96 - (Part 2) Dr. Gabor Maté- Unacknowledged Trauma is Hurting Us But We Can Heal Our Wounds and Our Lives.mp3.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about people who've turned their emotional shit into fertilizer for success. It's about seeing our darkest moments as opportunities for growth and transformation. Hello.

This is part two of my interview with the remarkable Dr. Gabor Maté.

If you missed part one. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcast.

There's been a lot of talk about polarization in our society lately, and the pandemic has brought that out even more. And I'm just wondering, what is the impact of trauma on all this polarization and hostility between groups and people really, like hunkering down in their camps versus them? How is trauma associated with that?

Well, in any society, under stress or pressure, you're going to get polarization because the fault lines are always there are going to get much wider and they're not papered over anymore. So that's what we're seeing right now. We can see this in societies. Historically, we can see it in Germany before the Nazis rise to power, we can see it in other countries. And whenever there's stress in our society, the fault lines open up. So partly that's what we're seeing. Now, if you look at the Covid situation, I've considered this, I need to be very careful.

I say this. So whoever is listening, I am not arguing with your choices about whether to get vaccine or whether or not they get vaccine. I'll also tell you personally, I've got the vaccine. I'm glad I did. I wish more people did, but I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'll respect your opinion and your personal decision. But I am talking about the venom and the anger that surrounds this issue on both sides. And I think the venom and the anger is trauma based.

I also think that the paranoid theories, I'm not talking about people's individual choices. People might say I have a fragile immune system. I don't want to experiment with this vaccine. Okay? I may not agree with you, but I get it. That's how it is for you. You might also be an Indigenous person who says that Western medicine has been very harsh on my people and sometimes very unkind, even cruel. I don't trust it. I got it. I'm not going to argue. If you're interested, I'll give you my opinion, but I wouldn't judge your opinion.

I wouldn't condemn it. I'm not talking about your decision. I'm talking about the venom, the rage and the conspiracy theories like the vaccine is a plot by the Bill Gates Foundation to implant microchips into people's circulation. This kind of stuff. That's pure trauma imprint that's people who are suspicious of authority figures because the first authority figures hurt them so badly. Now, they have nothing but distrust. So, again, you make your own decision on this as best you can based on the evidence that you've looked at and hope you look at all sides of the evidence.

But the emotions generated polarization that you mentioned the venom and the paranoia, those are pure traumatic imprints as far as I'm concerned.

Taking off from that point you're making, I have been a psychotherapist for over 20 years now. And most of what I see, of course, is trauma.

Have you ever seen anything that's not trauma?

Probably not. Probably. Well, I've seen people who have physical trauma, but yeah, I think everything kind of does come down to trauma. But what I've seen, especially, is when people have really very full-fledged cases of PTSD. For example, I've seen a lot of personality disorder diagnoses associated with that. Can you comment on that? Can you comment on how people with these diagnoses of borderline or narcissistic or antisocial personality, how that is connected to trauma?

Yeah. So first of all, I believe and I do talk about this in my new book, that all mental health diagnoses are trauma based. PTSD being one particular narrow range on the spectrum. So, PTSD refers to a specific set of symptoms. And if you got the symptoms, you call PTSD. But what we have to understand about diagnoses is that they don't explain anything. It's in fact, it's circular logic. So, for example, if somebody has moves that go severely up and down, what would you diagnose them with?

Either borderline or bipolar?

Okay. How do you know that they're bipolar on it?

You go to the DSM five.

But, you know, because the moods go up and down.

They have bipolar, right. Two poles.

Right. So we know they have bipolar illness because their moods go up and down. But why do the moods go up and down? Because they have bipolar illness? How do we know they have bipolar on this? Because their moods go up and down. Why did their moods go up and down? Because they have bipolar illness? In other words, there's no explanation there. So the diagnoses are descriptions, but they're not explanations. The problem is that both in the medical world, in the general world, we think that they're explanations.

They don't explain anything. They don't explain why that person's moves go up and down. They just describe.

They say it's genetic.

And I can talk to you about that next, if you like. But genes have got very little to do with it. Very little. Contrary to the medical mantra, let me address that in the moment when I was here with diagnosis is that there could be helpful as descriptions. So, if I know that somebody meets the criteria, then I have a kind of sense of how to work with them. But I haven't explained the thing about why they're that way. And so this diagnosis should never be confused with explanations.

And what I'm saying is that whether it's PTSD, whether it's bipolar with this ADHD, depression, anxiety, self-cutting behaviors, bulimia, we're dealing with traumatic imprints. These are all manifestations of trauma. Not only are they manifestations of trauma, they actually began as coping mechanisms at some point. And then it's the nature of these early coping patterns that they become problems later on. So we talked about depression. Now, if my parents can't handle my anger, if I want to maintain my relationship with them, which I have to as the two year old, what else can I do?

I'm going to push down my anger. That's why I have depression. The fact that Prozac or Floxetine or Selectar, Zoloft or any of these antidepressants that elevate serotonin levels can help sometimes. It doesn't prove a thing about causation. I mean, I've taken antidepressants and they helped me for a while. I don't need them anymore. And most recently, when I tried them, they just made me sick. Side effects. But at some point, they helped me in my life. So I'm not here to argue against them, but to say that because Prozac elevates your Flowoxin and elevates your serotonin levels.

Therefore, your depression was caused by a lack of serotonin. You know how much proof there is for that? Zero. There's not one slight bit of research that has ever shown that lower serotonin cause or are the cause of depression and the fact that these medications work, don't prove a thing. If you went to a party and you had social anxiety and you're kind of shy and you had a glass of alcohol, glass of wine, and you got more sociable and funny and approachable., would that prove that your social anxiety was due to brain lack of alcohol?

If you have a headache, you took an Aspirin or Tylenol, it helped you. Would that prove that your headache was caused by a genetic Tylenol deficiency? It's nonsense. This whole way of thinking. So, we have to really think beyond the diagnosis. When it comes to personality disorder, well, what if you took the disorder out of it? So give me a characteristic of personality anyone.

Impulsivity?

Okay, now how does impulse control develop? Impulse control is a function of a certain part of the brain. I'm pointing at it. I know the audience can't seem to, but you can. I'm pointing it at the right orbital frontal cortex. This develops an interaction with the environment. So, let me quote you from an article that appeared in the Journal of Pediatrics in 2012. This Journal is the official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the articles from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, which is the rules leading child development institution.

Here's what it says. Growing standard evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short-term physiological and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning behavior, health, and longevity. So the way we adapt to these early circumstances and traumas, help us survive, but they create problems later on. That's what I said about depression. It's an early adaptation. You push it down to connect with your parents. Later on, you get this diagnosis.

Now, you got depressive disorder. You mentioned impulse control. Let me read you a paragraph about brain development from the same article. The architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, and the significance of that is that stresses on the mum during pregnancy are already affecting the child's brain development. So, the architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all the health, learning and behavior that follow.

The interactions of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult child relationships, particularly in early childhood years. In other words, the most important influence on the development of the human brain is the quality of human relationships with the nurturing adults. What happens in the brains of kids who don't even see the nurturing adults most of the day or with whom the interaction is brief or stressed? These circuits that depend on those interactions for their physiological development, they don't develop properly.

They have poor impulse control. Then we diagnose them with a disorder. Why don't we look at their circumstances and try and help them develop better brain circuits, even as adults or another characteristic of bipolar or Bernardo Sergeant is instability of relationships. Right. Well, if you were traumatized by your early caregivers, why would you trust relationships? Of course, you're going to be suspicious. That's not a disorder. It's an adaptation. And then we label the individual with this disease. They don't have the disease. They had circumstances to which they adopted to the best they could given the conditions. Those adaptations are no longer helpful. Just like my depression in my 40s, it wasn't helpful. But it was sure helpful for me as an infant to suppress my feelings in order to protect my relationship with my mother under the circumstances into which I was born. So, these diagnoses don't explain anything. They just describe them.

Again, it takes away the judgments and the criticisms toward people who are expressing these maladaptive coping strategies.

And we can have more empathy towards and more sympathy and compassion

T,o reframe it slightly originally adaptive and-non maladaptive.

Yes.

Originally, they always had a purpose.

It was to survive and to cope.

Yeah, exactly.

We've spoken for a while, but I don't want to let you go before asking you, at least if you can briefly share what kinds of things we can do to help ourselves and each other around all this trauma that our world is suffering from. We're suffering from. Our society, our communities are suffering from. What kinds of things can we do as individuals, as groups, as practitioners, to help each other around trauma?

Well, first thing, we can educate ourselves. So trauma has come out of a closet. It's no longer. I mean, not that you'd know that walking into the average medical doctor's office. But there's so much information. So I mean, if you're so bold, I recommend my books, then is the work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk , whose book, The Body Keeps The Score, has been a New York Times bestseller now, for two years. It came up six, seven years ago. It's a huge bestseller. Why? Because the public is just thirsty for this information.

Dr. Bruce Perry, a wonderful psychiatrist trauma researcher, just wrote a book with Oprah called What Happened To You. It's all About childhood trauma, his other book or another one of his books, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. Wonderful book . So, people can educate themselves reading my books, reading Peter Levine's books, reading Bessel's book reading Bruce Perry's books. Educate yourself. Watch the Wisdom of Trauma, the film about my work that you just referenced earlier. So, first of all, educate yourself. Number one. Number two, really, consider in your own life how trauma has affected your behaviors, towards your children, towards yourself, towards your spouse. How have you suppressed yourself or how have you acted it out and do some healing of your own?

Do what you need to do to heal if you can afford it. Talk to a good therapist. And by the way, there's lots of terrible therapy out there. So, as you know, but somebody that can help you. There's all these modalities of trauma healing that maybe I don't have time to go into, but it's more than just one. There is I'll mention a few. There's the somatic experiencing. There's my method, compassion inquiry. There's Peter Levine's, somatic experiencing. There's EMDR. There's sensory motor reprogramming. There's brain spotting. Then there's modalities like yoga, meditation, mindfulness and so on.

This is very helpful. And then I would say that whatever platform you have, whether it's in a school PTA or whether it's your little classroom work as a teacher. Or if you're a physician or if you're a lawyer or if you're on the job, what can you do to have more cohesion and community support so that people aren't so alone. As a parent, really educate yourself about what children really need, rather than going along with the advice over these stupid, so-called parenting experts who tell you to trample on the child's needs in order to raise obedient children, good children.

So, there's so much that people can do. We all have our platform. We all have our circle of influence. Let's get to know what trauma is. Let's look at our own traumas and let's advocate for more trauma awareness. That would be my answer.

That's very helpful. Thank you. So I was wondering if there's something that you're working on now, now that you've finished your book. Are you just taking a break or are you starting a new project that people might be interested in?

Well, first of all, I get a lot of invitations to speak, podcasts, but also to give webinars and so on every week. I'm doing something online. People can always check it out on my website. Occasionally I do Instagram talk with my daughter, who is studying psychology so people can join my Instagram account. And these are free. And her and I just lead these conversations. We had one around Covid just a few months ago. It's been seen by about 80,000 people. There's the new book coming out. There's the film.

What else am I doing? Well, I'm just doing a lot of stuff. I'm teaching psychotherapist. I have this program called Compassion Inquiry. We've had about 2000 students now in over 80 countries. It's also available in a short version for lay people. They can just look at it online and see if they want to get it for themselves. There's dozens of YouTube lectures and videos of mine that doesn't cost anybody any money. I didn't put them up there, but other people did. But just put my name into YouTube and you can see any number of my talks for no cost whatsoever.

So there's never any shortage of me around.

Well, I wanted to ask you also, what do you do to take care of yourself?

I go on podcasts a lot. I physically exercise every day. I have to. I really almost have to. So I bicycle, or I swim. I get my elliptical machine. Occasionally, I have a yoga meditation practice, which I really have neglected for weeks now because I've been busy finishing the book. Something in me resists that kind of stuff all the time, but I know it's good for me. I also better than I do. I'm quite self-aware. Really. It doesn't mean I act self-aware all the time, but I paid a lot of attention to what's happening.

I did this morning. I woke up in a really lousy mood and I just noticed. Okay, well, there it is. Not me. It's just my nervous system in a certain state. Let's just take a few breaths. So, I did that. It lifted the self-awareness. If you're in a relationship as I am, one of the things I do to take care of myself is my wife and I are married now over 50 years. We know better than to let the relationship slide. So, we check in with each other about what's going on.

So we take care of that. Out there in nature as much as I can be. I read. I love reading. So I do that listening to music. So really, when I think about it, there's quite a bit that I do to take of myself. Hot baths, put me in a hot bath the rest of my life, and I get a good book and some music and I'd be happy.

Sounds wonderful. Yes, I'm sure you also eat very healthy food, right? You try to eat non-toxic food.

You know, I absolutely do. I really do. I much prefer it. It's not a sacrifice. I just don't feel right when I don't.

It sounds like some very good choices. In terms of self-care. I would add that one of the things I try to do is I try to stay away from things that are negative, so I don't watch really dark, scary things on TV or movies or books because I just feel like more negativity is not required. So, I try to stay away from a lot of negative news and negative people and negative media and negative social media. So, I'm not kind of poisoned because I feel that sometimes that actually acts like a poison to my system.

Fair enough. I'm not quite that way. I kind of really know what's going on right now. I'm reading a biography of Hitler, for example. It's a very interesting figure to me, but I would add one more thing that takes me back to something you said at the very beginning that all these people asking you to come and do psychotherapy, saying no is really important in health care, especially when you have something good to give. The whole world will want it, and you are not up to giving it to the whole world.

And I found it in my own skin. And maybe you found out as well.For sure. That if we don't know how to say no, it doesn't matter what else we do to take, then what do we have to do to take care of ourselves. It's like labeling water out of a leaky bowl. The water will still keep coming in. We have to set boundaries and say no.

That's my philosophy of Ruthless Compassion. I say no with compassion. I say I'm really sorry, but I have to say no.

Exactly. Yeah, well, that's just so important, and that's still a challenge for me, but I'm much better at it than I used to be. And I have a great manager whose job it is to stay on my behalf.

She's like your super ego. Well, just to end up in the podcast, I want to ask you for a call to action for the listener, something to suggest to them to either think about or to try doing that might help them with their own trauma or with the trauma around them.

I can only give you that one answer. Speak of everybody. If there's some injustice in your community, in your school, in your country, in your vicinity, in your municipality, in your province, in your state, stand up against it. Advocate for those who need the advocacy. Step out of your little shell and act on behalf of the larger group. That's going to open your heart and help free your mind. Do what you can on whatever level. Even if it's a small level, you'll still be adding to the light in the world.

And this world really needs light because it's pretty dark situation right now, as we all know. But the light is within us, so shine your little light wherever you can. That's what I would say to people.

That's a wonderful call to action. And I hope people take it to heart. And I want to thank you very much, Dr. Gabor Mate, for coming on this podcast today. It's been wonderful hearing what you have to say about all of these thoughts and ideas, and it's really important work that you're doing, and it's important for people to take heed of these messages. So, I appreciate you speaking with me today.

Thanks so much. And please, you might be back in a year when my book comes out.

I would love to and I will take you up on that offer.

Okay. Great. Thank you. It's wonderful to speak with you again.

That was the remarkable Doctor Gate

And I'm Dr. Marcia Sirta. If you like this podcast, please review it wherever you listen, and you can sign up for my free biweekly Wellness Newsletter at marcisrodamd.com, where you'll also learn about my online courses and my YouTube video series.