Depressing. Where does depression come from? It's not this disease. Depression comes from having had to push down your emotions.
33:24 Lewis Howes? Wow.
33:24 Gabor Maté? Literally had to push down your emotions. In other words, why did you have to push down your emotions? To stay connected to your parents. In other words, it was a coping mechanism. And what I'm saying is that a lot of illness, whether of the mind or the body or both, comes from coping mechanisms. There are normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation. It's not normal for a child to be banished from the presence of the parent. If you look at indigenous people, they carry their kids everywhere. The kids are always with the parents. And the...
34:02 Gabor Maté? The pilgrims, when they arrived in North America, they're very upset with how the natives reared their children. You know why? Because the indigenous people did not hit their kids.
34:11 Lewis Howes? They didn't hit their kids?
34:12 Gabor Maté? They didn't hit their kids. And the Christians couldn't understand this.
34:16 Lewis Howes? Why they didn't, you know, create obedience with them, right?
34:20 Gabor Maté? Yeah, yeah.
34:21 Lewis Howes? So what do they do?
34:23 Gabor Maté? They nourish them. And when you nourish a child, see, nature has got a natural agenda. Is that you should grow up to be a self-regulated adult in connection with yourself and with other people. That's nature's agenda. It's like, nature has an agenda for an acorn to become an oak tree. But an acorn doesn't spontaneously become an oak tree. It has to have the right conditions. So it's not a question of teaching the oak tree, the acorn, to be an oak tree. Just give it the nourishment and the sunlight and the earth and irrigation that it needs. It's nature to become an oak tree. The nature of human beings is to become self-regulated, socially responsible creatures.
35:07 Gabor Maté? That's how we evolved. Given the right conditions, that will happen. So it's not a question of teaching all these things. Yeah, there's some teaching involved. Mostly it's the question of meeting children's needs, giving them the right conditions, and then they will develop self-regulation. They learn it because you're self-regulated, so they're watching you.
35:27 Lewis Howes? You're not reactive and explosive and screaming.
35:30 Gabor Maté? You're not reactive, you know? Your eyes, "Oh, I'm angry. Okay, I'm angry." But you're not screaming at the kid. You know, so in a right environment, these traits spontaneously evolve or develop in a human being. So our society is always about how do we teach these skills and those skills? Well, teaching is important, but more important is the child's spontaneous growth, given the right environment. And what I'm saying about this toxic culture, we don't give our kids the right environment.
36:04 Lewis Howes? Yeah, I mean, you hear the number, the statistic that 50% of marriages turn into divorce these days and also probably, I think when I had Esther Perel on, I was like, how many of the 50% that are married are actually happy? It's a very small percentage, too.
36:18 Gabor Maté? So I've had a marriage that we've had a lot of unhappiness. We've been married 53 years now.
36:22 Lewis Howes? 53?
36:23 Gabor Maté? Yeah, we're very happy together.
36:24 Lewis Howes? Now you are.
36:25 Gabor Maté? But we took us, took us a lot of work, a lot of commitment. But here's what I want to say. There's two ways you can tell if a marriage is unhappy. One is you can ask the parents. The other is you can measure the cortisol level of the children.
36:40 Lewis Howes? Oh, wow.
36:41 Gabor Maté? Because the parent stresses affect the physiology of the child.
36:45 Lewis Howes? Oh, man, my, my cortisol must have been off the charts, but I was, all of us children, yeah.
36:50 Gabor Maté? It probably would have been. And so in this society, and this is not the fault of individual parents, like, it begins in the uterus, actually. Already stresses in the pregnant woman will affect the physiology of the child.
37:06 Lewis Howes? Really?
37:06 Gabor Maté? Yeah, oh, yeah. No, in this society, so many pregnant women are so stressed. In the States particularly.
37:13 Lewis Howes? You're talking about more emotional stress because there's physical stress of like the bodies expanding and growing and aches and pains, but the emotional stress.
37:21 Gabor Maté? I mean, emotional stress of having to.
37:23 Lewis Howes? The nervous system.
37:24 Gabor Maté? Perform on the job or being in a difficult relationship. In, in one of the chapters in the book, I talk about, it begins with the diary of my wife, who was writing it when she was pregnant with one of our children, about how unhappy she was. And she's talking to the infant, saying, please don't take this stress personally. And she wrote that, and I quoted it in, in the middle of Normal. And she knew what I didn't know. And no, no, she was unhappy because of her relationship.
37:52 Lewis Howes? She was unhappy because of the relationship.
37:54 Gabor Maté? She was unhappy because of what was going on in her relationship with me, being a workaholic doctor.
37:59 Lewis Howes? Not, not being there, not being available emotionally or.
38:02 Gabor Maté? Exactly, exactly. And even blaming her, you know, for how I was feeling, you know.
38:06 Lewis Howes? Wow.
38:07 Gabor Maté? So she's talking to this infant inside her, and that's why I opened one of the chapters. So already in the uterus, these stresses start happening. Lot of evidence for that scientifically, brain scans, blood work, all kinds of stuff. Then there's labor, which in our society is very often mechanical and, and emotionally very difficult. And in the United States, twenty-five percent of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. Now, that infant is meant to be with the mother for at least nine months, I would say years, but at least nine months. That infant is abandoned at two weeks. That's how they experience it.
38:43 Lewis Howes? Oh, man.
38:45 Gabor Maté? Even if they're looked after by
38:47 Lewis Howes? Someone.
38:47 Gabor Maté? Someone else, but the mother, the infant needs the mother's body.
38:51 Lewis Howes? Yeah, that was, my mom was working pretty, probably pretty fast after each one of us were born, you know, had to go back to work and, yeah.
38:58 Gabor Maté? And I'm not blaming the women.
39:00 Lewis Howes? Right.
39:00 Gabor Maté? They have no choice.
39:01 Lewis Howes? Yes.
39:02 Gabor Maté? I'm saying, but this society puts so stresses on women, it, it then doesn't support them to the pregnancy, then it puts a lot, and, and only that. We didn't grow up in individual, uh, isolated nuclear families, did we? We evolved in small band hunter, hunter gatherer groups where people supported each other, where children were with adults all day, where adults collaborated, they had to, otherwise they wouldn't survive.
39:32 Lewis Howes? Right.
39:33 Gabor Maté? So, that's where our nature actually evolved. So, when you get this society, which tells you that people are by nature selfish and aggressive and competitive, which isolates mothers, uh, in, in, in, in, in separate homes, where the community is more and more, you know, there's lots of, lots of work done by sociologists and others in the States about how communities are breaking down. There was that book, uh, Bowling Alone, some years ago, twenty years ago now, about the breakdown of community, so that people are not getting support, and that means they're stressed.
40:07 Lewis Howes? And the mothers are doing it all on their own.
40:09 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
40:10 Lewis Howes? Right. But they're also expecting the, the husband to, you know, work and also be at home as opposed to reaching out to peers or family or friends and
40:19 Gabor Maté? Exactly. So, it, it's, it's a very unnatural culture, and no wonder so many kids are getting diagnosed. And then, and with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder or depression, you know, there's article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago, also in the New York Times, I think. About the rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides in the US. It's mysterious. It's not mysterious. These kids are no longer having their developmental needs met. They feel alone and desperate and scared.
40:52 Lewis Howes? And the drug use is on the rise and addiction and
40:56 Gabor Maté? That's right. There's nothing mysterious about it. If you look at the cultural setting. It's only mysterious if we think we're dealing with isolated mental health issues or isolated physiological issues. But we see the connections. Nothing mysterious.
41:12 Lewis Howes? So what are the main, I guess, mental health?
41:18 Lewis Howes? Are they diseases or are they not considered a disease? Like depression, ADD, ADHD? What are the main mental health symptoms out in the world right now, could you say?
41:29 Gabor Maté? Yeah, so
41:32 Gabor Maté? depression and anxiety are fast growing and they're major challenges. More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD. More and more kids are being diagnosed with something called oppositional defiant disorder, which
41:47 Lewis Howes? What is that?
41:48 Gabor Maté? Opposition. That's when a kid is defiant and oppositional. And goes against adult values and adult expectations.
42:00 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
42:01 Gabor Maté? But we think there's something wrong with the kid. Instead of looking at the context of what makes the kid
42:05 Lewis Howes? The environment, yeah.
42:07 Gabor Maté? No, are these diseases? Well,
42:13 Gabor Maté? you can talk about them as diseases to some degree. And certainly, you know, I've had depression and I've taken medication for it in my 40s and it really made a difference for me. You might call it a disease, but actually that's a shallow way of looking at it. Because actually
42:31 Gabor Maté? What does it go back to? It goes back to being a one-year-old infant, or being a three-month-old infant. In the book, The Myth of Normal, the first chapter has a painting in it. The painting is by my wife, based on a photograph of me and my mother. This is Budapest, Hungary, 1944, and I'm three months of age. And my mother in the photograph is wearing a yellow star the Jews had to wear. My father was a reinforced labor, and within two months, her parents would be killed in Auschwitz. That was my first year of life.
43:06 Lewis Howes? Oh, my gosh.
43:07 Gabor Maté? And the look on my face is full of terror. I was absorbing my mother's fear and my mother's anxiety.
43:15 Lewis Howes? Because she had terror in her face, and you're mimicking and...
43:18 Gabor Maté? She had it in her body.
43:20 Lewis Howes? Body. You're connected to her, feeding ten times a day.
43:23 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
43:24 Lewis Howes? And you're feeling the stress.
43:25 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
43:26 Lewis Howes? There's probably now no calm in her.
43:29 Gabor Maté? There's no calm there. And, but, she's already so stressed, and she's just trying to make sure that we survive. She's not there to really receive my feelings. And then, when I'm a year old, or eleven months old, she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life, because she didn't think, where we're staying, I would survive for a day, and probably I wouldn't have.
43:51 Lewis Howes? Wow.
43:52 Gabor Maté? So I didn't see her for six weeks, five or six weeks. And...
43:55 Lewis Howes? And you're one?
43:56 Gabor Maté? I was one then, yeah.
43:57 Lewis Howes? Oh, my gosh.
43:58 Gabor Maté? And now, what could I do as a one-year-old? I could do two things, or as an infant going through all that. First of all, how do I deal with all that stress? I tune out. I tune out, I become absent-minded as an adopt, as an adaptive mechanism.
44:17 Lewis Howes? A coping mechanism.
44:18 Gabor Maté? Exactly. Fifty-five years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by tuning out. Is it a disease? The heck, it's a disease. It started as a coping mechanism. I'm also diagnosed with depression. Why? Because in that moment, I had to push my feelings down in order to not to burden my mother. It was already burdened enough.
44:39 Lewis Howes? Create more peace and more...
44:41 Gabor Maté? So I took that on, so I pushed on my feelings. I depressed my feelings. Then I have this depression. So are they diseases? Well, you can talk about them that way, but I say they began as coping mechanisms. And I'll tell you another story. I'm seventy-eight now, so six, seven years ago. I'm in San Francisco with a therapist and I've taken mushrooms.
45:05 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
45:06 Gabor Maté? She works with mushrooms and I've I worked with psychedelics and it's one of the things I write about.
45:14 Gabor Maté? And that but this time I'm the patient, I'm the client.
45:18 Gabor Maté? And I'm lying there on the mat, under the influence of the psilocybin. And I know exactly who I am. I'm seventy one years old. I'm a medical doctor, I'm a writer, I'm a speaker, I'm married to such as, you know, my wife Ray. This is a therapist, so I'm not like hallucinating. I know exactly where I'm, but at the same time.
45:39 Gabor Maté? I'm experiencing myself as a one year old infant.
45:41 Lewis Howes? Oh my goodness.
45:42 Gabor Maté? And this therapist is my mom, is my mom. And I start crying and I say, I'm so sorry I've made your life so difficult.
45:50 Lewis Howes? Wow.
45:51 Gabor Maté? That's my one year old self, all of a sudden, under the influence, speaking up. I took it on that early that I'm responsible. Now you talked about.
46:00 Lewis Howes? My gosh.
46:00 Gabor Maté? In our conversation before, you told me about how you were in this relationship and you couldn't leave it even long after you realized it wasn't right for you. Cause you took on the responsibility of how the other person would feel if you would quote let them down. I'm telling you, that's your one year old speaking. That you took responsibility for the suffering of your parents.
46:21 Lewis Howes? Wow.
46:22 Gabor Maté? And and and how you you mustn't let anybody down, cause it's your responsibility. We take this stuff on so early without without words, actually. They just become ingrained and then we then we live our lives out of it. Until something happens like she did for you, your body rebelled.
46:41 Lewis Howes? You have a breakdown or something happens, right? And you're like, either keep breaking down or it wakes you up and say, okay, why is this happening? What is? What is off, what is out of alignment, what is, you know, where am I, out of integrity, whatever it might be.
46:56 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
46:57 Lewis Howes? And I feel the challenge is, I was like, I want to end this suffering. You know, I've repeated this pattern many times. I'm sick and tired of this suffering.
47:07 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
47:07 Lewis Howes? I'll do whatever. You know, I think when you, for me, I was like, I've felt enough of this. I don't want it anymore. But it took so much courage to face these things for me. And I know other people have deeper traumas or different traumas and it's, it just seems so challenging.
47:25 Gabor Maté? I wouldn't go there. I would not compare your trauma to anybody else's.
47:28 Lewis Howes? Well, we all have our unique traumas, right? Different experiences that we face.
47:34 Lewis Howes? Why is it so challenging for people to face it and start addressing it? I was telling you, you know, I've been doing pretty intensive therapy for about a year and a half now, every two weeks.
47:45 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
47:45 Lewis Howes? Not because I feel like something's wrong with me anymore, that I'm stressed more, because I want to maintain a level of peace.
47:51 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
47:51 Lewis Howes? And I want to continue to maintain peace.
47:53 Gabor Maté? Good for you.
47:54 Lewis Howes? So, once I realized and started healing, I didn't say, I'm good.
47:58 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
47:58 Lewis Howes? I was like, I want to go to the next level of
48:01 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
48:01 Lewis Howes? peace, love, you know, an environment of beauty inside of my emotions. But why is it so hard for so many people to face it and actually speak the shame, guilt, insecurity, you know, imperfection about them?
48:16 Gabor Maté? Well, I think in your own work, you've touched upon very accurately on, on why it's so difficult. For one thing, if you, if you just, just the words that you just used, peace and love and connection, if you had played that to your 20-year-old self, how would he have responded?
48:34 Lewis Howes? Uh, he'd been like, suck it up, or he'd been like, what are you talking about? You're fine, like, yeah, don't be a little wuss, or, you know, just work harder, you know?
48:42 Gabor Maté? Yeah. But where would that have come from?
48:47 Lewis Howes? Just my entire conditioning growing up from sports and, you know.
48:51 Gabor Maté? Okay, so there's that.
48:52 Lewis Howes? The house.
48:53 Gabor Maté? So that's one of the factors, is the conditioning in this culture, okay?
48:59 Gabor Maté? I also say it would have come from intense fear. Because if you actually, it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself.
49:07 Lewis Howes? It's terrifying.
49:08 Gabor Maté? Yeah, it's terrifying. So there's intense fear.
49:13 Gabor Maté? So there's the conditioning, as you say, then there's the fear, it really is fear, painful. You know, nobody wants to have pain, you know?
49:22 Gabor Maté? But that's called growing pains. And the third factor is, we all develop this personality. Now, the personality, we think that's us, but it's not us.
49:32 Lewis Howes? Right.
49:32 Gabor Maté? The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods. Along with some genuine traits. So the personality is kind of an amalgam of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities.
49:46 Lewis Howes? Yeah, some good stuff, but then some also coping, yeah, yeah. Because I remember, I used to be like, I was a fun-loving guy. I was like a kind, generous, but then, when there was a trigger, it was like I was angry and, you know, defensive and guarded and things like that.
50:01 Gabor Maté? Or you talk about the various masks, the sexual mask, or the...
50:06 Lewis Howes? Material mask.
50:08 Gabor Maté? The aggressive mask, you know?
50:12 Gabor Maté? When I started reading a chapter on the sexual mask, you wrote about some guy, whose name I forget, but who's sort of the champion, picking up women. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for one split second. But what's that? It's having to prove to himself that he's lovable. Where does that come from, you know? So, but we identify with it.
50:32 Lewis Howes? Yes.
50:33 Gabor Maté? So we think we're the personality, I'm this sexually attractive guy, or I'm this aggressive guy, I'm this material guy who's gonna make it in the world, you know? And so we think that we are our personality. So it comes from, I say, three sources. One is the conditioning, the other is the fear of the pain, and thirdly, the identification with the personality. We think that's who we are, and we don't know who we'd be without it. All of which is all based on trauma.
50:59 Lewis Howes? Yeah, it's the identi-, you know, building this identity that, you know, and I talk about how the identity has supported you to accomplishing certain things or protecting you from certain things by having this identity.
51:13 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
51:14 Lewis Howes? But it's also not serving us to hold on to that identity if we want the next level of peace and freedom.
51:19 Gabor Maté? Exactly.
51:20 Lewis Howes? So it's, but it's so hard to kill an identity. It's like you've had this thing for decades, maybe, and you've got to let go of this thing.
51:27 Gabor Maté? Yeah, well, you see, I wouldn't even talk about killing. I mean, in my healing chapters of this book, I talk about, let's make friends with it. Like, for example, I have to, by the way, I have to be honest. I said that I wouldn't be in this guy's shoes for a minute. That's not true. Part of me was envying him. You know, even here, I'm seventy-eight and married twenty-three years, but I read about this guy who slept with all these women. Why couldn't I be that guy, you know? I don't want to go there and I wouldn't. I've long ago chosen not to, but, but there's still something that,
52:01 Gabor Maté? who doesn't want to be wanted that much?
52:03 Lewis Howes? Right.
52:03 Gabor Maté? You know?
52:04 Lewis Howes? Something with the ego or the desire, yeah.
52:06 Gabor Maté? Yeah, so, but if we didn't kill those parts, but made friends with them, if somebody came to me with that kind of pattern of, I'm not sexual guy,
52:23 Gabor Maté? but they don't want to, but they realize that it's not, they might feel high for a moment, like any addict will.
52:28 Lewis Howes? It's not fulfilling.
52:29 Gabor Maté? It's not fulfilling. I wouldn't say kill that part of you. I'd say, let's make friends with it. Let's find out what it's really trying to do for you. What it's trying to do for you is trying to make you feel wanted, make you feel valuable, make you feel desirable, make you feel loved temporarily, make you feel powerful. What happened to you that you don't feel lovable, that you don't feel desirable, that you don't feel powerful? You know, in other words, it's not a matter of getting rid of these parts or these aspects of ourselves. It's a question of actually getting to know them. And they all began as coping mechanisms. That man that you describe in your book, I guarantee is a highly traumatized human being.
53:12 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? 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?
53:37 Gabor Maté? That's right.
53:38 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?
54:18 Gabor Maté? Well, I mean, it's not that I can be a quiet 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. 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.
54:41 Lewis Howes? The world just revolves around me.
54:43 Gabor Maté? Exactly. So if bad things are happening to me, it must be a bad person.
54:49 Gabor Maté? Number one. Number two, I didn't fight back.
54:56 Lewis Howes? I couldn't defend myself.
54:57 Gabor Maté? And so that makes me weak and, you know, and 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?
55:17 Lewis Howes? Just depends what age you are.
55:18 Gabor Maté? No, but as a young child.
55:21 Lewis Howes? If you fight back on...
55:23 Gabor Maté? Against the sexual abuser.
55:25 Lewis Howes? Oh, right.
55:25 Gabor Maté? What would happen to you?
55:26 Lewis Howes? Who knows? I mean, it could have been even worse.
55:28 Gabor Maté? And were you in a position to run?
55:31 Lewis Howes? No.
55:31 Gabor Maté? No?
55:32 Lewis Howes? I was trapped in a bathroom.
55:32 Gabor Maté? So, the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated.
55:40 Lewis Howes? It's protecting yourself.
55:41 Gabor Maté? You're protecting yourself. And the part of the nervous system that feeds you, just be still, you get through this.
55:49 Lewis Howes? Wait till it passes.
55:50 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.
55:59 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."
56:05 Gabor Maté? That's the first point.
56:06 Lewis Howes? Man.
56:07 Gabor Maté? The second point is,
56:11 Gabor Maté? if I can ask you, how old were you when this happened to you?
56:13 Lewis Howes? Five.
56:13 Gabor Maté? And how long did it go on for?
56:15 Lewis Howes? It's probably ten, fifteen minutes, yeah.
56:18 Gabor Maté? No, but it was only one time?
56:20 Lewis Howes? One time, yeah.
56:20 Gabor Maté? Okay, who would you speak to about it?
56:22 Lewis Howes? No one.
56:22 Gabor Maté? Okay, now, you don't have kids yet.
56:25 Lewis Howes? No.
56:26 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?
56:32 Lewis Howes? Me.
56:33 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?
56:41 Lewis Howes? How would I explain it to...
56:42 Gabor Maté? How would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened?
56:49 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.
56:55 Gabor Maté? And that was your primary trauma?
56:57 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
56:57 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...
57:08 Lewis Howes? The weakness in you.
57:09 Gabor Maté? They have a laser, like...
57:11 Lewis Howes? Here's an insecure, weak person, yeah.
57:14 Gabor Maté? Which, by the way, speaks to their own trauma.
57:16 Lewis Howes? Right.
57:17 Gabor Maté? But they have laser, like the physicians who abuse their patients, the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers.
57:28 Lewis Howes? They see a weakness.
57:29 Gabor Maté? 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 the first thing that happened.
57:48 Lewis Howes? Yeah, I mean, that's the case for sure.
57:50 Gabor Maté? So, to answer your question, then, if somebody comes to me with those issues, now, first of all, if somebody realizes those things, I'd say,
58:01 Gabor Maté? "Don't try to do this on your own."
58:03 Lewis Howes? It's so hard.
58:04 Gabor Maté? Talk to somebody.
58:05 Lewis Howes? It's so hard.
58:06 Gabor Maté? Yeah, well, look, 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.
58:17 Lewis Howes? It's a safe space to...
58:19 Gabor Maté? It's a 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,
58:38 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, in which Jesus says, "That what you shall bring out of you will save you, and what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you." He says something like that.
58:54 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
58:55 Gabor Maté? And he was a supreme psychologist.
58:56 Lewis Howes? Wow.
58:57 Gabor Maté? And so you gotta bring it out.
59:00 Lewis Howes? Yeah, what you suppress becomes more depressed, right? It's like...
59:03 Gabor Maté? Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's gotta start with that somewhere.
59:07 Lewis Howes? You've gotta bring it out. And if someone has a... 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.
59:24 Gabor Maté? I hear that all the time.
59:25 Lewis Howes? It wasn't that big of a deal.
59:26 Gabor Maté? I hear that all the time.
59:29 Lewis Howes? I shouldn't be that concerned about it. I was five, who cares, you know, it was like, what do we.
59:34 Gabor Maté? Okay, then that's a very simple way to answer that.
59:38 Lewis Howes? But why are we so messed up right now?
59:39 Gabor Maté? No, no, no, not at all. If a five-year-old kid came to you and you were the uncle.
59:47 Gabor Maté? Uncle Louis. This guy did such and such to me. And I'm really scared and hurt. Would you say to them, oh, no big deal?
1:00:00 Lewis Howes? No.
1:00:00 Gabor Maté? Think of all the other kids that worse things have happened to. Would you say that? Why wouldn't you say that?
1:00:07 Lewis Howes? Because I'd want to be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen and loved.
1:00:11 Gabor Maté? And what would be the impact if you did say that?
1:00:15 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.
1:00:23 Gabor Maté? But you see, that's what you're saying to yourself.
1:00:25 Lewis Howes? Right.
1:00:26 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. There's no self-compassion there.
1:00:34 Lewis Howes? Right.
1:00:34 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.
1:00:43 Gabor Maté? And again, 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.
1:01:07 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, the wide range of emotions because they probably suppress the emotions themselves.
1:01:25 Gabor Maté? I mean, that's the whole point.
1:01:26 Lewis Howes? Right.
1:01:27 Gabor Maté? Is that they're, they're not, they're not comfortable with the child's pain.
1:01:31 Lewis Howes? Somebody crying, they're like, I can't handle it.
1:01:33 Gabor Maté? They can't handle it, yeah.
1:01:34 Lewis Howes? You know, my daddy should be like, stop crying, you know, just stop. You know, 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.
1:01:45 Gabor Maté? The emotions.
1:01:46 Lewis Howes? Yeah, the emotions.
1:01:46 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?
1:02:07 Lewis Howes? Oh, man, yeah, it was messed up too.
1:02:08 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:09 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
1:02:09 Gabor Maté? So this goes on from generation to generation.
1:02:11 Lewis Howes? 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 struggled from the war, from this or from the depression and, and their parents suffered and it was all about survival. It wasn't about thriving.
1:02:48 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:49 Lewis Howes? So how do we break, I guess, the generational trauma?
1:02:53 Gabor Maté? Yeah.
1:02:53 Lewis Howes? And not let it pass down to our children?
1:02:56 Gabor Maté? So not being seen is a major source of trauma?
1:02:59 Lewis Howes? Just not being seen in general?
1:03:00 Gabor Maté? Just not being seen for who you are.
1:03:03 Lewis Howes? Not being accepted for your authentic self?
1:03:05 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.
1:03:15 Lewis Howes? 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?
1:03:31 Lewis Howes? How can they support themselves in getting out of a stressed environment? So that they can be more of a baseline to have the ability to thrive and flourish emotionally?
1:03:40 Gabor Maté? You know, something as a privileged Caucasian identified male with 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 joining with others. You know, I don't want to preach to somebody else about that. You know, my job is to support and help, but not to provide some kind of...
1:04:25 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 book, that's for sure.
1:04:46 Gabor Maté? Well, again, you know, I'm not sure I can fully answer that, but I can give examples. So, The New Yorker a couple of years ago, within the last two or three years, had an article about an American black man who was jailed for decades and kept in solitary confinement, for decades.
1:05:11 Lewis Howes? Was it Shaka Senghor?
1:05:13 Gabor Maté? I don't know if I remember the name, it could be.
1:05:14 Lewis Howes? I interviewed this guy who was in solitary confinement for decades, but...
1:05:18 Gabor Maté? Yeah, well, maybe the same man.
1:05:22 Gabor Maté? Wrote a bestselling book and was on Oprah and it might have been the same guy, but good. All right. Well, my point is that, fair enough, my point is that it didn't, he wasn't destroyed by it. Right. He started to heal in the prison. He found the inner strength somehow so that it's not for me to tell, I don't know if I could stand it for one day, never mind for four decades or three decades. I know, that's crazy. But, but that just shows you that the strength, the capacity to heal and to hold on to oneself and to find oneself is actually inherent in all of us. Final question for you, what's your definition of greatness? You don't make it easy, you don't make it easy on a guy, do you? I'm gonna challenge you.
1:06:03 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.
1:06:11 Lewis Howes? 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 episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter.
1:06:55 Lewis Howes? And now it's time to go out there and do something great.
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